by Lara Avery
I watched her scrunch her eyebrows together in the rearview mirror. “Mom?”
“Yes?”
“Is this true?”
Pause. “Yes.”
Maddie made eye contact with me in the mirror. “How long has this been going on?”
“Since winter break.” We pulled up to the end of my driveway, and as Pat’s car started to kick up gravel on the steep hill, I said, “It’s okay, you can stop here. I’ll walk up.”
“Sammie—Jesus. I’m sorry.” Maddie didn’t sound sorry. She sounded mad. “Why didn’t you say something before?”
I unbuckled my seat belt and lifted my bag. All my papers fell out. Sheets printed with round times, scores, a welcome map of Boston. “I thought you wouldn’t want to be partners with me,” I muttered, gathering the pile.
Maddie made a sound between disgust and sadness. “What kind of person do you think I am?”
“Not because of you rejecting me as a friend or whatever, just because you might have thought I wouldn’t be able to handle it,” I said, shoving papers in clumps on the seat.
“That’s not the point!” Maddie yelled, then said quieter. “You lied to me!”
Pat reached behind her to touch Maddie’s knee. “Girls, why don’t you give yourselves some space?”
“Well…” Maddie made another sound, breathing air through her nose. “Isn’t that convenient.”
“What?” I said, almost ripping my bag as I closed the zipper. “What did I do this time?”
“You just drop bombs and leave,” she was saying under her breath out the window. “That’s the Sammie McCoy way. Just droppin’ truth bombs. Who cares what comes after?”
“Thanks, Pat,” I said to Maddie’s mom, forcing a smile, and slammed the door.
As I walked away I heard Maddie’s window roll down. “I’m sorry you’re sick but you can’t pretend you didn’t wait on purpose to tell me right when we got to your house!”
“Maddie,” I heard Pat say behind me.
I turned around. “What does it matter when I tell you? I’m telling you! It’s my thing! I get to decide!”
“Exactly,” Maddie yelled as they reversed. “You control everything!”
“Yeah, right,” I said to no one. “Believe me, I wish.” She has no idea how wrong she is.
QUASIMODO RETURNS TO THE BELL TOWER
After fighting with Maddie, all I want to do is burrow into my bed with The West Wing and not come out until graduation, but I was going to get a talking-to about what happened. When I walked up the driveway, Mom stopped mowing the lawn in the middle of a row.
I had left her a voice mail last night. She’d called three or four times until I texted her back. I would rather just have a conversation about it, I told her, and I needed to recover from losing Nationals.
“Hey,” Mom called across the yard as I stalked toward the front door. “Hey!’
“Give me a minute,” I told her, almost running inside.
Now here we were, in person, and I couldn’t avoid it. I could feel her energy rocking and swaying like a ship in a storm. Bette and Davy were putting a puzzle together on the floor. Dad was in the kitchen and dropped the dish he was washing when he heard me coming down the hall.
They followed me and stood in my doorway in their day-off outfits, Mom in ripped jeans and a Mickey Mouse baseball shirt, Dad in a Patriots cap and sweats.
“What happened?” Dad asked.
As I unpacked, I gave them a careful summary, being sure to leave out the curse words and the sobbing. Before I could finish, Mom came across the room and yanked me up into a hug.
“I shouldn’t have let you go,” she said quietly.
“It wasn’t that bad,” I said, my heart trying to decide between sadness and anger. “Not going would have been worse.”
“But we weren’t there, Sammie,” she said, pulling back to look at me. Wisps of her hair were coming out, crossing her face, her eyes wet. She looked young, unsure. I didn’t like it. My stomach hurt. I didn’t like making her look like this.
“Okay.” I tried to peel her off slowly. “We’ve got to be strong. We’re going to make a plan—”
“Sammie, just slow down a minute,” Dad said, and his voice was higher than normal.
I looked back at them, waiting. “What? What do you want me to do?”
Dad swallowed. “No, I just—nothing. Do you get what I’m saying?”
No. I didn’t. Especially when he talked to me in that poor baby, Santa-Claus-doesn’t-exist voice. I threw a shirt into my closet. “I can’t slow down. I can’t stop. I can’t go back in time and not go to Nationals.”
Dad spoke fast, lifting his cap and running his hands through his curly hair. “What if you had been on the street, Sammie? What if you had forgotten where you were and wandered into a dangerous place? What if you had gotten lost?”
“We just need to make sure we can help you!” Mom put on a sweet smile through her tears. She looked and sounded just like Davy, trying to coax a chicken back into the coop. Here, chicky! Come on, chicky!
I didn’t like this conversation. I don’t like hypotheticals, especially considering I had already gotten over it. I already had my crying time about how much it sucked, and now I didn’t want those feelings to come back just because my parents wanted to cry about it. No, thank you.
“Sammie? Earth to Sammie?” Dad asked.
I tossed a pair of pants in the closet. Don’t know why I even bothered unpacking, I was just putting the same pile of clothes into yet another pile. “You need more information, is what you’re saying.”
“We need to make sure we’re not going to lose you,” Dad said.
That stopped me.
