The Weight of Zero

by Karen Fortunati

  Sandy raises a hand to Thing Two. “That’s enough, Amy,” she says. “If you have an issue, you’ll need to say it in terms of how you feel, okay? No attacks. This is a safe zone.” Sandy turns to Kristal. “Welcome, Kristal. We’re glad you’re here.”

  And as with our apologies to Tom, we go around the circle like pre-K robots and say hi or hello to Kristal. Unaware that we met yesterday, Sandy makes a point of introducing me to Kristal. When it’s Thing Two’s turn, she says, “I’m sorry. It’s just that when you…I sort of lose focus when you…when people come in late.” Her huge head dips down as if that neck is getting fatigued. “It, like, disrupts stuff.”

  Kristal nods and asks Thing Two defiantly, “What’s your name again?”

  Thing Two takes a second, sizing up the room’s altered dynamic now that Kristal is here, realizing that maybe she’ll be dislodged from the alpha girl spot. Then she says, “I’m Amy.”

  Kristal says, “Well, I’d hate to disrupt Amy’s therapy. Maybe I shouldn’t come here. I doubt I can make it any earlier.” And it’s clear she likes this idea because a smile spreads across her face. She catches my eye and winks.

  Sandy shakes her head. “We’ll work something out, Kristal. We want you here. Now, we were discussing an incident that happened to Tom today.” Sandy gives a quick summary of Tommy’s bodily ejection from the restroom sink. What follows is a free-for-all of advice coming from Garrett, John and the Immaculate Conception girls that ranges from bringing a bigger bottle of Purell to finding a new bathroom.

  I offer nothing. After about ten minutes of this bathroom-crisis summit, Kristal asks Tommy, exactly how long does it take you to wash your hands? Tommy ponders that and answers, if it’s just before a meal or something, maybe ten, fifteen minutes. Kristal then asks, does it ever take you longer than that?

  Lil’ Tommy’s feet beat a pattern against the sofa as he answers, “Only after I…um…do my man thing.” He gives a naughty smile. “Hey, sorry, but a man’s got his needs. We’re supposed to be honest here, right?”

  The room explodes with laughter, shouts of “TMI” from Amy and Alexis and air–high fives between the boys. Kristal turns to me, the stunned grin on her face matching my own. Then her warm hand is on my wrist, squeezing it as she whispers, “Fucking A, Cat. Fucking A.”

  Only to me.

  Michael waits outside my locker Wednesday morning holding a sheet of paper in his hand. He’s wearing baggy black shorts, a Nike T-shirt, tennis sneakers and a baseball hat with the brim facing forward. His neck is bright red.

  I’m in a crappy mood. For the first time since Grandma died I think, Mom started in on what I was wearing. “You are not wearing those shorts for the fourth day in a row,” she had snipped at breakfast. I denied it, but she actually yelled back that I had worn them to church on Sunday, and school on Monday and Tuesday and told me to take them off and put them in the wash.

  “Hey, Cath,” Michael says, shifting back and forth. “I just wanted to give you what I wrote on Kasia.”

  I look at him blankly. What the freak is Kasia?

  “You know, Jonathan Kasia, the soldier we’re doing the biography on?” he asks. “You took off so fast after class yesterday I didn’t get a chance to give it to you. And I didn’t see you in the cafeteria.”

  Michael offers the paper to me and I take it. “Thanks,” I say, turning my back to him and opening my locker.

  “Maybe you can look at it tonight and text me if you want any changes or anything.”

  I turn suddenly to face him, paranoia kicking in. “How did you know where my locker is?”

  Michael points a thumb over his shoulder at the row of lockers opposite mine. “Mine’s right there.” His brown eyes cloud over with what looks like hurt that I don’t know the location of his locker. I guess I should know who’s around my locker. I feel bad, but I rarely look up when I’m stuck in this hellhole. I just concentrate on getting to class and avoiding all interaction with the nightmares who dwell here.

  “Oh…that’s right,” I say, but Michael looks bummed. So I ask, “Do you want to walk to history?

  He nods, a shy smile creeping up. “Sure.”

