Juliet the Maniac

by Juliet the Maniac (retail) (epub)

  “It’s stupid,” I said. “I haven’t really been able to concentrate lately.”

  He nodded like he understood. He asked me if I read a lot and I said yes. He did too. His favorite book was called Youth in Revolt. Mine was Geek Love. I’d never heard of Youth in Revolt but the title made me feel less stupid about the horror book.

  We started talking about our diagnoses. He told me he was bipolar, an alcoholic, a cutter, and also bulimic. I didn’t expect for his list to be that long. He looked boringly normal.

  “Your eyes,” he said at one point, his voice low and corny. He kept on edging closer to me, which seemed like it must have been uncomfortable because the slats in the railing were digging into his thigh. “They’re incredible. What are they, two different colors?”

  People were always commenting on my eyes. One of them was blue and the other was mostly brown. It was the kind of thing that was either annoying or embarrassing, depending on who was saying it. He was looking at them so intently I felt my cheeks burn.

  “Kind of,” I said. I looked at his feet. He was wearing the stupidest shoes. Tevas. His toes were long and skinny. My shoes were covered in dust from the chores we’d done earlier, but his feet looked perfectly clean. I looked up at him, at his brown eyes, so warm they were nearly yellow. Doomed eyes. I still didn’t know his name.

  I heard the big sliding glass door behind us open. “Luke,” someone said. His name was Luke. It was the rockabilly girl. She looked upset. She stood there for a second, then went back inside, slamming the door.

  “Fuck,” Luke said. He shrugged like What can you do? and then followed her inside.

  RUMOR MILL

  Alyson explained that when something happened at Redwood Trails School, the news spread so fast that everybody, including the staff, knew exactly what was going on within an hour. The rockabilly girl—her name was Julia (which I didn’t like—people were always mistaking my name for Julia and it made me furious because it was such a stupid-sounding name, like some nineteenth-century girl with braids—or a chubby girl with a pretty face). “Julia’s supposed to graduate in a couple weeks,” Alyson said. “She and Luke have been fighting a lot, about what they’ll do once she leaves.” Then she informed me that Luke was from Seattle; Julia was from Olympia. Luke wasn’t supposed to leave until December. The times and locations seemed close enough to make it work—but Luke had been saying he would die without her, that he couldn’t stomach it at RTS alone. She didn’t understand why he couldn’t wait. She thought he was making the options pretty clear by talking to me on the porch—either stay, or he’d get together with me. Which was annoying because no one stopped to wonder if I wanted to get together with him. He wore Tevas. He was a bipolar bulimic alcoholic cutter, which was way too many adjective-nouns. But nobody cared what I thought. I was new.

  After Luke went inside, Julia refused to talk to him. She went straight into her room, closed the door, and wouldn’t open it for anyone other than Rosie, including her roommate, Angel. She was crying real loud, the kind where the person is doing it mostly for attention. The rest of us were in the great room by then, watching the news because the only two channels we got were that and cartoons. We could hear her from across the house. She finally fell asleep.

  BEDTIME STORIES

  Since everybody else was so busy with the Julia drama, Alyson and I sat together on a couch in the great room, late. The lights were off and I didn’t think anybody knew we were in there.

  We talked and talked, about all the times we’d gotten fucked up and all the crazy things we did before we arrived. Alyson told me how she used to wear big baggy guy jeans, take a shoelace and tie it around the cuff, walk into stores and shoplift by putting bottles down the waistband. One time she got greedy, tried to put four forties in her pants, two in each leg, and a shoelace came untied. The forties fell out and broke all over the floor. She took off running, the beer and glass sticking to the bottoms of her shoes. Her friend was waiting in the car, and they peeled out before Alyson could even shut the door, laughing hysterically over what had happened. It’s the nights you get the beer that blend together, she said. I knew exactly what she meant.

