“We can’t have students threatening other students.”
“What about the girl who threatened Helaina?” my dad said. “And the boy involved? Are there no repercussions for them?”
This was dismissed with a wave and sealed with the words “expulsion.”
“Can’t you just let her finish out the year? It’s already March. It’s just two more months,” my mother said.
“No, we simply can’t. I’m sorry,” he said.
“I would urge you to reconsider,” my dad said, looking from one to the other.
“I don’t think so.”
And with that, we left, a wave of relief passing over me.
I finally made it out of that hellhole.
“These people have no compassion,” my mother fumed as we walked to the car. “They constantly write us asking for money. They are such hypocrites. What’s going to happen to Max? Nothing.”
“It’s ok,” I said. “I didn’t want to be there anyway.”
The feeling of relief was short lived, abruptly disappearing as soon as I pulled the car door closed, leaving me to absorb the disappointment and sadness coming from the two front seats.
All I could muster the nerve to say was, “Don’t tell Grandma.”
By then, I expected that Grandma most likely knew more about what was going on with me than she let on, way more than I would have liked her to know. I kept our visits light and breezy, but she always seemed sad, somehow, though we never talked about why. I wanted to preserve this idea of the good girl who always made Grandma happy and proud, and now that fantasy was disintegrating into charred bits and pieces with whatever my mom was feeding her.
I later found out that my parents lost the $5,000 deposit they put down for the next year at Loyola, something they had taken a personal loan out to pay that was, “Sorry, not refundable.”
This expulsion and its timing had another repercussion that I hadn’t thought about: all Grandma wanted more than anything was for me to sing on stage, and this had been my big chance.
As soon as I got home, I ran upstairs, hoping to beat my mother to it. But Grandma was there in her housedress holding a tissue, hanging up the white-chorded phone. I could see she was upset.
Look what Mom did to her.
No, look what YOU did to her! Another voice inside of me shouted back.
“I don’t know what’s happening to the little girl I knew,” Grandma said sadly. She wouldn’t even look me in the eye.
* * *
My mother may not have been the kind of mother who took my hand and sat next to me on the bed and said, “Let’s talk about it. What’s going on?” She may not have beet the type to smooth my hair and kiss my forehead and say, “We’ll figure it out together.” But she also was not the type to ship her kid, who was a nightmare, off to a boarding school or one of those places where they “fix” problem kids to finally get some peace in her life, which I think many parents would have, by then.
After I got kicked out of Loyola, she somehow managed to find somewhere in New York City that would take a fifteen-year-old who had already been to two other high schools within eighteen months.
The Beekman School was intended to be transitional. Translation: for kids who got kicked out of other private schools. The school requested a letter from my new psychiatrist, Dr. C, about why I needed this type of intimate, private-school environment to succeed, and, once again, my parents got to work figuring out how to afford the tuition for me, at this small school that inhabited a converted townhouse in midtown Manhattan.
The lockers were on the “ground floor,” near a back door that led to a small garden. The garden may have just been a slab of concrete with some trees and three benches, but it was like paradise to me. There were four floors, total, with two classrooms on each floor. There were four or five kids in each class, small, manageable. All of the kids looked older, down to earth, like they had all been through something. Just like me. I fell in love with it immediately.
Most New York City schools don’t look like the high schools you see on TV and in the movies. There are no pep rallies, big football games, or homecoming queens. There are no house parties where people hang out on the stairs and someone jumps from the roof into the pool. After school and on weekends, you hung out on rooftops, on the waterfront under some sort of highway or bridge, at someone’s apartment while their parents are gone, or, if you could somehow get yourself let into a bar, you went there. You went to a movie, or to a pizza joint, wherever else you could hang out for cheap.
I took the same walk to the 6 train that I always did, walking past the hospital, underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, down the steps of the station, through a tunnel, up some more steps, through a turnstile, down some more steps, the same routine over and over again.
Why is that guy looking up?
Why is that fire truck there?
Why is another fire truck pulling up?
Four years later, and I was no closer to being able to shake off the trigger response that came with it all.
The classes at Beekman were challenging, which commanded my attention and active involvement. I was engaged and participating often. My grades began to shoot right back up.
There were a lot of kids like me; this was good and bad. Good, because if I had a meltdown or a problem, I likely wouldn’t be made fun of or antagonized. Bad, because we all thought our behavior, the levels of extremes, were “normal.”
The teachers didn’t ask, “Are you ok?” if you cried during class. Neither did the students. We all had weird marks—the skin around my thumbnails were framed in giant red patches, where I would run ruts into the skin as a nervous tick, even after they started bleeding. Other kids had bruises here, or “slash marks” there.
There were also kids going in and out on rotation, though a fair amount stayed.
When the President—still George Bush—visited the United Nations just blocks away from the school, it was nothing but a pain in the ass and a traffic jam. Unlike Loyola, nobody here liked Bush. There may have been a few Republicans by blood in the school, but they were smart enough to keep quite about it. We were all allowed—actually, encouraged—to go outside and give him the finger as he passed by.
