“It’s called exposure therapy, and it’s scary but really effective.”
“I’m not really sure I need that,” I say. It’s not like I think Dr. Pat’s going to actually tell me I don’t have OCD, but I want her to at least admit I’m less severe than the rest of them. She’s doesn’t.
“I see—and why’s that?” she says instead. Picks up her pen, hovers it above the notebook.
“I just . . . what would you expose me to?”
“I think we still have a lot to uncover about what your triggers and compulsions really are, don’t you? But certainly we would expose you to driving without stopping to check, driving at a normal speed, taking fewer notes. Things like that. Some of it would just be you and I, some would be with the whole group. Everyone’s different.”
“Ah.” There is a world of difference between someone who pulls hairs out of her scalp one at a time and someone who is cautious on the road, I think. And taking notes about people and situations isn’t exactly ruining my life. There’s no way to say that to Dr. Pat, but she seems to sense it anyway. Sometimes I think she can hear my thoughts. Like she’s not just a therapist but also a psychic or something.
“Is Jenny okay?” I say at last. Sometimes the silence extends for too long and the discomfort drives me to blurt out random thoughts and I guess this is one of those moments.
“How do you think she did?”
“Looked . . . hard,” I say. Dr. Pat glances behind my head where the clock is. I can’t ever check the time without craning my neck, but I always notice when she does.
“Yes?” Another tactic to make me keep talking. She knows I hate the empty space where conversation stalls or halts completely. She knows I’ll be driven to fill it, with total crap if I have to.
“I mean, it’s kinda like, maybe Jenny’s happier being able to do whatever she wants to do. I don’t know. Not that she wants to be bald, obviously. But it seems like doing her, um, compulsions or whatever, helps her and that maybe it’s not so nice to take that away from her, right?”
“Interesting.”
“I mean, I don’t know. I guess, like, I always feel bad for those little kids whose parents take away their blankies when they turn seven or whatever. Like, what’s the harm in making yourself feel better?” Dr. Pat nods and I don’t even really know what I’m saying. It’s not exactly something I’ve given much thought to, but I’m creating a whole theory about this stuff on the fly. “I mean, when my parents stopped letting me sleep in their bedroom after that Jeff thing, I thought it was really mean, you know? Like, sleeping on a mattress in their room really helped my nightmares and stuff, and then they just took it away from me, and I don’t know, that seems kind of wrong, right?”
I’m surprised to hear Jeff’s name come out of my mouth. Dr. Pat knows all about him, but only from my mother, never from me. I don’t think about Jeff, or my parents sleeping in my room for a while when I was fourteen, or any of that stuff, but suddenly I’m all weepy and Dr. Pat is reminding me that there are tissues on the coffee table if I need them, and I’m insisting I’m fine, fine, fine.
“Good work today, Bea,” Dr. Pat says when the clock has told her it’s time for me to go. She says “Good work” every time I cry. Leaving the office, I wish Austin and Sylvia had the appointment after mine and not before, because with my head aching from the tears and my heart pounding from having mentioned Jeff and hearing way too much about exposure therapy, I could really use a distraction.
No such luck. I’m gonna have to get through it on my own. Sort of like my very own exposure therapy. Except, of course, I have my notebook. I flip through it in the bathroom before heading out to my car. Then I can breathe again.
I’M SO TIRED AFTER MY session with dr. pat that I decide I can’t possibly drive. It wouldn’t be safe. For a split second I consider calling Beck, who definitely owes me a ride anyway, but I can’t make my fingers press the buttons, and I call Lisha instead.
“Please tell me you are inviting me over to drink a bottle of wine in your walk-in closet, because I am having the shittiest day,” she says instead of hello. It is so rare that Lisha is upset and needs me to comfort her that I forget what to say for a few beats. “Hello?” she practically screams into the phone.
“Hi! We can drink in the closet! Or even in the TV room; my mom and dad are doing a date night tonight,” I say. Sometimes we celebrate our boring lives with a red wine from a good year and act out the idea of being stately and mature. Lisha knows about “good years” because her parents have made a point to teach her about things like that. So she’ll feel comfortable at Harvard.
