Black Box

by Julie Schumacher

  “I have to go,” Lila said. “But I wanted to tell you. You know, in case.”

  In case of what? I had always liked Lila but now I wanted to uncap the marker I kept in my pocket and write something obscene on the front of her sweater. “Do you know where she goes?” I asked. “When she’s not in class?”

  Lila was already walking away. “I think she hangs out in the bathrooms sometimes,” she said.

  42

  “Dora? Are you in here?”

  There were two girls’ bathrooms on the first floor, one on the second, and one on the third. It took me nine minutes, running up the stairs, to look in each one.

  “Dora?”

  No answer. I didn’t even know which classes she had decided to cut.

  43

  “Don’t flip out on me,” Dora said. “I’m not ditching that often. I just need to think sometimes.”

  “Oh,” I said. “About what?” We were walking home from the bus stop. It was almost Halloween, and a couple of little kids in costumes were running around on the neighbors’ front lawn.

  “I can’t sit there hour after hour with people talking at me.” She moved her hands in the air like little puppets. “It all seems so pointless.”

  “Why is it pointless?” School could be boring sometimes, I thought, but as long as you went to class and read and learned things, it was hard to argue that it didn’t have a point.

  Mr. Peebles was waiting on the front porch for us, cleaning his whiskers and looking annoyed.

  “I think I’m failing French,” Dora said.

  I dug my house key out of my pocket. “You could get a tutor.”

  “Yeah. Except that I’m also failing chemistry. I hate Mrs. King. She’s a walking fossil.” Dora picked Mr. Peebles up and scratched his furry stomach. “You probably have all As, don’t you?”

  “No.” I had a B in biology. I opened the door; the house was quiet. “How are you ditching and not getting caught?” I asked when Dora put Mr. Peebles down. “Doesn’t the office call home when you’re missing?”

  “They only call if you don’t have a written excuse.”

  “And?”

  Dora paused, then opened her backpack and showed me a note on my mother’s new monogrammed stationery: Please excuse Dora Lindt at 11:35 today; she has a doctor’s appointment.

  I looked at the signature; it was almost perfect. “You could get in a lot of trouble for this.”

  “Maybe. But the only way that would happen”—Dora tore up the note—“would be if someone found out and told the school.”

  44

  “I think being at school is hard for her,” I said to my mother while we were folding laundry. It was Saturday and I had offered to help. Matching socks was generally acknowledged to be my specialty.

  “You worry about your schoolwork, and Dora can worry about hers,” my mother said. “You look like you’re turning into a statue.”

  I had started playing a mental game that involved touching each sock only once: after a sock had been touched, I had to find its mate without touching any other article of clothing first. I was holding a white gym sock in my hand; in front of me on my parents’ bed were about a hundred other white socks.

  “I’m not talking about schoolwork, though,” I said. “I’m talking about being in the building. For seven hours in a row—it’s pretty stressful.”

  “She can hardly stay outside the building,” my mother said.

  “Yeah. That would be weird.” I picked up another white sock—luckily it matched—and folded the two elastic tops together. “The thing is,” I said, but just then my father came into the bedroom. He kissed me on the forehead and handed my mother two bottles of pills. “Where’s Dora?” he asked.

  My mother tilted her head in the direction of Dora’s bedroom door, which was closed. We could hear loud music, mainly the throbbing bass of the speakers.

  I picked up a sock. “What are the pills for?” I asked.

  “Dora’s prescriptions,” my father said. “They’re going to try something new.”

  “What kind of pills are they?”

  My father opened his mouth to answer, but before he could say anything, my mother held up her hand: “I don’t think Elena needs to know that.”

  My father closed his mouth and pretended to zip it.

  “Why are they trying something new?” I asked. “How would they know if something was wrong with the old pills?” I held a striped sock in one hand and a plain one in the other.

  My mother tucked the pills in her pocket and shook out a pillowcase with a snap. “What are you getting at?”

