Girl on the Line

by Faith Gardner

  “Rule number one in life is never, ever Google your symptoms,” I tell her. “Do you know how many times I Google a common cold and end up thinking I’m dying of lung cancer?”

  “True,” she says, laughing.

  Strange she can laugh when she feels nothing. Is she faking it? Or is laughing when someone makes a joke just a physical response to her, like when a doctor knocks your knee bone and you kick?

  “You’re right,” she goes on. “No more WebMD. I’m cutting myself off.”

  “Have you thought about talking to someone?”

  “Like who? My boyfriend, who has about three brain cells in his head? God, I’m so mean. I don’t mean that. He’s sweet as a teddy bear. He’s just—you know, he’s a football player. He’s a dude. He’s not into talking about . . . deep stuff.”

  “He might surprise you,” I tell her.

  “Or what? My mom, who is so zonked out on Xanax half the time, nodding off? I’m sure her answer would be pills. That’s the last thing I want.”

  “Maybe a therapist,” I suggest.

  “So you do think I’m crazy,” she says accusingly.

  “Not at all. Therapy can help everyone—”

  “You don’t understand. In my family, no one goes to therapy. They go to the doctor and get pills, but we don’t . . . ‘air our business,’ as my dad would say. That’s for weak people.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “I don’t know what I think. I’m so tired of thinking,” she says, her voice cracking. “I don’t know how I’m going to keep going sometimes. I’m supposed to be so excited right now, waiting to hear from schools, getting ready for the championship—it all feels surreal. Like I’m watching a TV show I don’t even care about.”

  “A trick I learned that helped me a lot is to practice breathing,” I tell her. “When you get overwhelmed, just concentrate on your breath for a bit. Let all the other thoughts pass by, like little boats on running water. Watch them go, but don’t dwell on them. Instead, count your breath as you inhale, exhale.”

  She breathes in. I can hear her. The sound of it—of a real-life person hearing my advice, of someone possibly feeling better because of me—is something I’m still getting used to.

  “Thank you. What did you say your name is?”

  I pause. “Journey.”

  “Thanks, Journey,” she says, not skipping a beat. Clearly she isn’t familiar with me. Not surprising. I’m not popular. Nor have I ever cared to be. “I’ll try that breathing thing—I’m sure I’ll be fine. I feel better already. Just talking to you made me feel better.”

  We say goodbye and I hang up. By the time I’m off, JD and Lydia are also off their calls, gabbing about some zombie TV show I’ve never watched. Lydia is knitting a pink beanie.

  “That’s really cool,” I tell her.

  “It’s for my grandson. He’s going to hate it.” She cackles. “I can’t wait to see him have to wear it every time I come over.”

  “You’re so evil, Lyd,” says JD.

  “Need to decompress?” Lydia asks without looking up.

  Decompressing is something we do after calls, especially if the calls have been hard in any way. We discuss them together and offer support. I’ve found it really helpful, actually, even though I thought it was a bit much at first. Lydia, JD, and Beatriz have volunteered here long enough to have all sorts of calls, and their advice is super helpful.

  “I just got a call from a girl who reminds me of me,” I tell them. “Except she has these moments where she . . . she thinks she’s already dead. Like nothing is real. Like she doesn’t exist.”

  “Derealization,” JD says, looking up from an iPad. “Or depersonalization. Or disassociation? Shit, I should know this.”

  “JD’s chasing an advanced psych degree,” Lydia tells me.

  I Google these terms on my phone, fascinated yet horrified by these new additions to my mental dictionary. Derealization is “an alteration in the perception or experience of the external world so that is seems unreal.” Depersonalization is a “state in which one’s thoughts or feelings seem unreal.” Disassociation is “disconnecting from one’s thoughts, feelings, memories or sense of identity.” All of it sounds similar to what the caller described, and it all sounds like hell.

  A while later, Beatriz hangs up her headset, wipes her eyes, and looks at us. “God, that was a hard one.”

  “Bring it in, chica,” JD says, with open arms.