Report Card Comments, April 11, 2005
Advanced Modern World History: I can tell that Helaina is very bright, and even though she has just started a new school, she has jumped right in and has been on top of the material. Helaina’s first quiz grade was excellent, and I hope that she continued to stay on task throughout the rest of the semester.
Science Fiction: Helaina has been a wonderful addition to the class. She is an astute and careful reader and already participates comfortably during classroom discussion. Her writing is also quite good, and she excelled at this week’s grammar lesson.
English: Helaina has proven to be a great addition to my class. She is interested, upbeat, and knows her abilities and skills. Her writing style is tight, expressive, and it’s clear she enjoys the writing process.
I even made a few new friends.
Jordan was an on-and-off cokehead whose mother worked as head of admissions for one of the most coveted universities in New York. Jordan had been kicked out of LaGuardia High School, and was a singer and actress by trade. Then there was Dave, who was smart and goofy. He had a lazy eye but an amazing sense of humor. He lived in Westchester, wore tie-dye shirts, kept his hair nearly shaved, and was outrageous. I also liked Natalya, who always looked like she had come from a 1960s war rally, with her greasy stringy hair and a green khaki jacket whose pockets were deep enough to keep all of her cigarettes and drugs in. Also among this crew was the daughter of an Oscar-winning celebrity, who, with Jordan, jumped a kid in our school for his iPod one day.
We would go to this catch-all deli/pizza place/Taco Bell for lunch, then smoke around the corner, in front of the back entrance to an office building, hiding behind two large pillars in case a teacher came by. Whatever Jordan and Natalya were thinking about when
they stared off into space, or quietly ashed their cigarettes onto a sidewalk grate, I was pretty sure it wasn’t Someone’s going to manufacture a virus and make us watch each other suffer until we die. We’re all going to panic and kill each other for a place in line trying to get the antidote.
I immediately developed a crush on a Croatian kid named Alex, who my mother probably would have thought was very much “for me.” He lived in a very fancy building by the East River. I didn’t think twice about cheating on Vin … but after I hopped off the M15 bus to say goodbye to Vin right after I did it—and right before a weekend trip to Washington—I told him. I created a whole new catastrophe where I hadn’t needed to, and, on top of that, made my parents an hour late to hit the road because of all the crying and talking we had to do. We spoke on the car ride there, for two hours of it, until my mother threatened to “throw my cell phone out the window.”
After that, something major changed between Vin and I. I thought that the constant screaming fights and violent behavior—punching walls, for example—was a sign of unbridled passion and love. I reasoned that of course, now, he always wanted to know where I was going, with who, and even who I spoke to during the day. Before long, we one-upped each other, doing and saying crazy things to get each other’s attention, making threats. He didn’t trust me, and I didn’t trust him, and I didn’t trust the world. In controlling him, I was like a teacher desperately trying to arrange thousands of rowdy kids on a stage and get them to stay put, but every time I got one right, another one moved, and so on and so forth. It took up a lot of energy and resulted in a lot of frustration.
When we fought, I’d stand, sobbing, wiping away my snot with my hand and flinging it into the street, fingers squeezing the life out of the filter of the Newport cigarette I furiously sucked on, surrounded by slinking midtown traffic or the occasional odd car moving through Battery Park’s South End Avenue. I was so far apart from people who walked by, as if they belonged to a civilization that I didn’t, and yet I felt I was smack dab in the center of everything, painfully visible, and visibly in pain.
* * *
“Do you feel that your moods are very up and down?” Dr. C, my new psychiatrist, asked me.
Her office was on the ground floor of a residential building on Park Avenue, and I sat on the couch, looking at her in her big chair as she took notes on a legal pad.
“Yes,” I said, because, it was true.
“When you’re up, when you’re high, do you feel so happy it’s like you’re on top of the world? And when you’re low, do you feel like you’re at the lowest point ever?”
“Yes,” I said, because that was also true, and because I was desperate to put a name on this thing and have her fix it.
“Tell me what else is going on,” she said.
I launched into it with no problem, so used to having to explain the same thing over and over again.
“I’m afraid that people are looking at me like they want to hurt me. In school, on the subway, everywhere,” I said. “I’m nervous all the time, and when I get upset, I feel like I’m out of control. I’m scared of things other people my age aren’t scared of. I feel like I’m suffocating, half the time. I’m having headaches so often that I’ve stopped identifying them as headaches. It’s like a permanent background feature of my life, changing only in severity. And, I’m always fighting with my boyfriend over things that he thinks aren’t a big deal.”
“Your mother said that you’re throwing a lot of tantrums, hitting and kicking and screaming, in these highly emotional states,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, looking down and shrugging. “I guess so.”
“Do you feel like you’re hyper-talkative?”
I didn’t even know what that meant, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to say anything that would cause her to not fix me.
So I said, “Maybe.”
What she didn’t account for in her line of questioning was cause and effect, triggers, and reactivity—it all came from somewhere. Yes, I had periods of depression, and yes, I couldn’t sleep. I made bad choices, but I did not have inexplicable, manic episodes, and I never had grandiose or delusional ideas. I did not think I was “chosen” for anything, and I did not go on spending sprees, or disappear for days and then remain unable to account for what had driven that decision or what I had even done.
