After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  * * *

  When I told my mother I was seriously depressed, she found me an old Jewish therapist on Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue by Washington Square Park, not far from Devin’s house.

  The long winding hallways of the building, the numerous musty staircases, and unmarked black doors felt ominous.

  “I don’t want to wake up in the morning,” I told Dr. F. “And I can’t sleep at night. I’m up for hours playing things over and over. I don’t enjoy anything anymore. I don’t feel happy. Nobody likes me for some reason. Everyone in school is looking at me like they’re going to hurt me.”

  Dr. F closed his eyes, made grumbling noises, asked me “why” or “when” and then sent me on my way. He didn’t tell me that there’s a science behind how trauma changes the brain, that neurotransmitters become like short-circuiting wires, sparking wildly from the ends. He didn’t tell me that the body remembers its experience with fear so strongly that it begins to respond to other stressful situations in the same extreme way, and sometimes, it responds to things that most people would never respond to or notice. He didn’t tell me that depression is often a symptom of post-traumatic stress, or that the past can become the present, years later, simply at the sound of a siren, or the feeling of someone grabbing your arm and startling you. He didn’t tell me that what had happened to me had to potential to change the entire direction of my life, causing me to do things and feel things and make decisions that maybe I wouldn’t have, and so maybe we should take a closer look at it and figure out how to go from there.

  He just said, “See you next week.”

  So, by the time the thin winter sunlight gave way to the more soothing, golden aura of May, nothing felt different, but I needed to feel different, somehow.

  I decided to take my first drink.

  It was on a Friday, and I remember that day because I had actually been feeling pretty good about myself for once.

  The art teacher had given us a quiz and told us, “Make sure you read all the instructions first before you start.” She had repeated it a few times, and a light bulb went off in my head.

  My dad once told me the story of how, at Brooklyn College, he was given a final exam with the same instructions. People were getting up after a few minutes, and he sat there watching them, for hours, wondering, how could they be done? As it turned out, the final instruction, when you read it all the way through, was simply to write your name and the date, and not answer any of the other questions. So, that day, that’s what I did: the last question, number thirty-six, said to simply write your name, the date, and draw a star. I sat there, done, looking at everyone else and smiling at the teacher.

  “How is she done?” one girl said, looking at me like I was ridiculous.

  For once, knowing something that everyone else didn’t wasn’t a scary thing.

  That night Becca, her older boyfriend, Harry, and his friend, Ron, took us to Pier 25 along the West Side Highway and filled red plastic cups with a small amount of brown liquid that smelled like lighter fluid. They both went to School of the Future, the high school across the street from Baruch. I looked out over the sandy volleyball courts where we’d played at Downtown Day Camp, then looked back down at the inside of my cup. I knew this was wrong, but everyone had to try drinking sometime, right? Maybe this will help, the invisible little girl whispered. I didn’t know what it meant, that Bacardi 151 was “151 proof.” But from the way they talked about it, I figured it was strong.

  I took a sip and grimaced, but refused to cough like Becca had.

  The boys laughed.

  “Wow, she’s tough, huh?”

  That stuck with me like a badge of honor, and was all the motivation I needed to take another shot, and another. That would be the beginning of feeling that the more I could impress these guys by downing alcohol, the more worthy I was of … something.

  The next thing I knew, we were on the roof of Harry’s building somewhere in Tribeca, and I was sitting between Ron’s legs.

  The sky was just starting to darken into a deep lavender, thin clouds spreading across it like someone had tried to wipe them away, leaving streaks on the surface. When I looked up and suddenly it all started spinning faster and faster, I didn’t feel afraid. When the next thing I saw was Ron, sitting with me a couch, trying to get his belt buckle off, I didn’t feel afraid then, either. And when he began pushing my head down, then up, then down. I didn’t feel afraid, because I couldn’t feel much of anything.

