Checked

by Jamelli, Jennifer

  Ten minutes later, I reach for my purse to get a piece of gum. A few calories to settle my stomach a little. I slide out my phone and notice that he has played. He’s also sent a message.

  I look around. Everyone seems to be working.

  Count. Open message.

  Aren’t you supposed to be working?

  Count. Reply.

  Aren’t you? :)

  Seriously—doesn’t he have patients today? Where do they fit in with all of this texting and game playing?

  He’s written back already. Look around. Open.

  I am working. I’ve dedicated my day to spending some relaxation time with a VIP patient.

  Wow.

  I don’t know how to reply to that. I settle with a simple thank you. Seconds later, he sends another message—a colon and a parenthesis. A smile from the man who wouldn’t even look at me during most of our first appointment together.

  Another ticket comes in. More proofreading to do. Reluctantly putting my phone back into my purse, I get back to work. The students in the lab keep me busy with a steady stream of tickets, and soon it’s time to go.

  HIS NEXT MESSAGE COMES AROUND 8:00 p.m. I am already home and dressed in sweats.

  Ready to chat?

  I text back a yes and head to my computer. After logging in to Facebook with the password Mandy reminded me of last night, I also pull up the latest version of my paper.

  HOURS LATER WHEN I TURN off my computer, I haven’t touched my paper. I complete my night routine (in its entirety) in a daze and am in bed at 1:30 a.m. with a printout of tonight’s chat session. Two chefs are on TV preparing some sort of Beef Wellington dish, but I don’t really hear them as I begin reading through our night’s discussion.

  DABLAKE: Stop beating me in Words.

  CALISTAROYCE: Stop playing sucky words, and maybe you’ll win.

  DABLAKE: I’ll try…

  DABLAKE: Ready to get started with our chat?

  CALISTAROYCE: Yep.

  DABLAKE: Okay, let’s start with our nacho exercise reflection.

  Stupid doctor terms—reflection sounds a lot like sharing.

  DABLAKE: Let’s talk about the odds of your worst fear actually coming true.

  CALISTAROYCE: Okay…

  DABLAKE: I assume your worst fear would be gaining a large amount of weight?

  CALISTAROYCE: Well, gaining weight in general, yes.

  DABLAKE: Okay. Can you think of some reasons why that isn’t likely to happen after one night of eating nachos?

  CALISTAROYCE: Because it can’t. I won’t let it.

  DABLAKE: Well, right. I’m sure you would do specific things to prevent it from happening. Like, I’m sure you went back to your structured eating routine today, right?

  CALISTAROYCE: I definitely made sensible eating choices today.

  DABLAKE: So you know that you have the willpower to go back to your eating plan after a day of splurging, right?

  CALISTAROYCE: I guess so.

  DABLAKE: So maybe it’s okay to splurge once in awhile.

  CALISTAROYCE: I don’t know…maybe.

  DABLAKE: Okay, let’s talk about your worst case scenario, what you would do if your worst fear came true.

  DABLAKE: What would you do if you did gain some weight?

  CALISTAROYCE: I can’t…I won’t.

  DABLAKE: But you worry about it nonetheless, so what would you do? Buy some new clothes, maybe?

  CALISTAROYCE: No. It won’t happen.

  CALISTAROYCE: I can’t think about that right now.

  CALISTAROYCE: Sorry.

  DABLAKE: It’s okay. We can move on for now.

  CALISTAROYCE: Thanks.

  DABLAKE: Now…Tony. Do you want to start where we left off?

  CALISTAROYCE: I guess so.

  DABLAKE: Let’s move beyond the night with the nachos—what happened next?

  CALISTAROYCE: Oh…well, I started the 800 calorie thing, like I said last night.

  DABLAKE: Did Tony know about that?

  CALISTAROYCE: No. I didn’t talk to him about any of it. I didn’t eat in front of him after that either.

  DABLAKE: How long did you keep that up?

  CALISTAROYCE: The 800 calories? Until that trip to the health center.

  DABLAKE: Why did you go to the health center that day?

  CALISTAROYCE: I was scared.

  CALISTAROYCE: I hadn’t had my period in a couple of months.

  I cannot believe I wrote that. Look at me getting all brave when protected by a computer screen.