I don’t think they know much about what Harvard’s going to be like.
On these nights I hijack my mother’s pearls and we buy a half pound of brie and take over my basement or my walk-in closet if circumstances dictate it, and we make a crappy day suck less.
“Okay, I’ll be right over. Oh my God, thank you so much, I can’t even tell you. I’m ready to kill Cooter and my parents,” she says. I hate that she has used the word “kill,” but I let it go with just a pinch on my thigh and the knowledge that while I am a loose cannon, Lish is just fine.
“You’re welcome, but you have to pick me up at Dr. Pat’s. I’m not home.”
“Pick you up? Where’s your car?”
I pace to the side of the building. I don’t want to even look at my car right now, truth be told.
“It’s here, but I can’t drive it, okay?”
“Oh,” Lisha says. It doesn’t even sound like her voice. I’ve made her bad mood even worse with my totally incompetent self.
“I know. I’m sorry. You’re amazing. The rest of the night is all about you,” I say. And I mean it. I can pull it together for an evening of wine and reality TV and popcorn with cheddar cheese grated on top and whatever else Lisha wants.
“It’s fine. I’ll be there in fifteen.”
“Seriously, I love you,” I say.
“Well, duh.” Lisha smooches into the phone and the sound hits my ear with a loud smack. I am the luckiest person on the face of the earth.
For fifteen minutes I watch my car from a distance. It’s a sturdy, boxy thing and shouldn’t terrify anyone. I light a cigarette. At first I just needed an excuse to be near Sylvia, and I still hate the taste, but it’s moved from novelty to habit pretty quickly. I feel powerful, sucking in the smoke, imitating the graceful movements I remember Sylvia making, the pretty shape her lips make on the exhale. I’m not smoking a pack a day or anything, but the urge is there, and growing. Especially when I’m stressed.
I’m stressed.
I think I see a scratch on the front of the car and maybe a tiny dent on one side, but I can’t tell from here and I don’t want to get any closer; standing a dozen yards away feels safest.
But it does look like a dent, if it’s not just the pattern the sun is making as it hits the passenger door. And if there’s a dent it could mean I hit something. Someone. Maybe that time I looked at Beck at the stoplight, the moment I got distracted by the shadows his eyelashes made over his ultrablue eyes. It is for that reason and so many more that boys should not have ridiculously long eyelashes.
Lisha pulls up just as I am taking a few cautious steps toward the car, to see if the sun shifting as afternoon turns to night makes the vision of the dent go away. It does not. Crap.
“Come on, get in here!” she calls out. I take a half step, but nothing more. “Bea, seriously, come on.”
I manage to look her way, and she’s got raccoon eyes from melted mascara and splotchy cried-on cheeks. Lisha doesn’t cry.
“Can you check out my car?” I say. I do not want to say it. I know Lisha will be pissed at me for saying it. But I say it anyway.
“Is it broken down or something?”
“I feel like it’s dented.”
“You feel like it’s dented?” Lisha does not put her car in park. She doesn’t smile or giggle or look me in the eye.
“I don’t know .
. . ” I’m blushing a mean red, and the blush is so hard it gives me a headache, makes me dizzy. If she can just check the car, we can go drink the cabernet I know she’s got zipped into her tote bag and talk about her bad day and annoying brother.
“Can we please do this later?” Lisha says after rubbing her eyes with the palm of her hand and spreading the mascara runs even farther.
“Yeah, I mean, of course. But maybe you can, like, look out your window?” I say, and the blush that could not get any redder or hotter gets both redder and hotter. “I’m so sorry. I promise if you just look—”
Lisha looks out her window, cranes her neck to get a good angle, and shakes her head.
“No dent, Bea,” she says. Her eyes are flooding with tears because I have pushed her one extra step too far. I want to cry too, with relief and with shame, but I hold back so that Lisha can have one second of feelings of her very own.
