“I’m all for you going at your own pace,” Dr. Pat says. She’s wearing more makeup than usual, and there’s cleavage showing in her black shirt, and there’s a whole world of things I don’t know about this woman. “We need to change your appointment times though.”
“Why?”
“You know why, Bea.”
And I stare her down for a few long, satisfying moments, but she wins out. She goes into her purse. And pulls out a notebook.
A pink leather notebook.
My pink leather notebook. Shooting star embossed on the cover. The height of ugliness and humiliation.
Certain moments don’t make sense.
“Austin said he found this. Do you have an explanation for this? Do you understand the ethical, even the legal . . . ?” She can’t even finish her sentence. I swallow and my fingers crawl toward my thigh and I want to dig in there so hard because I am going to either vanish or do something terrible to Dr. Pat, and it’s the only way to stay in control of the rushing, terrible feelings.
There’s a vase on the coffee table in front of us. I could break the glass and use a single sharp piece to hurt her, like Jeff.
But she grabs my hand before it makes its way to my thigh, and she holds it still.
“I have to do it!” I scream, and then there’s more crying, the kind that makes my eyes sting and my insides feel all squeezed out and overworked. But Dr. Pat doesn’t say anything, she just holds that hand still and I let my head drop into her lap and we stay like that until Kevin asks us to please leave because we have worn out our welcome.
Dr. Pat drives me home. I tell her I can do it myself but she says that’s not an option. I try to put the notebook away in my purse, but she grabs it and puts it on the dashboard so it’s watching us the whole drive back. Heavy and pointed and unavoidable. And no longer mine.
“You looked inside?” I say when we’re off the highway and getting close to my house.
“Austin looked inside,” Dr. Pat says, which doesn’t answer my question but definitely tells me all I really need to know. “You should feel lucky, very lucky that they are such kind people. Scared them, seeing this, reading their personal conversations, their most private, vulnerable moments . . . you terrified them.” I wonder if this part is therapy or her showing her actual feelings. I’m the kind of dizzy I usually only get after a really serious wine-drinking night with Lish.
“I probably need a new therapist,” I say. My mother does this sometimes—she calls it taking the high road—where she makes the horrible decision before someone else can do it for her.
“I still want to help you,” Dr. Pat says, but she’s rubbing her eyes with one hand and rolling her shoulders like I’m giving her knots in her neck. She says it like she doesn’t yet know what’s best. “We’re going to destroy this.” She continues nodding to the notebook. “You and me together. We’re getting rid of it. That’s the first order of business. Then we’ll see.”
“Can I have it just one more night?” I ask. But she’s smarter than me, she knows I’d copy it all down in another notebook, and I guess it’s almost a relief when she shakes her head and takes the notebook off the dashboard and tucks it under her thigh so she’s sitting on it. It’s a good gesture. Final. Inarguable.
• • •
My parents are on the porch when Dr. Pat drops me off. We don’t say much and they basically put me to bed. They might as well be tucking me in. I’m not tired. I don’t sleep. I am already missing the words in the notebook, the little stabilizing scratches I made in there.
I am running out of things to comfort me.
SOMETIMES LISHA ROCKS IT OLD-SCHOOL.
By which I mean she prefers a handwritten note to an e-mail, and a bit of embossed stationery to a piece of notebook paper. My mother serves it to me with my breakfast: eggs and cinnamon toast and crappy instant coffee.
“Lisha dropped by with this,” she says, and hands me the kind of envelope that costs money, that recycled-paper texture. My name in Lish’s pretty handwriting on the front. I’ve been to the mall enough with Lisha to know she can spend some serious time in a stationery store, buying up the prettiest notecards and embossing materials I can imagine.
Lisha at a stationery store is like me at the Salvation Army.
Every muscle in me shakes, opening that thing.
Dear Bea,
I keep thinking I’m helping.
But when I woke up the other morning, I realized that all the things I’m doing are actually fucking you up even more and I’m not saving you at all. Not even close.
