But, after a while, I noticed that all I was typing was “murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder”
I really did try to stop. But when my fingers paused for even a second, the drumbeat continued in my head. If I didn’t let my fingers say murder then my head would say it:
“Murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder”
And I felt like if I typed faster, then my heart would beat faster and I needed to type faster because if my heart and my typing got out of sync, then I’d vibrate so fast that I’d explode.
The edge of my vision was red. My fingers were numb; I had to look closely at them to make sure I was really hitting the keys. Then my feet went numb, too. When I tried to twitch my toe, it moved, but I couldn’t feel it move: I realized I was wearing a stranger’s feet!
“Murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder”
I didn’t want to murder anyone, but the word filled me up.
“Murdermurdermurdermurdermurdermurdermurdermurdermurdermurdermurdermurdermurdermurdermurdermurdermurd”
I think dropping the spaces is what saved my life. Because, after a while, the word blurred together and faded and became:
“Murdmurdmurdmurdmurdmurdmurdmurdmurdmurdmurdmurdmurdmurdmurdmurd”
And murd is not a word. Murd is nothing. I closed my eyes and looked straight into that burning ring. My hands wouldn’t stop moving. I didn’t have the strength to make them stop. But I gathered the will to open my mouth and shout, “Hello! Is anyone here? Help! Help! Mummy! Daddy! Help me!”
I had no idea if anyone was around. I hadn’t been downstairs in hours. But I kept shouting for help and typing.
“Murmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmurmur”
But eventually my shouts degenerated into sobs. No one was coming. Soon enough my heart would explode and I’d die. I honestly thought those were my last hours on earth. When I closed my eyes, the ring expanded to fill my whole vision and a booming voice said, “YOUR JOURNEY IS DONE. WHY DO YOU RESIST?”
I wasn’t even thinking about what was happening to me or why. All I wanted was for my life to end.
Then I heard someone say, “What’s going on? You were shouting.”
I couldn’t turn. I wasn’t even certain the voice was real. But I said, “Help me, please. Call the ambulance. I’m dying.”
Footsteps. Then George was next to me. My fingers were still jabbing the keys.
“Mumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumu”
“Reshma!” He interposed his head between my face and the computer screen. His unshaven beard had come in patchily on his normally smooth face, leaving most of his chin bare. “Look at me. What is happening?”
“I don’t know.” My unblinking eyes were latched onto his. “I don’t…I need a doctor….” The keys clacked underneath his face.
He put two hands on my shoulders and physically pulled the chair away from the computer. The last word on that screen was an “mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm” from where a fingernail caught on the edge of a key.
As I struggled to hold on, something fell from my desk. George’s hand swooped down and came up with my Adderall bottle.
“This is almost empty,” he said. “How many did you take?”
My fingers twitched, as if they were still typing. But that was only physical. The word was finally out of my mind. My eyes were heavy, and all I wanted was to crawl into bed, but I knew that’d do nothing. Every heartbeat felt like it would send blood gushing out my nose.
“I need to go to the hospital,” I said.
“I’m calling nine-one-one,” he said.
“No! No! I can drive.”
I stood up. Walking on numb feet felt like being whisked around on a magic carpet.
“God, what happened to you?” I could hear the tears in his voice. He snatched my keys from the desk. “Come on,” he said.
He put a hand on my waist and I shook him off. “Not crippled,” I said. “Only dying. I can walk.”
I jabbered nonstop nonsense as he coaxed me down to the car. I kept wanting to touch everything. I remember that I ran my hands through his slightly oily hair like a monkey searching for nits.
He drove like a maniac down the Lawrence Expressway. When I got into my car this morning, the seat and the mirrors were still in the same place, so I guess he didn’t even stop to adjust the settings. He kept saying, “You’re not dying. You’re not. Hang in there.”
He screeched into the front drive of Stanford Hospital and dragged me into the emergency room. Everything was melting: the whole hospital was a vaguely yellow puddle at my feet.
When we got to the front desk, my head was bobbing back and forth and I was murmuring, “Sorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorry.” I knew that if I shook my head in exactly the right way, I could rocket the blood back into place and everything would be all right.
George talked in a too-loud voice to the admitting nurse. “You’ve got to get her in right away,” he said. “She…I think she overdosed on study drugs.”
The nurse was a Hispanic woman with two black moles next to her right eye. She glanced over me. I was still wearing my purple polka-dot pajamas. I’d been wearing them for three days straight.
A baby was crying in the corner. An old man was clutching his side. A young girl got wheeled in on a gurney. A nurse took my arm and put a finger to my neck and shined a light into my eye and put the blood pressure cuff on me and then I was sitting in a corner on one of those padded seats and George was next to me and I was rocking back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and he said, “This is good. I’m sure if it were serious, they’d see you right away if…”
I felt like my whole body was splitting open and my viscera were flying out in every direction. I wasn’t thinking in whole sentences. I wanted this to stop stop stop stop. Then my hands flew out and went into his hair. As I clambered over him, his breathing got shallow and he said, “Easy…”
My fingers massaged his scalp and drifted through his curls. That went on for ages and ages. My fingers were shiny with the grease from his unwashed hair.
