Notes on a Near-Life Experience

by Olivia Birdsall

  A few minutes later, our conversation is interrupted again, this time by Allen. He has picked up the extension in his room. “Hey, Meezer, how much longer are you gonna be on this thing? I need to call Julio and I can't find my cell phone.”

  “Um, well…Julian's on the phone right now. Do you want to talk to him and just let me know when you're done?” “Julio? You there?” “Yeah,” Julian answers. “Oh. Uh… never mind, man. I'll talk to you later.”

  Allen's voice sounds strange. All of a sudden I feel really dumb. Like I'm eleven years old again, bugging Julian and Allen to let me play video games with them, just so I can be around Julian.

  “Yeah, I'll give you a call in a few,” Julian says.

  Allen hangs up. We sit there in silence for a few seconds.

  “Hey, listen, Julian, I've got homework to do, so I'd better go.” I don't really have much homework at all, but I feel weird about talking to Julian now.

  “Yeah, and I need to talk to Al, so…”

  “See ya.”

  “Bye.”

  I click the phone off.

  I don't remember to call Haley back until late that night when I check my cell phone messages and there are three from her.

  “Mia, I really need to talk to you. Call me.”

  “Mimoo, it's me again. Call me, call me, call me!”

  “Meems, I'm going to bed now. I guess we'll talk tomorrow.”

  When I see her at school, I ask her what she needed to talk to me about.

  “Mike Hickenlooper called me and asked me for our math assignment and he isn't even in my class. He's pretty cute, don't you think?”

  “Yeah. But isn't he dating Kiera Garcia?”

  “Maybe. I don't keep up on stuff like that…. So you don't think …” Her voice trails off.

  “Things have been weird with me and Allen and Julian lately,” I tell her.

  Haley listens to my story, but she seems kind of distracted. She's usually much more focused when we talk. The bell rings.

  “Argh. Class.” Haley groans.

  “I know. Doesn't it feel like just yesterday that we had the exact same classes at the exact same time?” I joke. “I feel like we never hang out anymore. Are you busy today after school?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you want to do something? Maybe play a little tennis?” I like playing tennis with Haley. Even though she's a superstar player, she doesn't mind how bad I am. She just plays along. Most people, especially Allen and my dad, don't deal as well with mediocrity. Allen has freaked out on me a few times when I've tried to play soccer, and my dad used to get really annoyed with Allen when he couldn't understand his math homework.

  “Sure. Let's just meet at my car after school.”

  “You got it. See you there.” I make a graceless tennis-racket-swinging motion as I walk away.

  “WOULD YOU GO TO THE PROM WITH AL IF HE ASKED YOU?” I ask Haley, looking at the strings on my racket and sort of clawing them with my fingers. I've seen tennis players on TV do this, and I'm trying to look like I don't really care what Haley says, so I continue to feel the strings while I wait for her answer.

  “Why are you asking? And what are you doing with your racket?”

  Haley and I took tennis lessons together in elementary school. She was great; I was okay. It didn't bother me because she was my best friend, and when she whipped someone's ass, I felt like I'd had some part in it. It's hard to be jealous of Haley. She's too nice. My mother says she's very grounded. Except when it comes to boys. She gets pretty jumpy around guys she likes, and she's fairly oblivious when someone she isn't interested in likes her.

  Once, this nerdy kid, Ricky Friedman, kept asking her to hang out, and she kept saying okay because she felt bad for him. She didn't realize that he thought they were dating, so she totally freaked out when he tried to kiss her one night. They were at the movies when he tried it, and she got up, told him she needed to use the bathroom, left the theater, and called her mom from a Wendy's down the street. We call that night “The Ricky Friedman Debacle,” and whenever anyone Haley isn't into asks her out, she always says no, even if they just want to be friends. “I can't handle another Ricky Friedman Debacle,” she says.

  “I'm checking to make sure my strings are okay,” I tell her now. “And I'm asking because Allen has no one to go with and Julian really wants Allen to go with us. He could end up going with someone awful and then the whole night would suck.”