I gave Austin your notebook. I guess I should have just started there, so you know what we’re dealing with. Maybe it was wrong, but when I saw Austin and Sylvia up on stage, all real and stuff, it started to make me sick.
Not sick. Scared.
Did you ever see the movie Single White Female? It was on TV the other day, and Cooter sat down while I was watching it and we both got pretty into it. Then out of nowhere Cooter started laughing and goes, “Hey, it’s a movie about Bea!” and I didn’t yell at him or anything because he was basically right.
I mean, I actually joined him in laughing at you. About you.
Then I backed up and tried defending you: “Yeah, but Bea’s got OCD, so she’s a different kind of stalker.” And Cooter shrugged. There was this bizarre moment where I think we both really heard for the first time ever how insane that sounded. You know, as a legitimate excuse.
So, that happened. And then we were at that concert and yes, I’m drinking, and your stupid notebook is in my purse and I’m about to give it back to you except . . . that makes me some kind of accessory, you know? And the world sort of clears up for a second because I can see perfectly that I need to turn you in, to get everything out into the open.
It’s just—I’m going to Harvard, you know? And I know this sounds paranoid, but how can I be someone big if I have some sketchy, assisting-a-stalker incident in my past?
Bea, there was really personal stuff in that notebook. And I thought about it and there’re all kinds of ethical issues with, like, doctor-patient confidentiality, and vulnerability and secrets and a right to privacy . . . that all just popped into my head when I was watching Austin and Sylvia rocking out on stage, and once those thoughts were there, I couldn’t unpop them.
I know you know how that feels.
After you left they were signing some CDs and I went up to Austin and I handed over your notebook. I didn’t say anything, just, “You know that Bea girl? Here.”
He looked inside and turned gray. And red. And then really, really sad.
I don’t know. As weird as Beck is, at least he’s just doing it to himself, you know? Like, okay, he does that weird counting thing and he goes through a bar of soap a day, I’m sure, and he looks like he’s popping steroids. That all definitely makes him weird. Weirder than us, I think. But at the end of the day it’s not illegal to be weird. There’s no big ethical conundrum when it comes to excessive hand-washing.
Do you ever wish your OCD was more like his? Wouldn’t that be better?
You’re my best friend and that is exhausting. You need to know that.
I sort of hope I get to college next year and meet some nice girl whose biggest problem is getting a B on her chem final. That’s the kind of person I’d like to meet next.
Even given all of that, I’d give up Harvard if I thought it would make you better. But it won’t, and that’s what sucks. That’s what really, really sucks.
Love,
Lish
I’m sweating when I’ve finished reading. She is either my biggest enemy or the most amazing best friend ever, and I could try to figure it out, except I’m having a panic attack at the breakfast table.
The instant coffee spills and just misses my legs. My mom hugs me until it’s over. Like I’m a kid, but I’m not anymore, and I think that’s more or less what Lisha’s note was trying to say.
Some therapy-ized part of me gets that, but the rest
of me hates her and her too-skinny frame and the Harvard-red-striped scarf she’s been sporting lately. The fact that ever since she and Cooter and her parents fought, I’ve mostly only seen her drunk. The impulse is strong to tell her parents all about it.
Then it’s even stronger when I think through the reality of what she did.
Then I’m picking up the phone to call them, not just to get revenge, but also because it’s the truth, and as usual, there it is, festering in my mouth, waiting to come out, and if I don’t call her parents right now and spit out every terrible thing she’s ever done, then—
But the phone rings before I dial their home phone.
“Come over,” Beck says on the other line. He is hushed and out of breath like he just worked out.
It’s eight in the morning. Of course.
“Where are you?”
“My house,” he says. “Just come over.”