  Beatriz scoots over in her rolly chair and JD embraces her. Beatriz breathes deeply. Lydia puts her knitting down and breathes deeply, too, from across the room. The silence, besides everyone’s audible breaths, is so intimate.

  “The woman was assaulted last year,” Beatriz says quietly. “She wouldn’t stop crying. No matter what I offered, she cried harder. Finally she just said, ‘You can’t help me,’ and hung up.”

  “Rough,” JD says, rubbing Beatriz’s arm.

  “It’s hard feeling like I can’t help,” Beatriz says, wiping tears away.

  “Helplessness is worse than pain,” Lydia agrees.

  She takes a swig from the jar of green on her desk—some kind of disgusting-looking homemade wellness drink—and puts her headset down, goes outside, sits on the porch. I can see her figure through the window, rocking back and forth on the swing.

  “Be back,” Beatriz says. “I’m going out there with her.”

  Beatriz, too, puts down her headset and gently opens and shuts the door behind her, sits on the porch. She puts her arm around Lydia and Lydia rests her head on Beatriz’s shoulders. This is the first time I realize that these three have a special relationship, that being plunged into this intense experience of answering calls with strangers makes you more than strangers, closer than friends.

  “Lydia had someone die on the phone with her once,” JD says, looking at me. “A year or two ago. Right when I started. Someone shot themselves on a call. She heard the whole thing, bang, the person moaning and dying slowly, the police showing up, everything.”

  “Oh my God,” I say, my heart dropping so intensely I actually clutch my chest as if I could lose it.

  “Yeah. This shit ain’t for the fainthearted.”

  Usually my instinct would be to find some terrible dark joke to fill the uncomfortable emotional canyon that is our silence, but now’s so not the time.

  “Why’d you start volunteering here?” I ask JD.

  “’Cause I used to call hotlines growing up, and that’s why I’m still alive, my friend,” JD says. “You know what it’s like being nonbinary and growing up in rural Oklahoma? I thought I wasn’t going to make it past fifteen.”

  “Nonbinary?”

  “Not all masculine and not all feminine. I go by ‘they, them’ pronouns.”

  I’ve heard that term, just never met anyone who explained it to me. It’s exactly JD, who sometimes looks like the butchest femme or femme-ist butch, who is so beautiful and so handsome simultaneously. I’m super glad I was careful with my pronouns and didn’t assume they were female or male.

  “You were bullied?” I ask.

  “Verbally abused, ostracized at school, depressed as fuck. Jumped out the window of the highest building I could find and tried to end my life.”

  “Holy crap,” I say.

  “I landed in some bushes and broke my leg instead,” JD says. “Because in rural Oklahoma the highest building I could find was three stories. I can laugh about it now.”

  I imagine JD at fifteen, alone, thinking their world was done as they leapt from a window. And here they are, grown-up, eyes twinkling, a graduate student getting their master’s, a volunteer, so confident it edges on endearingly cocky.

  “I tried to kill myself, too,” I say.

  It feels weird to say it, the weirdest part being how normal it comes out, the way JD just nods and pops some cinnamon gum in their mouth, then offers me a piece sticking out from the pack.

  “Well, glad you stuck around,” JD says.

  I
smile and take the gum. “Same to you.”

  Etta and I usually eat lunch Tuesdays and Thursdays after our philosophy class. We get plates of hot food from the cafeteria and sit on the same sunny spot of grass over an ocean so pretty it could make a postcard jealous. Etta’s lunch is some eggs, two strawberries, and ten slices of bacon.

  “Heart attack special,” I say.

  “Basically. I’m so despondent after reading about existentialism this morning I require bacon.”

  “The Germans have a word called Kummerspeck that literally means ‘grief bacon.’ Like, you’re so depressed you stuff your face.”

  “What? That is the best word in the universe. My whole life is grief bacon.”

  “My whole life is grief bacon,” I repeat in a German accent.

  Etta falls back on the lawn, clutching her stomach. When she laughs super hard, there is no sound. It’s completely silent.