Mom crossed her arms and cleared her throat. “This is the first time you’d left and we weren’t sure what state you were going to be in when you came back.”
Right then she sounded more like Mom and less like a kid, more like the mmhmms and the exhaustion and the pushing and pushing she did all day, almost never losing patience.
I think I was beginning to know what they meant. But that didn’t mean I agreed with them.
I walked toward Mom and grabbed her hand, and grabbed Dad’s hand with my other one, and we sat on the floor in my room. That felt right, that felt calm and stable. We used to sit this way as they read to me, a stack of library books in the middle. Then later, as I read to them, the littler kids draped over their bodies.
“So, what’s this plan, Sammie?” Dad picked up a paperback copy of A Wrinkle in Time, flipping through it as he spoke. “How are we going to make sure that you’re taken care of if something like this happens again?”
Much better. This, I could handle. That is, I could handle it if they listened and didn’t argue with me and let me do whatever I wanted.
“If the memory loss continues at the same rate, I might have a slight episode every four months. This is assuming that I would have an episode at all. With those odds, I see very little need to panic.”
My mom laughed drily. “Ha.”
Dad said, “Dr. Clarkington told us—”
“Dr. Clarkington doesn’t have enough information about someone my age with this disease.”
Dad shook his head. “The fact that you have the capacity to lose your bearings is enough information for me.”
Mom agreed. “Once is already too many times.”
“Goddamnit.” I thought we had gotten past this part. I let go of their hands. “I love you both so much but you can be so stupid sometimes.”
“Watch it,” Mom said.
“The specialist told everything he knew to Dr. Clarkington. What more do you want? Do you want me to leave and go live in Minnesota so I can rot at the Mayo Clinic? ”
“Don’t get worked up,” Dad cautioned.
“Is that what you want?” I couldn’t look at their close-to-tears faces so I kept my eyes on the ceiling.
I heard Mom mutter, “That is the last thing you say to Sammie when she’s
worked up.”
“I know everything is scary but I’m the one going through it, okay? And I get to decide how to feel about it. Which is very, like, practical. And rational. You should be glad that I’m not depressed, like that girl from”—I brought my gaze back to both of them—“Michigan who found out she had leukemia and got suicidal!”
“Christ, Sammie…” Dad said.
Mom looked toward the hallway, making sure Bette and Davy hadn’t overheard.
“Read about it in the Detroit Times! It’s a real thing! I’m happy, I’m focused, and I will do everything to get better. Except for compromise on my goals. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, once said…” I was flustered. “He once said…”
“Samantha,” my mother said. “Listen to me.”
“Okay!” My fists were clenched. She waited. “Okay.”
“We can’t be around all the time to monitor your health…”
I opened my mouth to protest.
“… and we might not always know what to do anyway,” Mom said, holding her hands up. “So you’ve got to, you’ve got to help us. You’ve got be smart.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Smart doesn’t always mean grades and vocabulary and all that, Sammie. We need you to be realistic.”
Dad started in, too. “Start preparing for the future.”
“What do you think I’ve been doing for the past eighteen years of my life?”
“No, I don’t mean that, I mean a future where…” Suddenly, he stopped, and I didn’t know why. Mom was looking straight ahead, but I noticed one of her arms was behind him where he sat. Pinching him, probably. She did not want him to go on. Now, that. That pushed a button—maybe because they worked so much and were rarely together, I wasn’t used to the magnetism of their powers combined. Jupiter and Mars aligned. Those bastards. The two biological sources of all my strength and weakness in one place. They think they’re protecting me. But I know them as well as they think they know me.
“Well,” I said. I swallowed, and went on. “I am no longer competing in debate, so I will be able to focus my efforts on completing the year without incident.”
“Good. And resting,” my mom said.
“And maintaining my status as valedictorian.”
Dad moved one of my clogs to match it with other, making a pair on the floor. “And visiting the doctor.”
“And finding a new doctor that we trust in New York City.”
Dad nodded. “We’ll take it one day at a time.”
I nodded with him. “Yes, one day at a time, moving toward next year. I agree.”
Mom put her hand on my hand. “Okay,” she said. She smiled at me less with her mouth, and more with her eyes. “Yes.”
And that was that.
But now I’m here, back at the attic window, and things look dark. I am not dumb, Future Sam. I am not blind to the tone with which my parents speak to me, and the bright-eyed choo-choo-train innocence with which I respond. Next year! I’ll get better! I’m fine! I can beat this!
I even speak strategically to you.
Because the truth is that my memory loss was much worse than I had described it here. Before I remembered who Maddie was, I was inches away from drooling and taking her hand on the debate platform like a little kid lost at a playground, asking her to take me home to Mommy and Daddy.
I don’t know how long I was quiet up there, blinking and looking around, before I called “time-out.” It felt like hours.
No matter what plans I make, no matter how much I help my parents, I feel like my body is failing me, and I don’t know how to stop it.
SPEAKING OF PITS OF DESPAIR, DON’T SPEAK
I just went to get a glass of water (thanks for the reminder to hydrate, Zavesca!), and I could hear them talking downstairs.