  Again, it’s odd to have someone beside me in the crowded halls, especially someone who wants to tell me every—and I mean every—detail of his quest for a soldier for our project. I tune back in when he announces grandly, “And then I found Kasia. I thought you’d especially like him.”

  Was Jonathan Kasia crazy too? I want to ask. “Why?” I ask instead.

  “Didn’t you read about his mom?” he asks, his eyebrows arching in surprise.

  “I…I’m drawing a blank,” I mumble. “Sorry.”

  “Kasia’s mother was Polish. She ran a Polish bakery in Waterbury,” Michael says triumphantly.

  I stare at him. I have not a clue where he’s headed with this one.

  “You’re Polish, right? Pulaski? Is your dad Polish?” he asks as we enter the classroom.

  Ah yes, my father. Or, the man who merely stayed around long enough to get Jody Pulaski pregnant. Mom was twenty-three, he was nineteen. They dated up until it was confirmed I was growing like a mutant seed inside her. And then he left. To this day, I still don’t know who he is, because Mom won’t give it up.

  My grandfather had just died and Grandma was living by herself when Mom got pregnant. With no other kids besides Mom, Grandma swooped in and took over. Mom moved back to her childhood home, a small Cape with two sloped-ceiling bedrooms upstairs. Grandma kept hers, and Mom and I shared the other. At some point, the dining room was converted into Grandma’s bedroom so that I could have my own room.

  “C’mon, c’mon, let’s get seated,” Mr. Oleck barks from his desk. He’s wearing a pink bow tie with his pressed white button-down today. “Got a ton to cover.”

  “Bye, Cath,” Michael says.

  I give Michael a slight nod as he heads to the other side of the classroom. My seat is the second from the front, one row in from the left. Louis Farricelli is spread-eagled in the desk behind mine, leering as I approach. I slide into my seat.

  “Those shorts are hot,” he whispers in my ear, lofting a nauseating garlic cloud around my head. “I’m getting hard right now.”

  Of course the pig would like them. They’re about two sizes too small. I send a silent, sarcastic thank-you to Mom for making me change this morning.

  I scoot my desk up, trying to get away from him. I could ask Mr. Oleck to switch my seat, but the risk that I’d be closer to Riley or Olivia is too great. Sucking it up and sitting near Louis Farricelli is the lesser evil here.

  “Hey, crazy, don’t run away,” Louis breathes into my neck. “I’m not gonna bite unless you want—”

  “Mr. Farricelli, is there a problem?” Mr. Oleck walks over. Despite the bow tie, Mr. Oleck is pretty tall and stocky. He’s also the JV wrestling coach. Looming over Louis, he says, “Push your desk back and keep it there, got it? If it moves an inch, you’ve got detention.”

  “Not a problem, Mr. Oleck,” Louis says smoothly. “Just chatting with…Cathy here. Sorry.”

  Mr. Oleck strides back to the lectern. “Okay, before we get started on the new chapter, a couple of housekeeping things about the D-day biography project. On Monday, I want a preliminary list of sources—both primary and secondary—on your soldier.” Somebody groans from the back of the class. “You don’t have to do any legwork. I just want you to begin compiling your sources so we can start figuring out logistics—who needs to go where, how many of you, et cetera. I spoke to the history chairperson yesterday. We’re going big with this, you guys.” Mr. Oleck strides up and down the aisles, his voice rising. “We’re going to do a blog. The local and online papers are going to carry it. Each week there’ll be a new installment with one of your bios featured. Maybe some of you can submit to some World War Two periodicals.”

  The rest of the day passes without too much pain. At lunch, one of the librarians, Mrs. Markman, stops by my cubby to say hello. I like
her because she never gives me any grief about eating in here, just checks in, asks if I’m reading anything good. I’m not, even though I spent the past summer volunteering at the Cranbury Public Library. Mom insisted, desperate to fill up the empty, friendless hours of my long summer days. I was waist-deep in books Monday through Friday at the end of July and all of August, my fingers constantly grasping the smooth, slick covers as I reshelved the books and arranged the “Hot Arrivals” on the display tables at the entrance. But I have a hard time reading—I’m too nervous to lose myself in a story again.