  She sits back up. “You are the goofiest weirdo. It’s amazing.”

  “Nothing compared to you,” I say.

  “True. No one can compete with the master.” She does a nonsensical upper-body dance. “Sorry. I had a quadruple espresso with seven packets of sugar. I think a heart attack’s next, followed by a coma.”

  And I thought I was a spaz. “Get it under control, woman,” I say, laughing.

  “I know, I’m a mess!”

  Etta and I have hung out enough at this point that I know her sense of humor is practically pathological. I always thought I was the jokester, but hanging out with her makes me feel like Queen of the Feels.

  “So, you play guitar?” I ask her.

  “How did you know that?” she asks, giving me the side-eye.

  “That first day I met you at the hotline, you had it with you.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Well, I don’t really play. I want to learn. I signed up for intro to guitar but I . . . I chickened out the first day.”

  I’m shocked. “You don’t strike me as the shy type.”

  “I’m a clown,” she corrects me. “I’m in it for cheap laughs. I can’t be serious.”

  “Huh,” I say, looking at her in this new way. Her vulnerability. The more I know her, the more I like her.

  I really like her.

  Not that Etta and I will, in any shape or form, be a thing. It’s impossible. Let me count the ways.

  She might only be a year older than me, but she is a bona fide grown-up who lives in a studio apartment.

  I am a human pizza slice who lives with her parents.

  She is rainbow-flag-bumper-sticker-sporting queer and I am a quasi-closeted bi girl who has only had boyfriends.

  When I mentioned to my parents I was attracted to girls as well as boys, my mother kind of rolled her eyes at me like it was a phase, and my dad just nodded and smiled and I could tell he didn’t really understand. I’m not confident about that part of myself. A part of me feels like, because I’ve only had boyfriends—one serious boyfriend, really—it’s not even true that I’m bi. What I’m trying to say is, my sexuality is complicated.

  Etta asks me what I’m doing tonight.

  “Hotline shift.”

  Her eyes are this mesmerizing golden brown. “How’s that going?”

  “I love it. You should really do it when you have the time.”

  “What are the people like who call? I’m so curious. Has anyone been suicidal?”

  “Not really. They’re just people who need to talk to someone for the most part.”

  “I used to volunteer at a children’s hospital,” Etta says. “Holding sick babies.”

  I wait for a punch line. But there is none.

  “Yeah, because, you know, a lot of babies in the NICU—baby intensive care—their moms have to work all day, or live far away, or some of them are addicts, or just not around,” she goes on. “So I would come in every Thursday after school senior year last year and hold babies.”

  “How sweet,” I say.

  It’s strange that between class and our lunch, I’ve spent hours with this stranger. So much so that she doesn’t feel like a stranger anymore. Her hair is electric, blowing everywhere as a sea-damp wind breathes over campus.

  “Yeah, my brother had cancer when he was a kid,” she says. “Those babies I saw on the ward, the ones the nurses held because there was no one there for them—they shook me.”

  “I’m sorry your brother had cancer,” I say.

  “He lived,” she says. “He’s a big old pain in my ass now.”

  “That’s good.”

  “But holding those babies was pretty much the best thing ever,” she says, gazing across the lawn, where some dudes play Frisbee. “It feels good to do good, don’t it.”

  This is something that has bothered me for weeks, ever since I learned about egoism and altruism. I can’t tell if there’s ever anything in life that isn’t inherently selfish.

  “Is it just a self-serving thing, to serve others?” I ask.

  “Even holding sick babies gives you an oxytocin rush,” Etta says. “So basically I held babies for drugs.”

  A woman walking by does a double take, apparently having heard just the last sentence Etta said, then continues on her way, shaking her head.

  “That’s right! I held babies for drugs! And don’t you forget it, lady!” Etta yells after her.

  As we walk to the edge of campus, down a long-sloped path, I let myself pretend for just a second she is my girlfriend. I imagine introducing her to some nameless so-and-so: “This is my girlfriend, Etta.” But then she says, “Well, bye, little buddy,” and hops on her baby-blue moped with cherry-red streamers and I am left at the bus stop with my heavy backpack, staring into the clouds blocking the sun, heart sinking back to earth.