“I . . . thank you,” I sputter out, and I feel the blush recede the tiniest bit. I’d still like to check the car one more time and maybe drive by that stoplight that Beck and I stopped at the other night, and a few other tasks that would make me calm. But the urge has subsided enough for me to get into Lisha’s car, give her a sideways, one-armed hug, and listen to her sniffle back a sob. “I’m sorry your day is sucking.”
“Let’s just get out of here. I want to get some good drinking in before your parents are back. I’m sleeping over, too. I brought clothes for school tomorrow, obviously.”
“Obviously,” I say, and squeeze her shoulder. We don’t speak much on the drive to my house. I’m pretty sure if Lisha even breathes too deeply she’ll start weeping, and I don’t trust myself to say noncrazy things yet. I close my eyes and make a wish that I’ll stop having OCD so that I can be a decent friend again. If I want it badly enough, hopefully it will come true.
In the basement TV room Lish and I do a sloppy job opening the wine, and the cork floats in the bottle, probably poisoning the cabernet, but I am not afraid of accidental poisoning, thank God. We drink from mugs and tune in to a world of bad accents, massive breasts, and fake laughter on MTV. Lisha takes one end of the couch and I take the other and our feet meet in the middle.
She doesn’t want to talk about what made her day so terrible, so instead we discuss what I should text Beck and what I should wear if we go out again.
“If I can’t get a date, you need to at least do something fun with the cute Smith-Latin guy,” she says.
“He washes his hands eight times every time he uses the bathroom. Eight,” I say. I do not want her thinking I have lucked out with some superstar love interest when really we are two ridiculously awkward people who seem to like kissing.
“Just text him. Whatever, so he’s a weirdo,” Lisha says. She does not say: You are too, which is especially nice given the fact that she had to pick me up from therapy because I couldn’t drive my own car ten minutes down a one-lane country road. So I text him and tell him to meet me in Harvard Square on Friday after school, and Lisha smiles in a way I totally do not at all deserve.
“You wanna come with us?” I say. I want to include her somehow, let her know how much I love her. Besides, I can totally see the three of us getting ice cream at J. P. Licks and picking out used CDs and making fun of the poser punk kids who hang out in the center of the square.
“I don’t think I’m ready for all the . . . compulsion stuff just yet,” Lisha says very carefully. “I mean, I’m used to you, but—” I shake my head ’cause I don’t want her to finish the sentence, no matter how delicately she phrases it. “Sorry,” she whispers after a moment of both of us staring at the TV screen and avoiding eye contact. I work my face into a smile and refuse to believe there’s something between us that we can’t talk about. A big swallow of wine goes down kinda rocky, and I practically choke it back up. It sort of dribbles out of my mouth, a bit of red spit.
“Classy,” Lish says, tapping my foot with hers, and I try to hold back a giggle, but it comes anyway, with a little more wine dribbling out of my mouth, and she kicks a bit harder with both of her feet until we are laughing and kicking and nearly spilling our mugs of cabernet. Soon I have to wipe tears from my eyes: I’m a girl who cries when she laughs, and Lisha snorts, so the combination is total chaos. After a breathless few minutes we settle back into our seats and throw out snarky comments about the leopard-print bikinis and overprocessed hair extensions MTV can’t seem to get enough of. I am proud of myself for the first time in months, thinking I’ve cheered her up and done something legitimately useful.
“Cooter told my parents he doesn’t think we can afford Harvard,” Lisha whispers, her voice almost hidden under the relentlessly annoying paper towel jingle playing on the commercial break.
“Huh?”
“Since he’s at, like, state school, he thinks it’s stupid for me to go to, like, the most expensive school ever,” she says, a little louder and angrier.
“Ex cuse me?”
“I don’t know. He’s on a kick. Read some article about private universities, and I think he was sort of just being confrontational at first but then, I don’t know, he sort of started talking himself and them into it.” Lisha’s voice cracks and then sobs heave out in huge crashes. I move to her side of the couch and put an arm around her. Pray to be normal for long enough to comfort her.
