Now or Never

by A. J. Bennett

  It was Tuesday morning and I had class at the local University at noon. As I was grabbing my things to head out to school, I noticed Tuck’s work shirt was left at my place. So I decided to run it by his house for him so he wasn’t late for work. Being in such a rush, I didn’t even think to call him I just drove to his place and ran up to the door. His mom kindly let me in the house saying that she missed me and it was good to see me. But she had this look on her face that I will never forget. The usual charming, church going Mrs. Green didn’t have her usual big smile on her face. She had a look of fear and confusion in her eyes. I told her why I came by and that I would just run up to Tuck’s room to give him his shirt and be off to school. I’m not sure if she tried to grab me or talk me into just giving her the shirt because I was in a rush, and hell I wanted to kiss my boyfriend. When I got to his bedroom door it was locked and I heard music playing. I knocked…nothing. I knocked louder…nothing.

  I banged on the door and shouted, “Tucker open up it’s me you forgot your work shirt.”

  Finally I got a reply with him saying through the door, “Cool thanks just leave it by the door.”

  “Tuck open the door why is it locked? What the hell is going on?”

  “Willow go away I have a fucking headache, just leave the shirt thank you.”

  At this point I could feel my entire body getting hot and my hands were starting to sweat and shake. I just kept banging on the door until finally his mom yelled upstairs, “Tucker you open that door or I will do it for you!”

  The door cracked open, and I pushed through with all my might. I stood there with my mouth open in shock (so cliché but yes it happened), I needed a minute to take it all in. There in the room where I shared many memories with this guy that I loved for two years, was this girl I have never in my life seen sitting on his bed. She was just sitting in her short shorts with her legs crossed and a shit eating grin spread across her perfect little face.

  “What the fuck is this? Who the fuck are you?”

  This bitch gets up and comes over to me and holds her hand out for me to shake it, “Hi, I’m Nicole nice to meet you.”

  I smacked her hand out of my way and she laughed and sat back down on the bed.

  “Tucker who the fuck is this girl and why the hell is she sitting on your bed? Why was the door locked? Tell me what the hell is going on right now!”

  “She works with me we were just talking about work and getting ready to head out,” He spoke so calmly and clear minded that I almost believed his bullshit.

  I looked at him, and then back at her sitting on the bed. The bed was looking pretty rough and if his lame story was true then the door didn’t need to be locked for one thing. That’s when I made my move. I lunged across the room almost as fast as I intended to. I wanted to rip that girl’s hair out more than I had ever wanted to do anything in my life.

  Tucker grabbed me, pulled me back, and dragged me out of his room closing the bitch in his room behind him, but not after whispering “sorry” to her. I didn’t get a “sorry”, but the perfect little smiling Nicole girl did. I managed to get away from his hold and ran down the stairs to confront his mother.

  “Mrs. Green,” I asked with tears welled up in my eyes ready to flow at any moment, “who is the girl in Tucker’s room?”

  All she did was look at me with that face again. She just shook her head and claimed not to know anything about it.

  So I went for Tuck again, “Tell me the truth, you already got caught. Just be a man and tell me what is going on, or I can assume and walk out of here forever.”

  “You should go, you are over reacting. She is just a girl from work. All we did was kiss that’s it. I told her I had a girlfriend and I stopped it. You should go you’re acting crazy.”

  I couldn’t believe he said that and I couldn’t believe what was happening. The tears that were forming in my eyes were about to come pouring out and I could not let him see. I ran as fast as I could to my car and drove as far as I could until I could no longer see from the tears that were pouring down my face. The only way I knew how to make the tears stop was to cause physical pain. So I pulled over, grabbed my keys and used the sharpest one to make a very deep gash on my left wrist. The harder I pushed, the deeper the cut, the more numb I felt. Numb was good.

  I haven’t cried since that day. It’s been six months and not one tear has escaped my eyes.

  I tried going out with old friends from high school over Christmas break, which happened to be just 2 weeks after the day all of that went down. I was so uncomfortable in my own skin, I didn’t even know what to say or do around people. I did know that I needed to find a new guy fast, because someone needed to fill the emptiness I felt inside me.

  I found a way to get myself more comfortable and out of my shell. It was called vodka, and it was my new best friend. I remember taking shots from a vodka-filled water bottle as I drove to meet up with an old crush from high school. Drunken sex filled the void for a while. Not eating anything to the point where I felt starving helped keep my emotions in check too. I found all sorts of ways to numb out and not deal with my reality.

  After I actually did eat, whether it was a drunken stop at a fast food place on the way home to sober up or when I had to be in front of people and act “normal”, I felt disgusted with myself. When I had food inside of me, I felt like I was crawling out of my skin, and I didn’t want to feel anything. That’s when the purging started. At first it was hard and it grossed me out to the point that I would almost cry, but I didn’t. I started to do it every day; it was sort of a release for me, kind of like the cutting was.