What she didn’t account for was that sometimes, “fight or flight” is as simple as a reaction. If someone made me feel threatened, whether it was my parents, or my boyfriend, or someone at school, or someone on the street, I reacted, impulsively, quickly, aggressively. My entire world revolved around a person who I needed so desperately, who was the only thing that could, temporarily, make me feel “okay,” that there was no room for him to be flawed, to make mistakes, to upset me in the way all humans accidentally hurt each other, without everything imploding into sudden catastrophe. My mood rose and fell severely with whatever he said or did. I would later learn that she had added something called “potential secondary trauma due to 9/11” to my chart when we first met, just one sentence long.
But Dr. C seemed to think that the reason for all of this behavior was because I was Bipolar, so she started writing me prescriptions for that.
By late spring of 2005, my life was overflowing with orange pill bottles, medication my body rejected, along with the last meal that I ate. After I got sick the first time I tried a drug, she lowered the dose, unless I got so sick that I was too scared to try again. We tried Seroquel, then Lamictal, then Lexapro, then Prozac, then Depakote, to try to tackle some of these symptoms, which, no matter what, continued to get worse. I sat there like a test subject, being analyzed instead of taught how to do anything differently.
She was just a psychiatrist, so I was still ushered in and out of therapists offices, always going in hopeful, unlike most reluctant, brooding teenagers who sat there and grimaced because their parents “made them go.” I tried to explain to therapists what was wrong with me over and over and over again, only to find they couldn’t help me, either. I did begin to feel more foolish for getting my hopes up, then resentful of the therapist I was talking to. Nothing seemed to be working.
I was always going for blood tests, and I was no longer the “brave” girl that the nurses marveled at. I had become squeamish. I was already charged up from the trip, trying to find an address I couldn’t find, another crisis. “I’m not good at this,” I would warn the technician as she wrapped a rubber strap around my arm. I’d look the other way, squeezing my eyes shut, trying to sing a song in my head.
But no matter how many blood tests I got, the answer never seemed to be swimming around in those vials.
* * *
It was a warm night in 2006 when I found myself on West Side Highway by Ground Zero, which was still a hole in the ground, trying to catch my breath. Vin was on his knees, blood smeared along the side of his mouth.
“I’m sorry!” he was crying.
We had left the Battery Park City movie theater just moments earlier after seeing War of the Worlds, which was a mistake. I had begun pushing myself to do things I wasn’t ready for, testing out my mother’s “exposure therapy” by doing something I knew would upset me, because I “should be able to just deal with it.”
Going to see United 93, the movie about the plane the terrorists hijacked and civilians tackled to the ground on September 11, fell into this category, as did going to “street” events where there were mobs of people because I just “needed to get over my fear of crowds.” Naturally, War of the Worlds, a movie full of explosions, people running and screaming, triggered me even worse. I kept saying, “We have to leave,” and Vin kept saying, “No,” and I kept getting mad and frustrated at him, whispering loudly, changing seats, leaving the theater, coming back, until some man shouted, “You guys better shut the fuck up or I’m going to kick your ass!”
I went to the bathroom and called 911 to report the threat, but nobody showed up, perhaps because we hung up too soo
n, perhaps because we didn’t wait long enough.
And somehow, we ended up outside, with Vin on the ground.
This had become commonplace, a catastrophe playing out somewhere in the neighborhood, my hand flying out, my body on the floor, watching myself through blurred vision as if I was a robot being remote controlled.
When that new, invisible girl took hold, I lost all ability to think—I just reacted, on impulse.
There were still the good times, hiding from the world in his room and watching HBO—which we didn’t get at home—eating cereal out of the box, ordering chicken cutlet sandwiches with lettuce, tomato, and hot sauce, and eating them in bed, some crazy luxury that felt illegal in the world of bedroom rules. He would call his friends with me on the line and act like an absolute idiot, singing stupid songs until they hung up, which made me laugh and laugh until my stomach hurt. Occasionally, one of his friends would throw a party, but parties made me nervous, and I wanted him all to myself.
We went out to eat at Chevy’s on his mother’s dime, or we sat outside on park benches, or we went to the smaller street fairs that would take up just a few blocks and eat Zeppoles, getting powdered sugar all over ourselves, laughing and spewing white dust at each other, everyone’s stares just egging us on more.
To fund these excursions, Vin sold Cutco knives. He made money by getting people to sit down for a demonstration, since the cutlery wasn’t sold in stores, and made additional commission if they bought something.
Grandma, who really didn’t need knives, sat through the demo and bought the second most expensive set they had, taking out her checkbook and handing him the slip with a smile. Later, when her mind started to go, she would cut herself with one of them, deeply.
There were still subtle things I couldn’t put my finger on, like why, during a fireworks show, with all of the crowds and the exploding noises and smoke and that smell of burning and gunpowder against the backdrop of the water and I.S. 89, I seemed to get inexplicably anxious, edgy, jittery, then upset, and eventually picked a fight with Vin and ran down the esplanade before the show was over.
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