And that will be it. You’ll be on the phone with your dad, and he’ll be dying.
But you don’t know about all that right now. Right now, you’re frustrated. You know you’d rather just avoid the problem, and conveniently, that’s not too hard to do at the moment. You’ve actually got a lot of other very legitimate things taking up your time, like work and school and practice.
But I wish you’d go to see him a little more often. Talk with him. Remind him that you love him. There’s nothing you can do that will change the outcome. What happens to him is not your fault. It’s a horrible collision of depression, addiction, and resignation. You can’t change it, but you can give him a few more moments of happiness.
It may not seem like much right now, but in a few years you’ll understand that those moments of happiness can really make a difference.
Jodi Meadows lives and writes in the Shenandoah Valley with her husband, a cat, and an alarming number of ferrets. She is a confessed book addict who has wanted to be a writer ever since she decided against becoming an astronaut. She is the author of Incarnate (2012) and Asunder (2013). Visit her at JodiMeadows.com.
THIS IS NOT YOUR STORY
Saundra Mitchell
Dear Teen Me,
All right, look. You didn’t kill him.
You’re going to spend tonight in the laundry room, sitting on the dryer. Shuttered doors closed, and phone pulled as far as the cord will go, so you can complain about it to your best friend.
Your idiot brother, who swallows all the energy in the family, who screws up everything, is at the hospital. Again. Last time, he was drunk and passed out and nearly burned his foot off at his makeshift camp in the woods.
And today, you came home from school and he was drunk. Again. You could tell because of all the empty beer cans in the living room. He was passed out, again. You could tell by the way he was sprawled across the living room carpet. With his stupid mouth agape. With his stupid hand on his stupid chest.
Was he going to wake up? You dug your toes into his ribs, way harder than you had to, and pushed. Pushed hard. Later, you’ll think you kicked him, like straight-up soccer-goal kicked him, but you didn’t. Guilt magnifies things, but the truth is, you shoved him, and he didn’t wake up.
So you called mom and bitched, “He’s drunk. Again.”
You called your best friend and bitched, “He’s drunk. Again.”
But there’s a family history with alcohol. You’ve got a bunch of extended relatives who all have an extended relationship to the hooch (it’s funny how we’re all kind of proud of the grandmother who bootlegged during Prohibition). You know that passed out drunks usually wake up. Or move. Or something.
So when you got nervous, and checked to see if he was breathing, he was. His heart was beating. And he did smell like beer. You did call your mother. That’s it. Those are the facts in evidence. As soon as you realized that all the pill bottles in the kitchen window were empty, you did the right thing.
You called Mom. You called Dad. You helped them carry your brother to the car in a green and yellow crocheted blanket so they could take him to the hospital. You knew better than to call 911, because ambulances are expensive, and nobody in the family can afford them.
And now you’re holed up in the laundry room, air thick and warm and spring fresh, and you’re going to rail about it for a while. How he always does this. How he runs away on the holidays and screws up birthdays, and how he’s so busy destroying everything around him that you may as well not even exist.
After a while, you’ll get scared. You’ll bluster about how you’re going to kill him when he gets home from the hospital. Eventually, you’ll just hope. When the other line rings, you won’t say anything when your mother tells you that your brother is dead.
You won’t hear anything, either. Later, the details will get filled in, passively, randomly. Pumped his stomach, but it was already too late. Took all of his antidepressants, blood alcohol level was negligible.
You’ll go through his room and discover somebody else was in the house that day, because all of his Metallica tapes are missing. There will be a funeral where you walk out on God, and so many people in the house, and for some reason, Mom will bring that yellow and green blanket home.
When you get evicted from public housing—bloodlessly informed that you no longer meet minimum occupation requirements for a three-bedroom apartment—the blanket will go with you. In the new apartment, it’ll be there, on the couch. On the chair. You’ll put it away and wish you could burn it. It’s a shroud, exactly the shape of death; you’ll hate it because sometimes you’ll need a break from hating yourself.
But that afghan didn’t kill him, and neither did you. It doesn’t matter that you tried to OD two years ago, taking pills off that same windowsill. He wasn’t thinking about you that day. It wasn’t your idea. You didn’t pull the trigger; there wasn’t even a trigger to be pulled. Your brother was mentally ill and couldn’t get the treatment he needed. He self-medicated until he couldn’t self-medicate any more. It had nothing to do with you.
Nevertheless, it’s going to be a while (a couple of decades at least) before you realize all that. Before you realize that we’re all dead for longer than we’re ever alive. Before you realize that shoving him with your foot isn’t the same as kicking him with jackboots. Before you understand that you were there that day, you were one of the players, but the story wasn’t about you at all.
Once upon a time, there was a sick little boy, and he killed himself six months before his fifteenth birthday. He had a sister, and she cannot forget.
