by Paige Rawl
Okay. Okay, I could survive anything—maybe even this—as long as I had a friend.
A day at a stress center is spent shuffling between meetings—group sessions and coping sessions and goal-setting sessions that are supposed to help you imagine other possibilities.
At my first group meeting, a leader named Brendan asked kids introduce themselves—first names only, plus age and why we were here. There were about ten of us altogether, and we sat in a circle in a corner of the day room.
I learned that the boy who’d grabbed my arm—his name was Louis—lived in a small town about forty-five miles away. His parents were religious, they didn’t understand him, and he didn’t understand them. At school, he’d been beaten up a bunch of times, because everyone thought he was gay.
“I might be,” he said, shifting in his seat. “But I’m not telling.”
Then he looked right at me and nodded dramatically, mouthing the words, “I am,” as if everyone in the room couldn’t see it. I surprised myself by laughing, then stopped myself. This didn’t seem like the kind of place where one should laugh.
Louis said that he also had struggled with bulimia in the past, that he had severe anxiety attacks, and what his mother gently called mood swings, which actually meant some days being completely unable to get out of bed.
Yeah, I thought. Yeah, I know what that’s like.
After a moment, another person broke the silence. “I’m Stacy.” That came from a girl with straight, jet-black hair. She looked around. “Frequent flyer here. OCD. Depression. Self-harm.” She folded her arms across her chest. “I’m having the time of my life. It’s like a fucking Seventeen magazine photo spread, being me.”
There were other stories, too: a fourteen-year-old who had been raped by a family member, a Goth boy whose anxiety attacks got worse after his dad was shipped to Afghanistan. (The hardest part, he said, is knowing that he’s over there worried about me.) Another girl—a thin, preppy-looking girl, the kind you’d expect to see on the tennis team—said nothing at all. She wore a long sweatshirt and gripped the cuffed ends of the sleeves in her fists. I remembered doing that, and I wondered what was on her wrists.
I gave the basic outline of my own story. Paige. Fifteen years old. HIV. Bullied. Stacy flashed hard eyes at me and scoffed, “You have HIV? Why are you even in here with us?” She said it like I should be quarantined, and I was like, Okay, you mean I’m not even good enough for here?
Brendan stopped her. “Stacy, there’s no risk to you from Paige’s HIV.”
And while he was speaking, Louis met my eye and pointed ever so slightly at Stacy, then made a gagging face.
So not everyone wanted to make me an outcast. That made me feel a tiny bit better.
“Paige,” Brendan said. “These guys have heard it before, but at Northside Pavilion we use a strength-based model of care. We want you to identify your own strengths, so you can use them in your own recovery.”
I nodded along. But I was thinking, In the last fifteen minutes, just listening to these stories, I think I already found some strengths.
Unlike some of these other kids, I had no addictions, no history of molestation, no hallucinations, no psychosis, no compulsive, violent outbursts.
By the standards of the locked-door facility of the stress center, I was doing pretty okay.
That was a word that came up often, it turned out. Okay.
In all these meetings, we talked about how we were feeling, and that was always our answer. Okay, we’d say, one after another. I’m okay.
Okay, I guess.
I dunno. I’m okay.
And then usually someone would cry, because none of us were really okay. If we had been okay, we wouldn’t have been there in the first place, wouldn’t have been seated in a circle inside that room. We wouldn’t have had staff checking on us every fifteen minutes; we wouldn’t be wearing pants whose drawstrings had been carefully pulled out from the waist.
We’d be out in the sunshine, or at a basketball game, or at the mall, or at school. We would be in the unbroken world, surrounded by those who still seemed whole.
We didn’t have to dress well. We didn’t have to brush our hair. We didn’t have to do homework, or put on sports uniforms, or smile at other people in the hallway. We didn’t have to smile at all, or be happy, or make grown-ups feel good about themselves. We just had to show up, exactly as we were.
When you bottom out, and that is exactly what I had done, it turns out people don’t expect much.
We had sessions, one after another, when we had to do exercises like “write one negative thought, then three positive ones.”
My negative: I am in a stress center because I took too many pills.
My positives:
1. I am wearing my favorite socks, which my mom brought me, even though I wasn’t allowed to see her.
2. I like when they play music in the day room and let us sit quietly.
3. This morning I thought about that Aristotle statue.
In another session, we circled our positive traits from a work sheet (me: accepting, self-directed, open-minded; Louis: sensitive, realistic, goofy, plus attractive circled three times with arrows). In another, we identified triggers for our stress (me: anything having to do with Clarkstown; Louis: absolutely everything. Stacy: this hellhole. Tennis girl: people judging me).
And I know what I’m supposed to say: I know I’m supposed to say that I hated being locked in there, that the nurses were awful, disconnected, and dictatorial, that everyone inside was a raging maniac, and that I just couldn’t wait to get out of there. But the truth is, it turned out to not be that bad. More than that, I think it helped.
Sometimes Louis made me laugh, and sometimes Stacy looked at us and rolled her eyes, but sometimes it was in a friendly way.
