The smell of the tables and lockers stung my nostrils as I reluctantly gathered my books from my locker and paraded in a very specific way along the outskirts, like we were in some sort of dog show, to get to my assigned seat on the bleachers. I was never sure what to do with my eyes, but I knew I shouldn’t hold my head down—that was a sign of surrender and defeat.
Everyone sitting on the bleachers was divided by class and arranged in alphabetical order, turning over their shoulders to laugh or shove each other. Some girls wearing red stringy “Kabbalah” bracelets like Madonna did, which I noticed when we all stood up to say the “Our Father,” that school gymnasium smell hovering low and thick over us.
My assigned seat was next to a quiet, androgynous girl who went by “Ted” instead of Theodora, who was also bullied, and whom I later found out, would become “mysteriously” expelled.
* * *
There was a lot that shook my faith in America, but Bush getting re-elected that November eliminated it entirely.
How could this happen after what we all knew he did—and didn’t do?
Even worse, all of the kids in Loyola were cheering him on. They made the announcement over the loudspeaker that John Kerry had “seceded,” and I groaned and let my head fall onto my desk.
Later that month, I found another boyfriend, through MySpace, the friend of a boy I had worked with at Downtown Day Camp. His name was Ryan, he was eighteen, and he was beautiful, blond, and had serious Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which he took several medications for. He lived in the most notoriously expensive building that Central Park West had to offer, and his mother owned a few restaurants. After going on several real dates, and not understanding how I had gotten so lucky, we went into his bedroom, turned on the movie Ghandi with Ben Kingsley, and crawled into his bed. He did something to me with his hand for a very long time that gave me my first orgasm, and he did it again the next time we were there, and the next.
A few weeks later, he called me and told me, after a session with his therapist, that he wasn’t over his ex-girlfriend, Cassandra, who had just texted him “Who do you love?”
I took off the heart necklace he bought me at his school fundraiser the week before and tossed it under my desk.
My attention was turned back to the kid who tripped me, the one who called me by my new name, “Jewish Whore,” and the girl who shoved me in the stairway, saying “Sorry!” and laughing to her friend, hand over her mouth, as soon as she turned away. Now, it was all even bigger.
I kept myself going by writing for the newspaper, stories that mattered to me, indicating that deep down, I had understood something about what I had gone through that I could not put words to on my own.
Thousands upon thousands of children living in Southeast Asia have lost everything they own; everyone they loved. As they ran for their lives, they watched everything they treasure disappear, swept up by the ocean in a matter of seconds. Some children were placed in shelters, others still wander amongst the rubble, clutching their blankies, not quite sure of what to do. Seven hundred children were found all by themselves in a village in Indonesia: one village out of hundreds. The concept of exploiting children to further profit from their misery may seem an incomprehensible one, but when natural disasters like the Tsunami occur, thousands of people are displaced and therefore vulnerable to trafficking. The children who do manage to find salvation are afraid to leave their tents just to get water because they’re scared of being snatched up and sold. There are in fact military personnel involved in the relief operations, but even their presence has not reduced the number of attacks. … Officials are concerned that the trauma of the catastrophe is provoking the culprits to commit crimes such as rape and abduction. Coupled with the increasingly cramped conditions of the refugee camps, this promises to act as a gateway for more and more criminals to surface. In the aftermath of this tragedy, the psychological damage may be more of a blow to the women and children of Southeast Asia than the tidal wave itself.
Random text messages from numbers I didn’t know continued to run up my phone bill, both pranks and threats. I didn’t tell my parents for the reasons teenagers never tell their parents when they’re bullied: I was ashamed. I didn’t want my parents to think they had messed up, that this was their fault, that I was like this because they had failed somehow. It caused a weird combination of being depressed and listless, like my body weighed a thousand pounds, coupled with a sensation that I had to be ready to tackle some sort of threat at any second. It was all too exhausting.
I was still seeing Dr. F, who just asked me the same questions, grumbled, closed his eyes, and sent me on my way.
Before long, I started to refuse to get out of bed in the mornings.
“I’m not calling you in sick again!” my mother shouted from the living room as I hid under the covers. “Stop being dramatic and get up!”
She pulled the covers off of me, making me feel exposed, and left the room.
She went to put on her coat—it must have been late November, by then—came back to find me still in bed, and tried to literally shake me out of it by maneuvering the sheets around. She left the room again, put on her shoes, and then tried to physically pull me out of bed by my arms. I turned toward the wall and pulled the covers over my head as she tried to yank me out, making myself heavy.
“You have to go to school. Daddy went back to work so you could go to school! What’s wrong with you?”
But I couldn’t go. I just couldn’t.
“You’re an ungrateful brat!” She yelled, frustrated and angry. She relented and called the school. Slamming the phone down, she called over her shoulder, “Something is really wrong with you!”
Banging the door on her way out, the impact slapped me across the face like a cold hand. I began to cry, trembling in bed for most of the morning. This is how it would go for most of December and January.