  It stems back to a year ago, September of sophomore year. “The Lithium Incident.” Spurred on, at least in part, by a book. After that, I self-imposed a book ban that I know is stupid because there are a gazillion different books out there. But it’s just the way it is now. The new, curtailed normal of my bipolar life. Like no unchaperoned Internet access, no driver’s license, no plans to take the SATs because college is not an option. I won’t even bring that up with Mom. If she won’t let me drive, there’s no way she’ll let me leave the house. Attempt to live on my own? Not in this lifetime. So, no reading turns out to be one of the less dramatic prohibited activities for Catherine Pulaski.

  The book was The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Old Dr. A had recommended it during our appointment on a Friday, just one week before my sixteenth birthday. I was sitting on the sofa in his office, the warm September sun making me sweat. The same tired sofa I had sat on for the past year.

  “You should read this,” Dr. A had said, smoothing back some lank gray strands of hair from his lined forehead. “The main character’s got some issues, but it’s really uplifting. Has a positive message.” True to form, he spaced out for a few seconds and then refocused. “Oh yeah. Hermione was in the movie. You know, from Harry Potter?”

  I had actually heard of the book already, and I wasn’t interested in reading some bullshit story of teenage psychiatric angst, some la-la feel-good crap. But I’m a good girl, manners-wise, and I couldn’t say no when Dr. A slid the book across his desk.

  “My granddaughter gave it to me,” he said. “Go ahead. Tell me what you think of it.”

  At home, I read the first page and was hooked. I got the main character, Charlie. He felt so real to me in his confusion over why he was the way he was—different. In how he related to other kids, how he saw the world, how things affected him, how he felt. And in his isolation. I breathed isolation too. Charlie had entered high school without a friend, and my friends were defecting throughout my freshman year and following summer.

  So that Friday, I couldn’t put Perks down. I was halfway done that night and Mom was thrilled to see me doing something and not just going through the motions. And the next day, that first Saturday of sophomore year, I sat on our living room sofa fully engrossed in the story and Mom left for her shift at Dominic’s with a lighter heart.

  I tore through the book until the end, when it was revealed why Charlie was the way he was. There was a reason. An objective fact. An event. A fucking incident that had skewed the way his brain and psyche had evolved.

  That crushed me, because I had connected with Charlie. I had recognized myself in him, but then everything changed. Because an event was the origin of Charlie’s problems, his healthy mind reacting to a bad thing, it meant we were no longer the same. He was an innocent victim.

  But me? Nothing had happened to me. I was born with a defective mind. As my father’s sole contribution to my life knifed its way into my mother’s egg, it unleashed a faulty genetic code that warped the normal brain development of fetus me, growing wrong inside my mother.

  I was a thing that should never have been.

  The book slipped from my fingers to the floor. I remember feeling bewildered at first. And then betrayed.

  Charlie’s friends had liked his oddness, valued the quirkiness and perception that his abnormal mental state had spawned. They had embraced him while he was hospitalized. Charlie emerged from the psych hospital straight into the arms of his large, loving family, his friends and teachers all ready to gently cradle him back to life.

  That’s not how it works.

  Friends run. My friends had run.

  Olivia, Riley and I had still been texting sporadically that summer. They typed quick, three-word courtesy responses to my more lengthy overtures. The past week, Mom insisted I invite them to the dude ranch in upstate New York she and Aunt D had planned on taking me to celebrate my birthday. But neither one responded. Years of best-friendness, sisterhood, reduced to a complete communication blackout.

  I lied to Mom. I told her they really wanted to come but had stuff going on. That the three of us were going to celebrate my big sixteenth, we just had to get around to planning it. This soothed Mom, and she threw herself into scheduling horseback riding, skeet shooting and spa treatments.

  So on that first Saturday in September, my new reality sunk in. And it was nothing like The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Friends evacuate. They don’t want a trace of fucked-up you or your birthday on their hands. The most profound loneliness takes up residence in your gut. The house is screamingly silent, absent of grandmother or friends. And it doesn’t get better.

  The grief finally filleted me, tearing vents in my head and skin to let Zero in. And in he rushed, capsizing me. I recognized him then as that emptiness, that nothingness, that absolute wasteland. And I understood his permanence.