  “Nothing. So are the new pills antidepressants?”

  “I’ll be downstairs if anyone needs me,” my father said. He left the room.

  I decided to segregate ankle-from kneesocks. “Maybe you should get Dora a different psychiatrist,” I said.

  “I don’t think so.” My mother shook out another pillowcase.

  “Jimmy’s mother hated Dr. Siebald.”

  “That’s enough, Lena.”

  “Jimmy says the doctors at Lorning just lock the kids up and give them drugs, and if we don’t even know whether the pills Dora’s been taking do her any good—”

  “I said that’s enough!” My mother was clutching the rim of the laundry basket. “Whatever you’re trying to say, I don’t want to hear it. It doesn’t help to have you latching on to half-baked theories that you’ve picked up at school from people who wouldn’t know a hospital from a hole in the ground. I don’t have time for that, Elena.”

  Maybe you should make the time, I thought. I left the socks where they were and went back to my room.

  About ten minutes later I heard my mother carry the laundry basket downstairs. I listened for footsteps and the clink of dishes in the kitchen. Then I went into my parents’ room and opened their closet and unzipped the outer compartment of my mother’s blue suitcase. She always hid our birthday presents inside it. I found the two bottles. Lindt, Dora, each of them said. I copied down the information from the labels and zipped the prescriptions back into the suitcase.

  The music pounded, louder and louder, in Dora’s room.

  45

  The new pills (she started taking them the next morning) didn’t make Dora drowsy. They made her angry. She called my father a jackass.

  “You people don’t give a crap about me,” she said.

  I’d already promised she could trust me. Who did she mean by you people?

  46

  “Were you checking the bathrooms again?” Jimmy asked.

  I had just flopped down at the desk next to his. We were in Mr. Clearwater’s room, supposedly reading the morning paper. Every Monday we spent the first fifteen minutes of the period trying to find relevant or “stimulating” articles about current events. Most of the kids read the comics or did the puzzle.

  “If you keep this up, your teachers are going to think you’ve got dysentery.” Jimmy crossed his legs at the knee and leaned back in his chair, the newspaper open on his lap. He actually read it; other than the faded long-sleeved T-shirt and the partly shaved head, he looked like a businessman on his lunch break. “Besides,” he said, “didn’t you tell me that you hate to miss class?”

  “I should probably be checking the locker room,” I said. I was still breathing hard. “But Dora doesn’t like gym.”

  Mr. Clearwater decided to get out from behind his desk and circumnavigate like Columbus around the room. He was jiggling a piece of chalk in his hand. “Mr. Zenk? I’m sure you won’t mind if I ask you to cease and desist from all conversation.”

  “Right,” said Jimmy.

  “Ms. Lindt?” Mr. Clearwater paused beside my desk, still jiggling his chalk. “Are you finding anything illuminating or relevant in this morning’s news?”

  I pushed my hair behind my ears and stared at the newspaper on my desk. “I’m still looking,” I said.

  “Good. You don’t want to give up.” Mr. Clearwater leaned toward me, his poi
nted mustache approaching my face, and turned the page. Only after he was back in his chair at the front of the room did I notice that he had left a chalky thumbprint in the left-hand corner of an article about depression. Teenage Epidemic? the headline asked. And beneath the headline, in smaller letters: How Safe Are the Drugs?

  I tore the article out (Mr. Clearwater pretended not to notice) and wrote Jimmy a note in the upper margin: Vcnm ml vjg zsq? Then I watched him slowly puzzle it out. Talk on the bus?

  47

  A bunch of guys hooted and whistled when I sat on the last torn seat by the emergency exit, next to Jimmy. “Hey, Jimmy Zee! Getting some action?”

  Jimmy ignored them. “What’s up?” he asked. He smelled like soap.

  I was full of a nagging uneasy feeling. A stand of gray trees flickered by through my window. Dora wasn’t on the bus. My mother had picked her up earlier for a doctor’s appointment.

