Girl on the Line

by Faith Gardner

“One of the strangest nights in a long and very strange life,” Lydia agrees.

  “You said something that night that stuck with me. You said it was hard listening to a stranger die,” JD says to Lydia. “But that . . . in the end . . . when it was quiet . . . you were just glad to have been there.”

  Lydia closes her eyes and breathes in and out audibly.

  “So that’s what I mean about being there, Lydia,” JD says. “We’re there for you. We don’t want to fix you. We know you’ve had a rough time. But, here we are.”

  “Here we are,” Lydia says.

  I turn away for a moment, pretending to be interested in a bulletin board, to hide how emotional this is all making me. There’s something deeply moving about knowing people see what a mess you are and keep loving you anyway.

  Lydia, JD, Beatriz, and I finish our tiny coffees. Well, Lydia doesn’t; she says this “six-dollar pour-over malarkey tastes like bile.” As we start the goodbye process, putting on sweaters, checking our phones, Beatriz asks me a question.

  “Not to pry,” she says. “But what exactly happened to you? Why’d you leave the hotline so fast?”

  “Yeah, Davina cited confidentiality when I asked, so I know this must be good,” Lydia says.

  “Oh . . . I broke a rule,” I say, flooded with immediate embarrassment, wishing a hole would open up for me to jump into.

  “What rule?” JD asks, with gossipy curiosity, leaning in on their elbows.

  “I knew a girl who kept calling,” I tell them. “Her name was Coco.”

  “I remember you talking about her,” JD says. “Go on.”

  I tell them the whole story.

  “You tackled her?” Lydia almost screams.

  The three of them are covering their faces with their hands, Beatriz because she is wide-eyed and stunned, Lydia’s got a double-facepalm going, and JD because they are laughing their ass off.

  “I’m sorry . . . ,” JD says.

  Laughter, more than even suicide, is infectious. I see JD’s shoulders heaving, their eyes tearing up in silent laughter, and I can’t help it. I start laughing, too.

  “Isn’t that insane?” I ask, tears springing to my eyes as my shoulders rock back and forth. I can barely catch my breath. It’s suddenly so funny, so incredibly funny, I can’t stop.

  “You didn’t . . . ,” Beatriz says, having caught the laughing bug, and now her eyes are rivering tears down her face.

  “At least I didn’t physically assault anyone when I got dishonorably discharged,” Lydia jokes.

  We clutch each other’s arms in laughter so big there is no noise for a minute. JD stamps their boot on the ground and Beatriz puts her head on the table, her curls splayed everywhere. Lydia cackles like a witch. I wipe my tears away. It’s weird how enough laughter can hit your heart in the same places as sadness, but backward. It’s like putting a shattered heart together again.

  “I’m sorry,” JD finally gasps. “It’s not funny.”

  “No,” Beatriz agrees, putting her head up. Her face is red and she wipes her eye corners. “We shouldn’t laugh.”

  “Too bad, because that was the funniest shit I’ve heard in a long time,” Lydia says, reaching out to poke me in the shoulder.

  I grin, wiping my eyes with a napkin, as my wild heart steadies itself back to its usual pace.

  “You should,” I say. “I deserve it.”

  “Coco, though,” JD says, face slackening with such seriousness I expect them to follow up with some kind of joke on me. “Coco called once since you’ve been gone. Now with this context, maybe what she told me will make sense to you.”

  “What did she say?” I ask.

  “Oh yeah, you told me about this!” Beatriz says, slapping JD’s hand.

  “Right?” JD asks. “So Coco called one night and asked for you, actually. ‘Is Journey there?’ I said you no longer volunteered there. Coco said, ‘Oh. Well, I just wanted to tell her that I exist again.’ I was like, ‘Can you elaborate?’ And then . . . click.”

  “She exists again,” I say.

  “She exists,” JD says.

  We get up and hug. We vow to start a text group, to have coffee more often. They’re sorry I got kicked off the hotline, because they think I was a good volunteer. I appreciate their words, even if they’re just the kind of words you say when you’re inching toward goodbye. I take the bus home. It might be the last time, because I’m taking my driver’s test in a few days, and Mom and Dad bought me a car for graduation, an ugly, horrid thing, yellow as mustard, old enough to be my guardian.

