Juliet the Maniac

by Juliet the Maniac (retail) (epub)

  No one made fun of Tommy after. He calmed down, and for a couple days no one spoke of it. But then Tommy’s parents showed up at the school, and they were pissed. He’d been feeling nervous so one of the staff gave him an Ativan, which reacted adversely with the medication he was on. Nobody had figured on that. So Tommy’s parents took him from the school, which seemed reasonable, but also made me sad, like it was something we had caused by being mean, rather than a fuck up by the staff. I don’t know where he went next, if he simply stayed home or went to a better school.

  Shortly after Tommy left, so did Dr. Hult, taking the Ativan with him. Bye-bye, ugly doctor. Bye-bye, lovely pills.

  PHYSICAL EDUCATION

  They started taking us snowboarding each week. They called it PE. Every Tuesday instead of class, we got in the van and drove two hours to Mount Shasta, always asking to stop and pee at the gas station in Weed whether we had to or not. They always let us.

  We had an instructor the first couple weeks to learn the basics. He was kind of cute, reminded me of the surfer boys in Santa Bonita, sun-bleached hair and a sunburned nose. We tried flirting with him but he was clearly not interested, just looked up at the sky like Help me Jesus, and then he’d get real quiet. I didn’t know if he knew we weren’t from a normal boarding school. I didn’t know if he could tell we weren’t normal teenage girls.

  I wasn’t very good at snowboarding, had never done it before or even skied, but soon enough I was better than all the other girls and half the boys. I could go down the trails faster than any of them. I was uncoordinated and clumsy, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was fearlessness, going down completely vertical, until everything was a streak of whites and blues and greens, until the whoosh of the air drowned out any other sounds, the mountain air cold and clean, the sun reflecting off the snow like lava.

  Every time, I wouldn’t stop snowboarding until I had to. After a couple hours, I didn’t go warm up with the others as they drank hot powdered cocoa in the lodge. I didn’t loiter at the top of the summit like they did, taking advantage of the relative privacy. I didn’t even wait to ride the ski lift with Alyson or anyone else I knew, unless somebody from school happened to be at the bottom already. I’d rather ride alone or even with a stranger than cut into my snowboarding time.

  It felt so good at the end of the day, to take off my wet clothes and get into dry ones, and then we’d all pack into the van, heater blasting. It smelled terrible, like sweat and wet socks, but it never mattered too much because I was so tired, each of my muscles loose from use. I felt as passive and elastic as a rubber band. We’d listen to the radio until it cut out, a rock channel we didn’t get way out in Redwood Trails, and sing along to the songs that we missed hearing, Sublime and Nirvana, even singing to Smash Mouth, not because we liked it but because it was fun to make our voices sound exaggerated and stupid like the singer’s. As we drove farther and the other cars thinned out, people started to drop off to sleep. Sometimes by the time we arrived it was only me and the driver who were still awake, the radio turned over to fuzz, and the only thing left to pay attention to was the headlights of the van as they illuminated a tunnel across the twisting roads. Once we arrived, I ran to the shower to get in before all the others, turned the water scorching hot. As the water pelted me I felt clean and pure, my body something to use rather than destroy.

  VOID

  We had just gotten back from a day of snowboarding. Alyson and Adrian had stayed at the school, punished because they’d been caught making out again. I’d assumed she’d be there to greet me. But the lights were off, the entire school dead silent and still. For a moment I thought Stephen had come back and killed everyone.

  A few minutes later, Rosie walked in, bundled in a coat and gloves and a scarf. “Oh thank God you’re back,” she said, and she and Carly and Vinnie, who had taken us snowboarding that day, went into the office, closing the door behind them without even addressing the rest of us.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Kiran said.

  We told Alex to go listen in the hall, but he didn’t get the chance because right after, there was a knock. It was the cops.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  The adults headed outside to meet them. “Don’t worry,” Carly said, as she walked to the door. “Everything is fine.”

  “Where’s Alyson?” I asked.

  Carly stopped. “We don’t know.”

