I was two days out from the deadline and it was the morning of the interviews. As I walked to school that morning, I looked over my interview questions, scratched through a few and reworked them. When I got to school, a cold sweat came over me and a nausea rolled through my stomach. I figured it was hunger so I pulled out the banana I snagged from home and ate it quickly as I walked to Ms. Stewart’s classroom. The interviews would start in less than thirty minutes; during first period. Ms. Stewart was sitting at her desk grading papers when I walked in for the interview pass. She handed it to me, and before I left she said, “You are going to do great Evan.”
I remember wondering how she could think I would do anything great. I wondered what she actually saw when she looked at me. She didn’t see the insomniac, the nervous as hell teen, the paranoid girl getting ready to interview a handful of jocks and beauty queens. I wondered what she saw in me that made her think I would do great at interviewing these students who were completely out of my league. I remember thinking, whatever she saw was a lie, a fake-out, a terrible misconception of what I could possibly be able to achieve. Definitely not what went down that morning.
The dance team was the first to be interviewed. Two were new to the team so they weren’t as... confident in their arrogance. They were sophomores on a varsity squad, basically at the bottom of the social totem pole. Oh, don’t get me wrong. There was some arrogance. It was subtle though since they had just broken the unseen barrier separating the popular from the obscure. They had become part of a team, and when you travel in numbers, especially in a pack as influential in a school as the cheer squad or dance team, you were automatically handed a free-pass of entitlement. The first two didn’t use the free-pass like the third one did, too new to it. Samantha Johnson was the third girl. Samantha was accepted on the varsity dance team when she was a junior. The difference between her and the other two was that she had an extra year on them to get used to her ability to manipulate and get what she wanted. One of the byproducts of being a loner is you automatically become a watcher. One that observes all the goings on around her from a position of social abstinence.
Samantha Johnson was easy to watch since she was the quintessential social butterfly and always had something to smile about or something to say. I swear I think she made a point to be everywhere she could, all the time, in fear of missing something.
I tapped my pencil on my notebook, while I waited for her to come into the empty classroom. She came into the room like I had expected she would, light and fluttery like a butterfly. As she sat, she sighed dramatically, like she was put out by being interviewed. I mumbled that I would try not to keep her long. She swept her long brown hair off her shoulder with the flick of her hand and crossed one leg over the other. “It’s all right. Whatever. What questions do you have for me?” she asked, curtly.
Of course she would react this way, I was a nobody and her coach had probably told her she had to do this stupid interview. JUST LIKE MY TEACHER TOLD ME I HAD TO DO THIS STUPID INTERVIEW!
I asked her the questions and she kept her answers short and without detail. I would be lying if I said I got anything enlightening out of her answers. Her last comment solidified she was toying with me and this was a game, something for her to talk about with her squad after.
“Is that everything you need? I’m sorry, what was your name again?” she said.
“Evan. It is short for. . .”
She snapped her gum between her teeth and rolled her eyes as she cut me off. “Whatever. Are we done?”
Fearful I might spew every ounce of anger I had building at her, I tilted my head as I looked down and nodded. She got up swiftly and headed to the door. By the time I looked up, she was leaving the room mumbling under her breath. “What a weirdo.”
When I heard someone laugh just outside of the door, my stomach dropped. It was a masculine chuckle, probably one of the soccer players I was interviewing. Perfect!
I breathed in deeply and held down the cry I desperately wanted to release. I wasn’t going to let anyone know I had heard them and it upset me, so I did my best to ignore the knot in my throat. I couldn’t keep my body from trembling though; my nerves.
The door opened suddenly and I looked up only high enough to see the tennis shoes and hairy legs of my next interview approaching the chair set across from me. I didn’t want to make eye contact right away and I was hoping I could buy some time to calm myself, but he spoke gruffly. “I’m here for the interview.”
The smell of soap and too much cologne filled the room. I hesitated responding to him as I pretended to sift through the interview sheets.
“Hello?” he taunted in a baritone sing song voice.
“W, what is your name?” I asked, stuttering a little.
“Crawford. Darren Crawford.”
I tilted my head to the side to look at him only long enough to see him hunched over, his elbows resting on his knees. He was gawking at me, waiting for the interview to continue, but I was stunned, like a deer in headlights. He was very good looking and this only made my lack of verbal skills freeze even more.
I looked back down and took a deep breath. I felt very hot and my hands started to tingle, like they were going numb. I shook them out and tried to count to ten in my head. Oh, and breathe. I had to calm my breathing.
“Is this going to take very long?” he asked, loftily.
“No, it is only a few questions.” My voice was barely a whisper and a quivering one at best.
“What did you say?”
Tense and frustrated, I raised my voice. “It is only a few questions!”
He leaned back in the chair and put his hands up, surrendering. “Whoa, chill out. You don’t need to be such a freak.”
He looked me up and down in disgust and that was how he made me feel, disgusting. I was a disgusting freak. I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply. A sad moan escaped from me and I guess it made him angry. “Look, I’m only doing this damn interview for coach. If you are not going to ask your stupid ass questions then I will leave. You are wasting my time. Shit, Sam was right. You are a weirdo.”