  “I don't know, Meems. I can't—”

  “He's no Ricky Friedman, Haley. C'mon. I mean, maybe he already has someone in mind to ask, but if he doesn't, would you go with him? Are you really into Mike Hickenlooper?”

  “What? I thought you said he was with Kiera Garcia.”

  “So you aren't into him?” I feel a little guilty about not telling Haley what Julian told me about Mike's having a crush on her, but if she doesn't even like him, it's not a big deal, right? Plus Haley will have more fun with us than with someone she barely knows.

  “I guess not. Why?”

  “No reason. Would you go with Al if he asked you?”

  “Sure. I guess. Can we play now?”

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  I know it sounds crazy, but it feels so nice to feel like you are in control of something, however small it is. The rest of my life has gone haywire, but I will have a perfect prom night. “Great. Let me call Julian and tell him.” I put down the

  racket, race over to my backpack, and get out my phone. “What? Why are you calling Julian?” I signal for her to be quiet—the phone is ringing. Julian

  doesn't answer, so I leave a message.

  When I hang up, Haley is staring at me. She looks a little sad, a little pissed off. “You know what, Meems? I'm tired. Let's just go home.”

  “Are you sure? Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, everything's fine. Let's just go.”

  I wonder what's going on with Haley. She's been acting

  weird lately.

  At home that night, I still can't shake the way I feel about not telling her about Mike Hickenlooper. It's one thing not telling her about what's going on with me, but it's different to not tell her things about her. I think of calling her and telling her, but I decide against it. She'll understand, right? She always does.

  I NOTICE DURING THIS VISIT TO LISZ'S OFFICE THAT HER COUCH is purple, not black. I had assumed, because the color was so dark, that it was black. Wrongo Pongo, it's purple. A very deep plum. I realize this because I have been staring at the couch for three solid minutes without actually speaking.

  I grab the jar, take out a piece of paper: your greatest fear.

  “It says ‘your greatest fear.’ ”

  I think about the potter's wheel, unused, in our garage, the diploma hanging on the wall of my father's office, the white line around the ring finger of my mother's left hand.

  “My greatest fear is being caught in a fire, or maybe heights.”

  “What about those two things, specifically, makes you afraid?” Lisz asks as she leans forward, putting her elbows on

  her knees, propping her head up with her hands.

  I stare at her nails, a muted tangerine color.

  “I guess I hate pain—and being burned would be really painful. I saw this episode of ER where this kid was burned and they had to, like, peel his burned skin off.”

  I expect her to look grossed out, but she acts as if she hears this every day.

  “And I hate heights because I hate the idea of falling. And splatting on the ground.”

  “I see,” she says. “So you've expressed a great fear of physical pain….”

  She asks me questions about pain: whether I had any experiences as a child where I suffered severe physical pain, whether I've been threatened with physical pain as some sort of punishment for disobedience, things like that. I consider lying, making up a story about my dad beating me with a belt for not cleaning my room, but I decide against it. I don't want to get my parents turned in to th
e police or anything.

  “Mia, you concentrate a lot on the exterior, on the physical, in our visits. What about the interior, the mental or emotional? Do you fear that kind of pain as well?”

  What kind of a question is that? Are there people out there who relish the idea of emotional anguish?

  Lisz looks at me expectantly.

  “I guess.”

  She acts as if I have just revealed a secret that has the potential to alter the study of psychiatry as we know it.

  “Okay, Mia.” She speaks cautiously, like she's the Crocodile Hunter and I am the wild animal she's trying to trap. “Tell me a little more about that.”

  I don't respond. She's given herself away; I know that she's trying to trick me into saying something I don't want to say.

  “Why don't you name things you think people are afraid of, and I'll tell you if those things scare me or not,” I suggest.

  “I don't think that's the most effective way to go about this. Do you think there might be a better way of discussing this issue?”

  “Like what?” I ask.

  “Well, if I try to guess what's going on inside you— what it is that you fear—we could sit here for hours and never get anywhere. I do have some ideas about how certain things have affected you and how you've chosen to react to them, but it's important that you recognize these things for yourself.”

