by J. Q. Coyle
I say, “Isn’t that a soap opera? One Life to Live?”
My mother shakes her head and looks away. I can’t help but feel like there’s a darker answer to the question, and no one wants to hear it. Sometimes all I want to say to her is that breaking her heart kind of breaks mine.
Waybourne twists in his chair and says, very solemnly, “We’ve got a special track here, Ms. Maxwell. It’s for kids who need more attention. Isn’t that what Alicia needs? More attention?”
“The Freaks Track?” I say. Sprowitz is in Freaks. He’d make my life hell. I’d be a Future Bottomfeeder of America. The anxiety kicks in. “Is that what you mean?”
“She has a very high IQ!” my mother says loudly. She’s wearing lipstick, I notice, maybe put on to sweeten Waybourne.
Waybourne blinks at her. He has very pale lashes. His scalp shines. “It’s not special ed. It’s just extra help. It’s meant to—”
My mother puts her hands up. “Do you realize what that would mean? She won’t stand a chance at colleges! She’ll be…”—she’s looking for the right word—“… derailed!”
“Ms. Maxwell,” Waybourne says quietly and calmly. “Don’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“It doesn’t matter how smart she is. She’s already derailed herself.”
My mother doesn’t move. For a full ten seconds, she does nothing. There are voices on the other side of the office door. A bus engine revs. Then she stands up so fast her chair squawks against the floor. She says, “Let’s go, Alicia.”
I stand up, too. My mother walks to the door, opens it, and I walk out in front of her. She leans back in through the door frame and says, “You can’t do this. We know our rights, you understand? You and I won’t discuss this again. I’ll have someone call you on our behalf.”
My uncle. That’s who she’s going to send in. My father’s brother—the doctor of brain science, the one who pays for my therapy sessions and all of my meds, the one who dug his way out of Southie by applying himself, the Maxwell who’s not my father, the one who’s better than we are, the one who can save us, the one we’re indebted to.
The one I can’t stand.
CHAPTER FOUR
MY MOTHER grips the wheel, her jaw tight. The warm air from the car heater is tinged with exhaust. I put my fists up to the vents then open my palms. My hands are shaking. I’m about to try to explain the flashes in the cafeteria. I want her to know that I’m not trying to cause these problems. But she pushes her phone at me as we pull up to a red light and tells me to call Alex. “Put it on speaker.”
“Are you sure?” I find the number and press the green call button. “Wouldn’t you rather talk behind my back?”
She doesn’t smile. She never wants to ask Alex for help. In fact, she’d been completely cut off from my father’s side of the family until I started having issues. She seemed to want a clean break, but she didn’t know anyone else to turn to. Alex is a specialist and, I have to admit, he’s totally and completely on our side. He wants to help. And he is this link to my father, even though he’s nothing like my father, and that’s probably a good thing. Still, my mother never wants to ask anyone for help, and she has to swallow a lot of pride on my behalf. He’s all we’ve got.
The phone’s ringing, and I’m hoping he doesn’t pick up, but then he does. “Francesca?” He has caller ID so he knows who it is. “Everything okay?” He assumes something’s wrong because my mother only calls when something is. I don’t hate Uncle Alex. It’s just, I’m like this problem he has to fix, and I will never be able to make it up to him. And I can’t help but feel that obligation. That’s what I hate. My uncle even tried to help my dad, but apparently the old man was a lost cause. I’m my uncle’s next big failure.
“We’ve had an incident at school.” Her eyes flick toward me and then away. “I was wondering if you could help.”
“Anything,” he says, and I imagine his thin face, his thick short hair tinged gray, his sport coat. In the summer, he kayaks, and he’s offered to take me, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Sometimes I wonder if I could let go of my father—really let go of even the idea of him racing through my hallucinations—I might be able to see Uncle Alex as a father figure. Would that be so bad? “Just tell me what you need,” he says.
My mother fills Alex in a little, keeping it short. She knows how busy he is and hates to take up his time.
“Hey,” Alex says to my mom on the phone, “we can help Alicia. She knows we can.” I heard him telling my mother once that he feels guilty his brother is a screwup. My grandfather on that side of the family lost it, too. It’s hereditary. And on the one hand I agree: my father did screw up, he left us. But on the other, I have this weird loyalty to him: he is still my father. “Listen, head over to Jane’s office. I’ll call ahead and ask her if she can clear her schedule, squeeze Alicia in.”
“Thank you,” my mother says. “Really, we can’t tell you how much this means to us.” Gratitude—that’s the real payment here. I wish it were money, which is simpler.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll call the principal tomorrow. I’ll get him to back off. Maybe we can readjust the meds a little. Listen, tell Alicia I’ll be at her party. I’ll check in with her then.”
I’d forgotten about my birthday party. I’m about to turn sixteen. My mother throws a party every year, which feels like a punishment for growing up. The Butlers come—the elderly couple two doors down with the dog whose hind leg was shattered by Sprowitz; Jill, my mom’s friend from work; and Uncle Alex. Both sets of grandparents are gone; my mother’s parents died when she was my age. She finished high school in foster care. I supposedly met my dad’s parents when I was little. I only remember them from photos. We eat nachos and cake.