My second day there, she sat down on the couch next to me and said, “I can be a bitch sometimes. It’s part of my problem. Sorry about that.”
I shrugged. “That’s okay.”
And it kind of was.
Even the Cookie Monster guy, who mostly just looked down at his feet, had moments of kindness, like one morning, when tennis girl knocked over a bowl of Cheerios with the back of her hand. The cereal had spilled all over the kid next to her (fourteen, ADHD, Tourette’s, mood swings, possible bipolar). One of the nurses came over to her and spoke to her in a low voice. I could not hear what she was saying.
“I’m just having a really freaking hard time,” Tennis sobbed to the nurse.
And while she cried, Cookie Monster stood up, got a bunch of towels, and began silently mopping it all up.
I’m telling you: it was the most visibly broken assortment of human beings I’d ever been around. But I don’t know. Maybe being broken helps you understand others’ brokenness. Maybe being broken helps you become a better person.
“So let me get this straight,” said Louis. It was mealtime, and we were waiting in line for our trays of food, which had been brought up from the cafeteria. Near us, at a table, Tennis was picking at chicken with her spoon. “I’m gay, and kids say that I have AIDS, even though I don’t. And you’re the straightest, skinniest little white girl I’ve ever met, and you’re a beauty queen, and you actually do have AIDS.”
“Not AIDS,” I said. “HIV.”
“Yeah, I know, HIV,” he said, waving his hand with a little flourish. It was his turn for food, so he stepped up to the nurse in charge.
“Name and birthday?” she asked. It was a question we had to answer every single time they gave us food, every time we took medicine. He answered in a bored tone of voice. Louis Mitchell, 7/18/93. She handed him a tray.
“But isn’t that a little crazy?” he asked, still talking to me. “I mean, doesn’t it all seem backward?”
My turn. “Paige Rawl. August 11, 1994.”
She handed me my tray. Pizza.
I shrugged. “I guess.”
“It’s ass-backward is what it is,” he said, sitting down.
“A
ctually,” I told him, “I heard Clarkstown’s lawyer is suggesting I might be gay, too.” I’d already told Louis all about the lawsuit, about the lawyer’s calls, about the fact that there would be a settlement hearing in just a few days.
“What, huh?” he asked. He looked surprised, then he said, “No. Wait, give me a moment. I want to do an actual spit take.” He took a swig of water from his glass, glanced around the room, then quickly spat it back out, spraying water against the wall in a dramatic show of shock. I glanced at the staff, but no one seemed to have noticed.
Then he continued. “So . . . what now? They think you’re gay?”
I shrugged. “Not really. But they subpoenaed my texts. In some of them I called my friends ‘sweetie.’ So my mom says that now they’re claiming that maybe I’m gay. That’s the last thing I heard, anyway.”
“But—why?”
“So they can say that that’s the true cause of my stress. Not the bullying, but that I’m stressed out from hiding that I’m gay.”
The moment the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. I mean, I probably shouldn’t have said that to a kid who was actually stressed out enough to be in an actual stress center specifically because of how he’d been treated for being gay.
He didn’t seem to mind, though. He just scoffed and shook his head. “Fuck those fuckers,” he said.
I smiled. That was the exact right thing to say.
“No, seriously,” he said. “They’re the bullies now. The school, I mean. You know that, right?”
I hadn’t thought of it that way, but in a funny way, maybe he was right. Certainly, every time I thought about the lawsuit—which was all the time these days, it was the thing that kept me awake when I lay in my hospital bed, staring at the ceiling as one staff member after another checked in on me—I had that same tight, ashamed feeling that I recognized from my days at Clarkstown.
“I guess they’re just trying to win the lawsuit.”
“Fuck them,” he repeated.
We sat there, then, watching the water from his dramatic spit take silently pool into a puddle on the floor. Then he added, “The fuckers.”
In one of our sessions, one of the kids asked me what I did when my classmates picked on me.
“I ignored them,” I said.
And then Brendan pointed out that few people ever actually ignore these sorts of things. “We might pretend that these things aren’t happening,” he said. “But in truth, even though we aren’t acknowledging the events, they’re causing a lot of hurt.”
And I realized he was right. I hadn’t been ignoring all those comments at all. I’d just been pretending that they didn’t matter.
“Paige, did they hurt you?” Brendan asked.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Does it still hurt?”
I bit my lip. I nodded ever so slightly.
“That’s important to know, Paige,” Brendan said. “It’s real. So it’s important to just accept that.”
The morning of the settlement hearing came, and I was still in the stress center.
My mother called. I asked her what she thought was going to happen.
Louis stood nearby, waiting for me. We were about to go into a session about the cycle of anger.
“I think they’re going to offer us a settlement,” Mom said. Her voice on the other end of the phone seemed very far away.
What my mom and I wanted was for the judge to grant us a trial. If the school offered us a settlement, there would be no trial. It would just end. More than that, it would end quietly; our attorney told us that a settlement would require that we never discuss what had happened. We would take some amount of money, then never speak of it again.
I thought about Miss Ward’s fake smile, about Miss Fischer’s parting words: I cannot promise to keep you safe. I thought about all those days I was home alone while the other kids just kept going to school.
