Girl on the Line

by Faith Gardner

“Dammit, Journey,” he says, snapping his fingers in front of my face. “Do I need to call the doctor? I’ll call the doctor.”

  “No,” I mutter, angry that I have to break catatonia to answer. “Just leave me alone.”

  He breathes a sigh of relief and leaves the room.

  On my phone, I see Etta’s texted multiple times. Thank God she doesn’t know, because I didn’t invite her. Marisol called, too. So did Jonah. So did quite a few numbers with no names.

  Within hours I was dismissed from the hotline. I’ll never get to set foot in that Victorian house that was my Tuesday-night home again. And yet, with all these mistakes lined up in a row in front of me like pink pills, I still find myself just wishing I were dead, because it would be so simple.

  I weep.

  I read the texts from Etta. Dumb texts about musicals we should watch and how much she wants to kiss me. She doesn’t even know me. She doesn’t know what a black pit I am inside.

  “Hey,” I say, recording a voice message. “It’s been fun, Etta, really, it has. But I can’t keep it up.” I stare at the phone, the seconds on the message adding up. “See, I’m a complete and utter mess. I’ve tried to keep it from you. You’re so . . . amazing.” My eyes fill with tears. “I am crazy. And I don’t mean that in some manic pixie dream girl way. I’m not fun crazy. I’m just crazy. I do crazy shit, I say crazy things, I should be medicated but I can’t bring myself to medicate myself because it’s never worked and because most of the time I don’t feel crazy.” I wipe my nose, my eyes, holding the record button. “I did something dumb and big today, though, and I need space, okay? I need space. Maybe an infinite amount of space. I need you to get as far away from me as possible and not look back. Please don’t try to contact me. I’m sorry.” And send.

  I delete her contact from my phone. Then I put my phone in the sink and run water over it, breaking it forever. It’s that old feeling, remember? The fuck it feeling. The burn it all down feeling. I’ve lost it again, so much so that I lie in bed in my clothes all night, that I talk to myself, that I draw a spiral on my mirror in red lipstick.

  It’s like old times, this self, and in a weird way, it feels like home.

  Welcome back, I say to no one in the mirror.

  I sleep for seventeen hours straight, like a sick person, which I am. I am a sick person.

  I stay in my room all week at Dad’s house, don’t go to work or visit Mom’s. I miss my appointments to see apartments. Instead, I lie in bed hugging Sprinkles and spacing out on Netflix and watching reruns. I go over and over all my mistakes in my mind. So many mistakes, so many wrong turns.

  I relive the graduation afternoon a thousand times in my mind since it happened. There must be something wrong with me. Who would do that? What was I thinking? I ruined all my progress, all my work, in about three minutes’ time. I see the whole scene from several perspectives, and in slow motion. I’ll go an hour without thinking of the Incident and then I shudder, remembering with a wave of what can only be described as a nausea of the soul. I am nauseated with myself.

  All my accomplishments this semester evaporate into the black hole along with every other speck of light. I don’t let myself plunge to the depths I did last year, where I looked up suicide methods and crime scene photos, but I do catch myself lying in bed and just ogling that vein in my right wrist, purple, ticking there visibly below my skin.

  My parents try an intervention-style meeting where they beg me to take meds again. I tell them I will think about it. I apologize for breaking my phone. I’m sorry I drew on the mirror with lipstick. I regretted it instantly, but then I had to live with it, like everything else I’ve done.

  Mom’s wedding is this coming weekend and I don’t want her to be worrying about me. We can’t get an appointment for weeks, because apparently Wolfman is in high demand these days.

  “Will you live?” Mom asks me when she tells me my appointment date over the phone.

  “I will live,” I say, knowing she didn’t mean it literally, but still somehow hearing it that way. I will live: it’s true, and I’m almost disappointed.

  Late, around ten, I hear a small knock at my door. I ignore it at first, but it persists.

  “Fine, what?” I finally ask.

  I expect Stevie, from the timid rapping, but am surprised to see Gary there. She has a cup of steaming tea.

  “Can I sit with you?” she asks.

