Girl on the Line

by Faith Gardner

  “Should I call them? Is that what I should do? Oh my God, I don’t want to die!”

  “You’re not going to die,” I assure her. “Take a deep breath and grab a pen . . .”

  Tuesdays are my longest school day and one of the days I see Etta, so I doll up in my cutest dresses, bright tights, and boots. I am old, I am old, I wear my lipstick bold.

  Etta and I sit on the lawn. I only saw her last Thursday and yet the sight of her, when I first walked into philosophy this morning, made it slightly hard to breathe. She wears a sundress printed with ice cream cones, her blinding red lipstick curling into a smile.

  She throws chips for a wily seagull flock. I pick at my pizza.

  “I don’t know whether it’s adorable or gross, watching you maim that pizza.”

  “Why did I even order this?” I say. “I work at a pizza place.”

  “Riiiight! I forgot about that! Please tell me you wear a little uniform.”

  In my mind, I can smell the pizza slice costume for a moment. I suppress a dry heave.

  “Yeah” is all I say.

  She sips her soda so loud I give her a playful push. She gives me one back. Is this flirting? Anyone else, I’d say yes. But Etta’s so dang nice to everybody I just never know.

  “Can I ask you something? Is it weird listening to people tell you their secrets on the hotline?” she asks.

  “At first it was,” I say. “But now I don’t think twice.”

  “You know what my favorite part about you is, Journey?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your unflinching spirit.”

  As soon as it sinks in she is not kidding, I am touched by this, although I don’t know if I can trust her word on me, since I haven’t gotten around to showing her all my ugly parts. I’m about to tell her my favorite part about her is she’s so kind to other people I sometimes can’t believe she’s real, but then a sassy seagull gang basically attacks us. They became real assholes since Etta fed them chips. We get up and shoo the seagulls. She walks me to the bus stop, which is near where she parks her moped. We hug goodbye. But Etta hugs everyone. She hugged the cafeteria cashier today.

  “So, I’m probably sounding all gushy and lame,” Etta says, her face serious, her eyes wider than usual. It’s the face she often gets before she cracks a major joke. “But you kinda sorta inspired me.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say, rolling my eyes playfully.

  “Yeah. To start volunteering again.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Really? Holding babies?”

  “Opposite end of the spectrum this time . . . there’s an old folks’ home near my apartment. I have orientation for it tonight.”

  “Oh. That’s sweet.”

  “Anyway, thanks for, like, being such a good human.” She switches to a German accent, for no apparent reason. “Das ist good human.”

  I’m not a good human, I want to tell her. I’m a selfish person who lost and is trying to find her way back.

  “I’m only in it for the compliments,” I joke.

  “Oh, of course. Of course you are.” She grins. “Want a ride home?”

  “On a moped?” I ask. “I kind of want to live another day, so I’m going to have to say no.”

  “Pffft. Scaredy-cat.”

  I could tell her I almost died on the freeway in a ball of fire, but now—in the sunshine—such a downer of a truth bomb seems out of place.

  “Nah, but thanks,” I say.

  “Are you really that scared of mopeds?”

  A shadow passes over my soul. It’s as if I’ve been caught in the act of pretending to be a normal person. I’m not normal. I can’t do things like ride on the back of mopeds. I can’t bring her to my house, because I’m not a real grown-up. I can’t even flirt properly because I’ve never kissed a girl, so I’m not even a real bisexual.

  I’m faking my way through life, through everything, too much to be ordinary, but not enough to be extraordinary.

  “I have issues,” I say.

  How else to say it?

  “No worries at all,” Etta says. “Did I just make everything awkward? Of course I did. Etta’s gonna Etta.” She laughs. “See you Thursday.”

  She gets on her moped and rides away.

  I go over the conversation again in my mind. I could eat my own words. How would it have felt, my arms around her waist, my chest pressed up against her back, the speed loud in our ears, the wind a taste in my mouth?

  Those three words form a feedback loop in my brain: I have issues, I have issues, I have issues. That special horror of hearing your own words on repeat.