Then I was sitting on a bed in an examination room. A nurse was looking down at me and getting annoyed because I couldn’t understand any of her questions.
George answered:
“No, I don’t know where she got them. I think they might be her prescription, but I couldn’t find any bottles.”
Liar! He was lying. He’d been holding a bottle earlier. Lie lie lie!
“I don’t know.”
“Pretty happy, I guess.”
“No.”
“Absolutely not. She’s eighteen years old.”
“No. You don’t have the right to tell them. She’s eighteen.”
“You can call him in if you want, but there’s no crime. The pills are all gone.”
Then she left. My fingers and toes weren’t numb anymore; now they were tingling. I wanted to lie down and die.
“What’s happening to me?” I said.
George threw himself into the chair next to the bed. “You took too many of those pills, obviously,” he said. “But your heartbeat and blood pressure aren’t at dangerous levels. Aside from monitoring you to make sure you don’t have a stroke or heart attack, I don’t think they’re gonna do anything except wait for the drugs to wear off.”
My back hit the butcher paper with a crinkly smack, and I said, “Dammit.”
“You could have died.”
“Can’t they
give me a sedative?” I said. “There’s time to get at least one night of sleep before school tomorrow.” My eyes were twitching constantly. The hallucinations were diminishing, though. Or, at least, when everything throbbed and mutated, I understood that it wasn’t real.
“They said it could be dangerous to add more drugs to the mix.”
I turned my head. The floor was made up mostly of white tiles. There were some black ones, though. A lot of black ones, actually.
“I have an econ test. I’ve barely studied.”
He rubbed the inside of my wrist. I wanted him to stop—I could feel all of my blood throbbing beneath his fingers—but I couldn’t speak: I was focused on counting every single black floor tile. We didn’t say anything for an hour. The nurse came in and checked my pulse and then went out.
Finally, George said, “Why would you do this? You were winning.”
Five hundred and twenty-nine black tiles. Unless I’d miscounted. Better to start again.
“Shouldn’t I at least call your boyfriend or…?” he said. “Someone needs to be here with you.”
Black thoughts kept leaking in from the gutters that surrounded the black tiles: Aakash couldn’t handle seeing this. He’d leave me. No one could ever love the real me.
“It was an accident,” I said. “I was trying to stay awake.”
“Don’t give me that. You know what this stuff does. You’ve taken it for years.”
The clock ticked above us. Outside, the fluorescent light flickered. The hospital had turned into a palace of sighs.
The words came out very softly. “I’m not good enough.”
“What?”
“I work harder than anyone. And there’s nothing I won’t do. But I’m still not a success. I’m not good enough.”
The rubbing of my wrist had become insistent. “Resh,” he said. “You’re smart. You’re pretty. You’re wealthy. What else do you want?”
“That’s my problem,” I said. “I’m…I’m broken. You’ve felt it. Everyone I meet can sense it. I don’t care about anyone or anything. All I want is to be better than everyone else. I don’t know how I became this way, and I don’t know how to change.”
“There’s more to you than that,” George said. “You see things that other people don’t.”
My stomach wriggled. I extricated my wrist from his grip.
“All I can see now is how I should’ve been good, kept my head down, and tried to get into Berkeley.”
“Berkeley isn’t so bad. I got in.”
I lifted my head. “What? Have they notified?”
“I mean, I signed a letter of intent. It’s done. I’m gonna run for them.”
“But…your grades…” For years, I’d heard George’s mom yell at him about his grades. He had a 1.93 GPA—way too low for the NCAA.
He waved his hand. “That’s taken care of. Coach told me to take these online classes from Las Vacas College. Yesterday, I signed up for five of them.”
I rolled my eyes. God, George had no savvy at all. “Grades on college classes don’t affect your high school GPA.”
“I dunno. Coach said it’d be fine.”
“They’ll probably make you do a year of community college. I bet these classes’ll count for that.”
“If you say so.”
“So, Berkeley…Maybe we’ll see each other there next year.”
He shrugged. “Will we? Right now we’re in the same house, and we still do our best to avoid each other.”
“I don’t like to disturb you.”
“Remember in fifth grade we had to write a book report on The Hobbit and I found out, at ten P.M., that I was missing my book? I asked if I could borrow yours. You’d already finished your report, but you wouldn’t give me the book.”
“No. I don’t remember that at all.”
“After that, whenever you left a toy lying around, I’d sneak out and steal it and bury it in the yard.”
My eyes opened real wide. “What! That was real?”
“Yeah. You kept telling your mom that someone was breaking in. But she said it was your fault for being messy. Eventually, you became super neat, and I had to stop.”
“I knew I wasn’t crazy.”
“You never thought for even a second that it might be me?”