  It suddenly became clear then. There was only one way to end it.

  Only one way.

  I rose from the sofa and neatly folded Grandma’s blue afghan. I took the paperback to the bookcase in my room and inserted it into the binder of that other work of fiction, my kindergarten “All About Me” book.

  There was a roaring in my head, a white noise that blotted everything else out, even my own heartbeat. I walked slowly back down the stairs, my hand skimming the wooden banister, and entered the living room. It seemed like the house knew. The air stilled as I cut through the rooms, the molecules ceasing their manic movement around my body; I was already dead.

  In the kitchen, I swallowed my fresh, full, amber-colored bottle of Catherine Pulaski’s lithium and my half-empty bottle of Prozac. Then I rode on waves of NyQuil to that place of peace that smelled of Yardley English Lavender.

  Inside Grandma’s room, the silence stopped its screeching. Grandma’s sheets were cool as I lay down. I hugged her yellow afghan and apologized to my body for any pain it would have. It had always been good to me, allowing me to dance when my brain had functioned. I asked the extra-large crucified Jesus to forgive me. And then I closed my eyes and waited for Grandma.

  But she never came.

  My lithium/Prozac/NyQuil cocktail began to circulate through my veins, bringing a sleepy haze and stomach pains that curled me into the fetal position. Then Mom was there, shaking me and screaming. I vaguely remember tears streaming down Aunt Darlene’s cheeks and paramedics hoisting my stretcher roughly into the ambulance. Then bright lights and IVs and monitors beeping and people in green scrubs and masks asking, shouting, “Catherine, can you hear me?”

  “Catherine, what did you take?”

  And that was that.

  It’s Friday afternoon and Mom is late again. It’s already 2:55 and she’s not picking up her phone. How hard is it to leave at 2:15 each day? It’s not like she’s doing brain surgery. Cath, she said yesterday, it’s not that easy. There’s always something going on, a closing, a client meeting, a deposition. I’m the only secretary in the office.

  Tonight’s football game is away, so the front of the school emptied out quickly. All decked out in a shirt and tie today, Louis Farricelli was too distracted by groupie drool to harass me much. A lone school bus enters the driveway and stops at the curb in front of the school, completely blocking my view. A hand shoots out a window and waves in my direction, but it’s clearly not for me. I ignore it and walk to the rear of the bus so I can watch for Mom on the curb.

  “Catherine!” a male voice calls.
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  I stiffen defensively until I see that it’s Michael, with a shorter kid in tow.

  “Hey!” He walks up, smiling shyly. He turns to the kid beside him. “This is my friend, Tyler.”

  “Hi,” Tyler says, quickly looking at me but then shifting his gaze to just over my shoulder.

  A lot of kids who know my history act like this. No real contact, just vague, distanced comments. They avoid meeting my eyes. As if what I have can be passed to them by a mere verbal exchange. They’re the nice ones.

  But I’m not getting that sense from Tyler. Because Tyler is tagged. Like me. There’s not one centimeter of clear skin on his face. It’s the worst case of acne I’ve ever seen. His face has been attacked, invaded, by fat, angry red welts topped with ripe whiteheads that stretch from chin to forehead. The onslaught continues past the border of his blond hair and onto his scalp. The only peaceful zones are the white circles of skin surrounding his blue eyes.

  “Hi,” I say.

  I get Michael now. He’s a fixer—one of those people who likes to collect the wounded and heal them. I feel myself unclench even more. I think Michael’s safe and not looking to publicly embarrass me. At this point, I’ll take being someone’s project versus their target. Something like relief flows through me.

  Michael smiles full-on at me and looks surprisingly cute. I return him to the number one candidate spot in the L.V. sweepstakes. “Ty’s the one I sawed in half at the talent show,” he says. “Remember?”

  “Oh yeah!” I smile back. It’s his eyes. The way Michael looks at me. Could that be bona fide interest instead of just Good Samaritan–ness? “Your act was great,” I add.

  “You’re a good dancer,” Tyler says to my right ear.

  “Thanks,” I say. And then, “But I don’t dance anymore.”

  “That’s too bad,” Tyler says, now studying his sneakers.

  “Headed to work?” Michael asks me.