Girl on the Line

by Faith Gardner

  “How does what I’ve said today sit with you?” she asks.

  “Well, on one hand, it sucks to think that maybe I’m not bipolar after everything, like I’m back at square one.”

  “I hear that. What about the other hand?”

  “I do want to get it right,” I say. “I want to know what I am, what to call myself, whether to call myself anything, what treatments there might be. I’ve doubted that I’m bipolar at times. Others I’ve felt like it fits. I hate the fact I have to label myself at all. But if I have to label myself, I want to get it right.”

  “We will, Journey,” she says. “It just takes time.”

  “Well, you’re in luck, because I have a lot of that,” I say.

  She laughs, pulling out her calendar to jot down our next appointment time. “I love a patient with a good sense of humor.”

  I think Dr. Ng and I are going to get along swimmingly.

  I leave the clinic this time with no scrap of paper, no word to Google, and more questions than answers. And you know what? I guess that’s what progress looks like sometimes.

  On the weather app, it says it’s eighty-one degrees today in Chicago, which seems impossible, because it’s eighty-one degrees here. Marisol and I go out to brunch. She’s packed and is heading to the airport after we eat. This is it. From the diner, from our spot next to the window, we can see Crusty’s two doors down, lights off, closed sign in the window. My world is too small. Even my new apartment is less two miles away. Not Marisol’s world, though. Hers stretches into other time zones. I’m jealous, in a way, but I know she deserves this, she wanted this. And I’ve been too busy losing and not losing my mind to build anything resembling an adventurous life. But, dear future self, I’m sure you’re out there exploring, and your world is impossibly large.

  “What if I just brought you with me,” she says, sipping her black coffee. “Stuff you in a suitcase and smuggle you into my dorm room.”

  “What if I kidnap you and lock you in my new apartment forever?”

  “I’m going to miss my creepy best friend,” she says.

  “Same.”

  I put the ten thousandth tiny plastic container of cream into my coffee. There is a small mountain of empty containers next to my hand. Then I start on the sugar packets.

  “Journey,” she says, shaking her head. “You’re going to give yourself a heart attack.”

  “I’m already giving myself a brain attack most days. Why not the heart, too?”

  “I hope you’re going to take care of yourself while I’m gone. Etta better be a good influence on you.”

  “Etta eats candy for breakfast and hates physical exertion possibly more than I do. She’s wonderful.”

  Marisol lines her fork, knife, spoon up, straightens her napkin. “You’re cute when you talk about her.”

  “We’re just friends who make out.” I take a sip of my coffee, the sweet screaming taste. “No big.”

  “Anyone but Jonah.”

  “I can’t believe I ever loved that empty vessel.”

  “We all date mistakes. Remember Lloyd?”

  Lloyd, Marisol’s boyfriend last summer, was the whiniest wisp of a manboy who I basically ignored, hoping he would go away, and he eventually did, and now Marisol makes herself gag whenever she thinks of him and his—I quote her, here—“eel-like tongue and sweaty fingers.”

  “I’m about to eat,” Marisol says.

  Alejandro, our old favorite waiter, brings us our usual. Marisol cuts our chicken-fried steak with a lovingness that can only be described as maternal.

  “We’re always going to be best friends, though,” Marisol says, putting my plate in front of me, as if she’s continuing some conversation. “And we can FaceTime anytime, day or night, and I can text you dozens of times while watching some show on TV.”

  “Sure,” I say.

  She stares at her plate for a moment, her exactly half a meal that looks so scrawny on its own. She looks up at me. “Journey, we’ve got to talk about what happened between us.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “What happened between us?” she goes on.

  “Does this matter now?”

  “Yes, of course it matters. It’s been bothering me for months. This has gone on for months. And then you just want to move on and not talk about it—how can we do that? We used to talk about everything.”

  “I’m tired of looking backward,” I say.

  “Yeah, I got that. And I’m glad your life is going well for you and you’re moving out and all that. But you know what? Ever since you attempted suicide, it’s like you survived by not being able to look behind you. And maybe that served you well. I’m sure it did. But it cut people like me out of your life.”

  “I didn’t mean for it to be like that.”

  “It was almost like the whole essay thing was just an excuse,” she says, her voice shaking. “An excuse to cut me out.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “No, really. I’ve thought about this a lot.”

  “Why would I want to cut you out?” I ask.

  “Because you’re so afraid of being abandoned like Jonah abandoned you, and you know I’m leaving. Because you didn’t want to fall back into old patterns and I’m part of those old patterns. You’ve been building a future for yourself—which is amazing! Which is great! But in doing so, JoJo, you’ve completely forgotten your past.”

  A fist closes over my heart. “My past is a bunch of pain, Marisol, maybe that’s why.”

  “Not all of it,” she says. “I’m part of your past, too.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Stop it,” she says, raising her voice. “It is like that. I’ve watched you sabotage relationships because of this stupid fear of yours. You’ve got to give that up.”