I held my breath and stopped taking in air. I was upset, angry, and hurt by his words. He was speaking to me like I was something stuck to the bottom of his shoe. An annoyance he had to endure because his coach told him he had to. I wanted to tell him to leave me alone so badly, but I couldn’t get past the sound of my pounding heart in my ears.
“What did you say?” he asked with a surprise tone. “Did you just say to leave you alone? I’m doing you this favor you stupid bitch.”
I hadn’t just thought it. I had told him to leave me alone and I didn’t realize it.
His brown eyes narrowed on me with his jaw set, waiting to see what I would do or say next.
All of a sudden, he rose from his chair. “Nah, screw this.”
He closed the gap between us and got right in my face. “Look at you. You can’t even speak!”
He wanted to intimidate me and it didn’t take much to send me over the edge. I pinched my eyes closed and tilted my head down away from him just as he pulled back, snickering. “Are you crying? Seriously? What the hell is wrong with you?”
I don’t remember saying anything else. I just stood, walked around him, heading straight for the door. He was talking and chuckling behind me as I left. Free of him, I saw two other guys, I was supposed to interview, leaning against the wall. They both looked up at me then at Darren, laughing as he came up behind me. I saw their serious looks turn to smiles and I knew I was moments away from their ridicule as well. I tried to run, but my legs felt like Jell-O, so I walked as quickly as my feet would take me down the hall. The other two started laughing just as I exited the building. I couldn’t hold my whimper any longer and I choked on my cries. I remember wiping my eyes with the sleeve of my shirt. I broke as I walked through the empty courtyard, around the cafeteria building, through the student parking lot, and off school property.
By the time I got home, my tears
had dried sticky to my face. The entire time I walked, I ran Samantha Johnson’s and Darren Crawford’s words through my head: weirdo, stupid bitch, freak. Sadness turned to anger, but I didn’t know what to do with it, except let it fester inside. I didn’t care that I had left campus without permission and was about to confront my mom who didn’t expect me home for hours.
I slammed the door behind me when I entered. The sound made Mom call, “Who is it?”
When I didn’t respond right away, she came around the corner fast, but not fast enough for me not to dart to my room. She was right behind me and when I shut the door on her, she knocked on my door and wiggled the knob furiously. “Evan, what happened? What is going on? What are you doing home? Evan, answer me!”
I didn’t want to talk.
She banged on the door, still demanding after not getting a response. “What the hell is going on Evan?” She was scared, afraid of me or for me, I wasn’t sure which.
“Go away mom. Just leave me alone! I wish everyone would just leave me alone!” I yelled back at her as she beat on the door. She told me I couldn’t spend the rest of my life alone.
I yelled back, “I don’t need anyone! You don’t know what I’m going through!”
She pleaded for me to tell her what I was going through. Even if I had, she wouldn’t have understood. She was never the loner, the outcast, the freak in high school. She was popular and beautiful and social.
Her pounding on the door was constant and I needed to drown everything out. I put my earbuds in and turned up my music until the pounding on the door joined the sound of the bumping bass. Eventually she stopped. Well, not exactly. Dad came home and made her stop, pulling her from the door. After that I feel asleep. The next thing I remembered was seeing an open doorway with no door on the hinges of my room. My door was gone. They fucking took my door off the frame. I lost my shit and I stomped out of my room into the living room. Dad was sitting in a chair and mom was pacing as she spoke with someone on the phone. “Yes, we have made an appointment with her doctor. I will call your office with an update once we have talked with them.”
Neither of them had seen me yet.
“Who is she talking to?” I asked Dad, sharply.
They both looked at me and Mom quickly ended the call. At that point I didn’t give a shit whether I was being an asshole. I wanted to know why they took my door off the damn frame.
“Why did you take my door?”
Mom started, “Evan we were afraid of...”
I cut her short. “Afraid? Afraid of what? I just wanted to be left alone! That is it! You couldn’t even give me that!”
Dad loosened his tie around his neck as he raised his voice. “We didn’t want you doing anything you might regret.”
That really pissed me off. Him thinking I was going to kill myself or some shit. “I am not going to kill myself, Dad!”
I didn’t think I would start crying, but I did. I couldn’t believe they thought I had gone so far off the deep end I would consider suicide.
In the heat of the moment, I went back to my room, both of them following behind me, begging me to talk to them; I didn’t. I curled up on my bed, put my ear buds in, and closed my eyes. I could feel them standing over me for a long time, watching me, trying to make sense of what was going on in my head, but I didn’t once open my eyes to look at them. I lay there until the house and everyone and everything in it became silent. Sleep finally took me away.
The next morning, Mom and Dad told me I wasn’t going to school and I had a doctor’s appointment.
“I just had a bad day? You guys are blowing this out of proportion!” I yelled.
Being the logical one, Dad’s tired voice reflected what had become true over the years, “You have more bad days than not, Evangeline.”
He only called me Evangeline when he was worried about me which, in turn, made me worry.