  I searched the entire school for Alyson, figuring she had to be hiding somewhere. It was twenty degrees outside. She couldn’t be out there in the cold. The whole time, this feeling built up in my stomach, a knot of nervousness, as I looked under beds, in the shower, the pantry—anywhere a person could hide. But I couldn’t find her anywhere.

  I didn’t find her because she and Adrian had run away. I couldn’t believe how stupid they were. They didn’t have any supplies or money. There was nowhere to go. Rosie put us in the great room to watch cartoons, while she made phone calls in the office. I kept creeping in the hallway, hoping to hear the phone ring, hoping for news that they’d found her. When it was time for bed, I couldn’t sleep, imagining Alyson dead in a snowbank somewhere, skin blue, eyes staring up at nothing.

  After a couple hours of just lying there, I heard noise from the kitchen. Alyson and Adrian were in there with Rosie. Everyone else had left. The police had found them hiding in the barn to get warm. They’d made it to the main road, but turned around because it was too cold. There were blankets wrapped around them, their hands in bowls of water to prevent frostbite. They weren’t even dressed warm, just coats over regular clothes.

  “Hi,” Alyson said. “Did you have fun snowboarding?”

  I wanted to ask her what the fuck was wrong with her. I was so mad at her for being so stupid. I was even madder at Adrian, the idiot, the tough guy. If it wasn’t for him, she never would have done something so dumb.

  But I went to her, wrapped my arms around her, and was surprised to find myself crying. “I was so worried,” I said.

  Alyson took her hand out of the water, patted me wetly on the head. “It’s OK,” she said. “Everything is fine. Go back to bed. I’ll be in there soon.”

  “Everything’s fine, baby girl,” Rosie said. “They’re safe now.”

  Alyson came to bed a few minutes later. I pretended to be asleep because I still felt mad, like she had betrayed me for the stupidest guy. She was a snorer, which usually drove me crazy. But that night I was relieved to hear it, the scratchy ins and outs of her breathing. Just like normal.

  But everything was not fine. The next day during school, Alyson and Adrian left. For good. They’d both been sent to stricter schools, not coed, more “discipline based.” Besides that, we were told nothing. I wasn’t even allowed to write her.

  And just like that, my best friend was gone.

  Just like that, I was alone.

  AMPHETAMINE SALTS

  Not long after, Stacy brought in her son CJ to work at the school. He was going to teach new classes, Philosophy and Drama. They were voluntary, held in the great room on the days that CJ worked as the boys’ overnight counselor.

  It seemed exciting, even if the excitement was only because it was new. We thought the staff finally realized that if we were treated better, we would act better. In Philosophy, we’d learn basic concepts and then discuss real-life issues. In Drama, we’d write and then put on our own play, complete with sets and costumes. It gave us something to look forward to.

  Before he got there, all the girls were hoping CJ would be cute. He wasn’t. Instead he was skinny and nerdy and pale, hair combed over preppy, which was confusing because he had a little hoop in one ear and a Buddhist tattoo on his wrist.

  About the same time, a new boy named Jason came to the school. It was obvious he liked me but I couldn’t tell if I liked him. He was good-looking, but not my type—he had very neat hair and wore boring clothes, Tommy Hilfiger and Nautica. He was funny and sweet, but he was from Alabama and talked with a Southern accent tha
t made him sound like a yokel. Actually he was from Puyallup, in Washington, but he’d just moved there. He’d lived in Alabama for most of his life with his grandparents, but they’d recently died so he had to go back to living with his mom. He hated her. He said she was crazy.

  Being from Alabama meant he had good stories. He told us about hunting armadillos, how they jump when you shoot them, except he didn’t say it like that. This is what he said instead: Dillers. They jump when you shoot ’em.

  I’d make him repeat this phrase, over and over again. No matter how many times he said it, it always made me laugh.