“That’s completely fucked up,” I say. Cooter gets on soapboxes from time to time. He once made their family go vegan for a few weeks. Another time he protested in front of the Catholic church a bunch of Sundays in a row. When Jeff was on trial, he wrote about a million letters to the editor about his best friend, even though Jeff’s family had asked everyone to please not talk to the press.
“My parents actually listened to him! My dad said, ‘He has a point. Harvard is very expensive and Lisha won’t qualify for financial aid.’ I mean he literally said that. Like, as if underachiever, live-at-home loser Cooter had a point!”
“Ok, try to breathe. They are not going to take away Harvard. Or if they try, you’ll just take out a loan on your own or something. You will figure it out.”
“Harvard’s all I have,” Lisha says, and the crying worsens.
“Okay, now that’s not true. You have a million amazing things, including Harvard,” I say, rubbing her shoulder and turning down the TV so that our conversation is not conducted to the soundtrack of whiny sorority girls playing drinking games.
“You don’t get it. You have, like, nice parents and your whole costume designing thing and boyfriends and everything. If I don’t go to Harvard I’m basically a waste of space.”
I’ve never heard Lisha talk this way, and the shift in our natural roles is unnerving. I keep squeezing her shoulder and saying shhhh, and when that fails, I refill her wine glass and watch her guzzle it down. Her mouth turns purple almost on contact, her teeth tinged red, and combined with her streaky, splotchy, teary face, it’s an overwhelming effect of messiness. Soon she’s hiccupping and moving her head in slow motion, side to side. I’m barely even tipsy. I drink just enough to help the anxiety so I can be there for her in the way she always, always is for me.
“You’ve got so much,” I say, sure she won’t even remember tomorrow morning. “Harvard, ballet, me.”
“I feel like no one is more pathetic than me.”
It hurts my ears, the ridiculousness of someone normal like Lisha hating herself. All her limbs are loose and floppy from alcohol, and she’s sad but for a real reason. There’s no tapping or pinching or note-taking or, God forbid, hair pulling. Just Lish and some tears and the ability to sleep it off and feel better in the morning.
Meanwhile, people like me and Beck are haunted.
“Want me to tell you more about Austin and Sylvia?” I offer. I hope it doesn’t sound like what it so obviously is: something that will help me feel better, not her. I want to read through my notes, just once before we both fall asleep. I wouldn’t mind checking the news, too, but I can probably pull that off by changing the
channel while Lish is in the bathroom.
“Depends. How pathetic are they?”
“Not so much pathetic, but totally screwed up and destined to, like, never be happy,” I say. I think it might be true: They’re magnetic and fabulous, but everything I overhear in their sessions tells me they’re miserable. So does the slow deliberation with which Sylvia smokes a cigarette. Like it’s the best part of her day. Like it’s her only escape.
“Okay,” Lisha says, and leans her head back so it rests on the back of the couch and she can stare at the ceiling.
“Lemme get my notebook.”
Lisha lifts her head from the couch and sighs. Mushes her mouth around like she needs to chew the words before they come all the way out, but even after a moment of staring at me and chewing, she doesn’t spit it out.
“What?”
“You need your notebook?” she says at last.
“I just thought—”
“Yeah, okay. Go get it.” I wonder if maybe she’ll forget this part of the conversation by morning too. Her eyes are glassy again, ready to let out a few more tears, and she bites her lips to stop them from coming. For a second I feel my defenses rising, but just as quickly they subside. Because she’s going to let me get my notebook. She’s going to let me read to her about Austin and Sylvia, even though she knows it’s for me and not her. She’s even going to let me pretend that I’m being a good friend by doing it.
“It’s pretty entertaining, I swear,” I say, smiling away the tension.
Lish smiles back but it looks like it hurts. “Yeah, sounds good.”
“Hey, you’re going to Harvard. Cooter’s an idiot.”
“Yeah.”
“And I do not have a boyfriend.” That makes Lisha laugh, at last. A quick burst of a giggle and a shake of her head. The sloppy, drunken kind, but still.
OCD Love Story Page 13