by Sarah Moon
“It’s such a boring answer. I wasn’t up there for any special reason, okay? I was up there because that’s where I go. After that terrible week with Monique and Leticia, I realized that most people don’t actually notice if I’m missing, so instead of going to lunch I’d go to the roof, because the cafeteria sucked and the roof is quiet and empty and a lot of birds come by.”
“Why do you think it’s been so hard for you to answer that question?”
“It’s the only thing anyone wants to know, why I was on that roof, and the answer is so simple, but I couldn’t tell them because how do you explain to everyone that you have no friends and lunch is hell and so you go up to the roof to hang out with the birds because they like you and are nice to you, and oh, by the way, you also happen to turn into one from time to time?”
“Who’s everyone?”
“Everyone who’s asked me about going to the roof.”
“Who’s that?”
“Well, you a million times, to start with.”
“Yep, but even after you told me about flying, you couldn’t tell me about the roof. Why not?”
“It just became this thing, like, ooooh, why was she on the roof, and with everyone else I can’t answer the question because I can’t tell them that I was flying, and with you I couldn’t answer it because I’d been refusing to answer it for so long.”
“How does it feel now that you’ve told me?”
“Anticlimactic.”
“Ha. Who else has asked you?”
“The doctors.”
“Who else?”
“No one, really.” Except Mom, I think. Her name brings tiny stabbing pinpricks at the back of my eyes. I’m not in the mood.
“Sparrow.”
“What?”
She’s going to insist, I can tell. I can tell, this is what the next eighteen minutes are going to be about. I can wait it out.
“Sparrow.”
“What?” I snap this time. “I’m done.”
“You’re not, really.”
“I have seventeen minutes and thirty seconds left and I’m done.”
“You’ll be done in seventeen minutes and thirty seconds.”
“Twenty-nine.”
“In the meantime, I asked you a question.”
“Yeah, and I answered it. Sorry you don’t like my answer.” These days I seem to be setting a record for being rude to adults. I mean, I know I’ve gotten angry at Dr. Katz before, but this feels different. I used to get angry and help myself out the window. Now I’m angry and I’m here, and my hands are fists and my face is hot.
“You can be angry at me, Sparrow, that’s fine.… ” I hear her say in the background. I don’t hear the rest. I do not feel my body doing it, but I know it’s happening. Suddenly I am standing. Suddenly I’m at the door. Suddenly I’m gone.
I run down the beige-white-green hallway to the door at the end and take the stairs two at a time until I’m at the street and people are walking by me like it’s just a regular day. They’re coming home from work or picking up their kids or getting out of a taxi or going grocery shopping. I run across the street and head up, up, up the hill. My legs know where I’m going even when I don’t, like at school when I tell myself I won’t eat lunch in the bathroom today and end up there anyway. I’m running up the hill, and though I’ve done it many times, I’m still surprised to find myself at the park and out of breath.
I keep going deeper into the park, past the soccer fields and the dog beach and the baseball diamonds and the people riding horses in the middle of the afternoon, to the lake my mom used to take me to when I was little. I guess it’s technically a pond, but it’s got swans and geese and it reflects the blue sky and the big puffs of white clouds. I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and pick up some rocks. I see Dr. Katz’s face in the water and throw the rocks at it over and over again. I like watching her disappear. I watch the swans until they start spreading their wings and my heart goes heavy inside my chest. I walk back through the soccer fields and hide out in the shade of the trees, watching the boys playing soccer with their dads and wishing they’d kick hard and fast at my head instead.
I stay a long time, longer than I should. I watch the sun go down over the soccer fields; the dads toss their kids on their shoulders and carry them home. Finally, one of those pretend cops comes by in his little golf cart and tells me to head home. For a while, I think about just sleeping here, like the kids in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Look it up. It’s a book. Mrs. Wexler gave it to me and I love it. It’s about these two kids who sneak into the Metropolitan Museum of Art and stay there. I remember thinking they were so brave. And that it sounded like such a good backup plan. Every time a teacher would drag our class to the Met for a field trip, I’d look around for good hiding spots, but I knew I would never be able to do anything that brave. I was right—I’m not that brave. I consider the park bench for a minute, but mostly I think about the different kinds of animals and humans that go through the park at night, and I decide to head home.
It starts to rain suddenly, the way it does sometimes in the spring—kind of warm until it’s dark and cold and not warm at all anymore. I walk another twenty blocks home down the hill and across the neighborhood, soaked through my sneakers, my hoodie, my hair. Alone and a mess.
Some kids have curfews, or at least they do in TV shows. I don’t have a curfew. I’ve never come home late in my life. I’ve never had anywhere to come home from. So, I wasn’t breaking a rule, technically. Well, I guess I did break one. I’m supposed to pick up the phone whenever my mom calls, no matter what. She called three times while I was at the park. I look at my phone and consider calling her back, but I just keep walking. When I get home, I am expecting her to be pacing the floor arms crossed, steam coming out of her ears. I am expecting to hear it all night long from her, to hear about how I scared her half to death, what in the world was I thinking, don’t I know better, didn’t she raise me not to do foolish things like this, go to your room, I can’t even talk to you right now, and on and on.
