Girl on the Line

by Faith Gardner

  I told the other lovely humans I share a shift with that I have a deep affinity for poetry and it turns out I am not alone. Lydia was a creative writing major “way back in the Jurassic Period” and wrote her thesis on Anne Sexton. JD reads experimental stuff they find online by people I’ve never heard of. Beatriz has a deep love for prose poetry, poems that almost read more like stories to me, poems polka-dotted with Spanish. For the past few shifts, we each bring our favorites and when it’s dead, when the lines are quiet, we read to each other and discuss.

  Tonight, Beatriz brought some fat candles she made to add to the ambience. She makes candles, earrings, sews patchwork skirts together; she’s crafty like that. The candles smell earthy when she lights them. She puts them on the long table she shares with JD and another on the table I share with Lydia. JD gets up and turns off the lights.

  “I feel like I should put on some music,” JD says, and scrolls through their phone. A moment later, some New Agey synth sounds emanate. They giggle. “Too much?”

  “Nothing’s ever too much for a poetry reading between suicidal compadres,” Lydia says.

  “Oh, come on,” Beatriz says. “We’re not suicidal, don’t say that.”

  “I consider ‘suicidal’ to be like ‘alcoholic,’” Lydia says. “You might not drink anymore but you’ve always got the disease.”

  “Well, that’s dark as shit,” JD says. “I don’t agree with that. I tried, I survived, I’m here, I will always be here. This world is stuck with me.” JD looks especially at me. “Don’t listen to her.”

  “JD’s right. I’m just a bitter old woman with major depression,” Lydia says.

  “I have depression, too, okay? But it’s not, like, my identity,” JD says. “Most of my life I take my Zoloft and then I don’t even notice it’s there.”

  “Lucky you,” Lydia says.

  “Have you ever tried acupuncture?” Beatriz asks them both.

  “No,” they answer together, in a pointed tone.

  I don’t say anything. Tongue officially bitten. I want to weigh in, but I’m not sure where I fit in here. I have meds prescribed in my name. I have a diagnosis. I’m not comfortable with any of it. But it makes me think twice to see these wise humans who I respect so much talking so openly about disorders, medication, things I’ve resisted so hard.

  “There are so many paths to happiness,” Beatriz says.

  Beatriz always has to be the peacemaker. It’s partly why she’s so damn good at taking calls. She has this soft-spoken, focused way of talking anyone down.

  “This one’s a fun one,” Lydia says, opening a battered paperback. It has coffee rings on the back of it and looks like something you’d find in a free box. “It’s a poem called ‘I Have Had to Learn to Live With My Face.’”

  I inhale, lean back, taking in those words. Imagining a mirror, a long one, my dusty, imperfect face staring back at me. Lydia’s voice is gravelly, deep, as she reads; I hear whiskey and tears. I hear age and fire. I lose myself in the rhythm and the words. Isn’t poetry magic, the way it stops life in its tracks, the way it quiets the you in you? That’s why I love it so.

  I am barely breathing, I am so enthralled and aquiver in the listening. But then the sound of a phone interrupts. The long, loud, deep-throated ring of a rotary phone that vibrates the table underneath me. It’s Lydia’s. Beatriz flips the lights on, blows the candles out. Lydia puts down the book and groans as she moves her rolly chair back into the desk. She’s clearly been in pain the past few weeks, her back a constant ache. “Goddamn bodies,” she told me when I asked today. “Never make the dumb mistake of getting old, you hear?”

  (Dear future self, you listening?)

  “Crisis line, this is Lydia. Why, hello, Davis. No, you’ve never told me about your fascination with miniature trains. I’m setting my alarm right now for ten, just so you know . . .”

  Maybe hang out this weekend? Etta texts, along with a video of adorable baby goats snuggling with puppies. I watch the video on my bus ride home, smiling. There’s so much I want to say to her. And I do want to hang out this weekend. I start writing a whole paragraph about how distracted I’ve been lately, how I’m sorry I haven’t been answering her texts in a timely way, and erase it and instead just give her a thumbs-up sign over the goat video.