  Day Two

  I’m scared to tell daddy that I am in here. I don’t know what to say to him or how he will react to it all. I was in such a fucking horrible mood when I went up to visit him a few weeks ago. Going from Florida to New Jersey may put anyone in a bad mood, but this was different and he could tell. He told me that I was too young to be so unhappy and that I shouldn’t care what other people think of me…but I do. He’s a guy he doesn’t get it. But at the same time, I am mad at him for not understanding it. He did the same thing to numb out; only he did it with just alcohol…he was in rehab before. So why am I so scared to tell him I ended up here too?

  So I met with my therapist today, her name is Gianna. She didn’t make me say much, which was nice, but she did give me my first challenge: I had to speak in group after dinner that night. I laughed in her face and said no fucking chance. I asked her if they served drinks at dinner and if so that it may be a possibility. That was a bad fucking call because now I am on all three “tracks” that they offer here. The “self-harm track”, the “trauma track”, and now the “drug and alcohol track”. Fuck, I’m never getting out of here.

  If I don’t do any of my challenges, I don’t move up the level system they have here. The higher the level, the more challenging it gets, but the more privileges you get at the same time. For instance right now I am on level one, and I can’t do anything unsupervised. I can’t even go to the bathroom by myself. If I had any shame left before I got put in this place, it is now long gone.

  Day 3

  This morning when I woke up I had to get in line to get whatever meds they are filling me with, and then take a piss in a cup so they could drug test me. That one was going to come back to haunt me, I didn’t fess up to all of the weed smoking I was doing before they put me in here. Why did I have to make a smart ass joke to my stupid new shrink? After they took my THC filled cup away from me I was ushered into a tiny room with white walls. It had a bunch of charts on the wall, a patient bed, and a scale. A fucking scale the size of my body. What the hell are they trying to do to me here?

  Before I got to the center I weighed myself over 30 times a day. On my trip to see my dad I packed my scale in my suitcase, it was more important to me than pants.

  There it was, my worst fear staring me in the face…and I assume this whole weighing thing was going to be happening daily. But I was in luck!
The nurse said I could do something called blind weights. I could step on the scale backwards and have them just write down my weight for my nutritionist (my what?) so I didn’t have to see it. Then things got really weird when the nurse asked me to take my gown off.

  “You have me drugged up, half naked and freezing my ass off and now you want me to disrobe?”

  I could tell the nurse was trying to keep her cool with me, or she was just going through the motions of dealing with another hard ass patient. “Says here you are on the self-harm track, and these are what we call body checks. For now you will get them daily, but we hope to cut that back the further along you get in your recovery. Now please remove your gown I have 20 other girls to see before breakfast starts, you don’t want a non-compliance do you?”

  “Yeah maybe I fucking do want whatever the hell that is because I think I have had all I can take this morning without you body checking me.”

  The nurse just put my file down and looked me in the eyes and said, “Sweetie if I give you a non-compliance you are going to have to go to two extra groups this week and eat at two extra snack times.”

  My gown came off before she could finish her couple of words.

  She saw the cuts on my arms and legs, and jotted them down in my file. I felt like a science project.

  That non-compliance threat scared me straight, at least enough to get me to speak at the processing group after dinner tonight.

  I told them my OCD treatment story…I think I get out of things, or make myself feel more comfortable by putting humor into things.

  My mother is anorexic, and refused to believe I ever had an eating disorder. She did however blame my obsessive compulsive disorder for everything food related. She had me go see a specialist when I was 15 who did biofeedback therapy. It was a bunch of crap, and I used humor a lot in those sessions. So anyway I told them one of my stories from that hell.

  When it was my turn to speak at processing, I wanted to say “pass” again so badly, but I also had that stupid non-compliance threat in the back of my head so I spoke up.

  I shifted uncomfortably in my chair holding on tightly to my ribbon, “Um hi…my name is Willow and I’m new here. I don’t like speaking in front of big groups, especially about personal shit, but I guess I have to try.”

  This time there was no laughter to try to comfort me, only silence and about 12 very sad and sick looking girls looking at me or looking at their hands in their laps. The group leader eventually spoke up after we heard the crickets chirping from the silence, “Willow tell us something about what got you to this point in your life.”

  “Uh ok…well I guess I should have been here a lot sooner. My mom has an eating disorder and never really owned up to it to this day. So when I started acting ‘weird’ with food my mom decided to put me on OCD meds and take me on an hour drive once a week to an OCD resource center. I did a lot of biofeedback therapy, but it was mostly just me holding hot dogs for an hour and then going home.”

  Silence.

  “They thought that it was OCD because I didn’t want to touch fatty foods because I thought they would go through my skin into my blood stream and make me fat. We started out having sessions where I would hold a piece of chocolate in my hand, but that ended up in a melted anxiety attack. So we switched to hot dogs for the remainder of our sessions.”

  Laughter came from all over the room. This time, it did make me feel a little bit better.

  Maybe we choose to stay in a constant state of ignorance as a protective instinct — maybe I was just in denial. I just don’t get how you can be completely in love with someone one day, and then all of a sudden you just aren’t. I will never forget that day, the day where I became numb.

  How can you be basically living with someone for almost two years, and decide to just become this different person? I will never forget that day, the day where I became numb.

  To be released Winter 2013

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