But my mother isn’t at the door. She’s at the island, eyes red. Even though I’ve never seen her do it before, I know she’s been crying. She’s wearing her bathrobe, hand around a cup of tea that went cold a long time ago. When I walk in, I hear her say, “Oh, thank God.” That’s all she says. She doesn’t ask where I’ve been. She doesn’t call me a fool. She doesn’t send me to my room or threaten to ground me until I go to college. She doesn’t even look at me as I cross the kitchen to go to the bathroom and hang up my wet things. I’m hanging my jeans on the hook on the back of the door when she says, “I know you want me to say something, Sparrow, but I swear to God I have no idea what to say to you anymore.” Her voice cracks while she says it, like more tears would come if only she had them. Then I hear her put her cup in the sink, go up the stairs to her room, and close the door. I sleep on the mat on the floor of the bathroom. I can’t bear the idea of running into her. I’m also pretty sure that a person who makes her mother cry like that doesn’t deserve a bed.
The bathroom at school stops being a bathroom when I start watching YouTube videos there during lunch. It starts with the Bots, and then I just let the YouTube gods take me where they will, skipping anything that doesn’t reach that spot right between my heart and my ribs. At first, the song title just makes me laugh; “Shithole” seems pretty appropriate for my current setting. But that’s not what makes me stay. It’s that my feet can’t sit still. It’s that she says “hoping for something to take me off this land,” and I think she might understand. It’s that with her blond curls, light skin, and crazy, fluorescent dress she looks like she could be Dr. K’s daughter. Or that if Dr. K was twenty-five now, this is who she would be. Thinking of Katz doesn’t even bring me down. I’m lost in the bass line, in the lyrics, in my sneakers beating against the stall door and not caring who hears. I download every Weaves song I can find. If I ever figure out who wrote me that note, maybe I’ll tell
her (him?) about them. If I ever speak to Katz again, maybe I’ll tell her.
“Come on in.” I sit down in my seat and stare at everything but her for a long time. I can’t believe it was just a week ago that I ran out of here.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble.
Dr. Katz peers down too, trying to catch my eye and raise it to meet hers. “You don’t need to apologize to me, Sparrow. It’s your session, you can do whatever you like with it, including leave.”
“Oh.”
“So, where’d you go?”
“To the park.”
“Watch the birds?”
“Not really. I went to the pond I used to go to with my mom when I was a kid.”
“Ah. You live in North Slope, right?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s pretty far from home. When did you get home?”
I’m a goner. I know where this is going. I might as well give up right now. Before the sentence is even out of my mouth, tears are all over my face. I wipe them off with my hoodie. This particular hoodie has been through a lot in the last week.
“I got home late.”
“Was your mom worried?”
Answering her hurts too much. I double over like I have a stomachache. It feels better, my face against my knees, my arms around my middle. Like a hug. I realize how long it’s been since I’ve had a hug from anyone, and the sobs come stronger. Finally, I get up and go over to her iPod dock. I put mine in.
It’s the song I was playing over and over again in my headphones after I left last week. I watch Dr. Katz’s face as I sit down. I have a pretty decent vocabulary for someone my age, but I don’t know the word for the look on her face. Like maybe she’s listened to this song on a park bench while throwing rocks into water?
“Do you know it?” I ask, wiping my snotty nose.
“Elliott Smith.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a beautiful song.”
I nod.
He starts on the second verse. This music is a lot softer than what I usually listen to, but he can do it too—reach the deep-down parts, speak them out loud even though you were certain you were the only person who had those particular parts.
“Somebody that you used to know?”
I don’t know how she knows. I nod. It’s all I can do.
“You feel that way about your mom?”
“She feels that way about me,” I squeak out.
“Did you tell her where you’d been?”
“She didn’t ask.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“Like she doesn’t care about me anymore. But I don’t think that’s it; I think I’ve convinced her that there’s nothing her caring will do. So she can care about me but it doesn’t matter, and she’s exhausted. Too tired to care about me now; I’ve worn her out.”
We sit for a second and let the song finish out.
“I went back to the roof,” I say. She nods. She looks at me, maybe sadly. “Things have been bad at school.”
“What happened?”
“I haven’t been able to do work, so I might have to repeat eighth grade if I can’t get my grades up, which means that every day I’m not here after school, I’m at my mom’s office doing homework. But what it meant first was a huge fight with Mom when she found out. And then it meant a parent-teacher conference at school that Monique found out about.”
“Yikes.”
“Yeah. I’ve just never felt like I’ve let that many people down before. Mom was so upset, and Monique was bitchy Monique and I … I didn’t know where else to go.”
“So you went to the roof.”
“Yeah. But it didn’t feel like it did before.”
“Because you can’t fly anymore?”
I nod. I swallow hard. I try to get her to read my thoughts so I don’t have to say them. I pull my hands into the sleeves of my hoodie.
“What were you thinking about while you were up there?”
“About flying. Without the birds.”
“That sounds more like jumping.” I hang my head. If she can tell that’s a nod, good for her.