  Alyson told me that she and her mother were best friends, and her father couldn’t stand it. She would go over there and they’d play checkers till 4:00 a.m. in the garage, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. She showed me a scar on her forehead, a perfectly white crescent moon curving up to her hairline, the lasting result of a drunken argument they’d had where her mother hit her with a beer stein. She seemed to think this was funny. By then her father was so sick of her mother not taking care of herself, and of Alyson coming home from her visits tired and hungover. The custody arrangement was modified. Alyson was forbidden from going over there. He didn’t care that her mother was dying; if they wanted to see each other, they were only allowed supervised visits at a special center that felt like jail.

  The great room was so dark I couldn’t see her face, only her outline and the glow from the hallway light glinting off her blond hair. But her voice cracked in a way that made me think she might be crying. I couldn’t blame her.

  And so, like the time with Holly, I told her my story.

  About the hallucinations and the suicide attempts and how I had found myself here, incapable of functioning like a normal person in normal society. She said nothing the whole time I was talking. When I was finished, she touched my hand, just for a second, saying without saying that she got it.

  By the time anyone noticed us absent from our rooms it was an hour past lights out. But even then I couldn’t sleep, so we continued to talk, gossiping about the other students. Eventually her breaths slowed and steadied. When I went to sleep that night, I closed my eyes, my own breath settling into the rhythm of Alyson’s, and for the first time since I’d arrived at the school, I didn’t feel alone.

  JUST TRAGIC

  In the morning, everything seemed fine and normal. Julia and Luke sat together at breakfast, alone at the far table. They held hands again but I didn’t see them talking much. But then Julia didn’t show up for group. So one of the counselors—Vinnie, this guy with a glass eye and a redneck accent—went to go look for her. He wasn’t gone very long. He came back, breathless, sweaty, holding Julia by the wrist. He had a belt in his other hand—one of those fat leather ones rockabilly girls wear, with rivets. Her neck was a bit red. He’d found her in the barn, standing on a fence with the belt around her neck. She said she planned to hang herself.

  Everyone acted like it was so sad and they felt sorry for Julia. I watched Luke sit next to her, their knees pressed together, and he stroked her hair as she cried. They were whispering so quiet I couldn’t hear a word they said.

  It seemed like I was the only one who saw the truth, which was if she really wanted to hang herself, she wouldn’t have gotten caught like that. She wouldn’t be standing on a fence with just a tiny red mark on her neck. She’d be dead.

  Julia had been on Phase Four, since she was about to graduate. You’d expect a suicide attempt, no matter how lame, to bump that back a bit. But nope—no privileges lost, nothing changed. And a few days after that, she was gone. Rehabilitated, but only theoretically.

  PATIENT LOG

  PATIENT NAME: Juliet Escoria

  AGE: 15 yrs 10 mo

  SEX: F

  DOB: 8/23/83

  DATE: 07/20/99

  HISTORY: Patient was diagnosed as Type I Bipolar Disorder, Rapid Cycling 11/98. Possible Borderline—reports unstable & intense friendships. Patient is sexually active, admits to past drug use: marijuana, alcohol, benzodiazepines, prescription opiates, prescription stimulants, prescription muscle relaxers, ecstasy, ketamine, psychedelics, cocaine. Reports marijuana is consistent drug of choice; other drug use is “sporadic.” Substance abuse began 06/98 approx. Drug test positive for cannabis. Experienced hallucinations (auditory/visual) in past but claims hallucinations have ceased. History of self-harm. Chronic reported insomnia.

  Patien
t admitted to school after recent suicide attempt requiring hospitalization. Attempt was made using patient’s own medication, Paxil & Tegretol, in addition to Soma (obtained from mother). 2nd attempt—1st made 6 months previous, approx. Circumstances similar; addit. Benadryl & Tylenol. Tegretol & Paxil were discontinued temporarily in hospital, resumed 7/10. Reported side effects of dizziness, lethargy, upset stomach.