“Thanks for everything,” my mother says.
Alex lowers his voice so it’s soft, almost scratchy. “And I’ll check on you. After all the things you do for other people, you need to be taken care of, too. You sometimes forget that.” His voice is too intimate. Maybe I’m paranoid, but sometimes I think he’s flirting with her in ways that he could always say were just him being nice.
“Hey!” I say, so Alex knows I’ve been there all along. “I’ll see you at my party! Looking forward to it!”
There’s an awkward pause. “Alicia, be straight with Jane,” he says, like he’s now my dad all of a sudden. “She’s on your side.”
“I know,” I say. Jane means well. I kick at my backpack wedged between my sneakers on the floorboard.
After he hangs up, my mother and I drive in silence for a few minutes and then she starts in: “Uncle Alex isn’t going to be able to clean up after you forever. One more slip and you’ll have to go into that program. Next time I won’t even call him.”
I think of my father, telling me to get lost and stay lost. I’m useless—worse than useless. I’m a burden. I feel sick knowing it. I wonder if this is how my father started to spin out. Was he put on something like the Freaks Track? I stare out the window. “I have a question about Dad.” I can’t look at my mom. She hates questions about my father, and I hate seeing the way her face pinches, as if she’s physically in pain.
“What is it?” she asks flatly.
“The restraining order.” I’ve never asked about. I guess I didn’t want to know.
“What about it?”
“Why’d you have to get one?”
She’s silent for so long that I wonder if she’s going to answer at all. Finally, she says, “We needed borderlines.”
“You mean, boundaries, like emotional boundaries in a relationship?”
“No,” she says. “I mean it the way I said it.” And I know by her tone that the conversation is over.
* * *
We wind out of Southie, onto I-93, and eventually exit into Westwood, where the streets are clean and tree-lined. The yards are wide. People keep their shrubs tidy and salt their icy sidewalks in case an old person is out.
My mom pulls up to Jane’
s house. Her home office is crammed into what would probably be a small family room, but Jane has no husband, no kids. I like this about her. She’s alone, so maybe she understands when I talk about feeling cut off.
“I’ll be waiting here,” my mother says. She reaches out and touches my jacket. “You have to just try to hang on. Just a little while longer.” She looks at me searchingly and squeezes my arm, then lets go. She’s scared in a way I haven’t ever seen before.
“Why just a little longer? What do you mean?”
She shakes her head and puts both hands back on the wheel, staring straight ahead. “Alex doesn’t want me to tell you; he’s not sure it’ll work.”
“Tell me anyway.” It’s just the two of us; we have to rely on each other.
She sighs. “There’s a surgery. It could free you of all of these issues, for good.”
I feel a flash of panic in my chest. “Surgery?”
“This has been what Alex has been working on all these years. One of the things. He thinks it could be an overdeveloped part of the brain. Wait for him to talk with you about it, okay?”
“Okay.” I’m not sure what to feel. Surgery that could make me normal, but also cut me off from those worlds, my father? It’s all I have of him. Sad, I know, but I couldn’t ever let go of him. I don’t think I could ever explain this to my mother—or anyone. My father is unforgivable, but not when I see him in my hallucinations. He’s different. We both are.
“If you can just really try for a little while longer, try to resist,” she says softly.
And I wonder if she understands, in some way, how much I’d like to disappear into those hallucinations sometimes and just not come back. Could she know how I wanted to lean into the knife?
I nod, but I know I won’t resist. I can’t. She would never understand those other places, what it’s like to suddenly be somewhere far away from everyone and everything in my own shitty little life.
“Be straight with Jane,” she reminds me, “like Uncle Alex said.”
“I will.” I am never really straight with Jane, almost.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
CHAPTER FIVE
I WALK up to Jane’s front door, dipping my head under some hanging planters with plants long since frozen and wilted over the sides. I swing my backpack over my shoulder, ring the bell, and wait. Eventually, I hear the familiar shuffling and turning of locks.
The door opens and there’s Jane—small and narrow, rubbing her skinny arms. She waves to my mom and then tells me to come in. “It’s freezing.”
I step inside. She shuts the door, looks me over. “Are you okay?” Her voice is maternal in such a soft way that it catches me off guard, and then she gives me a hug. “Alex told me what happened. I’m sorry.”
I almost tear up, maybe because I’m just exhausted, my defenses broken down. I wasn’t expecting that kind of sudden tenderness. People ought to warn you before they do something like that. “I’m fine,” I say.
She leads me down the hall to her office. I drop my backpack at the end of the slightly sagging love seat, sit down, and take in the small, familiar room. A fireplace that doesn’t look like it ever gets used. An old oak desk against one wall. An armchair. A coffee table with an unlit candle. Built-in shelves packed with psych books, all of them describing one problem or another. The sheer number of things that can go wrong with someone actually makes me feel a little better. There’s a painting of a sailboat tilting into the wind; it reminds me of the cruise ship and the speedboat.
Jane takes a seat in the armchair across from me.
I lean back. I still feel shaky. I remember my biology teacher talking about the aftereffects of hypothermia, the uncontrollable trembling. That’s how I feel now. “Do you know anything about geography?” I ask.
