What Kind of Girl

by Alyssa Sheinmel

  In our first session, Dr. Kreiter said she’d worked with kids like me before. Maybe she wasn’t just reducing me to a type like I thought. For the first time, it occurs to me that maybe she was trying to make me feel a little bit less alone.

  Dad says, “Fee, be reasonable. Junie wasn’t supposed to cut herself again, and she hasn’t.”

  “No, she’s just started using drugs.” Mom throws up her hands and storms out of the room. Dad looks at me and sighs, sinking into his usual chair next to mine.

  “She’ll calm down.”

  I nod.

  “She’s scared.”

  I nod.

  “This is just a speed bump,” he adds. “You’ve been doing so well, no matter what the doctor says.”

  Normally, I’d be relieved to hear Dad say that I’ve been doing so well. I’d be happy he thinks Mom just needs to calm down. He’s the one who talked Mom out of making me go to group therapy. He said I made a good argument against it—my brilliant three-month plan—and I deserved a chance to prove myself.

  But Mom just found pills in my trash can.

  I haven’t proved myself.

  And Dad doesn’t see it.

  He doesn’t see me.

  “What did the doctor say?” I ask. “About my progress?”

  Dad shrugs. “That you hadn’t really opened up to her. But of course you’ve made progress. Look at what you did today.” Dad pauses, then leans closer to me and says, “I know we weren’t supposed to go to the demonstration, but I couldn’t help myself.”

  Does he remember that I never said I didn’t want them to come? He said that. He decided it.

  He continues, “I watched from the parking lot. I saw Maya up in front of that crowd, and I was so proud of you. I drove away before you had a chance to see me there, though.” He winks.

  Proud of me, because Maya stood up and spoke out? Does he think I planned that, timed her speech perfectly for maximum impact? Could he ever guess that I was so out of it when Maya spoke I didn’t hear a word she said?

  I feel something twist in my stomach, but my hands don’t start their familiar shake. Whatever this feeling is, it isn’t anxiety.

  Dad continues, “When I was your age, I could’ve only dreamed of organizing an event like that. Everyone marching in lockstep, chanting in unison. One goal, one voice.”

  I shake my head. The words they were chanting weren’t my goal. They didn’t reflect my voice, or (more importantly), Maya’s voice.

  “I saw you and Maya heading for her car before I left. It must have been a hard day for her. But don’t worry, we can go back and pick up your car later.”

  I shake my head. Maya wasn’t the one who was so upset she needed to leave. I was. Didn’t he see that Maya was comforting me, not the other way around? Can’t he see—I’m sitting right beside him—that my face is streaked with tears? Is he even looking?

  “Imagine what you’ll achieve at Stanford,” Dad says. “You can write about today on your application—how you overcame your own struggles to plan such a successful protest.”

  How can my father be beaming with pride even after my mother found a bunch of pills in my trash can?

  I told Tess it wasn’t her fault that she didn’t know me. There are so many parts of myself that I hid from her. But I’m not sure it’s not Dad’s fault, not after everything that’s happened.

  There is part of me that wants to plan rallies and make a difference the way he taught me. I believe in the causes he believes in. I want to help people.

  But there’s also a part of me that wants to go upstairs and pull the covers over my head.

  I want both. At the same time.

  I am both at the same time.

  “It wasn’t one goal, one voice,” I say softly.

  “What do you mean, kiddo?”

  I raise my voice, just a little. “The protest today—it wasn’t what I planned at all.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  And louder still. “I wanted it to be about Maya and Mike, but it turned into something else. The protest got so much bigger—”

  “Bigger is better for events like these.”

  I wish I could be calm and reasonable, like Mom. But that feeling in my belly, that twist I couldn’t identify, makes its way up into my throat. I felt this same feeling last Monday, when Mom told me Maya came to school with a black eye: I’m angry.