  The next morning, Becca and I went to Hudson River Park behind I.S. 89 to “tan.” I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly I felt or why, but it was a very low-grade nausea and it made lying in the grass, in the sun, very uncomfortable. The food at McDonald’s on Chambers Street tasted weird—I was hungry, but, at the time, it was hard to swallow.

  My next drink was two weeks later, and it was Peach Schnapps with a Puerto Rican guy named Matt from School of the Future. He had been adopted by two gay dads and wore a huge white T-shirt to complement his shaggy hair. After school one day, a group of us filed into a limo with a drug dealer named Mike who had to be in his twenties.

  We parked the limo somewhere along Sixth Avenue and Twentieth Street, and the other guys, wearing hats tilted to the left and low-slinging jeans, left to “give us some time alone.” The limo driver sat up front, and Matt pushed a button to make him disappear. He undid his belt and slid down his jeans while saying, “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to,” I said.

  I don’t know how I knew how to do what I did, and how to look sexy doing it, but I did the same thing to Matt that I did to Ron, hoping, somehow, it would get me closer to this greater thing I couldn’t seem to have, some feeling of being a normal teenager.

  Inside, I felt like a parent who needed a break from watching over the invisible little girl inside me, the one who was always afraid of something and had access to weapons that could cause me to make some very adult mistakes.

  * * *

  After that day, things would begin to go really wrong.

  I would earn a reputation, and people would threaten me, leaving notes in my locker or confronting me in person.

  They’d shout “What!?” randomly in the halls, daring me to say anything.

  I had become, to a specific set of girls, a “slut.” They did, or didn’t, know about that day in the limo, or that later, I’d gone off with Mike the drug dealer, parking somewhere on the cusp of Chinatown underneath the FDR Drive and letting him play with my panty lines, which he thought was “sexy.”

  I walked those two long avenues from school to the subway like I was trying to avoid stepping on a landmine after being told I should “watch my back.”

  Suddenly, one of my only friends wasn’t talking to me, then, she was dating Matt, then, she started a rumor among two of the older girls in the school—girls who had gone to I.S. 89—that I called them sluts.

  “You’d better watch your back,” they cornered me one day in front of my homeroom class.

  Mr. Schwartz appeared just in time, saying, “Helaina, it’s time to come inside.”

  The next day, I was paired with a girl named Gemma for a Spanish project, and it turned out we had gone the entire year without realizing we both lived in Southbridge. She was half Italian, half Chinese, wore long-sleeve black T-shirts, and did not seem to feel the need to wax her massive uni-brow. We decided to translate our own short interpretation of Beauty and the Beast into Spanish, enlist Charles to play the beast, and film it in small increments over the course of a week after school. Making that video was the highlight of my year, the cause of so many giggles, belly laughs, sometimes even howling.

  When the day came to present our masterpiece to the class, the videocassette failed to work, refusing to play clearly in the classroom’s TV/VCR. As the snowy, choppy picture went in and out, Gemma and I laughed until we cried, busting at the seams, knowing exactly just what was so hilarious, not caring that everyone was looking at us with their eyebrows raised like
we had all gone off the deep end.

  Gemma, Charles, and I continued the movie-making fun for months after that, improvising nonsense and silliness with no real plotline, testing which one of us was willing to be more ridiculous than the next, in what costume, singing which song.

  One day, in the midst of making one of these movies, I ran into Christine at the Seaport. We exchanged hellos and pleasantries, and I invited her to come over to my place to watch the movie Thirteen, which I had gotten from the library on Murray Street.

  I had no idea that she had become someone who didn’t want to be touched or even spoken to, who wanted to be alone, who was depressed, with moods changing seemingly on their own for no real reason. I had no idea that she was scared of her own mind, that she couldn’t seem to make friends, that she didn’t give anyone the chance to know her. I had no idea, because neither of us talked about anything other than the movie, or music, or what was going on with other kids from I.S. 89 who went to Millennium High School with her.