I had never sat in my doctor’s real office before; only the patient rooms with their metal and cushioned bed, the little stool for toddlers, and the fun colorful walls to make it seem like a bright happy place. This was decorated with bookshelves, chairs, a desk, computer, and side chairs. Yes, there was a wannabe-shrink-doctor chaise longe too. Dr. Middleton had Mom and Dad sit in the waiting room while he talked with me about…me.
Some of the questions were strange: “Do you dream when you sleep?”, “Do you have sudden bursts of energy, then really low moments?”, “Do you ever want to kill yourself?”, and “Do you ever want to hurt anyone around you?”
I had never wanted to end my life or hurt another person and I was insulted by his questions, but I answered a resounding ‘no’ anyway.
“I have never prescribed medication for you Evangeline, but from what your mother told me on the phone, it seems you might be suffering from a sadness only medication can help,” he said, his voice gentle.
“You mean depression?”
“Yes, depression.” he responded.
“I don’t think I’m depressed. I think I’m just having a. . .”
He quickly reacted to my pause, “A rough patch?”
He continued to scribble down words on his yellow notepad. Words about me. I wanted to be a fly on his shoulder, to see what he had written.
“You are writing down I am in denial, aren’t you?” I guessed.
He stopped writing and angled his head toward me. “Why would you say that, Evan?”
I fiddled with the dry skin on my left thumb, looked down and answered. “Because, it is what you think. I can feel it.”
Dr. Middleton took down another note then removed his glasses, setting them on his desk. “Maybe I should speak with your parents while you sit in the waiting room,” he said, matter-of-factly.
That was the nail in the coffin. He was deferring to my parents because I was in hopeless rebellion of any mental diagnosis and he was done trying to talk me into it.
Hesitantly, I rose, not yet wanting to leave the office. My parents would have their turn to discuss my state of mind without me here and I wasn’t quite finished pleading my case. I turned to him before I left and asked, “You have been my doctor for my entire life. Do you think I am clinically depressed?”
Somewhat stoically, he sat back in his chair. “What does clinically mean to you, Evan? Do you know what clinical depression, or say bipolar disorder looks like? Did you Google it?”
Bipolar struck me as coming out of left field. I had Googled depression and bipolar disorder did pop up with some of the symptoms I was having, but not all of them. I folded my arms across my chest protectively and stepped toward his desk like getting closer to him might affect his opinion of me. “I don’t hear voices if that is what you are getting at. I’m not losing my mind.”
The way he eyed me, I understood his question was purely rhetorical and didn’t entertain an opinion on my part. He had already formed his own and my comments were just dead air. I walked out of the office without another word and told my parents Dr. Know-It-All wanted to see them. They were in there for a long time. Whereas I was evasive and elusive with my answers, I’m sure they were very generous to accommodate.
I Googled bipolar disorder on my cell phone while my parents were in with the good doctor, divulging my flaws and unfixable damage.
Bipolar Symptoms:
Mania: “Maybe”
High energy: “Sometimes”
Irritability: “Yeah”
Little need for sleep: “Yeah”
Denial: “No comment”
I was feeling some of these symptoms, but not all of them. There were at least ten more symptoms that I didn’t think I had. Just then the doctor poked his head out and called me back in to join him and my parents. As soon as I saw Dad’s stiff, lamenting lip and Mom using a crumbled tissue to gently wipe her eyes, I knew they had drank the proverbial Kool-Aid Dr. Middleton was passing out to them. Early onset Bipolar II is what he diagnosed right off; not just depression. Apparently it is the less psychotic of the types of Bipolar though. He s
aid if we left this disorder untreated, it could worsen and I could have more severe psychotic breaks, which scared the hell out of my parents. As I sat next to them, he began to detail how my ‘condition’ had been manifesting for a long time and was somewhat disguising itself over the years as depression. He explained how depression is hereditary and my mother’s bout of it was evidence of it being the case here. I hadn’t even known my mom suffered from depression until that moment. He continued pulling situations from my elementary school years that only my parents or I could have disclosed to him. As he flipped through my thick medical chart, he listed things I did that, he said, were ‘telltale signs’ of a festering mental illness. I couldn’t deny the instances of impulsiveness, aggression, anxiety, depression, self-isolation, anti-social tendencies he was referring to, but I also couldn’t see them labeling me with an illness that had so many more symptoms I didn’t show.
He asked my parents if my teachers had ever mentioned getting me evaluated for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder as a young child? I sat there shocked by the progression this appointment had taken with him bringing in yet another flaw in me, another disorder.
“No doctor, we did not,” my dad said somewhat surprised by his question. He immediately looked at my mom for an answer, like she may have known more about this than he.
Mom’s shaky, emotional voice added, “The teachers said it was a stage. That she was just a daydreamer and a little distracted. Her grades were fine. Yes, she struggled a bit, but they said she would be fine.”
He nodded flatly and jotted down more notes on his yellow notepad. He spoke about how many disorders like ADHD can sometimes be precursors to mental illnesses, such as depression and bipolar, due to the stress they put on the individual.
Dismantling Evan Page 4