  “This wasn’t a successful protest.” I’m yelling now. “I’m not proud of what happened today. It got out of control. I mean, Mike Parker actually marched! How can I be proud of that?”

  Dad doesn’t shout back. My whole life, whenever Dad and I argued, it was never anger that motivated me. Our arguments were more like debates than actual fights. He liked arguing the opposite side, liked seeing me craft a counterargument. It was the lawyer in me, he said.

  Now he says, “Maybe Mike’s seen the error of his ways. We believe in second chances, Juniper. Mike surely has demons of his own to confront. Studies show that abusers often have problematic backgrounds themselves. You know that.”

  “Today wasn’t Mike’s second chance.” I push my chair away from the table and stand. “What happened today, what it means for Maya, isn’t the result of some study. She isn’t a hypothetical person, a statistic, a fact I read about in a textbook. She’s my best friend! Can you understand that? Of course I hope Mike gets the help he needs too, but today, right now, I’m more concerned about Maya.”

  I know I’ll toss and turn over these words in bed tonight, worrying that I said the wrong thing—something that wasn’t fair, wasn’t kind, wasn’t true. But then I remember that Maya still helped me today, even after I said unkind words to her last night. Maybe I don’t always have to say exactly the right thing.

  “Today was a lie,” I continue. “Mike convinced half the student body that he had nothing to do with what happened to Maya.” I grip the back of my chair, but my hands still aren’t shaking.

  “Maybe I have to fight for things in a different way than you do. Maybe—” I rack my brain for an example. “Maybe I want to write about the world, rather than fight in a courtroom.” It’s the closest I’ve come to telling him I don’t want to be an attorney like him.

  “Junie, don’t let this setback—”

  I cut him off. “I freaked out this morning. I was barely conscious during the protest.” I thought I’d never tell my parents what happened, but maybe they need to know.

  “What do you mean?”

  I close my eyes, remembering how it felt to gasp for breath. I thought I was having a heart attack. “I was so out of it that I couldn’t hear what Maya said, and I certainly didn’t tell her to say it.”

  Before Dad can call that just another setback, I ask, “Why didn’t we go to family sessions?”

  Dad blinks. “What?”

  “Mom said that Dr. Kreiter wanted us to do family sessions. Why didn’t we?”

  Dad throws up his hands. “Not you too,” he moans. “Since when do you agree with everything that doctor has to say? She wanted you to go to group therapy, and I respected your opinion when you said you didn’t need it.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have.” My stomach twists with anger again. “What did you think when you saw me in the hospital in February?”

  “What kind of question is that? I was worried about you.”

  “I know,” I say. “But when Dr. Kreiter said that cutting was a coping mechanism—”

  “We all have ways of coping. We just need to find you a healthy outlet. Meditation. Exercise.”

  “But didn’t you wonder why I had so much trouble coping in the first place?”

  Dad doesn’t answer.

  “It’s not a setback, Dad. Not what happened today, and not the cutting. I’m sick. I started hurting myself because it hurt less than not hurting myself.
Can you understand that? Can you even imagine it?”

  Dad opens his mouth to answer, but for once a counter-argument doesn’t emerge. Instead, he shakes his head. “I can’t.”

  “Okay,” I say. Carefully, slowly, I push my chair back under the table. “Well, from now on, I’m going to try to explain it to you. Because I think you need to understand it if you’re ever going to understand me.” I think but don’t add, If I’m ever going to understand me.

  I take a deep breath, remembering what Maya said about good love. “And I have to hope that you’ll love me even if I’m not exactly the person you want me to be.” My voice shakes, of course it shakes. But I think I actually said the right thing for once.

  I turn on my heel and walk toward the stairs. Mom’s sitting on the bottom step, her head in her hands. She must have heard every word.

  “I’m so sorry, Junie.” I’m surprised to hear that her voice is shaking too—it’s high-pitched, nervous. I’ve never heard her sound so anxious before. “Dr. Kreiter said you were scared to ask for help. Like you didn’t trust that we’d love you no matter what.”