  “Remember you asked me about the kinds of medicines Dora was taking?”

  Jimmy nodded. The bus dragged itself up a hill.

  “I wrote the names down,” I said. We had reached the first stop. The bus doors opened with a wheeze and closed with a sigh. In the seventh grade I’d seen a movie about the human heart, and ever since, I’d thought that a bus door opening looked like the valve of a heart when the blood was pumped through. “I have them here in my pocket.”

  We stopped at a light. I found the piece of paper where I had written down the names of the drugs and I showed it to Jimmy. I had even remembered to write down the doses. “So? What do you think?”

  Jimmy barely glanced at it. “I think…that I’m not a pharmacist,” he said. “You haven’t asked, but I might as well tell you: I’m planning to be a chef. I’m going to open my own restaurant. You can come if you want—I’ll save you a table.”

  We went over a bump; my leg pressed against his. I put the piece of paper back in my pocket. “I’ll eat in your restaurant,” I said. “But in the meantime, would you help me find out about these pills?”

  48

  Chocolate milk with club soda. I was almost beginning to like the taste.

  “Jimmy, I thought you were going to help me with this,” I said.

  “I am helping.” He had set me up with a laptop at his kitchen table.

  “You aren’t helping. You’re cooking.”

  “This is just a snack,” Jimmy said. “But it looks pretty good.” He had spread an assortment of crackers with a mixture of cream cheese and horseradish and capers (what the heck were capers?) and dusted the top of each with some kind of spice.

  I looked back at the computer screen. The Web sites I had found so far were confusing. They talked about “suicidal ideation” and the side effects of antidepressants: weight loss, weight gain, nausea, dry mouth, dizziness, sweating, tremors, sleep disturbances, mood changes, blurred vision, kidney failure, seizures, and yawning. Yawning? One of the Web sites warned about the danger of any antidepressant prescribed to anyone under eighteen.

  “You’re going to love these,” Jimmy said, putting a wooden platter of tiny open-faced sandwiches near me on the table and sitting down. “What have you found out so far?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He looked at my hands, which were in my lap instead of on the laptop. “Did you try asking the computer to help you?”

  I pushed it toward him. He ate a cracker. Then, with his mouth full, he said, “Maybe you should decide what it is you want to find out. And what you don’t want to find out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Forget it. Here.” He handed me a cracker. “You’ve got to try one of these. The fresh pepper is crucial.”

  I ate a small bite—a corner of a cracker.

  “Do your parents know she’s ditching class?” Jimmy asked, starting to type.

  “My parents are impossible to talk to. And Dora told me not to tell them. I don’t want them sending her back to Lorning.”

  “There are worse things than Lorning,” Jimmy said. “Besides, if she had a relapse they could send her somewhere else. They could send her to an RTC out of state.”

  “What’s an RTC?”

  “A residential treatment center.” Jimmy kept typing. “Like a halfway house.”

  “So it’s like a jail?”

  “No. It’s a treatment center. Like the one near the Superstop, except that that one is for alcoholics. You aren’t eating your snack.”

  I lowered my voice. “We’re not going to send Dora away to live with alcoholics.” I pictured my sister in a run-down shack in the woods with a bunch of old men.

  “Okay, whatever,” Jimmy said. “Here’s one of her prescriptions. And it’s got a black box.”

  “A black box?” I pulled the laptop toward me. “Do you mean, like the ones on airplanes?”

  Jimmy looked at me as if to see whether I was joking. “Um, no. A black box is a warning. It means that anyone taking these pills should be kept ‘under close observation.’ There’s an increased risk of suicide.” He pointed to the screen. “‘Especially during the first few weeks.’”

  I stared at the laptop. “Close observation,” I repeated. “What do they mean by ‘close’?”

  Jimmy picked up a cracker with a mound of stuff on it. “Open your mouth.”