“A little,” she says. “Why?”
“Do you know a river called the Dnieper?”
She stands up and walks to a row of old encyclopedias. She pulls out one of the books, flips through it. “Dnieper? Here we go. It’s a major European river that flows through Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, eventually flowing into the Black Sea.” She looks up. “Why do you ask? Something school related?”
“No.” It’s real, but I’ve never heard of it. “Just curious.”
She looks at me for a moment. “Okay, let’s start over.” She slips the book back into its slot and sits down again. “The hallucination. What sparked it?”
“Well, there were two rounds of it just this morning, which means they’re getting worse, right?”
“Let’s try not the judge the hallucinations. Let’s just examine them.”
“Well, one happened during a multiple-choice test, and the other was when I was at lunch.” I don’t want to get into what Sprowitz said about my mom. Sometimes I just can’t break it to adults that kids can be so sick in the head.
“You can opt out of multiple choice,” Jane says.
“I know. I’d like to stop picking at my cuticles, too. I don’t even know I’m doing it really until it starts bleeding. Should I tape my fingertips or something?”
“We can work on some more relaxation techniques,” she says.
I suck at relaxation techniques; they make me more worked up than before. I look at the boat in the painting then back at Jane. A button is missing on her sweater. “This kid got pissed off and hit my friend Hafeez. Then I started flashing.”
“And how were these hallucinations different?”
I lean forward, elbows on my knees. “Do you think you can know something in a hallucination that you don’t know in real life?”
“Like what?”
“Just like a fact or even part of some foreign language. Not to be fluent or anything, but just to understand some.”
“I think in a dream your brain can make you believe you’re speaking a different language when, if fully awake, you’d really be speaking gibberish. As for facts, I don’t know. Maybe you could know a fact without remembering you know it.”
“I guess.”
“What did you see in the hallucination?”
“I was with my father.” I picture him now in the back of the speedboat. He looked so tired but still rugged, his dark windblown hair and straight jaw. He was fit, muscular and strong, his tattoo like a vine curling up from his wrists. “I talked to him. We were on a cruise ship at first, and it was sinking. Later, he talked back to me. But like he knew I was there. Me. That’s never happened before.”
I get up and walk around the sofa, doing one little lap. “It felt real. I was there, and then he told me to go back, and everything started to shake, and then—I was back.” I can’t say to her what he really said earlier: Get lost and stay lost.
The heater kicks on. I hear the soft exhale from the register.
“Back?” She seems to be concentrating really hard on what I’m saying, like she’s adding something up in her head. I hope so. I’m tired of the old answers—this med or that. Could there really be a way out of this for me, even if I have to get my head cut open?
“I was in the cafeteria. With Hafeez and the fight. And he had a bloody lip.”
“What did you feel—in your body—when this was happening?”
“I don’t know. It hurt.”
“How? Where?”
All those quick pains shooting all over me and that feeling like my chest was going to rip open. I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to make it bigger than it is. Though it felt so big I’m not sure I can really describe it in a way that makes sense. I shrug. “I don’t know.”
Jane’s fingers are all laced up, and her eyes are locked on the far wall—all those books. I’ve never seen her look like this. I don’t like the silence. I don’t know how to read her expression. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says. “It’s just interesting.”
“You know what’s interesting? The principal wants to send me to the Freaks Track.”
“What’s that?”
&
nbsp; “A special track for screwed-up kids. Like me. My mom seems to think Alex can talk him out of it.”
“I’m sure he can. That’s not an appropriate place for you to be. We’ve always wanted to keep you mainstreamed.”
“Staying mainstreamed, that’s a goal? I’m insulted,” I say, pretending to be disgusted.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“No, it’s fine. I should aspire to mainstream. I should be so lucky.” I’m pissed all of a sudden.
Jane shifts in her chair. I know she doesn’t like it when I get angry, but she wouldn’t ever call me on it. I’m supposed to feel comfortable with my emotions in here, even anger. She says, “Tell me more.”
“In one of the flashes, I saw a boy. I was in this really nice house but it was completely falling apart. Actually that whole place seemed like it was—I don’t know—cracking.” I remember his lips so clearly, the way he was talking to me, but I could no longer hear him.
“What did he look like?” Jane scoots forward in her seat. Something about the boy—or the destruction?—has caught her attention. I wonder if these are signs I’m really crazy.
I shrug. I want to tell her that he was kind of beautiful, but that sounds embarrassing. “He had black hair and these wild eyes—really, really light blue.”
“How old was he?”
This seems like an odd question: why would his age matter? “About the same as me, I guess,” I say. But then again, he was so thin, and haunted looking, he could be older. I don’t feel like talking about him anymore. He’s just made up, like my father in the speedboat. Do I really just want a father that badly? It’d be a better fantasy if the places weren’t filled with billowing smoke, drones, and gun-wielding thugs. Anyway, the places aren’t real. The boy isn’t, either. I have to remember that. I’m just a screwed-up kid who aspires to be mainstream. “He’s fake anyway, right? A figment of my imagination.”
“The imagination is powerful, Alicia. It can hold a lot of information that can help us understand who we are.”