  I sink onto the steps beside her. Mom’s dark brown hair is streaked with gray. Unlike my hair (I inherited Dad’s stick-straight mop), Mom’s hair is wavy. It’s pulled back into a tight ponytail this morning, but Mom tucks a few phantom strands behind her ear, almost obsessively. Or maybe precisely obsessively, since the same trick of genetics that made me inherit Dad’s hair could have made me inherit Mom’s OCD.

  “I noticed you were acting differently this fall, but I thought it was just the stress of junior year. I thought that if anything was really wrong, you’d have come to me to talk about it, but now—” She sighs heavily. “I thought I was being a good mother, giving you space. I didn’t want to raise you the way my mother raised me. Overprotective. Overbearing.”

  “You are a good mother,” I say.

  Mom continues as if I didn’t say anything, “Now, I think Dr. Kreiter was right. You were too scared to tell me you needed help. How could I have let that happen?”

  “I didn’t start cutting until December,” I protest. “I was still okay in the fall.”

  Mom shakes her head. “No,” she says firmly. “You weren’t.” I remember how pleased Mom had been when she thought I was taking baths, that I’d set aside time for self-care.

  At our very first session, Dr. Kreiter explained that while the cutting was our most immediate problem, it wasn’t our only problem. I nodded, because I knew she wanted me to agree (it made sense, given my diagnoses), but at the time, I didn’t actually think the doctor knew what she was talking about. Like Dad said, I wasn’t supposed to cut, and I haven’t, so how could Dr. Kreiter say I wasn’t making progress?

  But that was before I knew how it felt to be flush with a false sense of well-being. I thought Dr. Kreiter was wrong when she said I cut (partly) for the endorphin rush, but now I’m not so sure.

  I think back to the fall: studying SAT words and fitting in my homework between my extracurriculars. Falling for Tess months before she ever really noticed me. Even then, my hands sometimes shook while I typed my English and history papers, while I wrote out my notes from physics lab.

  Mom’s right: I was struggling even before the cutting started.

  “A parent’s most important job is making sure her child knows she’s loved,” Mom continues. “After that, it’s keeping her child safe. And I didn’t do either of those things.”

  “You kept me from cutting myself for months,” I offer.

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean you felt safe, does it?”

  I think about Maya, living day-to-day knowing that Mike might hit her. That’s not feeling safe.

  But when I think about the lengths I went to in order to hide my anxiety—not just the pills, but before that, playing it cool with Tess, insisting I could stop myself from cutting without extra help, too scared to even tell my father I didn’t want to be a lawyer like him—I realize it’s a different kind of not feeling safe, but it still counts.

  Mom says, “I should have said something to you sooner. We should have said something. But I want you to know how proud you made me today.”

  I blink in confusion. Mom heard what I said to Dad—the protest was a disaster, I freaked out. How can she be proud of me?

  Mom continues, “It was brave of you to stand up to your father like that. To ask him—to ask us—to see all of you. I’m just sorry you had to ask at all.”

  “I’m sorry too,” I reply. “I shouldn’t have lied. Not just about the pills, or about sneaking out last night.” Mom’s eyes widen in surprise (I forgot she didn’t actually know about my sneaking out), but I keep going.

  “I’m sorry I lied about everything. I’m sorry I lied about myself.”

  Nineteen

  Maya

  I imagine that he hears the phone ringing. I picture the surprise crossing his face when he sees my number on the screen. I exhale when I hear his voice say, “Hi, sweetheart.”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “How are you?”

  Sitting cross-legged on my bed, I feel my face crumple. I cry until my chest hurts. I cry until I can barely breathe. I cry until I have to put the phone down to wipe my face.

  If it were Mom on the other end of the phone, I’d end up comforting her, trying to quiet her concerns with soothing nonsense promises that everything’s going to be okay. But it’s Dad, so he waits quietly.