“I’m gonna have to walk,” I say. He knows that means I’m in no state to drive and that I’m in full-on OCD mode right now, but he takes a breath and says that’s fine. I can walk. He still wants me to come over. And walking feels good: my fingers, my toes, can all go numb and I can focus on nothing but one foot in front of the other. When I get to Beck’s house on the other side of town, it’s getting close to ten and I’m the kind of flushed-face-cold that looks totally pretty. Let’s face it: I’m really pretty in the winter. I’m just that kind of girl. I catch my reflection in the window on his front door before I ring the bell, and underneath all the humiliation and nerves and anger there is that unmistakable feeling of being pretty. They should make a word for that emotion. It’s like confidence but sweeter, more specific.
I check out the excessive Easter decorations draped all over the house while I wait for him to answer the door. Here’s another useful SAT word for you: “gauche.” I’m being hit over the head with it now, staring down a plastic bunny on his roof and Easter eggs in all sizes lined up on his lawn.
He takes forever to answer the door, and when he gets there, he does not look pretty. Or handsome. Or anything resembling the picture I have in my head of Beck. He’s in jeans and one of his too-tight T-shirts, and he’s scrubbed clean, which should be a good thing, but his skin is falling off in little sheets and what’s underneath is raw and painful. His face, his hands, his forearms: All the parts of him that I can see are worn through from scrubbing.
“Wow,” I say. It would be silly to pretend I don’t see it.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” He’s cringing as he hears the words coming out but he can’t stop them. His head shakes as he does it, the deepest kind of self-hatred in that little movement.
“I’m bad too,” I say. “I got caught. I mean, I know you don’t care. But Sylvia and Austin—you know, Tryst—they called Dr. Pat. They saw this notebook that I recorded all their therapy sessions in . . . I’ll be having sessions in my home because I can’t be trusted in a therapist’s office. So. Nothing’s more pathetic than that, right?”
He nods, but doesn’t speak. I wonder if he can say anything less than eight times right now. From the way he’s holding his mouth, I think not. Some serious struggle is going on behind those pretty lips. I’m caught off guard by the urge to kiss him. There’s nothing actually sexy about the redness of his skin. But there’s something sexy, I guess, in the fact that I had sex with him the other day.
Yep, that must be it.
“I can’t hug you right?” I say.
He shakes his head, tears up.
“You going to invite me in?” And he does.
Being in Beck’s room is not unlike being inside his head. It’s a grid of organization and sparseness. There’s none of my manic decorating, and there’s no sign of recognizable boyness. No discarded pizza crusts or dirty underwear or clothes piled on clothes piled on a bed. There’s just order. There’s a place for his stapler, for his shoes, for his workout journal, for a photo of his sister. It’s ninety-degree angles and a bed made with hospital corners and the fresh lines in the carpet from a vacuum cleaner. It smells like lemon and antiseptic.
It is the single most sterile place I’ve ever been.
In fact, I am the messiest part of it, in my red flannel pajama bottoms and a Harvard sweatshirt Lisha gave me a few months ago. My feet are stuffed into scuffed-up UGGs and I don’t think I even managed to wash my face. I threw on lip gloss and had three mints, but that’s about it. Maybe that makes me good for him, though. If Dr. Pat’s theories are right, maybe my messiness will cure him.
So I do what I think Dr. Pat would want me to do: I throw myself on the bed and roll around in it a little like a deranged puppy dog and I grab the framed photograph of tiny eight-year-old Violet and I kick off my shoes, one on each side of the bed, and make myself at home. Just like that: impromptu exposure therapy.
“Hey—” Beck starts tapping his finger and swallowing in sets of eight.
“I get to stay here, you get to keep that pair of scissors in the little scissor space there on the desk. Then we’re on equal footing and we can be psychos together,” I say. The walk must have done something to me. My skin’s prickling and I’m definitely sweating a little, but I’m doing an inward check on my anxiety levels and they’re rising slowly, then leveling out, then sinking back down.
“I fucked up,” Beck says. I don’t know that I’ve heard him swear before. It doesn’t suit him. That kind of thing should be reserved for obsessives like me and Rudy: the raw, whirling kinds of OCD kids. Not the neat-as-a-pin Beck.
“When?”