School had always been a priority, and now that was slipping away too. I was losing the last thing that made me who I was, what would make my parents and Grandma proud, despite everything.
At night, I would cringe as I listened to them arguing about me outside my room, blaming each other, knowing it would only hurt to listen, but unable not to.
“It’s your fault she’s like this,” my mom would say.
“Maybe you should punish her, then, you created this,” my dad would snap back.
When my mother tried to come into my room, the anger that had been bubbling below the surface exploded, and I’d throw things out into the foyer, screaming, trying to physically push her out, flying into a rage as she tried to force her way in.
I started spending my lunch periods in the library or in the school guidance counselor’s office, the closest thing I could find to a safe place. Of course, it was smack dab at the end of the cafeteria, so everyone saw me coming in and out of her office and smirked. In fact, it felt like whenever I walked into a room, people were snickering.
I told her I hated my parents and wished I was dead, that I didn’t want to stay at school or go home. I told her that small things like making a decision flustered me, like which staircase to take or what to eat for lunch, and it felt like my life depended on every decision I made.
She nodded, and then I left.
What I really craved more than anything else was a friend, the kind who knew exactly when to reach out and hug me when my eyes were about to spill over with tears, letting me fall into her, safe, protected.
But I was still alone.
It was a cold December morning when I first took a pair of scissors from the art room, the kind with the colorful plastic handle, into the bathroom during lunch. I locked the door behind me and looked in the mirror, wishing my reflection would leave and I could become somebody, anybody else. More than what was there, I saw what was missing. My heart was pounding and all I could think was I want go home. I was largely invisible, and the only times I was visible, I wished I wasn’t.
I cringed as I pressed the blade aga
inst my wrist. It snapped me back to reality right before it actually broke skin, and, at the same time, I was amazed at how much my skin could endure before breaking.
Did I even want it to break?
What if it did?
What if I actually killed myself?
No, not while Grandma’s alive.
I wanted a way out, a new life, and it seemed that no matter where I went, what I did, what I said, the darkness followed me.
Things scared me, and I didn’t know why.
I wanted to hurt myself, and I didn’t know why.
I was sad all the time, and I didn’t know why.
I had nightmares every night, and I didn’t know why.
All that other old shit was there that I should be over by now, the anxiety, the irritability, the panic on the subway. It had been three years already, why wasn’t it going away?
I felt trapped everywhere—trapped at school, trapped in New York, trapped at home in our apartment. There was no feasible escape in sight—I wasn’t old enough to get my hands on liquor on my own, and I didn’t have cool friends who went to parties.
Nothing will ever get better for you.
Looking from one haphazardly painted, crayon-blue bathroom wall to the next, inhaling the musty smell of brown paper towels and toilet water, my pulse raced. I shook, wondering if I should just get it over with. Even then, something stronger than me was holding me back from pressing down hard enough to attempt to slit my wrists, which made me feel like I had some control over the pain. So, where only I could see it, there were just scratches, which felt awful. I didn’t want to hurt myself, but all of this pressure was building inside me faster and faster, and I had read somewhere, in a book, that this made the girl feel better. It made people take her seriously and find her the help she needed to get better.
I wasn’t scared about what I’d done, but I was scared about what drove me to do it. So I told Dr. F, who decided that I was suffering from severe clinical depression, and recommended I started seeing a psychiatrist. That meant a visit to my pediatrician for a referral.
I told my doctor, who knew me since I was born, that I felt like throwing myself in front of a train, and she made my mother leave the room.
“I’ve started to scrape my wrists, but I don’t know why. I don’t want to live, but I don’t actually want to die when I do it,” I said.
“Will you show me?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, and started pulling back my long sleeve. “But only if you don’t tell my mom.”
She agreed. As soon as she saw the marks, she told me to roll up my shirt and called my mother back into the room, telling me, to leave.
I stood outside the door, listening. Of course, she told her. Fucking adults can’t be trusted.
“She’s faking,” my mom said. “She’s not cutting herself. She just wants attention.”
I could sense the doctor giving my mother a disapproving look.
“Mother,” she said, “if your child says she is going to cut herself, we don’t say she’s faking.”
Later that night, I found my mom sitting on her bed crying, which was a first.
“What did we do wrong?” she asked me through sobs. “We loved you, we tried to give you everything.”
I sat next to her and awkwardly rubbed her back. We never expressed affection, verbally or physically, a lead of hers that I followed. I resented her for being judgmental, dismissive, unavailable to talk about my feelings with, but I also felt ashamed and incredibly guilty. I didn’t want to do this to her. I didn’t want to do this to anyone.
“It’s ok,” I said. Closing the door behind me, I felt as though I had just committed murder.
She didn’t come out until the morning.
And in the morning I stared with disdain at my reflection in the dark, scratched windows of the train car. As I child, I’d press my face and hands up against the glass and watch excitedly as we moved through the tunnel, in awe of the majestic movement of the silver car through the dark and mysterious tunnel, the occasional flashes of light.