  I put my phone away and stare out the window at the dark town, the shuttered shops, the empty bus stops. How mournful and lonely the familiar world appears at night.

  Once I get off the bus I’m walking past the garish glow of the supermarket at the end of my neighborhood, the quiet movie theater, the dark hardware store with its potted poppies out in rows, my sneakers pitter-pattering the pavement on this cricket-chirping night, everyone tucked neatly in their houses, cars quiet and shining under the streetlamps, front windows curtain-drawn and golden from hidden lamplight. And then I hear the squeak of a bicycle tire. A jolt of adrenaline freezes me to a stop. I don’t know what I’m expecting. It’s an empty street on an empty night and my first reaction is inexplicable terror. But instead I whip around and I see a sight that drops my innards down two stories.

  There, five feet away, is Jonah Fucking Patterson.

  I know every minute detail about him because he is not just a boy. He was a home. He was a country, he was a continent. Then I forced myself to forget him because to remember him was to love him and to love him was to lose my mind. But now here he is and even in the darkness, even with his Thrasher hoodie pulled up around his head and tied tight, his eyes are bright enough to light the entire scene.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hi?” I ask.

  We don’t say anything. I stand there in silence. I burn. Across the street, just a few hundred feet away, through the tall grasses and under the gnarled oak tree where we once first kissed, I tried to die. It all floods back to me, the pain, the pain so big it didn’t just change me. It warped me. It made me question my identity, my sanity, how the two are interrelated. In one second, I look at him and I want him back so bad it has a taste in my mouth, sweet and overdone, burnt sugar.

  “I was just thinking about you,” he says.

  “Well, you must have manifested this, then, right? Magical thinking?”

  He and I had a passionate conversation about magical thinking once when we read the same book on it. When we thought we were important enough to conjure up realities.

  “Must be,” he says.

  He has a maddeningly dry delivery, a suggestion of a smile but only a suggestion. I can never really tell how funny he finds me, or means to be. This is why, when we were friends and he first told me he loved me so bad it hurt him inside, I thought he was joking.

  “Oh, Jonah,” I say, looking away. “I hate you.”

  “Don’t hate me,” he says. “I don’t hate you.”

  “What do you, then?” I ask. “You abandoned me. Never called. Ended up with the girl I knew you’d been drooling over the whole last stretch of our relationship. What do you, then?”

  “I’m an idiot, Journey,” he says quietly, keeping his stupid gaze on me.

  His statement shocks me so I run out of thoughts and words for a second.

  “I knew if I reached out to you, well . . . I’d fall in love with you again,” he says, voice cracking. “Because I can’t resist you.”

  “Now I hate you even more,” I murmur softly.

  And I can tell, in the way his gaze hasn’t wavered once, the hunger in it, the familiar hunger in it like the hunger that used to precede a long, deep kiss—I know, in a complete sucker punch to my soul, that he still loves me.

  This I never, ever expected.

  I moved on, see. I moved on not in some triumphant progressive march but in a wounded, half-dead zombie lurch. I moved on from him not because I wanted to, but because I realized that lingering and yearning for him would unravel me. I gave up on the idea there was a chance. I ripped the Band-Aid off and threw it in the garbage because, girl, that wound needed air to heal.

  “What
about Madison?” I ask.

  “I’m not with her anymore,” he says.

  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t fight the urge to grin from the sudden schadenfreude.

  “Oh” is all I say.

  “It was a rebound,” he tells me. “She’s so great, but . . . she’s not you.”

  His mouth is a straight line the whole time. A straight line, revealing nothing. But his eyes. His goddamn eyes. Even this short, sudden run-in with him has me wanting so badly I swear I never wanted anyone like this and never will. Not even Etta and her red, perfect lips.

  He reaches out and touches my arm. This used to be his favorite sweater of mine, the one with the roses, cashmere. “It’s not too late, is it?”

  “Why are you doing this?” I ask him, pulling my arm back. “Have you not hurt me enough already?”