  PREVIOUS MEDICATIONS:

  Zyprexa—discontinued 01/99 once stabilized

  Wellbutrin—discontinued 03/99 (ineffective)

  Tegretol—discontinued 07/99 (risk of overdose/replace w Depakote)

  Paxil—discontinued 07/99 (replace w Remeron)

  TREATMENT:

  Depakote, begin at 500 mg/nightly, increase to 1000 over course of 1 week

  Remeron (for depression/insomnia), begin at 15 mg/nightly, increase to 30 over course of 1 week

  Group therapy, indiv. therapy

  PHONE PRIVILEGES

  On Phase One, we were allowed only one phone call each week, and only from our parents. The first weekend, I had the idea that I would refuse their call—but then at the last second I felt a pull toward them, a homesickness, a longing—and I was surprised enough by this that I couldn’t stop myself from going to the phone.

  “Hello,” I said, making my voice cold and annoyed so they would know right away I was still angry. I was still so angry.

  “Juliet,” I heard my dad say. “I’m sorry. Please know we didn’t want to lie to you. Please know it broke both of our hearts. It’s just …” He trailed off.

  “We didn’t want you to die,” my mom said, listening in on the other extension. “We didn’t want you to die and we didn’t know what else to do.”

  “The school is supposed to be very good,” my dad said. He’d looked and called all over, gone on several early-morning plane trips around the West while I was in the hospitals, trying to find a place that could help me. Somehow this made me feel even stupider, that I hadn’t noticed he’d been gone. But then I remembered. I’d been unconscious.

  TEENAGE DREAM

  Luke, me, Alyson, and Alyson’s boyfriend, whose name was Kiran, decided to go to the barn so we could dip without anyone seeing. I’d thought chewing tobacco was gross at first, but soon I understood. It didn’t smell and they had cans of Skoal in baskets at the general store that were easy to steal, which couldn’t be said about cigarettes. You could do it during school or in the van, as long as you sat where no staff could see and brought something to spit in.

  They’d just gotten three goats, a mother and two babies. The babies were like kittens, clumsy and mewing and adorable. Rosie had named the mother Bessie. The baby goats’ names were decided in a vote between the students—the gray one was Smoke, the brown Mary Jane. We were petting them and joking around.

  Luke and I were sitting on the fence by the goat pen, while the others were trying to get Bessie to do tricks by feeding her baby carrots. It wasn’t working. If you told her to sit and held out a carrot, she just bleated until you fed her. I could feel Luke looking at me, and when I turned to him he put his hand over mine, which was wrapped around the fence post. The sun was hitting us straight in the face, bright and neon and beautiful. His hand was very big, completely eclipsing mine. His touch made my palms tingly.

  The first time he kissed me, we were down by the lake. It was hot. We were sitting on the big rocks, me on one, him on the other, in the clearing where the boat was, where they could see us from the back porch and make sure we weren’t doing anything we weren’t supposed to.

  Even though the bugs weren’t bad that day, I still ended up with a gnat in my mouth. I yelled, spat. Luke knew what had happened without asking because gnats in the mouth was something that happened to everybody.

  He walked over to me, crouched down, leaned over, kissed me softly but firmly on the lips. A quick kiss, so we wouldn’t get caught.

  “Even with a bug in your mouth, you’re irresistible.”

  Then he laughed.

  With that laugh I saw it, the same stabbing madness in him that was in me. The tilting demarcation between “fine” and “crazy.” That moment—the pine trees, the laughter, the bugs, the kiss—felt both familiar and strange, like something remembered from a dream.

  That was what cemented it. That brisk recognition, that quick kiss, drove home the fact I’d already known since the moment we first spoke. It was impossible to resist it.

  I couldn’t help it.

  I fell in love.

  PROMISE FULFILLED

  My favorite part was the evenings, right after dinner. Free time. We could do whatever we wanted. Most nights, Luke and I, or me and Alyson, or Luke and me and Alyson and Kiran, would get as far away as we could—the barn, a walk around the lake, whatever it took to get out of sight of the grown-ups, whatever it took to feel like normal teenagers, on a camping trip or something like that. Sometimes, it wasn’t even hard, the warm nights when the cicadas rang through the trees and the geese flew in V’s over the lake as the setting sun turned it scarlet. My parents had been right—it was beautiful up here, all big sunsets and trees.