  “I have to tell you something,” I manage finally. “Mike, Mike—Mike has been—” It’s hard to say his name. “He hit me.”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” Dad says. I wait for him to ask whether I’ve gone to the police. I wait for him to ask how long it’s been going on, and then to ask why I didn’t come forward sooner. I wait for his confusion that the boy I lit up around is also a boy who hurt me. But instead, Dad simply says, “I’m so sorry.”

  I blink and swallow. “You don’t sound surprised.”

  “Your mother told me.”

  “Mom told you?” I sit up and wipe my eyes. Mom and Dad haven’t spoken in months. They can’t speak. Since the divorce—and for a while before that—any conversation dissolves into shouts. I’m already planning to have them sit on opposite sides of the school auditorium when I graduate next year to keep the peace. But I’m not sure that will be far enough, because they managed to fight even after Dad moved into the guest room, and after he moved to a hotel, and then after he moved across the country to New York.

  “She called me Monday afternoon,” Dad says. “I didn’t tell you because—well, I guess I thought you’d tell me when you were ready.”

  “God, that’s just like Mom,” I say. “Making this thing that happened to me into something that happened to her.”

  “Not this time, sweetheart. She was worried about you. We needed to discuss it.”

  I almost laugh. “Come on, Dad. You guys never discuss anything anymore.”

  “I know we’re not very good at it,” Dad admits. “But your mom did the right thing, telling me.”

  It’s the closest he’s come to saying something nice about my mother for years.

  “It’s not just Mike,” I begin, and my throat catches but I swallow hard, determined not to start crying again. If I’m really done with secrets, I have to say this too. Even if it’s just as hard as telling the truth about Mike. “I’ve been making myself throw up. Pretty much ever since Mike and I got together. Even before he hit me.”

  Dad’s quiet. Maybe he’s thinking that Mom should have known, since she’s the one living with me. Maybe he thinks a good parent would have known, that he would have known. I’m surprised by how much I want to defend her. “I’ve gotten good at keeping secrets.”

  “Sweetheart,” Dad begins gently, “I hate to hear that you’ve been hurting yourself like that.”

  I almost object, thinking that th
rowing up is nothing compared to what Junie went through, but I stop myself. Maybe it’s not the same thing as cutting myself open—but Dad’s right. It’s still a kind of hurting myself. Dad continues, “Your mom and I have been talking. I understand the school hasn’t yet decided what Mike’s punishment will be, whether he might be expelled.”

  “There’s a board meeting tomorrow night.”

  “I know,” Dad says, “but whatever they decide—if you don’t want to go back to that school, it’s okay.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you could come live with me. Finish high school in New York.”

  I shake my head, even though he can’t see me. “Mom doesn’t even want me going away to college.”

  At the beginning of junior year, before Mike and I were a couple, our high school’s college adviser made all the juniors put together a list of all the colleges we’re thinking of applying to. My list included Berkeley, Pomona, and UCLA, but also East Coast schools like Barnard, Columbia, and NYU, Vassar and Cornell.

  When the adviser told Mom about the list at a parent/teacher conference, Mom freaked out. How could you leave me alone like that? she said. Why would you pick your father over me?

  “Actually,” Dad says now, “it was your mother’s idea.”

  “What?”

  “Maya, I’m the first to admit that your mother’s not perfect.” Dad sighs. “Maybe I should have been better about keeping a few secrets myself. I shouldn’t have let you get caught in the middle of our issues. Neither of us should have. Maybe if we’d done a better job, you’d have felt safe coming to one of us sooner.

  “Your mom loves you very much. She called me the other night because she—both of us—we don’t know how to make this better for you. She wants you to feel safe. And I—she—we want you to be healthy too.” I can’t remember the last time either of my parents referred to themselves as we. “And if coming to New York will make things easier for you, then she wants you to be in New York.”