Vannie - A Swann Series Prequel: A Contemporary Young Adult Science Fiction/Urban Fantasy Series

by Schow, Ryan

  “You like your depression?” she asks, just to be clear.

  “I just said that.”

  “Why is that? And don’t generalize. Really think about it for a second.”

  I do. Then it hits me. Something that hadn’t occurred to me before now. “It gives Margaret a reason to pay attention to me. To always want to help me, even though I kind of hate it.”

  “So if you weren’t depressed, what would your mother say to you?”

  “First off,” I say, “please stop calling her that. She’s not a mother, not a mom…she’s Margaret. Just Margaret.”

  “Okay.”

  “If I wasn’t depressed, if I was happy, Margaret would find a way to bring me back down. She’d stop trying to help me and instead she’d make me feel bad for not being depressed. I mean, look at me. I should be depressed. At least, that’s what she’d say. In her mind, to be overweight and happy at the same time, well that would be reprehensible. Then naturally, she’d start me on the same path as her. I’m not anxious to walk a minute in her footsteps.”

  “And that is?”

  “Plastic surgery, of course.”

  Tiffany draws a deep breath in through her perfect nostrils. She’s digesting this bit of truth and it’s telling her plenty. Wait a minute, didn’t she say she wouldn’t ask me about Margaret? Apparently it always goes back to her. But it’s not just that. As bad as things are with the monster, they’re worse almost everywhere else.

  “Do you want plastic surgery?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve spent half my life watching Margaret recover from everything from eyelid lifts to breast implants to vaginal rejuvenation. She once said I destroyed her pussy during childbirth. She was shit-housed and stumbling around the living room when she said it.”

  “Is that how she said it or are you embellishing?”

  “She used the P-word, I swear. That was years ago and I still don’t know what to think.”

  Tiffany’s face barely moves. It’s the same face someone makes when they hear about someone beating their kids, or some douche-knuckle kicking his cat in a fit of rage that had nothing to do with the cat.

  “Are you afraid of pain?” she asks.

  “I’m a realist.”

  “If you told Margaret you didn’t want to do plastic surgery, what would she say?”

  I shrug my shoulders.

  “You’d have to live with who you are, right? What you look like? The way the press abuses you, Margaret couldn’t take that, could she?”

  “No.”

  “She can’t stand the idea of not being able to fix you.”

  Holy Toledo! I sit up, my eyes clearing instantly. “You know something, Tiffany? I think you might actually get me.”

  “Sort of.”

  She’s seeing I’m not the problem.

  “Tell me about your friends,” she says.

  “Friend. As in one. Netty. She’s my best friend.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Um, because she doesn’t care what I look like. I mean, she does. It’s just…well I feel safe around her, knowing she’s not judging me. At least, not out loud. The way she projects strength…it’s like there’s not a lot that rattles her.”

  “What about your classmates?”

  “There’s this real piece of work, Jacob Brantley. He’s the worst. The things he says about me,” I say, surprised at the hurt welling up past my defenses. Whoa. Wait a second. I try to finish my sentence, but my eyes grow damp all the sudden and this lump in my throat, it’s like I swallowed a freaking hippopotamus.

  “There we go,” she says, like she found it: that thing that makes me who I am.

  Maybe she did. Maybe this is me finally finding the real me. Or maybe it’s just cramps. Who knows? All I know is I’m supposed to start my period next week so mentally I’m feeling too sharp and too soft and dissatisfied with everything and everyone.

  “I…I…had a…crush—”

  These eyes of mine, they’re forsaking me. The dam bursts and now they’re dripping like an open faucet. I wipe my eyes, cough out an embarrassed laugh, then feel my chest jump beneath an unexpected sob. I’m too sad to be embarrassed right now. Tiffany gets up, comes over and sits beside me.

  “Can I give you a hug?” she asks.

  “That’s not appropriate,” I say, sniffling.

  “I know.”

  “I guess so,” I answer, and she pulls me into a hug.

  4

  I have to say, at first, it’s weird, but then I find myself wanting to melt into her. This woman I didn’t know thirty minutes ago is now giving me the only warmth I’ve felt in forever. When she lets go and moves out of my space, I sit up and act like her hugging me is no biggie when it’s a very big biggie.

  “This boy hurt you,” she says.

  “He’s proof my taste in boys is too big for this ugly face and this gross body.”

  “What kinds of things does he say?”

  “He makes fun of me all the time. At school and online. It’s like a cruel game he can’t stop playing.”

  She just shakes her head, like pieces of the puzzle are coming together. Which is good, because I’m doing something I’ve never done before with one of Margaret’s shrinks, and that’s laying it all out. Being totally transparent.

  “Will you do something for me?” she asks. I nod, because I’m worried my voice will fail me. “I want you to take the next few minutes and think back to something that made you really happy. A moment, a person, perhaps even a specific situation. This should be a moment when you felt unbound from the burdens of family, school, your blistering views of yourself and your life. When you have that moment in your mind, I want you to describe it to me.”

  “What if I’ve never felt something like that?”

