Dr. Sowah looks up from his scissors. “You don’t need to stay all day, Eve. You can wade in, see what a few classes feel like. It’s going to be the sitting that tires you. Don’t overdo it or you’ll end up back in pain.”
A second mention of pain.
It’s time.
I have to ask.
But I don’t. I can’t.
Dr. Sowah keeps working. There are a lot of staples. He starts to hum some song that I know although I can’t place it. It’s bugging me, but I let him alone.
School drifts back into my mind. This does not lift my spirits. Especially with Personal Development first period. Personal Development was her idea. Goddamn it, Lidia. And now the kiss. Did I really have to go and make out with Thomas Aquinas?
What was I thinking?
I wasn’t thinking, that’s the point. I’ll just explain that to him—that it was the drugs.
The drugs.
I have to ask for the drugs.
Again, I don’t.
Instead, I envision myself trying to explain to Thomas Aquinas why I attacked him in the middle of the toilet paper aisle at the Stop & Shop. I remember the taste of him, and that moment when he kissed back—
“Eve?” Dr. Sowah’s hands hover over my rib cage.
“What?”
“You just flinched. Did I pinch you?”
“No, no,” I mumble.
The crunchy medical paper crinkles beneath me.
“You all right?” Dr. Sowah asks.
“Yeah.”
But I’m not. Because I want that Roxy. I need it.
“Just another minute,” he says, concentrating.
It’s now or… now.
“Dr. Sowah?” I stretch my arms up over my head, trying to give off the look of someone who couldn’t care less about the next thing they’re about to say. “I’m kinda low on the Roxanol.”
“You shouldn’t be,” he says.
I crack open my lips. Just a centimeter. I need the extra air to slow my pulse. I close my eyes and try to conjure up calm things like birds flying and ocean waves.
“Well, maybe my mom left the other bottle in her bedroom. When I spoke to her yesterday, she couldn’t remember where she put it, and I couldn’t find it.”
Great. An outright lie. When I’d googled drug-seeking behaviors last night, I’d promised myself I wouldn’t do this.
“I’ll renew. But we will need to talk about coming off the opioids, Eve, and your future pain management.” His voice hits my skin as he speaks, tickling me. “There is a very real risk of dependency.”
“Yeah,” I say with a sleepy air. Like I don’t care. Like talking about the Roxy is boring and not worth my time. And then I close my eyes and struggle not to cry. Because I did it. I have it. No matter that I had to lie. To push Mary Fay away. And my mother.
Every time I help you, Eve, a tiny piece of Minnesota will disappear.
For the first time ever, I see that it is. Disappearing. But it’s not my mother who is in danger, it’s me. It’s been me all along.
I am Minnesota.
Dr. Sowah straightens up in his chair. “Done,” he announces, checking his watch. “Record time, too.”
“You were timing yourself?”
“It makes it fun.” He smiles. “Now, let’s get you on your way.” And he grabs his prescription pad.
The Roxy.
I wait for the sting of joy. It doesn’t come.
Possibly. Hopefully. Probably.
“Eve?”
It’s Lidia.
“I’ll be right out.”
We’re in the women’s bathroom at
the movie theater and I’m holding
a giant fruit basket. It’s a
real struggle to squish out
of the stall with it.
“Oh my god, Eve,
fruit!” she gushes, as if
fruit were the most wonderful
thing in the world.
She plucks out a pear
(her favorite, my least) and
bites into it. Leaning the basket against
the bathroom sink, I also pick out a pear and
take a bite.
This is a dream.
I would never eat a pear
in real life.
While I chew, I think about how I want to stay in here
forever, chomping on this yucky pear with Lidia.
But she turns to leave, to walk out.
“Don’t!”
She stares back at me as the door closes, and
it’s like I’ve never looked into those eyes in my entire life.
I don’t know those eyes.
I’ve never seen those eyes.
The fluorescent lighting darkens and
I’m standing alone in the hallway
at school with the taste of
gross pear in my mouth.
Lidia is walking toward me. The
way she sways, her long stride, the
slope of her shoulders—
everything that sang out so
happy and familiar.
Once.
She grows closer.
I can’t make out
her face. Yet I know, by the
way she sways, her long stride, the
slope of her shoulders—
that this is now a nightmare.
My eyes on the ground,
I let her pass. Without a word.
Leaving only the faint movement
of hair on my arm to know
she’d been there.
I wake myself with a whimper.
Alone in my dark room, I stare up at my ceiling. Wet. Cold. Bloated with fear.
Or is it grief?
Whatever it is, it writhes inside me, and god, it fucking hurts. I replace the coarse moistness of pear with the bitter chalkiness of Roxy. So much better. I start counting the minutes.
I once read that five minutes after the end of a dream, we have forgotten 50 percent of the dream’s content. And ten minutes later, we’ve forgotten 90 percent. I wait… thinking how I wish this natural fizzling out of memory worked in real life, and that when we chose, we could forget our experiences five minutes after they happened.