  She exists, I think as I stare out the windows.

  I see shadows, shaped like women’s profiles, superimposed against the dark parade of passing trees.

  She exists.

  While on the bus, staring out the window at the surf shops, the fancy churches, and the palm trees, I realize I still don’t know which side of the crazy-person fence I land on. I remember that night Jonah and I ran around our childhood park and I caught up with him under the moonlight, my bisexual revelation giant inside me, quickening my pulse and filling me with a new electricity. It was the revelation of knowing I was both, or neither/nor. It was the revelation of knowing I didn’t have to choose. That there was world enough for both inside me.

  “You’re just now realizing this?” I ask myself in the reflection of the window.

  I look around. No one saw me say it. There’s a woman with a paper bag on her lap, drooling and asleep, and three freshman-looking girls giggling over something on a phone. I laugh, too, even though I have no reason to.

  I am standing in the sun, a giant pizza slice, and I am prancing. As mortifying as this is, it’s somehow so much better than the ugly places I can sink to if you let my brain remain at rest. Since my Wolf appointment days ago, I’ve thought it over times infinity. I’ve set up an appointment with the psychiatrist he referred me to, a nice lady named Dr. Ng with tired eyes and shiny hair. I don’t know if she’ll prescribe me something, or what that something will be, but I’m open. I’ve gone on the forums my mom has squandered good years of her life in to read stories of people who are like and unlike me. And I don’t know. I still carry around a brick for a heart some parts of the day. Other moments I feel it lift, get excited about the future like it’s a promise. But not now. Now I prance.

  Traffic light, green-yellow-red, you endless loop, you meditative escape.

  “Werk it, pizza! WERK!”

  “Oooh, I want a pizza that!”

  “Hey, girl, need some sausage for that pizza?”

  The moped in front of me at this stoplight looks familiar—bright blue, with rainbow streamers on the handles. Kind of looks like Etta’s, actually, but the driver clearly has a huge head of platinum hair, so that can’t be Etta. Notice, though, the arm of the driver, a white leather arm with dancing fringe. And the guitar strapped to her bike.

  I get a sick flutter in my gut for her, something midway between desire and regret.

  Like some kind of creepy wonderful mind reader, Etta turns and glances at me as she waits at the stoplight. She stares hard at my face. Then her eyes go wide behind her helmet. She points to me with excitement. The light goes green and she drives up on the sidewalk and gets off her moped. She pulls off her helmet, revealing the full absurdity of her messy-ass wig. Although I should be embarrassed, I can’t help smiling so big when I see her. This sunshine pours over my insides. She walks up to me and stares for a minute, me in my pizza costume and Etta in her Dolly Parton outfit. Who moved first, I don’t know, but in one hot second, we embrace.

  “What are you?” I ask, pulling back.

  “What are you?” she asks in disbelief.

  “I’m a giant slice of pizza. I work at Crusty’s.”

  “I’m Dolly Parton. On my way back from volunteering at the old folks’ home.”

  “I can’t believe this,” I say.

  “This is so crazy,” she says, showing me her hand, which is shaking. “I was just thinking about you. And t
hen you . . . appeared. I’m freaked.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I feel like I’m seeing a ghost. Maybe, because, I don’t know . . . you ghosted me.” She socks my arm playfully, and she’s joking, but her eyes are not. “Oh yeah. Remember that?”

  “I didn’t mean to ghost you.”

  “Really?” She flashes me a mean smile. “Could have fooled me.”

  “I’ve got issues,” I say. “I wish I didn’t, but, I do.”

  “You think you’re the only one with issues?” she asks.

  She says it so friendly, smiling big, but her eyes are glossy with tears and her voice shakes a little. I crumble.

  “I adore you,” she goes on. “But I really don’t understand you.”

  “You deserve better.” I look at my sneakered feet, thinking, how do I begin to explain? How do I begin? “I tried to kill myself two months before we met. I am basically your psycho ex-girlfriend.”

