“I would,” I tell her. I felt instantly safe with her, and I haven’t felt this comfortable with a therapist in ages. Maybe ever. I do want to be fixed; maybe she knows how.
“Okay, well, we need to do this intake form, and then we can make an appointment for next week?”
I nod and ready myself for the barrage of questions. You’d think it would get easier, but it really never does.
****
I have three texts from Jack when I get in the car. I don’t know if I should call him back yet. He still doesn’t know that I’m in therapy. Jack is aggressively opposed to mental health counseling. Partly because of his own suicide attempt and his time in the hospital, and partly because of the shitty doctor he saw who just wanted to drug him after his mom died. I don’t want to explain why I need it, though; he knows a lot about me, but some things, even Jack doesn’t need to know.
Besides, it’s been weird lately. I’ve loved Jack since I first saw him. He was so shy, so awkward when he transferred to my school freshman year. He was sitting in the back of my math class, his hoodie up, head down, looking angry at the world. I’d heard a few kids whisper that he was a freak, even though it was his first day and we were only three classes into school. But I was well versed in assumptions, and I sat next to him, offering him a piece of gum.
It took a while for him to become my friend, to tell me a little about himself, but I knew, on that first day in math class, that he was the love of my life. And now… well, he’s found his love of his life. She hasn’t shown any interest, not really, and he still calls me when he’s depressed, but it’s not fun being the one available rather than the one wanted.
Still… it’s Jack. I pick up my phone and text him back that I’m at school for something. I also didn’t tell him that I dropped out. I dropped out six months ago and he still doesn’t know. It was too much to deal with, between the anxiety, the people, my mom, and just feeling like I didn’t belong. There was more… but like everything, I would rather not think about it. I know I should have gone somewhere else, but I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t start again somewhere else. I needed to be here, for him. Jack will never understand; college is everything to him. It’s also everything taking him from me.
It’s strange. He’s my best friend, yet there are so many things he doesn’t know about me. He doesn’t know what my days are like. He thinks I work, go to classes, and spend time with my mom. Most days, though, I don’t even leave my room. I couldn’t stand being at school, and my mom panics every time I get anxious. Jack still thinks she’s the one with the problem, the one who’s unstable, but it’s more than that. Things are weird between us; I think she blames me because she can’t keep a man, since they have all turned out to be some twisted version of my father, but I also think she hates herself for blaming me and so she tries to overcompensate. When I would come home from classes shaking, she pushed the insurance company to up my prescription allowance. But stronger meds didn’t make it easier, so I left. She still thinks it’s because I didn’t like my major.
I haven’t even been working. I didn’t quit exactly, but they’ve mostly stopped giving me hours. I called out too many times too close together, all at the beginning of the spring semester, and now I only get scheduled when they’re desperate. It’s okay, though. I like my room. My room is safe. Well, now it is. I don’t know that it will ever be truly safe, truly free of its history, but it’s the only place I have to go. My mother offered to swap rooms, but why? Location has nothing to do with the memories.
I don’t feel like driving right now, so I go over to the little park across the street. It’s the middle of the day on Wednesday, which means there is no one here. I find a small bench and grab my pack of cigarettes. It’s the biggest event of my week – smoking in the middle of a park while everyone else does things.
I wish I was normal. I wish I wanted the things other people want, but I feel like I’m just waiting, just breathing because it’s natural. I wasn’t lying when I told Melinda I didn’t want to die; I don’t want to die. I have never been suicidal. It’s something I don’t understand. I guess I still have this inexplicable hope that something will change, that life is just waiting to make sense. But I don’t feel like I’m living my life. Mostly, I just wait until tomorrow is yesterday and go on like that.
Jack would tell me it’s the meds. He was outspoken about his own, saying they made him feel like a zombie, but I felt like this before the meds. The Xanax doesn’t make me feel soulless. My soul was torn from me almost ten years ago, along with my nightgown, on one summer night when my father decided that I was too pretty to resist.