Although I’m sure some asshole would say that these experiences are the ones that make us stronger or build our character.
Strength. Character. Key words for feeling like shit.
Maybe the people who can “bounce back” are actually just good at forgetting, as if they’d been dreaming and then woke up. Or the opposite: Instead of waking, they choose to sleep.
The minutes add up. I’m forgetting. I’m fine with it. Fine. I like the fading. It’s soft.
And forgiving.
I need my phone.
The harsh light makes me blink. It’s after two in the morning. I text anyway.
I’m sorry.
Dropping the phone onto my bed, I reach for my water. Even the memory of pear is too much.
A text buzzes back, shocking me.
A heart emoji.
It’s amazing how perfect a red heart can be. She follows it with two more texts.
I moved my lecture.
I’ll be home three days early.
I send her back my own heart emoji. And then I have an idea.
Can I stay out of school until then?
I watch the bubbles pulsating.…
Spoke to MF. No.
My mother finally comes around and her first act of motherhood in forever bites me in the ass.
My thumbs hover dangerously over my phone, itching to text her that whether I am ready to attend school should be “my decision,” but… that heart emoji. Instead, I send an angry cat face, toss down my phone, and close my eyes. She hates cats.
“Eve!”
It’s Mary Fay. It can’t possibly be morning.
It can’t.
I don’t move or answer. Because I am far away. Possibly I am gone. Possibly. Hopefully. Probably.
I hear her footsteps approach my bed. Her finger pokes me in the shoulder.
“Eve?”
I am not gone.
Anywhere but Here
I’D RATHER BE ANYWHERE BUT ON MY WAY TO SCHOOL IN Thomas Aquinas’s car. He obviously senses this and asks, “Would you be more comfortable in the back seat?”
“Do you plan on driving erratically?”
He laughs. “I might,” he says. “If you provoke me.”
Facing the passenger-side window where he can’t see, I roll my eyes.
I begged Mary Fay to let me stay home one more day. She wasn’t having it. The woman absolutely knew it wasn’t one day I wanted, but forever, even if she didn’t know why. She also straight out told me that lying in my bedroom all weekend staring at a telescope had not helped my case.
Had I been staring?
So when Thomas Aquinas called Mary Fay this morning volunteering to pick me up, I knew I was doomed.
The sun is weakly shining. Cars and buses surround us. People wait to cross at lights, bags over arms. Others walk speedily past one another up and down sidewalks. A moving, active world. A world I’ll be subjected to all day long in a body that I have no idea how to navigate. I have become the hamburger—forever wrapped inside its giant plastic head. But I’m still in here. Small, sweaty, and sans one salty french fry friend.
Thomas Aquinas takes a sharp right.
I lurch toward him. He quickly sticks out his hand to steady me, then pulls his hand back like I’ve burned him. And maybe I have because the place where he touched my arm stings with heat. He had called at least six more times since MGH. Because of course he would. Because he’s Thomas Aquinas.
I picked up none of them.
He clears his throat, keeping his eyes on the road.
“You good?”
I let go of a big gulp of air.
“Yeah,” I say, peeking over at him.
I should be kinder to Thomas Aquinas.
“Listen, Eve, I read over your crit essay for English Lit. You might want to take a look at your comma usage.”
I glare out the windshield. I hate Thomas Aquinas.
“I like my commas right where they are.”
“Missing?” he asks.
“What?”
“You didn’t use any commas, Eve. And you needed them.”
“According to who?”
“According to the rules of grammar.”
He throws on his blinker as he pulls into the student parking lot and I shiver at the sight of so many cars and people and colors dodging about under the spindly trees that look even spindlier without their leaves. There’s something so sad about parking lot trees.
“Anyway, I put them in for you.”
“What?”
“The commas. I put them in, along with a few other minor adjustments.”
“I don’t need commas. I purposely did not put them in. That essay was exactly how I wanted it to be. It didn’t need to be helped or fixed or changed.”
Why am I getting so upset at him over an essay I can barely remember writing?
“Chill, Eve. It’s just an essay.”
And now, I’m pissed again. Only I can say it’s just an essay.
He gets out of the car and shuts his door. I open my door and there he is, reaching down to help.
“I can do it,” I grumble.
“As you wish, Eve. I shall stand here with the easy ability to aid you in your exit from the vehicle yet will not endeavor to do so.”
I ignore him, struggling to get out of his car, but my body is a log wrapped in hard plastic and his car is too low. I’m stuck.
“Why is your car dragging on the ground?”
He says something about his car and standards although I’m not hearing him because now I’m struggling to reach behind me for my backpack in the back seat. Which—because I am completely fused is completely impossible.
“What the fuck, Eve!” He leans past me and grabs my backpack.
“You have the worst mouth,” I say.