  Reluctantly, I make space on the floor, plowing some books and sundresses aside with my slipper. We sit crisscross applesauce. She hands me the tea and I inhale the scent of peppermint. After a moment I take a sip. It burns my tongue. A welcome burn.

  “It’s been a challenging week,” she says finally, which seems like the understatement of the century. “And I know this is no consolation . . . but I admire you.”

  I take another sip.

  “You were just trying to help someone,” she says. “You had a good reason to believe she was suicidal.”

  The tea sears my throat.

  “I would rather be a person who goes too far trying to do good than a person who sits idly by while bad things happen.” She gets up. “Enjoy your tea, and let me know if you need anything.”

  Her words linger after she leaves me alone again.

  At my mom and Levi’s wedding ceremony, the tables all have bouquets of peonies on them (Mom) in tiny glass boot vases (Levi) and the Elvis impersonator who officiates their wedding makes everyone laugh with his one-liners and random pelvis thrusts and constant interjections of thankyouverymuch. At first I kind of hate him but then I realize, standing in front of the crowd in my vomit-colored dress with a forced, frozen smile and my squeezed-back tears, that I’m only envious. Because he seems silly and carefree and everyone’s looking at him and laughing and he’s not a walking mess of a human like me.

  Weirdly, I don’t look like a mess. It was that way last year. I’d feel like a monster, imagining myself with feral-looking hair and crazy eyes. But when I go to the bathroom after the ceremony’s over and everyone’s hitting the catering line, I’m struck, in the mirror I encounter, by how grown-up I look, how pretty. I weep in the bathroom stall for a while, not sure why it feels like my heart is torn into little shreds. I beg myself silently to please get it together. I try to count my breaths but it doesn’t work because counting breaths is idiocy. If I try to meditate, all I hear is an endless crap fountain of I hate everything. I’m the worst. Why did I have to be born? So I get up again, reapply my waterproof mascara, and go out to get my hot food.

  I sit at the table with Jonah, Ruby, Stevie, and some ancient woman I don’t recognize who I imagine is a professional wedding crasher. Ruby plays a video game on her phone under the table the whole time and is already changed back into her usual black tee and black jeans. The ancient woman is telling Stevie what it was like growing up without “cellular devices” and how exciting it used to be to “check the mailbox” when she was a child. I don’t know why but it makes me think of Davis, and even the thought of Davis fills me with a dark, spiritual sadness of which there is no name. Maybe toska, an untranslatable Russian word for sadness, yearning, nostalgia. But sprinkled with a dash of shame. Toska-plus. I eat and don’t talk much, though I’m aware of Jonah, Converse shoe next to my high heel, his leg jiggling, the feel of his gaze on my face. After the food’s done, Ruby and Stevie leave the table to go find the other tweeners, the ancient woman falls asleep blissfully in the sun with her eyes closed, looking dead but hopefully not, and it’s just me and Jonah and a bunch of paper plates mountained with chicken bones.

  It’s weird that if you walk down that pathway right there, the one through the eucalyptuses, and go on the main path around the turn, then you’d see the oak tree.

  “You okay?” Jonah asks me. “You haven’t been texting me back.”

  “I broke my phone. Haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet.”

  “You want to talk about what happened at graduation?”

  “I thought I was helping
someone,” I tell him. “Instead, it turned out I just ruined everything again.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic. You do know she gave her speech right afterward and we all graduated and no one cared or remembered what you did, right?”

  “I tackled a girl in front of hundreds of humans for no reason.”

  “You had a reason. You thought she was going to hurt herself. It makes logical sense.”

  “How . . . do you even know that?”

  “Your dad.”

  “Why are you talking to my dad? I don’t, like, talk to your mom.”

  “Your dad’s cool, we email sometimes.”

  “My dad is not cool, and that’s weird.”

  “Want to go for a walk?” Jonah asks me.

  He reaches out and puts his hand on my wrist and then slides it up my forearm. I get a chill. A warm, sick kind of chill you get when someone you pine for touches you unexpectedly. I look him in the eyes and he’s smiling that half smile. I must not be entirely dead inside, because I half smile myself.