  “What relationships?”

  “Etta, for one,” she says.

  Neither of us have touched our food. We sit, motionless, her eyes on me, my eyes on my food.

  “I know you too well to let you burn this down,” Marisol says. “I swear if I wasn’t relentless, you’d have just let me go. And that hurts me so bad, JoJo.”

  “I wouldn’t have let you go.”

  “But you did.”

  “Temporarily.”

  “Are you even sorry?” she asks, tears in her eyes. “Did you even miss me?”

  “Yes,” I say, looking her in the eyes, blinking tears away. “But I had to just—just focus on other stuff. To survive.”

  “I’m glad you survived, obviously, but don’t let survival be an excuse to push people away,” she says. “Because that’s not truly living.”

  Dumb stupid uninvited tears prick my eyeballs. And they are contagious. So now Marisol’s sniffing hers back, too, dabbing behind her glasses with a napkin.

  “I’m really sorry, Marisol,” I say.

  “It’s okay. And I’m sorry, too. I just wish we hadn’t spent our last year together this way.”

  I put my head on the table and sob. She pats my hair. When I’m done with my mortifying display of emotion in a public place, she hands me a napkin.

  “It’s like no matter what I do, when I look back, all I feel is regret,” I say.

  “Stop being so hard on yourself. Have some compassion. Those regrets are just getting in the way.”

  I blow my nose on a napkin. “I hate that we’re spending our last moments together mopping up the mess I am instead of being excited about the future.”

  “Are you excited about the future?”

  “Weirdly, yes.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Keep living,” I say. “Go to school. Maybe study psychology, English. Save my money, I don’t know, travel somewhere—”

  “Chicago,” she interrupts.

  “Have my own apartment. Write some more poems. Maybe not screw it up with Etta.”

  “And what if you get depressed?”

  “I will get depressed,” I say. “If there’s one thing I know, it’s that
I’m not getting off this roller coaster entirely.” I grab a triangle of jammy toast and chew it. “Right now, though, I really am okay.”

  Marisol nods. I can tell my words didn’t really assuage her worries. But it’s not like she can argue with me.

  “Keep writing poems,” she says. “Keep going to school. Send me pictures of how you decorate your apartment. Don’t forget about me. Come visit me in Chicago.”

  “I will.”

  “But no, I mean it. Come out for Halloween. We’ll go to a dumb party.”

  “I would love that.”

  She comes and sits next to me and shows me pictures of the campus on her phone, and I, in trade, show her some pictures from the listing of my apartment. It’s nothing fancy. Dim-lit photos with blah-colored carpet and blah-colored walls. It’s a studio, and you can practically reach both the toilet and the stove from the only place my bed will fit. But I paid the deposit. I signed the lease. It’s mine.

  She leans her head on my shoulder. I lean over and breathe her in for a moment. Her smell comes with an entire history—like I’m breathing in not only us, but another time and place, another self I once was. The freshman girl with long hair and blue eyeliner, who scribbled in composition books all day long, who hadn’t yet fallen in love or been broken. Whose big feelings shone in her eyes and were kept quiet in her heart and hadn’t yet spilled over. It’s weird how different yet the same you can be. It should be a contradiction, shouldn’t it? But it isn’t. It’s life.

  “I love you, Journey,” she says, hugging me. “Love you so much. The world is such a better place with you in it. I hope you know that.”

  “I do,” I say.

  And I’m not lying; even when the black hole tempts me, I know my absence would only bring more pain, more emptiness, to a world desperately in need of more joy, more sunshine, more pretty things.

  “Good luck. I want to hear all about your adventure,” I say.

  Each word hurts. I miss her already, and she’s standing right in front of me. Please leave some space in my dictionary for that definition.

  “Journey, I loved you then, I love you now, and I’ll love you forever, okay? I love every Journey. Every one.”

  “You too,” I say.

  We say goodbye. I want to say more, but she has to get going, and so do I. Some poor girl was just hired at Crusty’s and I’m about to train her in the art of pizza dancing. As I watch Marisol drive off, a pit manifests in my stomach, a sour cramp, regret physicalized. Then I breathe in and out, counting. I let the feeling stay there. I feel unfulfilled, unresolved. But that’s okay.

  Because real life?

  It has no resolution.

  Dear future self,

  I see you there, stumbling, mucking things up, not knowing which direction to choose. Making wrong turns and then doubling back to find your way again. Reaching your hands into the darkness, feeling for the light switch, falling down. I know you’re going to fall. It hurts to know this.

  But you know what else I see? I see you reaching for hands to help you up, laughing at yourself, dusting yourself off. Admitting when you’re wrong. Learning. Growing. Writing. Verbing all the nouns.

  Most importantly, dear future self, I see you. Not your shape; not your details. I just sense your shadow. I see you’re there. And guess what? I like you.

  And I think I want to keep you.