  “You have, Savannah,” she says with the kind of tender encouragement I’ve never felt from family. “It’s in there somewhere. You just have to find it.”

  A few minutes later I do, and it surprises me that I ever felt anything like this at all.

  “I saw this poster once, in San Francisco. Down at the Warf in one of those tourist shops. It was beautiful. And haunting. It was cold and gray and forlorn, but somehow free, you know?”

  I’m back there, in that poster shop, seeing that blown up photo and I’m totally immersed in the day. Describing what that photo did to me, how it impacted me, it’s too hard to put into words. For some reason I force myself to try.

  “There was something about that photo that got inside me and made me…it made me ache for something new. A new life. The moment where I was happiest, that was when I believed maybe it was possible. That one day I…I could be her.”

  “Tell me about this poster,” she says.

  “It was a photo of this girl in a grayish-green summer skirt and a white tank top. She was skinny and relaxed, and she had long brown hair that was half braided and half untied. This girl, or woman maybe, she was in this yellow field against cloudy gray skies leaning her back against an old Chevy with her arm laid on the hood. It was one of those classic cars you see old guys driving from time to time. But not nice, you know? Really weathered. The car’s headlights and fog lights, they were busted out. All the glass scraped away so the lights looked like empty eye sockets. And the sky blue color of the car was just patches of rust and dull paint. But the girl?” I say, feeling myself feeling again. My mouth breaks into a smile that surprises me, one that stays for a fleeting moment. “Oh, the girl…she was free. She had her head tilted back like she didn’t have a care in the world. No one to come along and crush her spirit. Nothing to gobble up her untouched soul. I still don’t know if she had her face tilted into the wind or if she was seeing God, but it didn’t matter. She was feeling things I couldn’t. Being ways I’d never been. I remember studying her, thinking she was pretty, thinking right then I would give anything to look like her. To feel as uninhibited as her. To be her. Old people are always going on about
the past being simpler times. That poster made me feel like maybe I understood what they were talking about because that’s how that photo looked. It looked simple. It gave me a moment of hope.”

  “But our times aren’t simple, are they? And this world we live in, this plastic existence, it’s overflowing with pretense.”

  “It is.”

  “Can I make a leap? And please tell me if I’m spot on or way off, okay?”

  I nod.

  “Your family is rich. You have most everything you’ve ever wanted materially, but your mother being beautiful is a slap in your face because you’ll never be beautiful like her unless you go through years of plastic surgery and you’re not ready for that yet.”

  All the sudden she could be a hypnotist because I’m mesmerized by the truths in her words, so dizzy with focus because, again, she’s hitting the nail on the head.

  “And your father, he’s got it easy because in a man’s world, you don’t have to be good looking to get the girl. You just have to have a lot of money and he does.”

  “Yeah,” I say, my eyes starting to water again.

  “Your parents both have what they need to make them happy, but you don’t have what you need to make you happy and they don’t get that.”

  My breath is suddenly sitting so high in my throat I can barely breathe. What’s happening here? I’m never this emotional in therapy. Not some sloppy baby that cracks so easily. But here I am, being honest and it stings because this perfect stranger is seeing me where neither my father nor the monster can.

  “Girls get ahead using their good looks, their fitness bodies, their sexuality, and you have none of that.”

  I shake my head, no.

  “You really want to be with this boy, Jacob, but he reminds you that you’re not good enough for him. And you want acceptance from Margaret because without that you’ll never get her love, but she won’t accept you.” I can’t even speak at this point. “So what’s the answer, Savannah?”

  Clearing my throat, I say, “More drugs.”

  5

  Tiffany snorts out a little disappointed huff, shaking her head back and forth, not realizing I’m reverting to sarcasm, the last bastion of hope.

  “You think I’m missing the point, Tiffany, but really I’m just trying to explain. The monster’s got me on drugs. It’s how she fixes me when people like you can’t. This is her answer for me and what I’m trying to tell you is that I really don’t have a choice in the matter.”

  “Well I won’t be prescribing you any drugs,” she says.

  “But you won’t give me a fix either, will you?”

  “Of course I will,” she says, “but you won’t like it.”

  “Go ahead then, give it your best shot.”

  I’m wiping my eyes, realizing I like this woman and I really think she might be able to help me. Or maybe she won’t. Maybe this is my best chance at help and it won’t be enough and I’ll eventually go psychomatic, which is what people call you when you go from zero to bat-shit crazy in one second flat. If you’re wondering, that’s how it starts—that’s how people sometimes get it in their heads that cutting off an ear will solve everything.

  “The fix is psychological, it’s not going to be physical. It won’t be a fix that involves pills or diets or future boob jobs.”

  “Okay…”

  “In your head, you want something to be a certain way, but it won’t be that way. You won’t ever be a man who controls his destiny based on his net worth, and you’ll never be as pretty as your mother, so your happiness has to come from somewhere else. Somewhere inside you. The minute you realize you can’t rely on others or outside circumstances to fulfill you is the minute you can really start to adjust your perspective on life. And you must adjust it. Obsessing over things you can’t change…in part this fuels your social anxiety disorder. You know others expect more of you, and you know you’ll always disappoint them. And boys? Contrary to popular belief, boys change their minds about girls all the time. It wouldn’t surprise me if later in life this Jacob character takes a different kind of interest in you.”