  We go for a walk in the sun-speckled shadows; in Japan, they have a word for that, komorebi, which is the light that comes through the trees. I tell Jonah this, and he looks up at the trees like he’s seeing something new in them. He used to love all the untranslatable words I collected from other languages and carried around in my brain. He loved the poems I wrote, the little madnesses in them. His profile is exquisite. Someone should draw his portrait. I think of the night we lay on the trampoline and the world seemed full of magic, and for a brief adolescent moment, we seemed eternal.

  He loved me, and let me count the ways: loved me first as a childhood acquaintance, next as a middle school friend, finally as a teenage lover. Even now, remembering his love makes me ache with a dry thirst that starts in my rib cage and echoes through my skin. I want him more than I want anything else in the world. We walk along a bridge together, my heels echoing on the wood, and stop there, leaning over the wooden railing, where reeds jut up from the murk for their taste of sunlight, and ducks quack between. Like no time has passed, we stand in silence—one that seems to say everything.

  “I’ve missed you,” Jonah tells me.

  Our hands sit next to each other on the railing, his pinkie reaching out for mine and meeting it for an electric moment. My lips buzz because I can feel him looking at them.

  “You broke up with me, remember?” I ask.

  “What if I made a mistake?” he asks in a small voice.

  Even though all I want is to put my lips to his and stick my tongue in his mouth, I look away, at the geese flying through the air. I ask myself why, if this is what I want—him—why does my heart still throb inside like some broken thing?

  Maybe it’s not my heart. Maybe I am the broken thing.

  “I look at you now,” he says. “And you’re the girl I wanted before we were together. This . . . confident, mature you.”

  “Pffft” is all I say, thinking of the versions of me he didn’t see just from today alone. The one who wept in the bathroom stall, the other who didn’t want to get out of bed upon waking, the other who thought about killing herself and then thought about getting back on medication, back, forth, back, forth, like a game of shitbrain table tennis while getting dressed.

  He puts his hand on mine. It just fits. Our temperatures match. It’s hard to explain.

  “It kills me knowing that you’re better now and we’re apart,” he says. “That you’re this . . . better version of you, Journey 2.0, and I don’t get you.”

  I close my eyes and see nothing but gold, an imprint where the sun was shining from behind a cloud a moment before. The imprint stays on my vision like an ache. What Jonah just said bothers me so much my feet itch. I pull my hand away and open my eyes. He’s still watching me with this smile like he thinks I’m so beautiful. Which maybe I am. But that’s not all I am.

  “Jonah,” I say. “What if we’d just stayed together, and I had tried to off myself, and you’d been there for me?”

  “I think we needed this to happen this way, right?” he asks.

  I try not to get lost in his perfect imperfections: the mole on his left cheek, the scar on his chin from when he needed stitches in third grade, his hair that’s always just a touch greasy. Even though I want to touch him, to hold him, I don’t. Because I see him, but I don’t think he truly sees me. I don’t know that he ever will.

  “No,” I say. “I needed you.”

  “But now you’re so independent,” he says. “Stronger than ever.”

  “Jonah, this morning I woke up and honestly wondered if I will live long enough to get married someday and have my own wedding.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Come on. Of course you will.”

  “I wondered, will I ever be stable enough to be a mother?” I ask, my voice shaking. “Because right now I wouldn’t even trust myself to pet sit, I’m that much of a selfish mess.”

  “You’re eighteen,” he says.

  “He can count, too,” I say quietly, but my heart’s not in the sarcasm today, and it comes out sadder than I meant it to. I begin to cry.

  “Journey, you’re fine,” he says.

  “But I’m not,” I tell him, wiping my eyes before the tears can wreak havoc on my made-up wedding face. “Don’t you see that? Whatever I am, whatever you call me, I’m not fine.”

  “Oh, Journey,” he says, opening his arms to wrap me up in them.

  But I push him away.

  “Journey,” he says in that old tired tone I know so well. Once he gets into a place where he has no words, he just parrots my name. “Please.”

  “Please what?” I ask. “This is me. I still am dramatic or crazy or bipolar or moody or whatever the vocab of the day is. I’m still Journey. It’s the one thing I know—I’m always going to be this.”