  I took a bite. The stuff on the cracker tasted bizarre—lumpy and salty—like some sort of cross between a vegetable and a squid.

  “It means someone needs to watch her,” Jimmy said. “Whenever they switch her meds like that, you have to be careful. Someone should keep an eye on her.”

  I remembered what my mother had said: from an early age, even though I was younger, it had seemed to be up to me to keep an eye on Dora.

  “These might be too salty,” Jimmy said, pulling a murky green sphere from his cracker. “Do you think I used too many capers?”

  “Dora doesn’t swallow her pills sometimes,” I said. Because I was nervous, I stuffed an entire cracker into my mouth.

  Jimmy closed the laptop. “Say that again?”

  “I don’t know whether she’s still doing it,” I said, trying to chew and talk at the same time. “But I saw her put them under her tongue and then spit them out.”

  “Do you know if she’s saving them?” he asked.

  I was going to ask him why she would save them, but the pepper and horseradish collided at the back of my throat and squeezed off my airway as if someone inside me had turned off a faucet. I managed to take one small sip of air before I started to cough.

  “If you’re choking, just make the international sign for it,” Jimmy said, holding his hands in front of his throat. “Because I know how to do the Heimlich. I took a one-day course.” He watched me cough for a while (he seemed to be hoping for an opportunity to show off his Heimlich maneuver skills), then finally shuffled off to the sink for a glass of water.

  I drank most of it down and wiped my eyes while Jimmy watched.

  “Are you crying?” he asked.

  “No, I’m coughing.” I drank the rest of the water. “I never cry. My therapist wants to talk to me about it.”

  “You never cry?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve never liked the way it feels. It always reminds me of throwing up. You get little signals in your mouth. That watery feeling. It’s the same with crying. I don’t want to go there.”

  “Huh. I kind of like crying—not that I do it all the time,” Jimmy said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, look at that, there’s salt water coming out of my eyes.’” He ate another cracker. “I’ll bet you that crying is actually healthy. You know the human body is about sixty percent water? It’s almost the same percentage that the earth is ocean.”

  “I’m not sure where you’re going with that,” I said.

  He put his hands in his pockets. In black ink, one pocket said right hand here. The other said other hand. “How are you doing right now?” He cocked his head. “Sixty-five percent water? Seventy percent?”

  Why on earth did I tell him any
thing? I stared at the scar on his lip to make him feel bad.

  He touched the scar with his tongue. “How long have you been going to a therapist?”

  “Not very long. Forget I said anything about it.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell anyone. I’m good with secrets. But therapy’s probably a good plan for you,” he said.

  “I should go home now.” I stood up. “Have you ever been to a therapist?”

  “Who, me?” Jimmy laughed. “My mom’s in the field.”

  49

  “Do you think you’re yawning a lot?” I asked Dora. I had found her sitting on the couch when I got back from Jimmy’s. I imagined a black box inside her, like some kind of new and mysterious organ.

  “I don’t know,” Dora said. “I yawn when I’m tired.”

  The TV was on but we kept the sound low: we needed to slip past my mother’s anti-TV radar.

  “Are you sweating?” I asked. “I mean, more than usual?”

  “What do you mean, am I sweating? Do I look like I’m sweating?”

  “No.”

  A commercial for sleeping pills came on. Dora pulled her feet up onto the couch, her bracelets jingling.

  “Do you have tremors?”

  “Jesus, Lena, give it a rest.” She shook out a blanket and lay down on the couch. “I’m going to take a nap. Scram.”

  I turned the TV off and went into the kitchen. My mother was putting on her jacket and collecting her purse. “I need to run to the grocery store,” she said. “Dinner at six-thirty.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’ll leave me a note if you go anywhere?”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” I wondered if we were speaking in code, if my mother was telling me to keep an eye on Dora.

  I read the comics and the horoscope (“The events you have been looking forward to will not take place as expected”) and went back to the study. “Dora?”