  “Now you’re just blowing sunshine up my ass,” I say, even though I’m feeling better.

  “Maybe a little,” she says, giving me a reassuring smile, “but I’ve seen stranger things. The point is, you aren’t going to find the happiness you want in the external world, so you’ll have to go internal. Find one thing you love and immerse yourself in that.”

  “I love ice cream,” I admit.

  Anything coffee flavored with bits of shaved chocolate, that’s the kind of thing I devour without delay. I swear, when I’m putting away a pint of Häagen-Dazs ice cream, sometimes I have to remind myself to breathe.

  “Will that help you later in life or not?” she asks.

  “Not.”

  “Then find something that will help you that you enjoy doing, or at least something that won’t hurt you, and then do that. That’s where you can indulge. And try your best to ignore the Jacob Brantley’s of the world. He sounds like a turd in the punchbowl anyway.”

  Laughing and wiping my eyes, I say, “He is.”

  “So ignore him, and all the kids who tease you, and the paparazzi.”

  “Just be a shut-in?”

  “For now. But while you’re alone, when you have that perfect stillness, I want you to think of that girl in that poster, how free she was, and I want you to stay in that emotional place for as long as you can. Really feel the feeling of it. Really suffuse yourself in all the emotions you found that day. Then, when you’re feeling good and you’re feeling ready, venture out into the world on your terms. You’ll never be that girl in that photo, but that doesn’t mean you can’t feel the way you imagine she was feeling when the picture was taken.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?” she asks.

  “Can I see you again?” These are five words I’ve never said to a shrink.

  “I’m afraid not,” she tells me with a sad face.

  “What? Why not?”

  How is she going to bilk my parents for tens of thousands of dollars if she’s giving me all the good stuff now and unwilling to cement it in with a multitude of follow-up sessions?

  “It’s the agreement I made with the monster,” she says. Her referring to Margaret as the monster must mean the monster did something to offend her. “I didn’t have time for you today because I’m booked that tight, but she found a way anyway.”

  “She can’t book out later? I mean, I can wait a month.”

  “I don’t like your mother very much.”

  I huff out a sigh. Margaret, that buzzkill. She’s always finding ways to disappoint me. The one shrink I finally find who treats me the way I want to be treated and the monster finds a way to completely ruin that, too.

  “I don’t like her very much either,” I say.

  “She’s flawed.”

  “That’s the understatement of the century.”

  Our time is interrupted by a light knock on the door. This prompts Tiffany to glance over at the clock. It’s time. Wow. I can’t believe our time is up already!

  Margaret walks in and the fresh air suddenly feels fartified with her mixed energy. I hate feeling like this, but then again, if I loved the monster and if she loved me back, I really wouldn’t need therapy.

  6

  Tiffany walks over to her desk, sits down behind it; Margaret sets her cup of coffee on Tiffany’s desk and takes her checkbook from her purse to pay. I remain seated on the couch, thinking. Really digesting what Tiffany said. In my subconscious brain, I hear Margaret talking low to Tiffany, and though I hear what’s being said, I don’t focus on it.

  “Don’t bother spilling your coffee,” Tiffany says to the monster. It’s not a warning as much as it’s a statement. Like some sort of stern directive, or something.

  “I bought this coffee for the sole purpose of spilling it,” Margaret says.

  “I’ve got no notes for you today.”

>   My eyes clear at the exchange going on between them, and I see Margaret holding an envelope that looks thick with something.

  “What do you mean you don’t have notes?” Margaret asks.

  “I never take notes until after the client has left. But since Savannah won’t be coming back, there’s no use in having notes anyway.”

  Margaret stands up straight, looks down at the woman. I can’t help frowning. Margaret puts away her checkbook and I’m thinking, what the hell is going on here?

  “It’s five hundred for the hour,” Tiffany says.

  For a long moment the women just stare at each other and finally Margaret opens the envelop, pulls out five bills and hands them over.

  “I won’t see your daughter again until I see you first,” Tiffany says. “That’s a better deal than what you offered before. And more than generous from my vantage point.”

  “Well that’s not going to happen,” the monster says. In my mind, I’m thinking, Tiffany knows. She knows I’m not the problem. That the monster’s the one with the broken, broken brain. Turning to me, red faced with pursed lips, Margaret says, “Let’s go, Vannie.”

  Triple Caramel Chunk

  1

  There’s a lightness inside me that lasts for about five minutes. In the car, the monster says, “I have a line on this doctor who says he’s got a line on a new drug that will neither counteract nor upset the balance of your existing meds. He says it’s being developed specifically for the kinds of problems you have.”

  “Which are?”

  “Numerous.”

  Yawning, writing her off, I say, “What did you tell him I’m on?” The way I say it, it’s like I need a nap. Or less powerful drugs. Or maybe a lot more coffee.

  “I only mentioned the Zoloft, but I told him I’m not all that excited about the Zoloft, so we’ll be talking about maybe Paroxetine or Sertraline.”