Even thinking about it makes me shake. The cigarette flickers as I try to keep my hands steady and I use my free hand to dig in my purse for my medication. I don’t remember when I took it last, but I need it. I feel the tremors starting and I can’t have a panic attack here, alone in the park.
I do this all to myself; I know it. I could ask for help. My mom’s been seeing a decent guy and Jack would try to do something. But they’re moving on. They’re both starting to be happy without me, and I’m still stuck on something that was taken from me, something that was stolen with no reason and with no explanation. Except that I’m beautiful.
It’s still true. A while ago, when I got drunk and made Jack go with me to pick up some strange guy in a bar so I could fuck him while Jack watched, I saw that most of the guys in the place would’ve fucked me. They don’t care. I do it too much. Some are married even, but it’s all I am. It’s all I’m good for. Even Jack…
No. Not him. Not Jack. He might want that girl, but I know he doesn’t think it. At least… I hope he doesn’t. Because he’s all I’ve got left.
4
“You need a calculator?” I asked him. He was so focused on the classwork in front of him.
He looked up, like it was alien to him that someone would speak to him, like it was the first time someone had said something nice.
“Um, no… I…”
“I don’t bite,” I told him and tried to smile. I knew it probably looked freaky and crazy. I’d taken to wearing dark eyeliner and black lipstick, to make myself as ugly as they all said I was. It didn’t stop the guys from randomly grabbing my ass or “accidentally” brushing my boob at the locker or in gym class or, really, anywhere. But while their bodies seemed to want to be near mine, they were hateful. Yesterday, one had slipped a hand over my breast in the lunch line and, when I backed away, he tripped me and kicked me in the middle of the cafeteria after we’d paid. The vice principal came over, but the guy, whose name I don’t even know, said it was an accident. It was always an accident, and I’d learned that nothing I said mattered.
Jack looked at me and his eyes went wide. They were so blue. Innocent. I’d already developed a massive crush, but when he looked at me, I really felt beautiful. Not the dirty beautiful that everyone else saw, but good. I felt like I was worth something.
“I know. I mean… no one really talks to me. I’m a loser.” He said it so matter of fact, like even though he’d only been at the school a few months, it was the only truth he knew. It amazed me how much power the words of strangers had. They didn’t know me, and they didn’t know him, but they defined us. We were nothing but a reflection of their ideas of us.
“Jack, right?”
He nodded. “My dad killed my mom. She was a drug addict. He’s going to be in jail for a while. I saw it all.”
“Okay,” I replied.
“So you don’t have to talk to me. Because it’s okay.”
“Alana,” I said. “I mean, that’s my name. Alana. I’m a loser. A slut. A nasty whore. I don’t have the right to judge you.”
He looked down at my classwork paper. “You aren’t using your calculator?”
I shook my head. “No, do you need it?”
“No. I’m done. It was easy.”
I laughed. “Right? Why is she giving us an entire class period?”
He looked around the room
and leaned closer, whispering. “Alana, I hate everyone here.”
I whispered back, “I think we can be friends.”
****
Later that day, at lunch, I had just found a seat by the window when he sat across from me. I was used to sitting alone. He didn’t say anything, and he had nothing to eat. He looked up at me, though, after a few minutes, and his eyes did it again. I hated my body, hated the way I looked, hated that somehow I owed my body and my looks to everyone else. But when Jack looked at me, I wanted to let someone touch me. I wanted him to hold me. He felt like safety.
It didn’t even make sense. He was just a broken kid, like me. He always wore the same threadbare hoodie. Most days, it covered his head. He was cute, but awkward. His hair was too long and usually greasy. His Chucks were a little too big, so they looked a little like clown shoes. Yet those gorgeous eyes were all I cared about. I hadn’t considered guys at all. I didn’t find them attractive, and I certainly couldn’t see the appeal of sex or of intimacy. With Jack, though, the thought of him near me didn’t make me nauseous.
“Do you want my orange?” I asked him.