  She told me everyone was good, but they were not good, because they didn’t tell her much, either.

  Michael stayed locked in his West Village bedroom most days after school and on weekends, conducting independent research projects on cultures of resistance and conspiracy theories. Soon, he began to have dreams that he was carrying out school shootings and started making plans to drop out and run away. Eventually, he thought about what it would be like to possibly plan a dramatic suicide attempt that entailed jumping off of a bridge or making a bomb threat, then going out via suicide by cop. But they were just thoughts.

  Then, there was Greg, who still often left the subway to call the police, plagued by the If you see something, say something signs all over the city. He was having thoughts that were scaring him too. When he tried to open up to his friends, telling them “It’s like I’m fighting hard just to suffer. I’m around people but still feel alone. I can’t sleep, I just lay in bed and can’t turn off these bad thoughts, which just race,” he quickly regretted it. Based on the way they reacted, he decided that sharing his innermost feelings with other teenage boys was clearly a mistake. Instead, he began to quell the violent thoughts that emerged with alcohol and weed, which gave him some relief.

  His parents tried sending him to a therapist, but, as Greg will tell you, “She was whack as fuck.” He went through three different high schools, a natural introvert who, with each transfer, became more paranoid about what people thought of him. He went in and out of outpatient rehab until his parents sent him away to boarding school.

  * * *

  With the threat of another school year looming overhead and the lighter days of summer vacation as a counselor at Downtown Day Camp slipping away, I sulked out of my room and announced, “If I have to go back to Baruch, I’m going to kill myself. People are threatening me, and telling me to watch my back. I only have one friend. I hate it there.”

  All of that was true.

  My mother was sitting at the computer, which was usually my dad’s seat, but my dad was off at a Community Board meeting.

  “Well, I’m glad you’ve made that decision with two weeks left for us to find somewhere else,” she said, looking at me in exasperation and throwing her hands up in the air. “What are we supposed to do? Who’s going to take you on such short notice?”

  Getting into any public school in New York City was difficult, which made this a challenge of Olympic-sized proportions. Still, she did the research and found another school that would take me on short notice, a private Jesuit school on the Upper East Side called Loyola. My parents would have to dip into my college fund to afford it, and my father, who had only retired two years earlier, would have to go back to work, but they were willing to do it.

  Mom to the rescue.

  During the interview, I came across charming, motivated, and bright, qualities I still possessed underneath all of the muck.

  Gemma wasn’t nearly as thrilled as I was when they called me later that day with the very quick decision that of course, based on my grades, my enthusiasm for learning, and my glowing personality, they would be happy to welcome me for $25,000 a year.

  “Thank you for the gift of Helaina,” Loyola wrote me in an official acceptance letter, along with instructions on where to start sending in the checks.

  That same week, a plan to “destroy” the New York Stock Exchange and other financial institutions was uncovered by authorities, and a second, unrelated set of arrests were also made for an attempted bombing of the New York City Subway system before the 2004 Republican National Convention.

  Still, sophomore year started off as an ocean of possibilities.

  It rained on my first day, and I had straightened my then long, curly hair, so my mother called me a car service to take me uptown. She wanted it to be special. As we drove up the FDR, that same scared little girl was right there with me, snuggled into the backseat. She was excited, too, but in my attempts to protect her, I would grow into an even bigger monster.

  The entire Upper East Side was glamorous, wide open, clean, and full of potential for the life I wanted. The Lincoln Town Car pulled up to Park Avenue and Eighty-Third Street in front of a big, beautiful building with oak wooden doors. The whole place looked like it had been carefully carved from white marble, just like the high schools I’d seen in movies. I had always wanted to wear a school uniform, and now, there I was, in a tight white polo, plaid skirt, and black knee socks.

  On the first day, I zeroed in on a guy named Max, who was almost like a “boyfriend referral” from this other guy I had been hooking up with over the summer, CJ.