  The excitement of the conversation sinks into doubt and, looking out the window of the bus, my chest swells. It’s hard to control my own breath. The black hole whispers, I’m still here.

  My nemesis. My friend. The electric fence around every gift.

  Wolf’s whole office is in boxes. Towers of boxes. Walls of boxes. On the sofa, on the desk, on other boxes. He has to move a box for me to sit in my favorite swivel chair. The bookshelves, the walls, are bare. To be honest, I’ve never seen the place so clean.

  “You’re moving?” I ask, swallowing.

  “The building is shutting down for earthquake retrofitting and I’m supposedly getting new floors and paint in the meantime,” he says. “I’ll be shutting down for a month or so.”

  I swivel once and put my sneaker on the floor. “And what happens if I lose my mind in that month?”

  “I can still do phone appointments. But if you’re feeling like a risk to yourself, please dial 9-1-1.”

  Sometimes, since I told Wolf I got off my meds, it seems as if he’s become stricter with me. His responses—like that one, like a message a robot might tell you while you’re on the Kaiser psychiatric phone line—make me think he no longer trusts me.

  “A risk to myself,” I repeat.

  It strikes me the biggest risk to myself has always been—myself. In other places in the world, people have actual problems. There’s no clean water, or there are wars, or diseases. But me? I’m just a risk to myself.

  “How’s the hotline?” he asks.

  “I’m actually good at it. The other people I work with tell me I have a gift. Maybe I want to be a . . . therapist.”

  He raises an eyebrow.

  “Is it true therapists are all converted nutjobs?” I ask.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “It seems a general consensus. Are you a nutjob? Were you once a nutjob?”

  “My grandpa owned a cashew farm, and I worked there in the summers, so I suppose I once did have a nut job.”

  Wolf’s smiling again, and I’m thankful I’ve broken him. He’s human again, not a robot.

  I groan. “That’s, like, beyond a dad joke.”

  “Have you been in contact with Jonah?” he asks. “Had any closure there?”

  “Is sleeping in his sweatshirt every night closure?”

  Wolf shakes his head at me. “You know the answer to that.”

  “It’s a very nice sweatshirt.”

  “Why would you do that to yourself?”

  I think about it, staring at the window, where a bunch of sunlit fronds dance wildly in the palm tree outside. “It’s the last part of him I have.”

  “What would happen if you let it go?”

  “I’d be cold at night.”

  Wolf sighs.

  “It’s just a sweatshirt,” I say, maybe too loudly.

  “Is it,” Wolf says.

  In the silence, his point sinks in, and I’m irritated this man is always so right.

  Every therapy session is a story you tell someone about your life. That’s all it is. Sometimes I omit things that maybe would change his perspective—the fact my mom is getting married and there’s nothing I can do about it except smile and say congratulations. Or how Marisol and I are in a fight now for the first time in I can’t remember how long, because I tried to die and she dared tell the world. Or how I like a girl so bad I ache and yet when I’
m with her I am plagued by a creeping sense of doom that this can’t happen, I’m too crazy, nothing will be right.

  The story I want to tell today is this: I rocked school this semester. I’m saving money, I’m working toward my goals of moving out and going to school. I’m learning to drive. I’m well. So that’s the one I give him.

  Wolf shakes my hand when I stand up to leave and I agree to call him in a couple weeks to make an appointment when his office is done. He says I can call him sooner if I need him. I don’t like that he said that, like he could sense something was off about me.

  Is it? Did I not tell the right story to him today?

  Today was supposed to be my two-year anniversary with Jonah. I woke up in tears. I thought of the lake. Of lying in the grass. And for a split second, I got sucked into that stupid lie of a suicidal fantasy. Then I remembered what it was actually like—lying in the bushes in panicked regret, stomach twisting in agony.

  Then I pushed it from my head. I wiped the tears away. I changed out of his sweatshirt, put on regular person clothes. Then I went out in the world like I did every day, faking like I wasn’t falling apart. If I let myself stop—if I let myself feel—

  I couldn’t do that.