I thought about what it would feel like to take their money and then keep my mouth shut forever.
“But you’re not going to take it, are you?”
There was a long pause.
“Honey,” she said, “I don’t know that we should keep going on with this.”
“Mom,” I said, and I could hear the sharpness in my own voice, a sharpness that surprised even me. “You cannot settle.”
I saw two nurses look up at me. I turned my back to them and looked down. I was wearing the same pair of sweatpants I’d worn the day before. I was wearing slippers. A thought flashed through my head: I look like a mental patient.
And then I realized that I was a mental patient.
When I looked back up, Brendan had come to get Louis. Louis glanced back at me as he followed Brendan out of the room.
My mom’s voice on the other end of the line was uncharacteristically quiet. “I won’t settle if you don’t want me to,” she started. Her words were slow and deliberate, like she was afraid of upsetting me. “But you took pills, honey. You’re in the stress center. I think this is too much. Maybe it’s time to just let it end.”
My fingers gripped the phone tightly, so tightly I could feel it all the way up in my forearm. I wanted so many things at that moment. I wanted my mother there. I wanted to cry in her arms. I wanted to return to bed, to just go to sleep and make it go away. But there was something I wanted more than all of that: I wanted to make them pay. All of them—the kids, my soccer coach, the counselors, the administrators. Every kid who had ever joked about me, and every kid who had ever laughed. I wanted to see them up on the stand. I wanted them to have to look me in the eye in a courtroom.
“Mom,” I said. I was trying so hard to control my words, but I could hear the shrillness creeping into my voice, could feel my legs shaking.
I took a deep breath and started again. “Mom. If you settle . . . I swear to God . . .”
I stopped, leaned into the wall. My legs were so weak. I could feel a presence behind me, and I knew that one of the staff was standing there, standing with that ID badge around her—the badge that allowed her to come and go whenever she pleased. She was, I knew, watching me closely.
“If you settle . . .” I continued, my voice urgent now. It was hard to catch my breath. There was something hot inside me, something rising up. I looked up and saw the happy-looking WEEKLY SCHEDULE posted on the bulletin board. The letters blurred into a kind of wave. My voice sounded so tight, so angry, it didn’t even sound like me. It was like the voice was coming from another animal entirely, some creature trapped deep inside my own body. A creature filled with rage.
“I will never, ever speak to you again. Do you understand?”
“Okay, honey,” came my mother’s voice, so far away. I imagined her alone in the kitchen. I knew she was going into the settlement hearing all alone. I knew how hard that would be for her, surrounded by lawyers. I suspected she needed me there just as much as I had needed her all this time. “Okay—”
But I couldn’t hear any more. I didn’t even let her finish. “Never!” I added one more time, and I slammed the phone down in the receiver.
The schedule for the week swam before my eyes, and then I felt hot tears on my cheeks.
I was stuck here. I was just a kid. I was just some messed-up kid, and the most important thing in my life was happening somewhere else, with other people. I was stuck here inside these walls, and it was all my fault. I had done everything wrong. I had yelled at my mother when she wasn’t the one I was mad at. I had hung up on her when she was only trying to help. I had taken pills when I should have known it would break her heart.
She was all alone now, and I couldn’t fix any of it.
I still wasn’t in control. I was a kid in sweatpants and slippers who had no control over anything, not even my own voice.
I wanted to tear all those posters off the wall. I wrapped my arms around myself and dug my fingernails into my arms hard, until tiny half moons appeared on my skin. I stayed that way for a long time, until the room stopped swimming in my te
ars. Then I took a deep breath, shuffled out of the room, into the hall, wiping my nose with the back of my hand.
My mother didn’t settle. The days dragged on. I shuffled to pizza lunches and stroganoff dinners. I identified people I might reach out to the next time I was having a hard time: Amber. Mariah. Erin. Maybe even Mr. Gilchrest, the nice teacher at Herron who told me about Aristotle and virtue. I listened to Brendan talk about the importance of gratitude, of kind acts, and I read about signs of stress: Fatigue. Nausea. Social withdrawal. Sleeplessness—I recognized that I’d had them all. And we created a discharge plan and a home safety plan—my mother would be hiding all the knives and locking up the medicines, for one thing.
Then one day they told me I was ready to go home. Whatever “ready” looked like.
On the morning I left, Louis stood in my doorway. He had fresh scratches on his arm, and the pink marks stood out against his dark skin. When I asked him about it, he shrugged.
“I guess I have a while to go.”
We weren’t supposed to exchange numbers, but I wrote down his number anyway. We hugged briefly.
“Go get ’em, girl,” he said. “Don’t let the fuckers win, okay?”
“Yeah, okay. You either.”
My mom and I were silent on the drive home. She flicked on the radio. A newscaster was talking about a Florida girl who had killed herself after months of bullying by her classmates. My mom quickly turned the news off.
I reached over and turned it on.
“Paige,” my mom said in her warning/worried voice.
“What?” I asked. “You think it’s going to give me ideas I wouldn’t have on my own?”
I meant it as a joke, but I could see my mom cringe.