  She sucks in air. “Oh, Journey . . .”

  “And I don’t know, I might be bipolar or some crap,” I tell her. “And I might have to go on medication at some point.”

  Etta shakes her head. Her blond wig head. “And?”

  “And . . . I don’t want to put my shit on you,” I say.

  “That’s it?” she asks, punching me in a pepperoni. Not hard. But not soft, either. “That’s why you broke my stupid heart?”

  “I didn’t break your heart, did I?”

  “You’re so oblivious,” Etta says, and her face crumples. I suck in air watching, not knowing how to comfort her.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I really like you, I didn’t mean—”

  “This is so dumb,” she says, wiping the running eyeliner, struggling to keep her voice calm. “This is what I get for going after some girl in high school. Which I didn’t know, by the way, for the longest time, BECAUSE YOU DON’T TELL ME ANYTHING!”

  Here, standing on Fairview Avenue in front of Crusty’s, is a flesh-and-blood human being I have hurt without realizing. I was so self-obsessed, I ruined something spectacular.

  I feel like I trampled through a garden bed and only now just looked down at my feet to see the crushed flowers.

  “Come on,” Etta says. “We all have problems. Maybe if you’d let me get close to you, maybe if you were curious about what’s inside me, you’d see that.”

  “I’m curious,” I say.

  “You have a stupid way of showing it,” she says.

  Her tears are dried, her eyeliner is still intact. She sniffs.

  “I have crippling anxiety,” she says. “I take meds almost every day to prevent panic attacks. Doesn’t give me any excuse to ghost girls or push people away from me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?” I ask.

  “I did say I have panic attacks. I said it a bunch of times.”

  “I thought you were joking,” I say.

  I really did. Every once in a while Etta would say, totally casually, something about a panic attack. Almost having one. Or that time she had one. But she said it like she was kidding, in the same voice she said she was raised by wolves or joined a circus or was Jesus reincarnate.

  “For once, I am serious,” she says.

  When she’s serious, she’s tired, and she’s tired right now, in her Dolly Parton outfit and her wig.

  “I didn’t realize you really had panic attacks,” I say.

  “Oh, it’s bad.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she says. “I manage it. Keep my pills close by and then I don’t end up in the ER.”

  Medication, problem solved. So many people are like that. And it works, clearly. Maybe it would work for me.

  “I’m a mess,” I say.

  I put my hands over my face because it’s humiliating enough to be in a pizza outfit discussing my madness and my feelings on a busy street corner; I don’t need to show everybody I’m crying now on top of it.

  Etta steps closer to me and wipes under my eyes with her fingers. “You’re not a mess,” she says. “You’re exactly what you need to be.”

  “I really like you,” I say, welling up again. “I’ve been so smitten since I met you last year. But every time we started getting close—I kept pulling away. Then I got in this explosively shitty place. The bad place. I wanted everything to end. I sent you that message and screwed everything up.”

  “You haven’t screwed anything up, though,” she says, her eyes shiny. “I still exist.”

  Those three words seem to hold the world for a second. She and I, we are here. For now, for this brief little flash in the space-time pan, we are our own universe.

  “Etta, you’re too good,” I say to her.

  “I know I am. Guess what? I give people one chance to screw up. And this is your chance.”

  I breathe in, grateful.

  “But that’s it. Once chance. You screw me again . . .”

  “I wasn’t trying to screw you.”

  “That was the problem, really, but—” She laughs. I have missed her laugh.

  There should be a word for when you only truly know that greatness of how much you’ve missed someone at that moment you see them again. The way it floods back, nervous. I’ve been pushing Etta from my mind, but I hurt exquisite when I see her.

  “I’m not okay,” I tell her. “I mean, sometimes I’m okay. Then I’m not again. I’m confused. They diagnosed me as bipolar and I tried medication but then got off it and I think I might go back to see a psychiatrist—”

  Etta leans in and interrupts me with a soft, abrupt kiss, our lips one, her hand on the back of my neck and touching my pizza body, my hands in her wig. With my eyes closed, all I see is gold, sunshine filtered through my eyelids, and I think, for the first time in a long time, hell yes, life; I’m going to be okay.