“At the concert. You were right. I hate that you were right. But you were,” Beck says with a shake of his head. I sputter a little bit of laughter because I didn’t think I was coming over here to get an apology. I am never right. I have OCD. I’ve pretty much come to accept that whatever is going on in my head is probably wrong.
“I was stalking people,” I say, like he’s forgotten. “We were on a date with the guy I was stalking.” And though that’s what I’m saying, I still have in me that flare of anger at the way I had to accept him while he never had to accept me.
“No,” Beck says. It looks like he’s swallowing down an impulse to just say it once. I get it. It looks the way I feel when I’m trying not to spit out the truth at ridiculous moments. “I mean, yes. That was weird. But not any weirder than the things I . . . less weird probably than most of the things I’ve done. So who the hell am I to—”
“Yeah,” I say. There’s that truth-telling again. Just hanging in the air. Just like that.
“Yeah,” Beck says. He gets into bed with me: lies on top of the sheets I’ve properly messed up. We don’t touch—things don’t get solved that easily—but it’s nice for a little to lie like that and stare at the ceiling. “You want to tell me about them?” Beck says. “The band? Dr. Pat’s patients or whatever?”
I shrug.
“I’m sort of screwed,” I say. I’ve tried not to think about the next time the impulse hits me to see them because I know that’s about to get much, much harder.
“What do you like about them?” Beck says. “What’s so special about them?” It is a question I have asked myself, but no one has asked me out loud. Not even Dr. Pat. I think once you have that OCD label people stop asking for reasons, since everything you do is probably just from the disorder. I’m flummoxed. Speechless.
“When did you see them first?” Beck says. My jaw remains dropped because, again, no one has asked me this before. I’ve said the whole thing about magic eyes and people popping out at me from nowhere, and that’s true, but I have a little fuzz along the edge of my answer, like there’s more to it, more to uncover.
“God . . . I don’t even remember . . . not long ago . . . ,” I say. I scrunch up my eyes to make myself remember something more. “It’s a recent thing.”
“You just heard them or saw them one day?”
“I guess I heard them first. Before my session. Heard them talking about stuff .
. . ” For a moment I think it’s there: a Reason. But then it fades back again and there’s nothing. “I can check. It’s probably in my notebook . . . ” I almost scramble to my purse to get it, and the thought of flipping through it and putting pieces together makes me truly, truly happy for a moment. Like I’ll get a real relief, the sort of relief that actually chills out my whole system.
But I don’t have the notebook. Dr. Pat has the notebook.
“What if I never find out the reason?” I say. I don’t know if he’ll know what I mean, because I don’t know if I really know what I mean. “Do you think I’ll be okay if it was just a thing that happened? Would that be weird? What if there wasn’t a real reason? I mean, maybe I’m just kinda crazy.”
“Sometimes crap just happens,” Beck says.
“Yeah, sometimes people just do really fucking weird things.” I put down the photograph of Violet. “Sometimes there’re real reasons, but sometimes maybe there aren’t any.”
“Yeah.”
I touch some of the rawest parts of Beck’s skin. His neck, the place where his thumb meets the rest of his hand, his chin.
“I’m sorry. This is, like, truly grotesque. My skin is falling off. I mean, this is not okay. There goes the theory that I’m less psycho than Jenny and Rudy. . . . ” He’s sort of tearing up. “I thought I was getting better.”
I thought he was getting better too.
I thought I was getting better. This blows. And his sad, sad face hurts me. The scrapes on his skin, the dry patches in between each finger. I know how badly he wishes they could be hidden.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . . ” I let him finish the eight times, but then I dive in. Because I can’t fix the dried-up bits of him, the itch of too-clean skin, the haunting eyes of his little, gone sister, but I can do this, at least.
“I’ve got other stuff to tell you,” I say. I have no interest in showing Beck how disgusting my thigh bruises have gotten. But something much deeper inside me doesn’t want him to lie there thinking he’s the only one whose crazed tendencies are showing up on his skin. So I unceremoniously take off my pants.
OCD Love Story Page 24