  My eyes prickle with tears, the words a lump in my throat.

  “You were my best friend, you stupid asshole,” I say, the words coming out hoarsely. “That was what hurt the most. Fine, don’t be my boyfriend, but you didn’t even care I tried to kill myself. You turned around and walked away from me.”

  “I was scared.”

  “Oh, well, boo-hoo.”

  “I was wrong. I’m sorry.”

  Those five words stop me short. I was ready to go on, berate him, tear him to pieces—but those five words were really all I ever wanted to hear.

  For a moment, I can’t even speak.

  “You coming to graduation?” he asks.

  “Yeah. My parents paid for the stupid outfit, I figure I owe it to them.”

  “You look like you’re doing great,” he says. “Marisol says you got a job, you’re a semester deep into city college . . . that’s amazing.”

  “Finals were last week,” I say, unable to help myself from bragging just a little bit. “I can’t believe I managed to get Bs.”

  “I can.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “I’ll be there, too, next semester. You’ll have to show me around.”

  Now he smiles. And when he does, Lord help me. The word charming was invented for Jonah Patterson’s wide, shining smile.

  “How about you download a map and show yourself around next semester? I have a girlfriend.” Yes, I exaggerate. Girlfriend is a term that might be a slight exaggeration, but how I enjoy the pinch of the news and the way he ever so slightly flinches at it as he keeps smiling.

  “Good for you,” he says. “She’s one lucky girl.”

  The lump is still in my throat, no matter what words I say. Inhale. Exhale. The air feels colder somehow, stinging my eyeballs.

  “I gotta go,” I say.

  His moon-blue eyes linger on me. They know me too well. They know every inch of my body, every ounce of my madness, every me I have been since I was a child. I feel naked. It’s invasive. And yet, I am so myself with him. I don’t have to explain anything. He knows, without any words. He just knows.

  “Can we hang out again sometime?” he asks. “Like old times? Be buddies again?”

  “My mom and Levi are getting married,” I tell him. “You can come to that with me if you want. I mean, you were practically family, until you ditched me like a coward.”

  “I’m honored you’re asking me,” he says. “I’d love to come.”

  Why did I just do that? I was going to ask Etta. I really was. But, I don’t know—even after everything, Jonah is a part of my past, my childhood, my family. It feels right to invite him instead, even if he’s not my boyfriend anymore. He and I walk in silence, his bike wheels clicking as they rotate. When we get to my dad’s house, he comments on the peonies in the yard, compliments my hair and how long it’s gotten, my new necklace, because Jonah Patterson is the kind of boy who notices such things. He hugs me on the lawn and in one whiff of him—his stinging aftershave and his lemony soap—the smell that lingered in the sweatshirt so long—I get a wave of desire so big it threatens to eat every bit of progress I’ve earned since we parted ways last time.

  I say goodbye. I head upstairs, get into my bed. But in the dark, here, under my covers, my heart is beating so wildly. I am thinking of Etta and our kisses and our laughter. I am thinking of Jonah and the mountain of emotions I hold for him. I am thinking of life and how wicked it is and how beautiful it is, the twisted strangeness of a lone walk home that turns into a reunion with a boy who broke my heart across from a lake where I tried to kill myself.

  I wouldn’t have wanted a yearbook—why commemorate the hardest year of my life, the school I left behind, the connections I no longer have? But my parents paid for one. I get to my dad’s one night and open a brown box and find it there, shiny with our year screaming across the front in stencil lettering, the inner pages stinking of sweet glue and glossy paper. I look at my senior portrait, taken just weeks before I tried to end my own life. I feel so deeply for past me I shudder with a sob. And there’s Jonah, that Jonah I loved, that Jonah I could maybe love again, and I recognize everything about him, from where his sideburns end to the collar of the shirt he’s wearing. And Marisol, with her lopsided smile and her old glasses. The nostalgia aches. We’re already not them.

  I flip pages, taking in the year I didn’t have—the dances, the clubs, the student elections, the gags and inside jokes I don’t understand. And then I get to the song team page and read down the list of girls’ names. My breath stops short when I see the name Nicola “Coco” Albierti.