  The whole bus ride home I think about what Etta said. I look up oxytocin on my phone—the cuddle hormone—a chemical—and wonder if love is just as much a lie as lithium.

  Since I last saw Marisol, just two weeks ago at Galentine’s, she pierced her nose and got new glasses. It makes me feel like we’ve been apart a year. We meet up for breakfast at our favorite diner on a Sunday.

  “Two coffees,” she tells the waiter, who remembers us from last summer when we used to brunch every weekend.

  “Where you been?” he asks us.

  “Having a nervous breakdown,” I say.

  He laughs and laughs.

  Some joke! So funny!

  It occurs to me the last time I was here, Sunday brunching, it was the weekend before I tried to off myself. I was miserable, failing at faking it. Marisol asked what’s wrong over and over like a broken robot and I couldn’t find the words to tell her. I stared out the window. The cars looked like toys. I longed for earthquakes. I fought tears and wished I had died in the car wreck.

  I get a jolt remembering, like I stepped too close to the edge of a very tall building.

  “Remember last time we were here?” Marisol asks.

  “I was just remembering.”

  “That was when I actually thought Hobart was sexy,” she says.

  Oh, right. Yeah. Marisol had the hots for her tennis instructor, Hobart. I forgot about Hobart. I forgot about how she was into tennis for ten seconds. Honestly, all I remember about that day is me.

  “Hobart,” I say, looking out the window wistfully.

  She cracks up. “Hobart,” she imitates, with wide-eyed naivete.

  I kick her under the table.

  Marisol’s wearing, by the way, the most ridiculous black shirt that has the shoulders and boob area cut out. Underneath, a neon-green camisole blares out her tit area like a stoplight.

  “You okay? For reals?”

  I dislike the way she asks this, dripping with such concern, like I’m not okay and she knows it and I don’t.

  “I’m dazzling and wondrous and sensational and tremendous,” I tell her.

  She smiles. “Okay, human thesaurus.”

  “Ever notice how a thesaurus sounds like a dinosaur name?”

  “I have not. B
ut you make a good point.”

  We order the usual, chicken-fried steak split on two plates, and I tell her about Etta.

  “Cool, cool,” Marisol says. “As long as you’re not trying to replace me.”

  Marisol has a jealous streak that is, frankly, quite flattering.

  “I’m hoping this is a pretty gay thing going on between us.”

  “I’m glad you’re finally exploring the gay in you,” she says. “Took long enough. Plus, anyone who isn’t Jonah is a ten in my book right now.”

  I sigh.

  “Yuck, really?” she says.

  Because she’s that good at reading my sighs.

  “I’m trying really, really hard to forget him,” I say. “But if I let myself remember him, I start thinking there’s still a chance.”

  “There is not, and you must stop.”

  “Is he with someone else?”

  “Not playing this sick game again, JoJo.”

  Marisol refuses me any updates on Jonah these days. Believe me, I’ve tried.

  “You’d tell me if he was,” I say.

  “The obsession must stop.”

  “You’d at least—”

  “No,” Marisol says, banging a spoon on the table. “No, no, no, no, no.”

  “But—”

  “No.”

  Our chicken-fried steak comes and I tell her about the hotline, about my shift buddies (“Oh my God I want to meet Lydia I love her so much already”) and Davis (“That is so wrong that he abuses the line like that, come the hell on”).

  Marisol signs the credit card receipt with a flourish. Marisol always pays. She is some kind of ninja at intercepting the waitress before I can and accepts no “splitsies,” as she calls it. If I do manage to pay, she’ll find a way to slip money in my pocket before we say goodbye. She is a lot better off than I am and I know she’s just being generous. But sometimes I wish she wasn’t so eager to pay all the time, like I’m a charity case.

  She seems to be thinking hard, biting her lip.

  “Good seeing you,” I say as we linger out in the parking lot near her Beetle. “Do this again soon?”