As I walked from Eighty-Sixth Street and Lexington Avenue to Eighty-Third and Park Avenue, past the Best Buy, the closed pizza shops, and the expensive doorman buildings, my backpack chafing my flesh against the cold, I secretly hoped to get hit by a car. I felt too cowardly to step out into traffic and cursed myself for it. I turned on Eighty-Sixth Street and headed down Park like a dead girl walking. Dragging the dripping, tar covered, smoking baggage I seemed to carry everywhere, I was polluted, damaged, a disaster.
Why am I like this? I thought. What’s happening to me?
I had the sinking realization that no change of location, or hairdo, or uniform, was going to fix me. Therapy wasn’t working, and I couldn’t talk to my own mother.
What kept me from taking my own life was the same thing that kept me from drawing blood, this tiny, packing peanut-sized bit of hope. That little piece of me refused to give up, despite the therapist, the guidance counselor—and most recently, the school psychiatrist—not getting it. It was a whisper over the shrieking of this little girl inside me that sent the alarm bells going off, and it told me, “This isn’t going to last forever.”
But standing there on Eighty-Third Street, staring at the school through the moving cars, the wind stinging my eyes, tears began to fall as I admitted to myself that, even if I wasn’t going to take my own life, I actually wanted to die.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The more we lose ourselves in someone else, the more we lose ourselves, period. This loss means a reduced connection to personal strengths, desires, opportunities, experiences, values, and priorities. The feeling of this continued loss can lead to sensations of fear, danger, and other emotions that addictions frequently assuage. Clinging is a dangerous coping mechanism; it gives our power to someone or something else and leaves us more vulnerable and unsafe. This is especially true in romantic relationships—clinging opens us to abuse, betrayal, misdirection, and misguidance.
—Michele Rosenthal, Healing Your PTSD: Dynamic Strategies That Work
On January 25, 2005, Loyola had a snow day.
I was feeling particularly nervous, staring out the window at the cold concrete of the basketball court outside my window and at the rimmed, barbed wire fence of the rooftop next door, the wheels in my head turning, quickly.
What if the terrorists have been waiting until it snows?
Babies and grandparents will freeze to death.
“They” have Weapons of Mass Destruction.
I ran my finger along the crevice of the window frame, looking up at the golden angel perched atop a castle of white concrete on the Municipal Building.
Is this it?
Is this staleness just life?
I took down some photo albums from the hall closet, which I did from time to time, looking at pictures of myself from when I was little.
There I was at age four or five, standing on a dining room chair, bent over the table, sticking my butt out at the camera as I cleaned up some sort of Play-Doh–related mess I’d made. My lips pursed in a spiteful smile, I wore a pink nightgown that had a blue satin skirt. I was clearly having a grand old time; who knows what I had been doing with that red clay, which was flagged by items like a wrench, a playing card, a plastic toy, and a pile of square, dry paper towels that had clearly been provided for me.
In another photo, I’m three years old and wearing a black jumper with colorful dots all over it, sitting in the middle of a rainbow parachute. It was the kind preschool teachers used to tell you to “grab a handle of,” raising it up into the air and bringing it down again. “Run underneath!” they’d shout, or “Time for Suzy to sit in the middle!” as people made the parachute billow all around. That’s what I was doing in this particular snapshot, “Helaina in the middle,” wearing a pile of tight curls atop my head and a satisfied look on my face that said, “Of course, this is where I belong! Where else would I be?”
I sighed and coaxed a Zoloft out of
the orange bottle my new psychiatrist, Dr. V, prescribed me for the depression, swallowing it with Diet Coke.
I closed the photo album and practically fell into the computer chair in the living room, logging into AOL Instant Messenger to see who was on.
Shane was online, so I sent him a message. He responded:
Yo. Wanna smoke?
The message came up in a blue font with a black background.
Another pinging sound brought another message:
Jordan will be there.
Jordan was a baby-faced kid with big eyes, blond hair, and very rosy cheeks who I had decided to develop a mild crush on while working as a camp counselor.
Yeah, 3:00 p.m.? Burger King? I wrote back.
I made sure to pick out jeans that hugged me in the right places, accentuating the thin leanness of my legs and rounder part of my bottom. I spritzed on some Coach perfume, laced up my fuzzy boots, wiggled into my North Face jacket, and headed out the door to wait on the corner of Fulton and Gold, on the concrete benches outside of Burger King.
Shane and a few other guys came sauntering down the block in the way that a group of fourteen-year-old boys trying to look tough would, all puffy jackets and caps tilted artfully at all sorts of angles.
I was not expecting to find the person who would change my life among them, but there he was, sitting in a booth while Shane ordered something. His hat brim was positioned so low that I couldn’t see his eyes until he looked up at me from underneath it. My heart stopped—they were big and blue, and they were peering right at me. I was standing up, leaning with my hands behind my back, on a table right across from that booth, and when he introduced himself as “Vin.” I took the hand he offered and felt a wave of something pulse through me like jelly.
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