  Dear future self, my composition book says. Dear future self.

  And I realize something.

  I’m here.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you first to Claire Anderson-Wheeler, who always goes above and beyond as an agent—not only guiding me through the business side of book writing, but helping shape my messy first draft ideas into something so much stronger in the end. I’m ever grateful for your patience and support every step of the way.

  Thank you to Kristen Pettit; I’m still pinching myself that you’re my editor. It’s truly been a dream to work with someone so brilliant who has such an appreciation for the complexities of this story and Journey’s voice.

  Thank you to Dr. Jessi Gold for your invaluable input as a mental health professional.

  Thanks to everyone on the HarperTeen team for their work on this book, and to Darren Booth for the gorgeous, thoughtful cover design.

  Thank you to Gordon Hess, one of the kindest, most generous people I have been lucky enough to cross paths with, who met me during the hardest period of my life and saw me as a whole person, who taught me to learn to love my “big engine” despite how difficult it can be.

  Thank you to all my friends who supported and loved me during the times echoed in this book: Paul Isham, Isaiah Klein, Ida Ruff, Jared Blankenship, Christine Lewis Giffen, Jonathan Pugh, Tawnie Cameron, Dan Weiss, Erin Cantelo, Steve Gross, Heather Stevenson, Wyatt Lavasseur, Alyson Gove, and so many others I’m sure I’m forgetting.

  Thank you to the Santa Barbara Rape Crisis Center for making me a hotline volunteer and a better feminist.

  Thank you to my best friend in the wide world, Ramona Itule-Patigian, for not only your sisterhood, but for your support for my ideas, my writing, and my mental health.

  Thank you to my lovely friend Eliza Smith, for some important conversations early on in the writing process as I thought through the complexities of mental illness and identity.

  Thank you to my friends at the Ralston retreat, where I first started this story; a special thank you to Jane Martin-Gilmore for being the heart of that retreat and a champion of young writers and readers.

  Thank you to my tribe who has seen me through the best and blurst of times: Mom, Dad, Matt, Jackson, Micaela. Thank you too to all my extended family for the constant support: Katie Gardner, the Sanitates and Ellen Martin, the Richardsons, the Woods, and all the Gardners in North Carolina.

  Thank you to my daughters, Roxanna Tulip and Zora Fire-lily, who bring a special sunshine to my life I never knew existed.

  Thank you lastly, but most of all, to Jamie—my partner, my best friend, and someone whose understanding and love reaches impossibly far back in time. I still remember sitting shotgun with you as a teenager while we drove around our little paradise and exchanging stories about our struggles. I felt so wholly known, respected, and adored, despite all my mistakes. Decades later, I still feel the same. I’m so grateful to still be riding shotgun with you everywhere we go on this wild journey.

  Resources

  If you or a loved one are struggling, there are many resources to support you through crisis. Here are just a few:

  • National Suicide Prevention Hotline (https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org): “The Lifeline provides 24/7, free and confidential support for people in distress, prevention and crisis resources for you or your loved ones, and best practices for professionals.”

  oCall 1-800-273-8255 or chat online at https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/chat/.

  ohttps://youmatter.suicidepreventionlifeline.org is “a safe space for youth to discuss and share stories about mental health and wellness.”

  • The Trevor Project (www.thetrevorproject.org): “The Trevor Project is the leading national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ+ young people under twenty-five.”

  oTrevor Lifeline (1-866-488-7386) is “the only national 24/7 crisis intervention and suicide prevention lifeline for LGBTQ+ young people under twenty-five.”

  oTrevorChat (www.thetrevorproject.org/get-help-now/#trevorChat: is a “free, confidential, secure instant messaging service for LGBTQ+ youth.”

  oTrevorText (text START to 678-678) is a “free, confidential, secure service in which LGBTQ+ young people can text a trained Trevor counselor for support.”

  • Crisis Text Line: “Text HOME to 741741 from anywhere in the United States, anytime. Crisis Text Line is here for any crisis. A live, trained Crisis Counselor receives the text and responds, all from our secure online platform.”

  • NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) (www.nami.org): “T
he nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to building better lives for the millions of Americans affected by mental illness.” Their website includes tons of resources including connections with local chapters, statistics, educational information, and more for people with mental illness or friends and family who want to support them.

  oNAMI also has a HelpLine open Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET, reachable at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264) or by email at info@nami.org.

  About the Author

  Photo by Niki Pretti

  FAITH GARDNER is the author of The Second Life of Ava Rivers and Perdita. Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of online and print publications. When she’s not writing, she works at Daily Kos and plays in the band Plot 66. She lives in the East Bay area and can be found online at www.faithgardner.com.

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  Books by Faith Gardner

  The Second Life of Ava Rivers

  Perdita

  Girl on the Line

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  Copyright

  HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

  GIRL ON THE LINE. Copyright © 2021 by Faith Gardner. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.