  “Oh. But if you're a professional, don't you think you'd be better at knowing what bugs me or what makes me crazy than I would?”

  “Mia. First of all, you aren't crazy. You aren't here because you are crazy or because anyone thinks you are going crazy. Second, you are here to learn about yourself by thinking and talking about your experiences, how you've responded to them and why you've responded to them the way you have, not for me to tell you who you are and why. I'm not a psychic; I'm a psychiatrist.”

  “Right. Well, can I pick a different paper, then?”

  After vetoing several topics, I settle on your best friend. I talk about Haley and the time I tried to perm her hair when we were in fourth grade, how I ended up frying it so badly that she had to cut all her hair off, and how she looked a lot like a young Matt Damon with her hair so short.

  Lisz asks me if our relationship has changed since my parents began having problems.

  “No,” I lie, “things are the same as always.” The same as always except that now we hardly see each other, act like strangers when we do, don't really talk, and she seems kinda pissed at me when we do talk. Yep, things are great. Totally normal. I've just been hiding the fact that this boy who she might actually like (which never happens) might actually like her. Something I would probably never forgive her for if she did it to me. Only, Haley would never in a million years do anything like that to me. But yeah, we're best friends and everything is fine. I just suck, that's all.

  “How does it make you feel to know that your relationship with Haley hasn't changed, even though so many other things in your life have?”

  “Good,” I tell her, “like there's at least one thing I can count on, like not everything had to change or get all messed up because of the divorce.” It seems like that's what she was going for. Sometimes it's easy to read Lisz; sometimes it's more difficult, depending on her questions. Sometimes I understand what she's trying to get me to see, what she wants me to say, and it makes sense. She wants me to see what I have, what I can do with it. She wants me to see what's changed and figure out how to deal with it.

  While I wait for Allen to finish his session with Lisz, I call Haley. Her phone goes straight to voice mail: “Hi, you've reached Haley's cell phone. I try not to use this thing very much because it probably causes brain cancer, and I try to live as noncarcinogenic a life as possible. So leave a message and I'll call you back from a landline.”

  “Hi, it's me.” I think about telling Haley about Mike right now, but I can't. “Where are you? I miss you. I feel like a jerk about the other day. I'm sorry for being such an idiot lately. Call me…if you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”

  JULIAN WILL WAX POETIC ON OCCASION, USUALLY WHEN HE ponders the mysteries unfolded to him in his advanced biology class.

  “We're losing pieces of ourselves, Meezer. It's the way life works.”

  “What?” I ask, breathless. He likes to think about this stuff when we're kissing, I think; he has this tendency to interrupt really great make-outs with his musings on science.

  “In evolution, it takes a long time, you know, for things to be lost, to disappear. Like how we're going to lose our pinky toes eventually. And we've already lost tons of teeth.”

  “We're not going to have pinky toes anymore?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “But they're my favorite toes. Why can't we lose the freaky second toe?”

  He shrugs and looks like he's ready to kiss me again.

  But I'm already distracted. “It's weird how some people's second toes are longer than their big toes.”

  “And the crazy thing is, that stuff doesn't come back,” he says. “Once you lose it, it's gone.”

  I don't say anything.

  “And that's just one example of how biology, which is life, essentially, is about losing things. Really it's about change, I guess, but for humans, for people who live in the modern world, most of our adaptations have to do with losing things, with how we don't need to be as strong anymore.”

  I look at him, put my hands on his cheeks, kiss his eyelids, then the three freckles on his forehead.

  “I hope we never adapt out of freckles,” I say, and I feel like crying.

  MOST GIRLS DEVELOP BREASTS IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL. I didn't get boobs until I was almost fifteen. I guess that wouldn't have been that bad except for the fact that, having skipped a grade, I was already a year behind everyone else. I was a sophomore in high school by the time I really needed a bra, and I still can't even fill out a B-cup.

  Kiki Nordgren has had a rack since she was twelve.