“Are you sure?”
It wasn’t a groundbreaking question. But it was how I knew that what I naturally felt for Jack was right. Because no one had ever asked me that. No one had asked if I minded, if I was sure, if something was okay. They just took things.
“Yeah.”
He took it and I handed him my knife. It was flimsy plastic and wouldn’t even pierce the rind, so I took the orange back and peeled it with my fingernails. Jack just watched me and, when I handed him the orange, now peeled, he smiled. His upper lip curled more than it should have and he looked silly, smiling at an orange. But he drew the same smile from me.
“Thank you,” he said, and he pulled two slices free from the whole and handed them back to me. I didn’t eat them right away. I just watched him eat his part. He was messy and he ended up covering himself in the juices. He unzipped his hoodie after the orange squirted down the front. Underneath, he was wearing a washed out blue T-shirt with a train on it. He looked ten.
“Nice shirt,” I teased.
He looked down. “I live with my grandmother. She has no concept of clothes.”
“It’s cute.”
He smiled again and it was less awkward this time. “Do you live with your grandmother, too?”
I was wearing a huge black sweater over baggy black pants. “No. I just… I don’t like people looking at me.”
“Yeah. I get that.”
He didn’t tell me that I was too pretty to dress the way I did; he didn’t say my body was too good to hide. He just went back to eating his orange, letting the juice spill all over the train shirt. We were fourteen, but I already knew Jack would always be the only thing that mattered in my future.
5
I wish it didn’t hurt. I wish seeing him, knowing that it was too late, didn’t feel like dying a small death a hundred times over. At the concert, I watched him watch her. She’s so pretty. Blonde, sweet, a little awkwardly imperfect, and he loves her so much. I don’t think he even knows that he does. Even when he tried to explain it, he couldn’t make sense of his need, but the cracks between us have grown. Life is starting to tear us apart.
I knew. I knew when he went away to school that it would happen. I’m surprised we lasted as long as we did. Even in high school, after we broke up and just fucked for fun, I still thought there was nothing but me and Jack. Sure, I tried with Dave, but Jack was the sun that I orbited. He tried to leave me once for good. It was the same math room where we’d met. They came to tell me that he was in the hospital and I felt the loss, even though he’d failed. I’d never understood singularity before but I did then. Gravity and all the forces of space and time folded over me and there was nothing but pain.
But that night, at the club, it was so final. Suicide, fights, even the distance of college… none of those things could come between us like him falling in love could. I don’t know why I wasn’t ready. But I wasn’t. And seeing his eyes, the way he looked at her… he hasn’t looked at me like that in years. And even if she never speaks to him, it’s irreparable. The foundation is shattered.
I notice I’ve dropped the cigarette. My hands are shaking. I try to bend down, to pick it up, but the world turns watery. I’m in a tunnel, with one of those old-fashioned scuba masks on, and everything is distorted. I feel my legs start to give out, my body slide away from the bench, and I bite down hard on my lip. Focus, I tell myself. Nothing is going to hurt you. You’re in the park. I manage to sit upright against the bench, but the shaking continues. The reverberations of anxiety echo through every nerve. I hate this. Why don’t the stupid pills work?
I’m tempted to go back to Melinda’s office, to ask for something else, to beg her to fix me, but why? As much as I liked her and already feel comfortable talking to her, no one has been able to fix me yet. The damage was done too long ago. I’m like a house built on a rotting foundation, the wood eaten away by termites over time. Even if you hire an exterminator, the house will fall down. Because the termites might be gone, but the wood still slowly splinters and breaks until it can’t hold up everything else anymore. My termites are long dead, but I feel the sinking every day.
There’s no one to call, no one to rescue me. I focus and concentrate on breathing and, once I can see again, I stand up, stomp out the cigarette just in case, and head to my car. Maybe I’ll go to the bar. At midday during the week, there is bound to be some lonely guy there. I know what my purpose is now and I embrace it. As long as I control it, as long as I choose it, it doesn’t matter if it means nothing. It doesn’t matter that I wonder every time if I’m just adding more weight to the collapsing foundation.