  This afternoon Etta texted and invited me over. She didn’t say to study. I didn’t bring my books. It’s Saturday, and evening’s rolling in on the horizon, barely darkening the sky. Is this a date? Ha ha. No, really, is it?? I’m nervous, which is dumb, and I hate being dumb and I WISH I COULD STOP. I get dropped off by my Lyft driver, a long-haired dude who seems mighty high. The apartment building has a placard out front that says Manzanita Meadows. There are no manzanitas. There are no meadows. Six months ago I skinny-dip hot-tubbed here on that night a car almost killed me on the freeway. Reminding myself of this fact is like telling myself a story. It’s amusing but meaningless. It’s unreal.

  Two years ago I kissed Jonah for the first time by the oak tree near the lake.

  That’s just as meaningless.

  Just as meaningless now.

  STOP.

  Etta’s apartment looks like a dozen other apartments, a brown cluster of buildings I would get lost in if Etta didn’t meet me at the entrance. Tonight she waits for me there in a neon shirt and cutoff shorts in the twilight, jiggling her long brown legs with restless energy, her hair piled atop her head in a crazy bun the size and color of a small pumpkin.

  “Hey!” she says, smiling.

  She opens the gate for me and hugs me. Just one second of her body being pressed up against me fills me with something even more electric than hope. And I forget about Jonah. She leads me through the maze of the courtyard, plotted trees all exactly the same distance apart. Every balcony the same, except decorated with different stuff—a mess of bicycles, a neat row of plants, a bunch of hanging beach towels.

  “I hope you’re hungry, and I hope you like Chinese food,” Etta says. “Because I was starving and you took forever to get here, so I ordered us dinner.”

  I was trying on clothes for almost an hour. Putting on makeup. Bursting into tears while looking at pictures on my phone of Jonah and me. Taking my makeup off. Contemplating canceling this date. Deleting Jonah’s pictures off my phone, freaking out and Googling how to recover deleted photos, putting makeup back on again. Rubbing it off. Then I show up makeupless, in jeans. Typical me.

  We serve up some kung pao shrimp in the kitchenette. As I stand with the steaming meal in my hand, I’m momentarily spooked by what I now realize is a teased-high white-blond wig hanging on a nearby chair.

  “Oh, it’s my Dolly wig,” she tells me, sitting on the chair next to it and petting it like a cat. “You like?”

  “Wh-wh-wh-wh . . . why?”

  “For the old folks’ home.”

  The silence is so long I hear a distant train.

  “Why?” I repeat.

  “Because I’ve been playing music for the old folks.”

  “Really? But I thought you sucked sooo bad at playing guitar and singing. I thought you quit guitar lessons.”

  “Yeah, captive audience. It’s elder abuse, really.”

  I roll my eyes. She can’t be that bad.

  “Anyway, I’ve discovered they’re way more into me if I come in character. Check out my outfit,” Etta says, gesturing toward her closet door, where a sparkling cowgirl dress hangs, an abomination of glitter, white leather and fringe.

  “Did you spend money on that atrocity?” I ask, sitting on the edge of her bed and eating.

  “You don’t even want to know,” she says.

  “This food is so spicy—”

  “God, yes. My mouth is burning,” she says, putting her plate down. “Thank you. I thought I was being a total wuss but this is, like, undoable.”

  “Can I have some water?” I ask.

  “Water,” she sputters. “I’m about to pull the fire alarm.” She heads to the kitchenette.

  She comes back with a glass of water. We chuck the food that burned our tongues so bad. She makes us hot dogs and hot cocoa for dinner, serves it on mismatching plastic plates. We eat it sitting on a futon/love seat thing covered in a floral sheet. For a second, I think, this grown-up thing is perfectly achievable. I could do this.

  “Hot dogs and cocoa, what a combo,” I say.

  “I know, right? This is a little special I like to call ‘the Etta.’”

  “You have impeccable taste.”

  “My parents raised me a sugar-free vegan,” she says. “This is my revenge.”