  This all brings me to the realization I had today: Julian has never tried to feel me up. I wonder if he is gay. Or if he hates my boobs.

  IT'S 6:20 A.M. I AM SUPPOSED TO BE AT DANCE PRACTICE IN ten minutes, but Allen is not awake and ready to take me like he's supposed to be. I knock on his door. No response. I open the door and walk quietly over to his bed, which doesn't make sense since I am about to wake him up. He's dead asleep.

  “Al, wake up.” I nudge his shoulder.

  He doesn't respond.

  I say it again, louder, and shake him harder.

  “Ow,” he croaks. “What? No. Too early.” He rolls over so his back is facing me. I shake him again. “You said you'd take me to practice this morning. I can't be late.”

  “Can't, Mimoo. Too tired. Must have the flu or something,” he mumbles, turning over in the bed so that he faces me.

  When he does this, his breath hits me, and I know he doesn't just have the flu, if he is really even sick at all.

  “Have you been drinking?” I ask.

  “Too tired. Need to sleep. Ask Julian to take you.”

  “Is he hungover, too?”

  He opens his eyes and shields them with his arm. “Are you crazy? Julian? Come on. Please… turn that light off.” He rolls back over and pulls his sheet over his head.

  I call Julian.

  “Hey, sorry to call so early. Can you take me to dance practice? Al can't, and I don't want to have to explain why to my parents.”

  “Huh?”

  “I can't talk about it right now. Can you take me or not?”

  “Easy, tiger. Yeah, I'll take you. Can you walk over here while I'm getting dressed?”

  “Sure.”

  I walk to Julian's, knock on his front door, walk into the house, and wait in the living room. He comes out with his toothbrush in his mouth. He points to it and to his watch, tries to say something. I guess he is trying to tell me that we'll leave as soon as he finishes brushing his teeth.

  He disappears again. I hear him running the water
in the bathroom and spitting. He reemerges, keys in hand.

  “So what happened with Al?” he asks as we get into his car.

  “He's hungover. Or maybe he's still drunk. I don't know. Either way, he's been drinking. Do you know anything about this?”

  “Last night after the game some guys decided to go out, but usually that just means pizza. Are you sure he was drinking? Not just tired?”

  “I think I know the difference between the smells of alcohol and morning breath. He's been drinking.”

  “Wow. Today's Tuesday. I mean, it's not even a weekend.”

  “Yeah.” I think about this for a moment. “Wait, are you saying that if it was a weekend, this would be normal?”

  “Not exactly,” he says, hedging, “but it's not like your brother's partying is anything new, right?”

  “It's not?” I remember the canteen in his backpack, the calls from school, the way he's always disappearing from home, driving off by himself.

  “Oh. Right. Maybe it is. I'll ask him what happened.”

  “Thanks.” But I don't want Julian to just ask him what happened. I want him to fix it, or I want somebody to fix it, or erase it. I don't know how to talk about real problems, much less how to resolve them, but I wish someone did.

  Neither of us can find anything else to say, so we listen to a band I've never heard of sing a song about French fries and Eskimos.

  When we get to the school, he kisses me quickly on the lips and says, in an effeminate voice, “You dance your little heart out, you hear me? You little dancing Eskimo, you.”

  I laugh before I can stop myself, grab my bag from the backseat, and get out of the car. “Will you please try to get Al up and to school? He's already in trouble for missing so much.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  BEFORE JULIAN MOVED IN, MOST OF THE KIDS ON THE STREET were lots older than Allen and I, so we hung out with each other a lot. We were best friends because Allen didn't know yet that it wasn't cool to hang out with your younger sister more than anyone else.

  Once, we were playing with the hose in the backyard and a bee flew into Allen's ear. I ran inside to tell my mom, who ran outside, saw Allen holding his ear, and then ran back inside to call 911. While Mom panicked, I shoved the hose in Allen's ear, turned the water on full blast, and flushed the bee out. By the time she got through and had explained the situation to an annoyed operator, Allen and I were already back to spraying each other with the hose, and Allen was doing his best to put the hose in my ear to “see if there are any bees in there.”