“There’s no way,” Dad was saying.
“But what’s the point of telling her that?” Mom whispered back. “You know what that would do.”
“I’m on her side! We’re both on her side! I want her to go and live and be happy. But how are we supposed to ignore fuckin’ science, Gia?”
“Stop cursing.”
“I’m serious!” Dad’s voice was almost raised now.
Mom made a shushing noise. “She’s doing great right now. I don’t think anything will get worse for a long time. She gets to just… be herself. I refuse to treat her any differently.”
“This isn’t cancer, G. The thought of her… forgetting to do things, or forgetting where she is, or forgetting who we are.”
“I know.”
Long silence. A couple of sniffs. I wondered if they could hear me listening. I held my breath.
“She only has a few weeks until school is over,” Mom finally said. “I say we let things take their course.”
“You’re right,” Dad said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. We take all the safety precautions, but we don’t, you know, force her into a cocoon. The specialist said it was better that she doesn’t get depressed.”
“Exactly.”
I hate that word. To hear it was just like it sounded, like two giant hands pressing down on me from above and below. I’m not depressed. I may be pressed, sure. I’ve got a limited timeline and lots to do, and sometimes the pressure is a lot, and sometimes it feels like I’m just pushing myself onward for the sake of pushing myself, but I am not depressed.
Dad continued. “But we’ll just agree together that, no, she is just not in a place to go to New York next year.”
“Agreed,” Mom said.
I let out my breath. Red flashed in the dark, and I realized I had my eyes squeezed shut.
“Thank you,” I could hear Mom say.
“For what?”
“For being on my team.”
Then I could hear them kissing. Ew.
I almost went downstairs to argue, but then I stopped. I remembered a key phrase. Dad said, she IS not in a place to go to New York next year. Is. Of course they would say that right after an episode. They’re only thinking of the present. You and I know, Future Sam, that the present is merely a road to something else. Whatever’s ahead.
The other good thing to come out of this is that they’re not going to try to take me out of school again, at least that’s what it sounds like. So, this is bargaining, Future Sam.
This is where they give you an inch, and inch by inch, you take a mile.
I mean, sure, they’ll say, Sammie can finish out the school year, but can she keep her grades up?
I mean, sure, Sammie can keep her grades up, but can she be valedictorian?
I mean, sure, Sammie can be valedictorian, but can she make it through a semester at NYU?
And so on. So I’ll just show them I can do those things. I can do them all. And then they won’t be able to stop me from going to college, not when I’ve proved to them I can do it.
They’ll see.
TASK FORCE
In order to become less pressed, and to achieve my goals episode-free, I have assembled an NPC task force of my favorite feminist icons, each in charge of inspiring me in a different way. I cut out pictures of them and arranged them on my wall, and wrote quotes in marker in little speech bubbles. Good thing no one ever comes into my room because this is the cheesiest thing since the invention of cheese (5500 B.C., in what is now Kujawy, Poland).
The NPC Task Force includes:
ELIZABETH WARREN
Purpose: researching as much about the disease as possible and making sure health providers are straight-talking to my parents, and not taking advantage of us for insurance money.
BEYONCÉ
Purpose: reminding me that I’m flawless, and that I’m an independent woman. Or rather, girl. Even if Stuart rejects me, I will love myself. (Still haven’t heard from him about when exactly he wants to get coffee. Whatever. Independent girl.)
MALALA YOUSAFZAI
Purpose: helping me remember to be less selfish, and that young women can do a lot. I always think ab
out what I’ll do when I’m older, but she was like, no, I will do good for the world now, even though I’m only a teenager.
SERENA WILLIAMS
Purpose: learning something new (tennis), which is supposedly good for people with memory loss. Taking better care of my body and not being afraid to be a “jock.” I’ll probably need new muscles if my old ones grow weaker.
NANCY CLARKINGTON
Well, this woman is literally my doctor so I have to trust her expertise and listen to everything she says. I asked her for her cell phone number so I could text her questions anytime, day or night, just in case. Is that weird?
No matter what happens, I can’t have an episode like I did at Nationals, at least not until my grades are in and my status as valedictorian remains intact.
If I’m going to deal with all this stuff, I’ll need to be more than just inspired, I will need to be even more strategic. I will need different methods than what worked before. I need to put my best self forward, and hope I don’t run out of it too soon.
YES, YES, YES
Stuart Shah: Hang Wednesday?
NO ONE CARES AS MUCH AS WE DO
A few days later, the sun is soaking through the walls and the daffodils are out and the birds are singing and inside my stomach it feels like horses are running, which I assume is just the biological thing that happens when your chemicals combine with someone else’s. Stuart had asked me to meet him outside on the benches after school, because apparently he lives near there, and he figured we could walk into town.
I was wearing my favorite outfit besides my debate pantsuit, a dress my mom bought for me for church two years ago, a light blue cotton thing with a V neck, and I had let my hair go without the dryer this morning so it hung loose and curly near my shoulders. I didn’t know if I looked hot, but after an imaginary conversation with Maddie, I decided I didn’t care. I remembered her looking at herself in the mirror and saying, According to whom?