  Jason had been diagnosed with ADHD. He said he didn’t have it really, it’s just when his mother sent him to a psychiatrist, he was so high he had a hard time paying attention to anything the doctor said, so she’d concluded that was what was wrong. He got put on Adderall, eighty milligrams, forty twice a day. That’s a lot of Adderall.

  I liked Adderall. Jason didn’t; it made him feel nervous and sick. He said he’d give me his, but only if I traded him a kiss. I still didn’t know if I liked him but I wanted the Adderall. I kissed him on the mouth, and there was something that felt good about it, light and innocent. The next time he kissed me, I let our lips linger longer, a real kiss that left a softness. A few days later, he asked me to be his girlfriend. I said yes.

  Every day he gave me half his Adderall. Because I’d always had insomnia, nobody noticed. My room was still empty, Alyson’s bare bed and shelves silently confronting me, so it was OK if I stayed up late reading because there was no one to bother. Soon, I’d read all my books. I moved on to the Harry Potters that were on the shelf in the great room. I didn’t care about Harry Potter, it was just something to keep me occupied. Once I’d finished those, I went on to the psychological texts. There were a lot of them. I took notes. I learned all the disorders and all the symptoms and all the treatments and all the medications and their side effects. I became an expert on the human brain.

  * * *

  —

  In Drama class, we read a lot of plays, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and Chekhov. Once we’d read enough, CJ said we were allowed to begin our own. I was the only person who enjoyed writing, so I was put in charge of the script, which I liked because I could decide who said what and when. So in between reading about psychology and psychiatry (which I had learned were two separate things), I worked on the play. It was going to be an epic, about a school a lot like ours, except this one was set in the future. All the kids in the school had boxes installed, which regulated their mood and behavior, emotional cyborgs. Instead of doing farm chores, they learned to solder and to program, got put to work making more boxes. I wasn’t sure what should happen next, but I’d figure it out.

  But I didn’t take well to the philosophy. It was Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Return that got to me. Back at home, sometimes when I couldn’t sleep I’d go into the living room and watch PBS. They played space documentaries between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. I’d learned about the distance of the earth to various planets, the distance between our solar system and other solar systems, and that the universe was infinite and always expanding. To think there was something larger than infinity, that there was something that not only went on forever, but this forever was always growing larger and more savage. It left me feeling untethered, like nothing I did mattered at all.

  The thing that really did me in was thinking about my suicide attempts. According to Nietzsche, in some alternate universe, I’d died. The thought of this made me feel irrevocably doomed, locked in a bubble of impenetrable darkness, a black hole. In all of them, every universe and every path, I was a mistake, a suicide.

  I started asking a lot of questions, hoping to prove both CJ and Nietzsche wrong. Hoping they had no idea what they were talking about, that these were ideas created just to fuck with us. Both Nietzsche and CJ seemed like sadists, their eyes intense and devoid of humor.

  I could tell CJ didn’t like my questions. At first he tried to answer them, speaking slowly like I was stupid, but eventually he gave up and just ignored me.

  THE BITCH IS BACK

  I also started to pretend to forget that CJ’s name was CJ. Instead, I called him BJ, as in blow job, as in he was gay. I started a rumor, that he was hitting on all the boys. I wanted to hurt his feelings, to make him feel like he didn’t belong here. He wasn’t as smart or important as he thought. And it worked. Every time I called him BJ, the other students laughed and his eyes got all hard and hurt, just like Nietzsche’s, and an ugly ball of pleasure rose in my chest.

  The other thing I started doing was hallucinating again. All the Adderall had made me manic. Or maybe it was the lack of sleep and Depakote. At breakfast, I sat down with my bowl of oatmeal and suddenly the world froze into a snow globe, radiant circles of light around everyone’s heads, the brightest around mine. At night, I saw shadows ducking in the holes. As I fell asleep, I heard the voice, whispering the same old thing: I was chosen. This time, though, I knew what I was chosen for. I was chosen to help rid the world of evil.

  There were two evil things at Redwood Trails School: one of them was Stacy, and the other was CJ. I could see the shape of their auras, and they matched, both smoke gray, both narrow, reaching into the sky and down through the ground. I saw the birds in their faces, but they were less like birds and more like bats.