“You didn’t seem to mind my mouth Tuesday night in the Stop & Shop.” He grins.
Oh. No. He. Did. Not.
“Yeah, well, I was on drugs.”
“Creo que sigues endrogada.”
“Don’t think I didn’t get that.”
“I absolutely know you did not get that”—he laughs—“since you’re failing Spanish.”
I hate him. And not just because he’s right. Okay, totally because he’s right.
I make a second attempt to get out of his outrageously low car. “Don’t touch me.”
He steps back. “You do you, Eve,” he says.
I scoot all the way to the end of the seat and then feel around for something to give me leverage. I’m cursing myself for not bringing my forearm crutches, especially since the only reason I left them home was to spite Mary Fay—if she was going to make me return, I was going to make it as hard as possible on myself to spite her. I’m pretty damn sure she didn’t even notice.
Velcroed tightly inside my post-surgery brace and without anything to push off of, I basically topple out of the car toward the pavement. Thomas drops my backpack and catches me.
I hate his hands on me. I hate him pulling me up without any effort. I hate the way he makes a show of brushing me off after he sets me on my feet.
“Cut it out.”
“You need a sense of humor,” he says with a cheerful snort.
“I need my backpack. And BTW, I’m taking paratransit home. Your car is a death trap.”
He shakes his head, taking the math textbook out of my backpack. “I’ll return this to DeSota for you.” Then he zips the bag back up and hands it to me.
All it has in it now is my spiral notebook and my English Lit paper. His English Lit paper. I start toward the front doors.
He walks next to me.
“You can stop in the library and reprint your essay without my corrections during Personal Development first period,” Thomas says. “I don’t even know what that class is, so it can’t be important.”
“Personal Development is a perfectly fine class,” I snap. Although I remember how Lidia had dubbed it Personal Downtime. She’d chosen it as a place for us to hang together. “Anyway, why the hell do you know my schedule by heart? That’s mega-creepy.”
I can see his smirk out of the corner of my eye. “We basically have the same schedule, my dear School Within a School pal. Except of course for Personal Development. Which you obviously need.”
I don’t respond. His comment is below me. Plus, I don’t have a comeback that won’t just make him sound more right.
The crowd ahead of us slows due to the traffic jam at the front doors. I teeter a bit as the space around me shrinks. Everyone is too close to the throbbing sore newness of my spine. To my sawed-off ribs. To the thin, soft skin of my incisions.
Way too close.
I stumble. Thomas reaches for me, but I catch myself and back away. Elbows, hoodies, bags… even their cheerful shouts are threatening.
“Listen, I’m going to wait out here until everyone goes in,” I tell him.
He stands there for a second, staring at me. And I know he’s thinking he should wait with me but is most likely afraid to suggest it because I’ll bite his head off. I most likely would. Friends, he’d mouthed, standing in my living room. I don’t deserve a friend.
“I’ll be fine. You go on in.”
He stands there for another second, like he might not listen to me, then nods and moves on. I watch the back of his jean jacket disappear into the crowd of bodies and suddenly feel more alone than I have since that night at the movies. Two months… it feels like two hundred years.
I wander back toward one of the benches under the front office windows, and, slapping my empty-ish backpack on the bench, I lower myself down next to it.
A couple of people say happy hellos and welcome backs as they pass. I mumble hi in return but pull myself deeper into my brace to keep them walking.
The first bell rings, sounding more like a very loud board game buzzer than a bell. The crowd gets louder and picks up speed as it makes for the doors. They only have four minutes before they need to be in homeroom—I doubt anyone expects me on time, or at all.
The second bell rings and I’m still on the bench. The murmur inside the school quiets. A cold spring breeze whips by, clanking together the branches of the trees surrounding the student parking lot and making everything feel hollow.
I put half a Roxy in my mouth and let it dissolve, savoring the chalkiness as I watch the birds fly out of the trees together in one big clump, only to spin about in the air and re-land like some strange version of a bird flash mob. The Roxy tastes extra-terrible, which feels somehow right to me. I only take halves now. Although sometimes I still take two halves. This morning was sometimes.
I look around but am actually seeing her… willing her to come to me. To be here. To take me inside. To help me through this day.
My face feels like it’s sliding off me. I don’t have long until my whole body will slide off this bench. The world begins to blur. Or maybe I begin to blur.
Don’t blur, Eve.
I open my eyes. Wide. Taking in the trees, the sky. The birds? Where are the birds? My eyes are closed.
School. You’re at school, Eve. God, I just want to be fucking anywhere but here.
No.
Not anywhere.
Not there.
The Real One
You didn’t move.
Unlike Jayden,
who flew up out of his chair.
The hat—
the one he’d so sweetly
placed on your head
twelve minutes earlier—
spiraling out into the darkness.
“What the hell!”
he whispered.
“What the hell.
What the hell.
What the hell.”
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