“Okay. What kept you from doing it?” I notice that she’s not secretly dialing 911. She doesn’t sound panicked. She’s just asking me more Katz-y questions, the way she always does.
“I don’t know. Mom, I guess. I don’t think I wanted to be dead as much as I wanted to be gone.”
“You’re pretty used to being gone.”
“Yeah. And I can’t anymore. And sometimes that sucks. Maybe I’m just stubborn, and I didn’t want them to be right.”
“Who?”
“The people who think I tried to kill myself.” I take a deep breath. “Mom.”
“What have you told her?”
“Nothing.”
“Literally?”
“Pretty much. I miss her,” I say quietly, to myself mostly.
“I bet.” Dr. Katz lets me sit there, just sit there missing her. “Sparrow, I’m going to say something that’s going to make you want to leave the room. You can if you have to, but I want you to try to stay.”
“Okay.”
“Do you think you can tell your mom what happened?”
“No.”
“Do you want to?”
I don’t know how to answer. Kind of? Hell no? You first? She’s not even speaking to me right now and I’m going to be like, Mom, you can stop worrying, I’m fine, I just turn into a bird every once in a while, I’m working it out in therapy, nbd.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, why haven’t you told her?”
“I don’t want her to feel bad. Who wants a kid who’s crazy?”
“You’re crazy? I hadn’t noticed.”
“I’m not normal.”
“Do you think your mother thinks you’re normal?”
“I think she’d like it if I could at least pretend to be. I think she wants me to be like her. And that would mean not turning into a bird, not going to the hospital, not being in therapy at fourteen.”
“Has she said that you shouldn’t be in therapy?”
“She says she doesn’t think it’s helping. But, I guess, what would she know? It’s not like I talk to her about it. Or anything.”
“You’ll never know if you don’t give her the chance.”
“Ugh.”
“Yeah, ugh. But still, the question is, do you like how things are going with your mom or do you want to try something else?”
“I don’t want to be somebody she used to know.”
“Right.”
“I can’t tell her. I just won’t. I know I won’t.”
“Why don’t we tell her together?”
“I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.”
She laughs. “That’s disgusting, but I take your point. Still, it might be a little easier to bring your mom in. That way, at least I can help you understand each other. Maybe you’ll be able to start talking to her, even if it’s just a little.”
“Whatever. Okay. It’s not like it’s going to make it worse.”
“That’s the spirit. Ask her to come next week.”
On the way out the door, I say, “Do you know Weaves? I think you might like them.”
I told Mom that I needed to do rehearsal for the talent show instead of coming to her office. It went like this:
Me: Mom, I can’t come to the office today. I have to go to rehearsal for the talent show with Ms. Smith.
Mom: (Silent.)
Me: So, can I?
Mom: I want to see all your work before you go to bed.
Me: Okay.
Mom: (Nods. Leaves the room.)
This completely fantastic interaction has not left me a lot of hope for the conversation in which I ask her to come to therapy with me. I try to psych myself up, to get myself to ask her. Instead, I just look like a creeper. I go into her room; she’s in her bathroom doing her makeup. I stand there telling myself that when she comes out, I’m going to ask her to come to ther
apy with me. When I hear her put down her lipstick, I run out of the room. “Sparrow?” she calls. I don’t answer. I sit at the island, poking at my cereal and promising myself that when she comes downstairs, I’ll say it. I hear the creak of the stairs as she starts down them, and I literally run out of the house. I don’t even say good-bye.
“Sparrow.” It’s Tanasia whispering to me. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her voice before.
“What?”
“Your turn.” I look up and the whole class is looking at me, including Ms. Smith over her glasses, which is never a good sign.
“You weren’t paying attention,” says Ms. Smith.
“Right. Sorry.”
“ ‘Sorry’ is for when you’re not going to do it again.”
I have heard Ms. Smith say this a million times, but never to me. I want to fall through the floor. I keep my face very still so that I don’t cry.
“So, can you tell me what you think about the relationship between Nick and Gatsby?”
“He idolizes him.”
“Yes, we have that already.” She gestures to the board, where the class has apparently been making a list for quite a while. “Does anyone else have anything new?”
With her eyes off me, I can start to breathe again. Tanasia sneaks me a smile, like it happens to everyone. Except that it never happens to me, at least not in English. At the end of the period, I still want to fall through the floor and I’m trying to get out of the room as fast as I can.
“Sparrow.” Ms. Smith stops me.
I sigh. “Yes?” I look up because I don’t want her to say what adults always say when you don’t want to look at them: Look at me when I’m talking to you!
“Tough day. See you at the theater at three.”
“Okay.” She doesn’t seem mad, but it’ll be a while before my stomach untwists.
When I get to the theater at three, Ms. Smith is already there. “Hi!” she says happily from the stage. “Come on down, I promise I won’t make you sing and dance.” I head to the front and take a seat near her.
“That’s the light booth up there; we’ll get there last. First you’re going to get to know backstage. That’s where I’ll be. The night of the show, you’re going to be in the light booth, but before that you’ll be backstage with me making sure all the props are where they should be and everyone knows the set order. Okay? Good. Come,” she says, and we sneak behind the heavy green curtain.