But know that eventually, you can forgive. Him. Yourself. The world. You’ll write a book and put his name on the dedication page. That’s the best you’ll be able to do, a little bit of immortality catalogued by the Library of Congress.
And today, you did the best that you could. Start the dryer again, because the sound is soothing, and wait for the call that’s coming. It changes everything, but listen to me; this is the truth:
You didn’t kill him. It’s not your fault.
Saundra Mitchell has been a phone psychic, a car salesperson, a denture deliverer, and a layout waxer. She’s dodged trains, endured basic training, and hitchhiked from Montana to California. She teaches herself languages, raises children, and makes paper for fun. She’s also the author of Shadowed Summer (2009), The Vespertine (2011), The Springsweet (2012), and the forthcoming Mistwalker. She always picks truth; dares are too easy.
Q and A:
WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST JOB?
“Dog walking, I was thirteen. I lived in NYC so there was a pick-up-poop law. That part was kinda nasty, but I was so proud to be earning my own money. Spent most of it on candy, which we didn’t have in the house.”
Tracy White
“Movie theater popcorn popper.”
Cynthia Leitich Smith
“McDonalds, represent! I was 15 and worked the front register. Try not to be too jealous.”
Rhonda Stapleton
“Teaching piano at Lecuona Academy.”
Caridad Ferrer
“I worked for my best friend’s family at the carnival. They ran concession stands and I made funnel cake, sold cotton candy and caramel apples, and scooped sno-cones. That syrup does not come off.”
Jessica Corra
“Cutting wood and selling it by the side of the road.”
Kersten Hamilton
“I was a teenage tax collector. Seriously! By the time I was fourteen, I could talk knowledgeably about “millage” and the fiscal benefits of waiting until the “face period” to pay your real estate taxes.”
Beth Fantaskey
“Fry cook at White Castle.”
Marke Bieschke
“Paperboy!”
Geoff Herbach
“Writer.”
Riley Carney
“Vacuuming the floors at Barbara Ann’s, a department store ‘down the back’ in Secaucus. Practically every girl in town worked there a
s a salesgirl, and I vacuumed. Needless to say, I gossiped more than I worked!”
Michael Griffo
“Washing greasy dishes at a roadside diner.”
Katherine Longshore
“I started my own babysitting service when I was twelve. A quarter an hour.”
Ilsa J. Bick
“Babysitter, then lifeguard.”
Lauren Oliver
“I was a canvasser for the League of Conservation Voters when I was 14. I got mugged on my third day. Nobody believed me.”
Carrie Jones
“Mucking stalls in my aunt’s barn. (FYI, mucking stalls means shoveling out the horse poop.)”
Tera Lynn Childs
“Working at the local McDonald’s. I was even in a national commercial for them.”
Heather Davis
“Babysitting a nine-year-old demon spawn all summer when I was 13. First ‘real’ job, where I got the minimum wage? I was a hostess at the K Bob’s Steakhouse.”
Nikki Loftin
“Babysitter, followed by camp counselor, followed by one of those people who dresses up in colonial costume and gives tours of The Freedom Trail.”
Leila Sales
“Waiting tables at Paco’s Mexican Grill when I was fifteen. I came home smelling like chips and salsa everyday. It was pretty gross.”
Stacey Jay
“McDonald’s cashier, complete with polyester uniform that gave me a rash in my armpits.”
Amy Kathleen Ryan
GET BETTER
Hannah Moskowitz
Dear Teen Me,
So you have this CD you burned a few weeks ago, and you’ve listened to it God knows how many times now, because ever since you got your license you’ve hardly left your car. It’s just easier to drive around and go out for coffee (which you don’t like) with boys (who you don’t like) than it is to go home and stare at all the food you want to eat and cry over the 94 percent on your test (because what about the other six points). Because then you eventually just have to go to bed for your four hours of sleep before you have to repeat the whole thing again…and again…and again.
Lately you have an extra hour in the car every week, because you’re driving to and from therapy trying to shake that eating disorder.
You’re about to turn seventeen, and it doesn’t matter how much you want to get out of the house and listen to those same songs again and again and again; driving scares the crap out of you (it still does), so half the time you call and cancel the therapy appointments five minutes before they’re due to start, which means your parents still get charged the full amount, which means your parents probably think you’re going, but instead you lie on the floor and count your ribs, and you’ve never hated yourself as much as you do when you see what you are doing to your mother all the hell over her face. You take pictures of yourself sucking in your stomach and leave them on her camera because you just don’t care anymore, because this stopped being fun a long time ago, and your favorite clothes are too big, and now the only good part of any of this is that CD.
I’m listening to the songs I can remember from it while I write this, and I’m right back there in the parking lot where you used to park illegally, sitting in the car instead of going in to therapy, seat pushed all the way back, crying so hard you can’t breathe. I’m there too. Pretend I’m there the whole time, okay?