  Between all of this, I started to become afraid.

  I stopped taking the Adderall. I thought about what had happened with it and with the Ativan. I was done with drugs. I figured all I needed was some sleep, to take Depakote every night again. But on the third night of going back to regular, I was awake till dawn just crying in my room, exhausted.

  The lack of sleep made me brittle. I began to yell at people, people I didn’t want to yell at. Jason seemed afraid of me, was no longer seeking me out, left me alone in my room. One time I even yelled at Vinnie. It was during breakfast. I was so tired and his voice was so loud that I couldn’t stand him talking anymore, so I threw my bowl of cereal at him. I got in trouble, was sent to the office so Stacy could chew me out. In her office, I started to cry, which was embarrassing because Stacy was evil. I told her I hadn’t been sleeping, I’d only thrown the cereal because I was so tired.

  Stacy surprised me by being nice. She came out from behind her desk and hugged me and I let her but the hug made my bones cold, like being caught in a draft. She said she’d get the doctor to prescribe me something to sleep later that week.

  I went to Philosophy class later that day, against my better judgment. I went because Jason wanted me to go, said he missed me. We sat next to each other and held hands.

  CJ was telling us about Nietzsche’s views on God. I don’t know why it made me angry but it did. “These are only ideas, abstract and meaningless,” I yelled at CJ. I told him he was stupid, that this was bullshit, that only a faggot would sit around learning this shit, and only a big gay faggot would not just learn this shit but try to pawn it off on others.

  I watched his face turn red, and then he got up and left the room. The rest of us sat there, not sure what to do. He came back a few minutes later with Stacy. Under my breath I said, “Aw, he had to call his mommy.”

  I don’t know if Stacy heard me, but she brought me to her office for the second time that day. She told me I was out of control, and dangerous, and that I was no longer allowed to participate in “extracurriculars.” This meant no more Philosophy, which I couldn’t care less about. This meant no more Drama, no more play, which I was a bit sad about, but I mostly didn’t care because I had hit a wall with my script anyway, hadn’t been able to add anything new to it for a whole week now.

  The thing I cared about was the no snowboarding. We were supposed to go the next day. It was late in the year, and not unlikely that we wouldn’t be able to go ever again. I told her this but she didn’t care. “You’re too unpredictable to be let off school grounds, anyway,” she said. “Once you get on new medication, and get some sleep, we can reassess. For n
ow: absolutely not.”

  I walked back across the parking lot. I entered the house through the door to the great room. They were still discussing Nietzsche like a bunch of idiots. They looked up when I walked in the room, surprised.

  “You’re just a big dumb asshole, BJ!” I yelled.

  Then I went into my room. I closed the door. I left the light off.

  I had a single razor blade hidden in the fold of a pair of socks. I got it out. I sliced into my arm. I never cut my arm because it was too noticeable, but this time I simply didn’t care. I watched the blood ooze out, hot and bright red, but it wasn’t enough, so I cut again, longer and deeper this time, and then again, a short little shallow cut, and then again, a fast slash.

  The razor slipped on the last one, and I could tell I’d fucked up right away, I’d really fucked up, because it didn’t bleed immediately. I’d cut so deep I could see fat. I looked at the paleness, a curiosity.

  The bloodlessness didn’t last long. I took the sock that had held the razor blade, pressed it against my arm to try to stop the blood, which was pulsing out of the gash to the beat of my heart. It didn’t work. The blood soaked through. I pressed the other sock but the same thing happened again. I tried squeezing my other hand around my arm, a kind of tourniquet, but I couldn’t get a tight enough grip because of all the blood. I started to feel woozy. I needed help.

  I went back into the great room. I’d meant to leave one of the socks on the cut but I forgot, and the blood was dripping down my arm and onto the floor. Everyone’s eyes bugged out when they saw me, especially CJ; he looked so scared and disturbed that I started laughing, laughing with blood dripping down my arm, onto the floor.