  Someone honks and we pull apart, laughing.

  “Yeah, I’m sure this is a traffic stopper,” I say. “Dolly Parton impersonator making out with a pizza slice on a street corner.”

  “Oh my God, Journey,” Etta says, giggling into her hand.

  “What?”

  “Your face . . .”

  I turn around and look into the moped’s side mirror, where I see my lips are clownishly stained red.

  “Goddamn your lipstick,” I say.

  She’s laughing so hard she’s silent for a moment. “I’m sorry.”

  “Okay, now we’re even.”

  “Yeah right, you stupid heartbreaker,” she says, wiping her eyes.

  Who cares about the lipstick all over my face. The sun’s starting its slow descent down. The sprinklers behind her sing.

  I can’t help it.

  I kiss her again.

  In a twist of irony, or more likely the limitations of health insurance options, Dr. Ng’s office is in the same building as Dr. Shaw’s. I sit in the waiting room with its enormous potted palm and outdated magazines fanned on coffee tables and get a flashback of the time nearly a year ago when I first came in here, desperate for clarity—an answer in the shape of a diagnosis. I left that appointment with a prescription and new word to describe myself, bipolar, lighter, inflated with hope, certain everything would get easier from there. Now here I am again, different year, different doctor, same clinic, same old mess.

  When my name is called, I expect to walk into another dark room to another uninterested clinician with a clipboard and another multiple choice questionnaire. It surprises me that, on the contrary, Dr. Ng is warm and welcoming and her office is painted bright blue. She offers me a seat across from her on a plush chair and asks me to tell her about why I’m here. She doesn’t give me paperwork, and she doesn’t take notes. She sits intently with her hands folded and listens. I guess not all psychiatrists are the same.

  How shall I construct the proper narrative of my downward spiral? Chronologically, beginning in childhood? Skip ahead to the traumatic events that led up to the nervous breakdown? The suicide attempt? A back-and-forth narrative sequence featuring my past and p
resent selves? I don’t know, but as soon as my mouth opens, I become a human gush of information, trying to squeeze in everything in a race against the clock—trying to construct a story of myself that most closely resembles the truth. When I get to the part about that first appointment with Dr. Shaw, how short our time together was, the lithium and how I went off, her eyebrows furrow.

  “Did you get a second opinion of your diagnosis after that initial appointment?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “Did you come back for follow up?”

  “Not really. I saw other psychiatrists when I was hospitalized, though. And I have a therapist. That’s kind of why I’m here—I was kind of hoping you would give me a second opinion.”

  “I’m a bit shocked you weren’t followed up with and that you were diagnosed so quickly,” Dr. Ng says. “That’s not typical, at least not in my practice. We’re frequently overbooked here, and that could be part of the issue—but a bipolar diagnosis and a lithium prescription require a lot of adjustment and I would expect multiple follow-up appointments.”

  My heart beats wildly at her admission. “Are you saying . . . I might not be bipolar?”

  “Journey, we’ve been together a total of—” Dr. Ng checks her watch. “Twenty minutes? I wouldn’t feel comfortable diagnosing you that quickly. I can say, based on what you’ve told me and reading your medical records, a bipolar diagnosis seems like it might fit. But I also see symptoms that could be major depressive disorder, a personality disorder, or even PTSD related to your accident. Or you could simply be a teenager going through a tough time. I can’t say for sure if you have bipolar disorder or not in this first appointment. It’s possible you were misdiagnosed. It’s possible you weren’t.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “Mental health treatment is a journey, so to speak,” she says, giving me an encouraging smile. “It takes time to get it right. It can evolve over years. Diagnoses are reassessed, medications are adjusted, the diagnostic manual is updated, treatment plans change. People change.”

  I let this information sink in, chewing the inside of my cheek. It’s funny, isn’t it, to be a poet, to be a writer of imaginary dictionaries, to be the person forever looking for words with no English equivalent to describe the indescribable—and yet to never feel like I find that proper word that fits me.