  CJ worked at an exclusive underground sneaker store with a French name on Bleecker Street, and was really not interested in anything serious. A couple of weeks before school started, after I had gone down on him, he begged me to let him go down on me, something he claimed he “loved doing.” I thought the idea of a boy doing that to a girl could be nothing short of extremely unpleasant, and so I said no, and changed the subject, telling him I’d be going to Loyola. That’s when he mentioned Max, without a hint of jealousy, not seeming to care at all what would happen when I found him.

  Two weeks into September, I was in my glory. I had a new school, a new boyfriend, a new start. I felt Max gave me a leg up, with my being the new girl and all, trying to force my way into the notoriously difficult Upper East Side private school cliques.

  Look, see? I’m normal. Since one of you wants me, I’m just like one of you.

  For field day, we headed to Central Park, just a few avenues from school.

  I remember exactly what I wore: a black velour Ecko sweatshirt that zipped in the front, hugging the outer curves of my breasts, round and prominent under a tight, long-sleeved red tee shirt. I was also wearing my favorite new dark jeans and black New Balance sneakers.

  The crisp fall air blew my hair (flat-ironed, of course) across my face, where it stuck to my red lipstick. Max sat in between my knees, sprawled out on the grass across from another “couple,” Cal and Kathy. Cal was incredibly flamboyant, but didn’t understand why people asked him if he was gay all the time. He’d had me over to hang out once, and we watched the Paris Hilton sex tape, One Night in Paris, him focusing more on Rick Salomon than Paris, after giving me a tour of his walk-in closet full of Hermes scarves and peach colored Chinos.

  Things started to spiral with one question.

  “Is she Jewish?” Max’s mom had asked him. That was a half-affirmative, which somehow resulted in his being grounded every single day, save for soccer practice after school. That little nugget of information began to buzz around the common area of the cafeteria, and depleted whatever points I felt I had gathered by linking up with Max for acceptance-by-association.

  The trouble was, I happened to really like Max. Like, a lot. I can’t remember if I used the word love or not, but his mother keeping us apart triggered something in me that started to burn my second new beginning away. The clinginess, the desperation to see him, the neediness,
it was all a little much for him. Suddenly I was this person whose entire realm of happiness and stability depended on a fifteen-year-old boy with braces who made fart jokes and quoted Family Guy too often. Every little thing he said or didn’t say weighed a ton.

  I was always on the lookout for signs of trouble, something or someone that would take him from me, to make sure he didn’t leave. I didn’t know, then, why I felt so fragile and flaky, attached to him by a single loose hinge. I was starting to make desperate threats when he didn’t pick up my calls. I clung to him as tightly as I could, at whatever cost, smothering him and at the same time lashing out because we couldn’t see each other outside of school, successfully making what I most feared happen.

  He “left.”

  Things continued to spiral down from there. I tried to take on an undefeated attitude, grinding up on an upperclassman at the Halloween dance, boobs pushed up to my chin, but something was wrong with me, beyond just the way I handled disappointment, stress, unexpected changes. All of the other teenagers around me at that dance seemed ready to conquer the world, free, fearless, spontaneous, alive, and invincible. But no matter what I did, standing next to them, I was like a vibrating bundle of nerves, stuck to the ground.

  Maybe I withdrew into myself without knowing it, maybe Peter had told them all how crazy I was, maybe I just lacked that self-awareness, that easygoingness that young people use to form camaraderie with one another.

  But soon I was wandering the hallways at lunch or trailing silently by the quiet crowd.

  At my locker, I tried to move as slowly as I could to take up time between class breaks, pretending I was looking for something, since I had nobody to talk to. Three years of high school suddenly seemed like an eternity, hundreds of thousands of minutes spent thrashing around in feelings that felt like they would destroy me. Pulling out my earphones, the band Simple Plan abruptly stopped singing the lines that made me think they totally understood me, that maybe I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Do you ever feel like breaking down? Do you ever feel out of place. …