Fucking fall. It’s not even four o’clock and it’s starting to get dark. Wood smoke fires are starting and I can smell them as I cross the street to the office lot to get my car. I hate the fall. For all its beauty, it’s nothing but the dying of the year. Everything is just waiting for winter, waiting for death, hoping to make it out alive after the thaw.
I don’t know. I’m sure I’m overthinking it; there are actually few months that I do like. Most are linked to something bad. Halloween is just around the corner. I hate Halloween most of all.
****
The bar is pretty empty, but as expected, the few men in the place are alone. I look down at my ensemble. The fraying hem and the loose heel aren’t visible to strangers. Like most of me, they’re secret, the broken parts I keep to myself. My shirt clings to my chest; I unbutton the top two buttons for added effect. It usually doesn’t take much, but why not make it easier? Still, I’m twenty, beautiful, and willing to have cheap, anonymous sex. I could be wearing a housecoat.
There are three guys – one at the bar on a stool, one in the booth in the back, and one sitting at a small table. The guy at the bar is old and ragged; he reminds me of my stepdad and I get chills. Cross him off the list. The one at the table looks nice. He’s actually dressed well and fairly attractive. But he’s wearing a wedding band. If possible, I like to avoid getting wrapped up in that. It’s not their wives’ faults that the men they married are weak. Sometimes, though, my anger at my mother wins and I do it anyway. Because what other secrets are the women hiding? What else are they pretending isn’t happening?
I approach the booth and slide across from the guy drinking. He’s got three empties already. I hope he’s been here for a while, because drunk often means useless. At least for my purposes.
“Hi,” I purr, and he looks me over. He isn’t subtle, focusing on the cleavage spilling from my shirt.
“Well, well. What are you doing here?” he says.
I undo one more button, revealing the edges of my lacy pink bra. “I’m not going to waste your time. I’m looking for something, and I figured this was the place to come looking.”
“Yeah, well, you may have found it.”
I slip my foot out of my shoe and run it upward along his leg. H
e reacts a little when I begin to rub circles on his crotch, but surprisingly, it’s a subtle reaction. It looks like the beer is old and he’s still with me. That’s good. It also feels like he’s definitely going to be up to the challenge, and he’s well-equipped. It’s better when there’s a chance I can come. It’s much easier for me to come with Jack, or if Jack’s there. I know a lot of it’s emotional with him, but he’s also an unbelievable lover. I guess it makes sense; we basically taught each other everything we know. Well, in my case, everything I wanted to know. However, I prefer these casual afternoons to end being worth my while. I may only be good for one thing, but why not try to get something out of it, right?
“So, where to, boss?” I ask.
He lets out a raspy laugh. “Don’t you want to get to know me first? Ask my name?”
I lean across the table, ensuring maximum exposure of my tits bursting from my shirt, and lick my lips. “I don’t give a damn about your name. I came here looking for someone to fuck me. Are you gonna be that someone?”
He coughs and tries to move out of the booth, no doubt to pay his tab or whatever. I press down hard on his crotch as he moves, to remind him why he’s in a rush. I’m already losing interest. Maybe I should just call Jack. Maybe I should go home and read or something, but I don’t want to think about the panic attack in the park, or about Melinda and my memory of my dad. I just want someone to bend me over and use me. Better yet, I want to come. I want to feel something other than fear or the dull ache that resides inside my belly and keeps me awake at night.
He doesn’t take long to pay his tab, which is good because I’m already starting to get bored. He sits next to me and takes my hand in his, like we’re heading out to go ice skating and to share a milkshake or something.
“My place?” he asks.
Hell, no, I think. Neutral ground, so there’s no awkward leaving and exchanging of phone numbers or whatever. I want to get out of this with an orgasm and without knowing his name.
Blue Rose (A Flowering Novel) Page 2