  CALISTAROYCE: I thought that I had completely screwed up my body. Irrevocably. I figured I would never go back to normal, never be able to have children…

  CALISTAROYCE: It turned out that I stopped having a period because I had stopped eating all foods that contained any fat whatsoever. Apparently, the amount of fat you consume somehow has something to do with your period…or something.

  DABLAKE: That’s true. Did the nurse at the health center talk to you about that?

  CALISTAROYCE: Yes. AFTER my pregnancy test came back negative.

  DABLAKE: Right. I guess she just figured that would be the most obvious explanation for your problem.

  CALISTAROYCE: Yeah, I guess.

  DABLAKE: But it made you angry.

  CALISTAROYCE: Yeah, it did.

  CALISTAROYCE: It was a pretty touchy subject at that time.

  DABLAKE: Why was that?

  DABLAKE: Callie?

  DABLAKE: Callie?

  DABLAKE: Are you still on?

  CALISTAROYCE: I’m here. Sorry—Mandy came in to borrow a suitcase.

  That was pretty good timing, Mandy.

  DABLAKE: Oh, is she going somewhere?

  CALISTAROYCE: She is going to go visit her boyfriend in Pittsburgh on Friday.

  DABLAKE: So no Girls’ Night on Friday?

  CALISTAROYCE: Nope. Not this week.

  DABLAKE: Couldn’t you do it tomorrow night?

  CALISTAROYCE: Nah. Melanie is leaving town tomorrow. And Mandy goes out every Thursday night.

  DABLAKE: Oh.

  DABLAKE: And you?

  CALISTAROYCE: And I have therapy after class, right?

  DABLAKE: Right. But I would’ve postponed for Girls’ Night…

  CALISTAROYCE: No big deal.

  DABLAKE: Okay. Back to tonight’s therapy.

  DABLAKE: Why did that test make you so mad?

  CALISTAROYCE: Because of Tony, I guess.

  CALISTAROYCE: We weren’t even dating at that point, but I couldn’t get the whole thing off of my mind.

  DABLAKE: What “whole thing”?

  CALISTAROYCE: The relationship. The weight thing. The arguments. The breakup.

  DABLAKE: Arguments about?

  CALISTAROYCE: Sex mainly.

  DABLAKE: Okay…

  CALISTAROYCE: He wanted to have sex, obviously. I mean, he was a 19-year-old male. We’d been dating for a long time. And we were in college. It wasn’t really a farfetched idea. For most people.

  DABLAKE: But…

  CALISTAROYCE: But I wasn’t every other college girl. I’ve never been every other girl. Obviously.

  Or we wouldn’t have had to conduct this unconventional late night therapy chat session.

  DABLAKE: And Tony thought you could be?

  CALISTAROYCE: No…I don’t think so. I think he thought he could change me. Or “fix” me, as I said before.

  CALISTAROYCE: When that didn’t work, he tried to manipulate me. Especially near the end.

  DABLAKE: How?

  CALISTAROYCE: He used my feelings for him. Tried to twist them around for his own benefit.

  DABLAKE: How?

  You already used that question, Doctor.

  CALISTAROYCE: He talked about having a future together. He told me he thought that he was looking at the rest of his life when he was with me. I knew I didn’t feel the same way.

  CALISTAROYCE: I also knew he was lying.

  DABLAKE: You didn’t feel the same way
?

  CALISTAROYCE: Not really. I mean, I thought I loved him, and I was terrified of the idea of him breaking up with me. But I didn’t trust him at all.

  CALISTAROYCE: And I couldn’t see how I would ever be able to share a home and have a family with someone who refused to understand the OCD thing, someone who antagonized me about it.

  You used the word “share,” Callie. Way to sound like a tool.

  CALISTAROYCE: Oh, and the weight thing. After the nachos, I couldn’t even have him touch me without cringing. That couldn’t be the rest of my life. It couldn’t.

  DABLAKE: How did he react to the whole cringing thing?

  CALISTAROYCE: I doubt he even noticed. And if he did, he would’ve just blamed it on the OCD. Never on himself.

  DABLAKE: All right, so you just kept saying no to him about furthering the relationship physically?

  I was right. He does spell “all right” correctly. Figures. The chefs on television have just plated their Beef Wellington. My stomach growls. {Jimmy Buffett takes that as a cue to sing “Cheeseburger in Paradise.”} Stop, Callie. Back to reading.

  CALISTAROYCE: Well, kind of. I did try to come around.