Because I haven’t forgotten. I remember you, Hannah.
And I know what you want to hear more than anything else in the world, what you’re dying to hear, what you want so much to be true—and listen to me, because it is true. Ready?
This isn’t normal.
It’s not. It’s not normal and you don’t have to go through it. You’re not weak. You’re a chick with some messed up brain chemistry, and you’re crying in the parking lot afraid to take meds because you think you won’t be able to write anymore if things don’t hurt this much.
About six months ago you wrote that book about the kid who wants to break all his bones (and in about a year and a half people are going to start asking you, “How do you know so much about self-injury?” and you’re going to smile and talk around the question). A few days from now, you’re going to be standing on the sidewalk outside your therapist’s office when your agent calls and tells you that you’re going on submission, but she’s going to tell the publishers you’re seventeen, okay, because no one wants to work with a sixteen-year-old, and God, can you understand, because you have to live with a sixteen-year-old and you have to watch your parents try to live with a sixteen-year-old and you’d get out of all of that somehow if you knew how. (You don’t get out. You stay. And thank you for that, Hannah. Thank you for that every single day.)
Your therapist asks questions you don’t know how to answer. You think maybe turning seventeen will help, and then you turn seventeen and it gets worse and junior year slips through your fingers. You sleep through prom and your best friend’s graduation. You get your lowest GPA ever. It’s unacceptable, because if you don’t get into Brown, you don’t know what you’ll do.
(You get into Brown. After the first month, you’re ready to get the hell out of there. You transfer home to the huge state school you refused to ever apply to. It’s incredible.)
Look.
It’s not normal.
You’re not normal.
And I know that if I were there really sitting in the car next to you, and you heard these words—words that everyone else in the world would probably think are horrible—you would latch onto them. Because yes, I understand. You are not overreacting and you are not imagining that things really are unfathomably difficult, and you are so not alone.
It really should not be this hard to get out of bed. You really should not be that angry all the time. It’s not hormones and it’s not a phase, and I believe you, and you should have actually talked to that therapist and reached out and gotten the help you needed a long time ago, because you’re going to keep doing this for years, and it just does not have to be this hard.
“Suffering for your art” is just a pretty phrase people say, okay?
But you’re not going to listen, and you’re going to keep doing this to yourself for a long time.
You’ll probably be surprised at what fixes itself when you get better. Things that seem irreparably broken now, like your relationship with your mom? You two are going to have an amazing relationship. Your best friend who’s doing even worse than you are? She’s okay now, too.
Those songs you listened to while you drove to therapy and out for coffee with boys or around your neighborhood and thought about food the entire way every time? Those songs are eating disorder songs and will be until the day you die. You broke those songs.
But it’s okay. Because here I am, as better as it really gets, listening to those songs and remembering you.
What’s funny is that I can’t write a good story that’s in any way related to your eating disorder. I’ve tried, believe me, because everyone’s always telling me to write what I know, but the truth is, your ED ruined that story for me, because now it’s full of details that aren’t important and don’t make any larger sense, and they’re clogging up the big picture and I’m so filled with shame when I try to type that I can’t ever make it sound real. You took that story off the table. It’s the same reason that when you wanted to write a book with self-injury, you had to have the kid break his bones, because you took all the normal stuff off the table, didn’t you? You stole the stories. You keep stealing stories.
Stop. Leave me something to work with. Don’t make me try to make art out of your suffering. It doesn’t work.
Get better.
Get better.
Get better.
And get a fucking move on, because I have all these books to write and you need to not use up any more stories because I’m bad enough at coming up with ideas as it is, okay?
Go make up new stories and live things that are too beautiful and unreal and stupid and happy to make their way into
books.
I’ll be here.
Hannah Moskowitz is the author of multiple books for teens, including Break (2009), a YALSA Popular Paperback for Teens, Invincible Summer (2011), and Gone, Gone, Gone (2012), as well as several books for younger readers. She is a student at the University of Maryland and she wouldn’t be a teenager again if you paid her. This whole author thing is all just an excuse for her to get to talk to people, so visit her at HannahMosk.Blogspot.com and say hi, okay?
WHAT I REALLY WANT
Jenny Moss
Dear Teen Me,
It’s your senior year.
You’re in English class, at a desk in the back corner of the room, with a point to make about Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, but your teacher turns away, her wiry black and silver hair shaking, as she laughs with the cheerleaders and student council members, and you want…What?…What is it you want?
I see your confusion. You’re so distracted by those around you that you don’t know what you want.
So listen to me for a moment.
Think of your wildest dreams.
Talking with Hemingway and Fitzgerald about art, life, and things that matter until late into the night at a smoky Parisian bistro…
Catching a glimpse of a nervous Shakespeare gathering his actors before they take the stage in the court of Elizabeth I…
Dear Teen Me Page 12