  DEATH CAMP

  Even with Alyson and Luke and the therapy and the big sunsets and trees, sometimes this terrible feeling would creep through me and I couldn’t seem to get it out. One morning I woke with an especially heavy feeling of doom. Before breakfast, we were doing chores in the barn—cleaning out poop and the animals’ feeders, while Kiran and Bill (the ranch manager, who I totally hated) did repairs—when I saw movement behind a pile of hay in the corner. I thought it was one of the barn cats. We hadn’t seen the gray one in a while.

  I was right. It was the gray barn cat. Only she wasn’t doing the moving, because she was dead. The flicker of movement I had seen was hundreds of maggots. She had been dead so long that her eyes and ears had been eaten away. Most of the maggots were squirming around on her underbelly, with bones poking out. I might not have even known it was a cat if I hadn’t recognized her fur pattern. I stood there watching for a few moments. It smelled and looked horrible, but for some reason it didn’t sicken me. It seemed a good reminder: this is everyone’s future. Rot. A dead cat.

  Then Bill saw me standing there doing nothing and started to jump my ass about it. So I showed him the cat. He told us to go back to the house, that he would bury her body. And by “bury,” I’m sure he meant “transport to the dumpster.”

  Later in school, we were on World War II, and guess what? Death, death, death.

  We had fried rice for lunch, and it felt like the circle of life. I’m eating this thing that looks like maggots, and someday the fried rice maggots will eat me.

  And then in group, no one had anything much to talk about, so Nathan started asking Alyson about how she was doing with her mom’s illness, which I had learned by then was MS; severe, terminal. And then we were talking about dying in general. Angel’s mom and sister had died in a car accident. It turns out Kiran had a sister who had died before he was born, only three months old. I sat there thinking about how I’d tried to kill myself and how I’d really meant it, but now I was really glad I’d fucked that up. I didn’t want to be dead and rotting yet.

  When I got in the shower that night, I wasn’t thinking about my life, and I wasn’t thinking about my death, or anyone else’s.

  I was thinking about the hole in my chest. The finger prick of it bloomed until I was only the hole, a sucking void of darkness and sick. In it, I was floating alone. No matter who I was friends with or who loved me, there was no way to kick through the cavern that held me in.

  I did my old razor trick, biting the head until it split and I could remove the thin blades one by one. I was careful to make only little cuts, surface level, the kind that hurt but barely bled. I’d meant to make only a couple, but once I started I didn’t want to stop, so I didn’t until the top of my whole right thigh was a crosshatch of lines, until you wouldn’t have even known a thigh was the thing under there. But it didn’t work. I still f
elt just as rattled and doomed, like something dead and rotting. I sat under the shower nozzle and cried until the water changed from hot to warm to cold.

  Rosie was waiting in our room for me, sitting on my bed. Just the tip of what I had begun to think of as my pain quilt showed below my towel, but somehow she saw it right away. She made me pull up the towel even though I was naked underneath, and when she saw it her face looked like it had broken. She sat me down next to her on the bed, and then she held me, still wearing nothing but a towel and with dripping wet hair, but she didn’t care, and I cried, and she rubbed my back and whispered Shhhhhhh. Like my mother.

  I thought the pain quilt would be my and Rosie’s secret, but I had all of my razors taken away. I wasn’t allowed to use them at all anymore, the staff said. I asked what the fuck I was supposed to do with my hairy-ass legs and my hairy-ass armpits. I told them they were being cruel, that they wanted to take away any self-esteem that I was able to maintain in this demeaning shit-hole, that they wanted me to feel ugly and gross like Sasquatch. They gave me a twenty-minute time-out for the swearing and told me to ask my parents for an electric razor. So I did. The cuts turned into little scabs and my hair grew in dark and straight and a couple weeks later the cuts were mostly gone, a pale pink stippling, and an electric razor arrived for me in the mail.

  * * *

  —

  Later, on the porch, the cuts healed to scars, peeking out the cuff of my shorts. Luke and me, sitting on the rail, waiting for everyone to get ready so we could go into town. His fingers on my thigh, touching the pink bumps. “Beautiful,” he said. Quiet, like he didn’t even know he was saying it.