  He sighs and looks at the reeds. I can tell I’ve turned him off, the way I used to.

  “You’re disappointed, aren’t you?” I ask him. “Here I am, same old me, and you’d hoped I was the 2.0 version.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” he says.

  “Life is dramatic, you dumbass,” I tell him. “Life is full of sadness and messed-up-ness. Everyone, even us, a couple of kids with as much privilege as is humanly allowed, living in a goddamn dreamtown with everything at our fingertips—even we suffer.”

  “I don’t,” he insists.

  “You don’t,” I scoff, because what a dumb thing to say.

  I stop and we stare at each other. The wind lifts my hair and gently sets it into place again. It’s gotten long enough that it tickles my shoulders now. Jonah Patterson is so exquisite, so sad-looking sometimes when he’s not stifling that charming smile. He looks like a boy who thinks deep things and feels deep things. But I realize right now, for the first time in my life, that he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to. He lives on the surface, which is where he’s comfortable. When anything comes along and threatens that, it becomes too much, and he runs.

  He abandoned me once. He will again. Look at the quiver in his blue eyes right now—he wishes he could abandon me at this exact moment.

  That night on the trampoline? That magical night under the stars? Those were the only kinds of conditions where we could be truly happy. The tears let loose and he pats my back.

  “Don’t cry,” he tells me.

  Which . . . What an inane thing to say.

  “It’s okay,” I say, wiping my eyes and sniffing back the emotion. “It’s going to be okay.”

  It feels good, those words coming out of me. They would have felt better coming from him, but maybe it’s better that they’re mine. He watches me like I’m such a puzzle. He doesn’t have that hungry look on his face anymore. And you know what? I don’t give a shit.

  We walk back and I go into the bathroom again, redoing my eyeliner in the mirror.

  “Hi,” I say, as if it’s been a while since I saw me.

  Strange, but it feels like it has.

  I don’t miss him

  Like fi
re misses its spark.

  But he misses me,

  Like an arrow misses a mark.

  I get a new phone the next week and catch up on all the communication I missed being a depressed hermit. I’m surprised and disappointed that Etta obeyed my wish and never responded. I imagine her listening to that voice message, thinking, This girl is off her rocker. Dodged a bullet with that one. Phew. Don’t need another psycho ex-girlfriend, thanks. Marisol texted me not once but twenty-three times. A third of the texts are about the graduation fiasco, a third are about how happy it makes her that we’re on speaking terms again, the other third are about a My Secret Obsession episode concerning a man who comes home from work and dresses up as a dog and chews bones and lies on the floor and a pet sitter comes to take care of him.

  I refuse to accept the fact my best friend is really actually leaving for Chicago in a month.

  I delete all the texts Jonah sent before the wedding. Texts asking, in such a concerned tone and with such horrid grammar, how I’m “fairing.” Funny how I get nothing after the wedding’s over. I’d be insulted but you know what? I don’t care anymore. The boy’s basic. The apathy I feel for him, after months of sick-with-itself desire, is, quite frankly, bliss.

  Tim-Tim sent me two messages.

  Miss my fave dancin pizza slice!!!!!!!

  All’s well??????

  Both feature random GIFs, one with an animated dancing pickle, another with a psychedelic cat changing colors.

  I can come back Monday, I text back.

  FUNDAY MONDAY!!!! he texts back, with a GIF of ever-flowing champagne.

  I’m already exhausted by Tim-Tim’s energy, but glad he values my pizza dancing so much and that I still have a job. Apparently I can relapse into crazytown and still resurface into the real world and be accepted with loving arms. That’s something.

  Hey, I text Marisol. I exist.

  JoJo!!!! she texts back with so many hearts.

  My eyes prick with tears reading that. Shallow boys come and go, almost girlfriends turn to dust, but Marisol, my soul mate, my bestie forever, will always be here for me.

  We text back and forth for a while, first about graduation, which she thinks was entertaining and, once she learns the backstory behind my thinking, heroic. I tell her about Jonah and our frustrating yet enlightening conversation, which she is so relieved to hear.