  We decide to watch an old musical on her laptop. We get on her bed together, pull Prince over our legs to keep warm. Even though I’ve hung out with Etta many times now, many lunches, many long walks across campus, even hung out here studying and did karaoke—tonight feels different. I can’t explain it. I am sure she really likes me. And here we are, in this intimate space, the space she lives in, that smells like her, where she sleeps at night. We are sharing a Prince blanket. She invited me for no reason at all. And what if she wants to kiss me? What if I fall totally in love with her and it makes me a crazy person? And isn’t it wrong to do this on my would-have-been-iversary? Like what if we do get together and we have the same anniversary as Jonah and me?

  Why can’t I stop my brain? Why am I so much??

  I will channel Wolf and his breathing exercises.

  Be here with Etta, appreciating the smell of the pear candles she lit and the lighter-than-air wonder of Gene Kelly tap-dancing down rainy lamplit streets on-screen. She’s so near I can feel the warmth of her. I can see, out of the corner of my eye, her neon-red lips glistening in the movie-lit darkness.

  It should be easy to be here now with Etta. Desire can keep you focused.

  “You have any ChapStick?” I ask her.

  “I don’t believe in ChapStick. I have lipstick, though.” Etta pulls it out of her pocket and hands it to me. “Who needs boring ChapStick when you can have moisturization and color?”

  I put it on, giving her a look. “So in the middle of the night, you put red lipstick on when your lips are dry.”

  “A lady always has to look her best,” Etta says, in some kind of old movie star voice. “Even in the dark.”

  “Weirdo,” I tell her, handing her the tube of lipstick.

  She takes it from my hand, but I don’t let go, looking at Etta’s flickering eyes and glistening lips.

  There’s a word for this in Yaghan, mamihlapinatapei, a look two people exchange when they both want to start something but don’t know how to, exactly—an expressive shared quiet moment that means everything. All the want rises up in me and I am here now. I am being all the way here right now. The song is ending, Debbie Reynolds and the boys collapsing in laughter on a golden couch. Etta pulls the lipstick harder and I don’t let go again; instead, she pulls me in, all of me, and then my red lips are on her red lips, my hands are in her hair, her hands are around my neck, pulling me down on her bed as the movie goes on without us.

  The lipstick rolls off the bed
and to the floor.

  Nothing has felt this good in a very long time, possibly since last fall, when Jonah and I last kissed. (Stop thinking of Jonah. Get out of my brain, Jonah.) Etta. I am kissing Etta. And it’s nothing short of perfect. For whole moments, with my eyes closed, I am only my body. I am not my thoughts or my brain.

  I am red lips and warmth and tangled hair and soft skin.

  I’m not sure where she ends and I begin.

  I am not sure I want to know.

  After a minute, we open our eyes and sit up and catch our breath.

  “Journey,” she says, so sweetly, touching my cheek. And then she starts laughing. As the movie changes scenes and the lighting changes, I see Etta’s face, her clownish mouth smeared with red, and laugh, too. I look over at the mirror in her vanity and see us both there, faces coated, and we double over and can’t stop laughing to the point of crying, of practically sobbing with laughter.

  “This is why ChapStick is better,” I finally manage.

  “Touché,” Etta manages between gasping fits. “Touché.”

  We get up together and wash our faces in the bathroom, pausing the movie. No matter how much I scrub, I still look oddly pink. I moan into the mirror.

  “It’s okay,” Etta says. “You just look sunburned. All around your mouth.”

  “Comforting,” I say, fixing my hair.

  She puts her arms around me. “Is this okay?”

  I see us there in the reflection, my heartbeat wild. Her chin rests on my shoulder. I reach backward and put my arms around her back. This is real. I am with her, she could love me, I could love her.

  Dear past self, I’m happy.

  Dear future self, I’m scared.

  “So much okay,” I say.

  “Let us celebrate our make-out session with ice cream,” Etta announces after we go back to her room.

  “Sounds delightful.”

  “Bowl or cone?”

  “Bowl and cone.”

  “I should’ve known,” she says, shaking her head, and goes back to the kitchenette.

  My lips are still buzzing as I sit and stare at the bright screen paused on Gene Kelly’s overjoyed face. I consider writing Marisol a text gushing the news that I made out with Etta, but I need to get used to life without Marisol just like I need to get used to life without Jonah.