I stared at the chart of a human chest on the wall. One of those red spindly things was a heart.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We should’ve been better to you.”
My heart was still slamming around in my chest. I wanted desperately to sleep, but knew I’d never be able to.
He wound the curtain into a tight cord. When he let go, it whipped around and around.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “And give yourself a break. I know that good things will happen for you.”
I hated that he wouldn’t look directly at me. Before, he might not’ve liked me, but at least he respected me.
“You must be tired,” I said. “I’ll call an Uber—” Wait. My Uber account was linked to my parents’ card. I couldn’t imagine what they’d do if they found out about this. “I mean, I’ll reimburse you for whatever you spend on a cab.”
“You gonna be okay?”
I looked at him helplessly, with eyes big and wide, and said, “Yeah, of course.”
The ceiling was still shifting around and weird, hollow voices were still beating in my ears. But as long as I wasn’t alone, my filipendulous sanity remained unbroken.
“No, I think I’ll stay,” he said. “I’m not tired yet.”
He was lying. His eyes had a fixed, dull look, the way I bet a sleeper’s eyes would look if you pried their eyelids open. I just felt so weak and humiliated. I’d never needed someone else to step in and take care of me before.
Okay fine, I told myself. This had happened, but now I was better, and I was ready to take responsibility for myself again.
“Go home,” I said. “Go to sleep. I’ll be fine.”
He murmured, “Is okay. You shouldn’t be alone.”
“Get out! I don’t want you here!”
He was startled upright. I clicked the button next to the bed and called the nurse and said, “Is he even allowed to be here? Aren’t visiting hours over?”
“Come on, what’re you doing?” he said. “I don’t mind staying.”
I turned my head away from him.
After a huge ruckus, the nurse escorted him out, and I was alone.
I lay there for four hours, while that weird tension slowly squeezed my whole body. My thoughts went around in an endless loop of self-hatred. The world would be better off without me. I swore that first thing, once I got out of here, I’d kill myself.
But I couldn’t even move! The voices were floating in the thin half-darkness created by the light on the bedside table. Ghostly figures swam down around my head and whispered that my days were numbered and that hell was going to come and take me soon.
Finally, sunlight bled past the edges of my dead eyes and a very wide-awake nurse came in, read my chart, and said that I could go. When I staggered out, George was asleep in the waiting room. I woke him up, and he drove me home. In the car, he didn’t betray a hint of annoyance over the way I’d hijacked his weekend. Instead, he was all concerned smiles and solicitous questions.
I wanted to feel grateful to him, but I had no emotions left: I was a candle that’d burned all the way down.
When we got home, my parents still weren’t there. They’d left a message on my voice mail: they were gonna stay up in Napa for another few days.
So here I am, back in my room, writing. And in a few minutes, I’ll go to school. What else is there to do? I have a test today.
Monday was hell. Halfway through the day, I popped a leftover Adderall. I knew I was flirting with death, but the alternative was to collapse right there in school. Then I went and laid out the paper. Ms. Ratcliffe put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Reshma, what’s wrong?” But I shook her off and shot her a go fuck yourself stare. That night,
I slept for four hours—my first real sleep in three days.
Finally, on Tuesday, my awful condition downgraded from “I almost died last night” to “I just pulled an all-nighter,” and I flushed all my remaining pills down the toilet.
That night, I went home at 4 P.M. and fell back onto my bed and woke up at 8 A.M.
Today, I feel…surprisingly good.
Stanford notifies in a few days. But who cares? I almost died. It’s so hard to wrap my head around. My life almost ended.
So, like, a half an hour ago, a rumor went around school that if you called Stanford’s admissions office, they’d tell you their decision. When I heard, I excused myself from class and went to the bathroom and dialed the number. A woman with a tired, harried voice came on. She’d probably been rejecting people all day. I told her my name and then she paused for a second. “Reshma Kapoor…” she said. “I’m pleased to say that you’ve been given an offer of admission.”
(Yes, you heard me, dear reader, dear Ms. Montrose, dear whoever. I actually got into Stanford.)
I thanked the admissions woman and ended the call and went out into the courtyard.
Everything was a different color: blue was yellow and red was green. I glided through the crowds of kids. They were already gone and out of my life. My future was expanding in all directions. In fact, at that moment, I was already charting out how my future would go. The next thing to do would be to find some way to skip the horrendous premed classes that colleges make you take in your first year. So as I was walking around in circles I went online and quickly researched those Las Vacas College classes that George had been talking about, just in case.
I guess I was in shock, because it was only then that I realized I could have everything I’d ever wanted. I could be a doctor. I could win a Rhodes Scholarship. I could be elected president. I could do anything. I’d won. I’d won. I’d won.
And I know that when you win by cheating and maneuvering and scheming, it’s supposed to taste like ashes in your mouth, but it didn’t. It tasted…it tasted like relief. It tasted like, thank God, my life can finally begin.
Enter Title Here Page 15