  DABLAKE: How?

  CALISTAROYCE: Well, I told him my conditions.

  DABLAKE: Conditions?

  CALISTAROYCE: Yes. Obviously, I was pretty worried about a couple of things. Pregnancy. Diseases.

  DABLAKE: Pregnancy, I understand. But diseases? Weren’t you two together even in high school? I had the feeling that you guys hadn’t really dated seriously before each other.

  CALISTAROYCE: We hadn’t. But remember, I didn’t trust him. What if he had slept with some other girl when he was out with his new obnoxious friends? What if he started doing drugs with those friends and shared a needle or something?

  CALISTAROYCE: The numbers started to add up in my head. If he had slept with one girl, and she had slept with two other guys, and if they had each slept with three people…

  CALISTAROYCE: Or…if he had shared some sort of needle with two other people, and they had each shared one with five other people…you can see how fast this all added up—just like in the old public service announcements about sex.

  CALISTAROYCE: By the end of my calculations, he had approximately every single contagious and sexually transmitted disease.

  CALISTAROYCE: And soon I would too.

  DABLAKE: But you weren’t going to let that happen.

  CALISTAROYCE: Of course not. I got the most heavy duty looking condoms I could find after going on the pill.

  DABLAKE: And he didn’t agree to using a condom? Seriously?

  CALISTAROYCE: No, he did. But I wasn’t done yet.

  CALISTAROYCE: I wanted him to get tested for Hepatitis, AIDS, everything.

  DABLAKE: Oh.

  DABLAKE: And he wouldn’t do it?

  CALISTAROYCE: Well, he fought it for a while. He told me that I was ridiculous and paranoid.

  CALISTAROYCE: And I was, of course. But I still needed him to go through with it.

  CALISTAROYCE: So eventually he did.

  DABLAKE: Well, good. What happened?

  CALISTAROYCE: According to the tests, he didn’t have any diseases.

  CALISTAROYCE: So we planned to spend the first weekend together when break ended and I went back to school.

  DABLAKE: So he came out to Pierce that weekend?

  CALISTAROYCE: He did. For the last time.

  DABLAKE: You broke up?

  CALISTAROYCE: Yes, he ended it after I didn’t really sleep with him.

  DABLAKE: Didn’t really?

  CALISTAROYCE: Well, we were pretty close. Clothes off. Me feeling like a whale. Condom on, lights off, and him just closing in. And me pushing him away just in time.

  DABLAKE: Why?

  CALISTAROYCE: It had been over a week since his blood test and I couldn’t stop wondering if he had slept with someone or done something since then.

  CALISTAROYCE: He just wasn’t clean to me.

  DABLAKE: Mom always used that phrase—people that were and were not “clean to her.”

  CALISTAROYCE: I guess the terminology just comes with the disease. Like a package deal.

  DABLAKE: I guess so…

  DABLAKE: So he wasn’t clean to you?

  CALISTAROYCE: No.

  DABLAKE: Was he ever?

  CALISTAROYCE: I don’t know. I guess it seemed so at first when our relationship was young and I thought I knew him. But once college started, and he had his new friends and new ideas, that all changed. Or became more clear maybe.

  DABLAKE: So what happened next? After you pushed him away?

  CALISTAROYCE: He exploded. About everything. He said that he was done trying to put up with me, that he couldn’t “fix” me. So he left. And that was it.

  CALISTAROYCE: I haven’t seen him since.

  DABLAKE: Wow. I’m sorry.

  CALISTAROYCE: Don’t be. I’m not anymore.

  DABLAKE: But you were in the moment?

  CALISTAROYCE: Of course. But not like you’d think.

  CALISTAROYCE: Even though we didn’t really do anything, I, of course, figured I was pregnant and diseased.

  CALISTAROYCE: So I spent the next month taking over-the-counter pregnancy tests and trying to get myself to schedule a blood test for STDs.

  CALISTAROYCE: Obviously, I wasn’t pregnant. No immaculate conception for me. I did do some weird jumping up and down routines and some hitting of my abdomen to make sure no imaginary sperm somehow entered my body through a cut on my hand or something and managed to work its way through my body to impregnate me weeks later. Then I spent days feeling guilty about that. And I never did get myself to the doctor for a blood test.

  DABLAKE: You realized you couldn’t possibly have gotten an STD?