  “No shit,” I say aloud to no one, my finger tracing the outside of her flawless face, her careless hair.

  Aha.

  So that’s you, Coco.

  So that’s been you all along.

  My phone rings and I slip my headset on. I recite my greeting, the recording that lives in my throat. “Crisis line, this is Journey.”

  “My friend,” Coco says. “There you are.”

  “Hey, Coco,” I say.

  It’s strange saying it, this time, because I know who she is now. It’s been weeks since she called. I picture her now in a way I never did before. I can see her, Nicola Albierti, there in her brown two-story house on Covington, lying on her bed, her hair a glossy spill on her pillow, her eyebrows shapely and striking, her eyes big and brown, her skin olive and flawless. I am not proud to admit how long I’ve stared at yearbook photos of her and social media pictures of her since I connected the dots and learned who she was.

  “It’s been weird,” she says.

  “What’s been?”

  “All of it.” She’s quiet. No background noise. Just the soft buzz of silence. “I’m drunk. I feel like I’m losing it,” she says. “If there’s an it. You can only think you’re not alive for so long. I’ve been doing all I can to shock myself out of it, Journey. Drinking my mom’s wine she buys in bulk for book club. Kissing boys like the world is ending. I crashed my car the other day and . . . you wanna know a secret? I did it on purpose.”

  “You crashed your car?!”

  “Into a fence. At ten miles an hour. Don’t flip. It’s not like it was an actual suicide thing. I mean, I know where my dad keeps his gun. If I’d really wanted to off myself, I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”

  I swallow.

  “And guess what? It didn’t do anything. It didn’t even damage my fender, let alone shock me into life again.” She exhales loudly. “I want it to stop.”

  I’ve never heard her this somber, this lifeless. She’s almost someone else. And now that I can see her in my mind—see who she actually is, imagine her in her entirety—she’s like a stranger all over again.

  “That sounds so hard,” I say.

  “I’ve had this happen before, but never this long,” she says softly. “Never for, like, months. I have gone so long now without feeling real that I forget what it’s like. It’s not even scary anymore. It’s just . . . nothing. You know what it’s like to feel nothing?”

  I’ve felt too much, so much. I’ve wanted to die aplenty. I’ve had black holes open up in my path at moments when I least expected them
. I’ve been so lonely I’ve been a raindrop. So upset I’ve been a roll of thunder. I’ve watched life happen outside me, spinning, moving, golden, and I could not touch it. But I have never really felt nothing.

  “I can imagine,” I say.

  “You’re so lucky,” she says. “Because you’re not me. I look at people all day long and think that now. I wish I were you, because you’re not me.” She sniffles. “And I’m walking soon. I’m supposed to give a speech about—of all things—hope.”

  “What are you going to say about hope?” I ask.

  “A bunch of bullshit, of course.” She laughs. “A bunch of memorized butt-kissing pseudo-Zen bullshit I stole from my mom’s self-help library.”

  “Read me some of it.”

  “Journey,” she says, sounding tired. “I didn’t call you to practice my speech. I don’t even know if I’m going to give it.”

  “Sometimes, we just have to plug on through, even when we’re not feeling it. And later, you’ll look back and be happy you did.”

  “Or not,” she says. “Maybe I won’t look back at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I swallow. I look up at my fellow hotline volunteers, see they’re all on the phone, having their own intimate, murmured conversations into their headsets, no eye contact. I swivel forward again and stare at the poster above my desk that is a crappy clip art printout of two hands holding a heart. I can’t tell you how long I’ve stared at that picture, so long the shapes start becoming meaningless, more than hands, less than hands, more than a heart, less than a heart.

  “I want to end this. I want to end myself at the height of me, stop this horrible nothing that is my existence.”

  She starts crying.

  “I want everyone to remember me as being something. Not this nothing person I am inside. That should be how everyone remembers me. On a stage, in a cap and gown, young and beautiful forever.”