Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  He puts the brain model back and neatly aligns it with the edge of the sink. “Olive. I can’t tell you everything.”

  “Why not? I thought we were a team.”

  He sighs. “Because I’m not sure what everything means yet, and the last thing I want is to cause you even more unnecessary anxiety. You heard the doctor. No stress.” Then, recognizing her unhappiness at this: “Please, just…let me do my thing for a bit, and you take the Depakote and try to get more sleep, and we’ll see what happens.” He steps in closer, turning so that he is leaning up against the cabinet next to her, and puts his arm around her shoulder. “If you take the pills and you’re still having your visions, then we’ll know Dr. Fishbein was wrong, won’t we?”

  She looks away from her father and shivers, suddenly cold from the blasting air-conditioning. She has a terrible feeling that her father believes something about her mother that she will not like at all, something so awful that he isn’t willing to say it aloud. She senses them sliding apart again, as if they are standing on opposite staircases in a bank of escalators, one rising as the other sinks, watching unhappily as their faces fall into darkness.

  You’re going to be just fine. Her mom was always right about that, wasn’t she? Right up until the day when nothing was fine at all.

  —

  Her father drops Olive off at school just as the lunch bell rings. The classroom doors bang open one by one and release a murder of Claremont Girls, skirts flying in their haste to raise their blood sugar levels. Olive wanders through the Sunshine Wing toward the cafeteria, acutely aware of the orange vial of Depakote nestled in her backpack. She just won’t take it. Who will know if she doesn’t, anyway?

  The cafeteria is serving avocado sandwiches and chocolate pudding and a lentil salad studded, alarmingly, with bloody-looking beets. She gathers her tray and locates Natalie sitting at a table under the big window with Ming and Tracy. Her heart sinks—she hoped to find Natalie alone.

  When she approaches, Natalie slides down to make room for her. Olive puts her tray down across from Ming and Tracy, who are leaning their heads together and talking in lowered voices, their hair falling in protective curtains around their faces. The Smart One and The Pretty One, that’s how the Girls always refer to them; Olive suspects that Ming and Tracy cling to each other because they complete each other, together making a whole person that is better than the sum of their parts. She remembers how she used to sit behind that curtain of hair with them, giggling and gossiping. Was it only a year ago? It’s not that they aren’t nice to her anymore; it’s just that they’ve shifted Olive to the periphery since her mom disappeared. She wishes Natalie didn’t still hang around with them.

  “Where were you this morning?” Natalie asks Olive. Her hair circles her face like a halo, wild and out of control, clipped haphazardly over one ear with a kid’s butterfly barrette. Olive looks at the barrette admiringly—Natalie never seems concerned about what anyone thinks of her—and then takes a bite of her sandwich, resisting the urge to reach out and smooth down a particularly unruly curl of Natalie’s hair. The avocado sandwich is unpleasantly soft and squishy in her mouth.

  “Doctor’s appointment,” Olive says with her mouth full, glancing at Ming and Tracy, who, thankfully, seem less interested in her than in vigorously stirring their chocolate pudding into syrupy goo while discussing the plot of the latest episode of a zombie show that Olive has never watched.

  “Because you fainted on Monday?” Olive winces at how loud Natalie’s voice is, wishing for once that her friend had a volume control.

  “Yeah,” she says, lowering her voice. “Dad took me to a neurologist. So ridiculous. He made me get an MRI.”

  “Hardcore.” Natalie puts a hand on Olive’s arm, giving it a squeeze that tingles even after Natalie pulls her hand away. “You should get a copy of the MRI and frame it. That’s so cool.”

  Ming and Tracy have stopped talking and are listening intently. Ming turns to examine Olive, her eyes widening. She’s got a giant crusted pimple on her nose that she’s attempted to conceal with cover-up; her black hair is as shiny as patent leather except for the frizzled bits where she’s dyed it in violet streaks. “I saw you fall! What was up with that?” Ming turns to Tracy. “She, like, pitched straight down the front steps. Mr. Heron was freaking out, he called an ambulance and everything.”

  “Oh, it was nothing. I just fainted. Probably dehydrated or something.” Olive picks at her sandwich, extricating a particularly stringy bean sprout. “So, did I miss anything this morning?”

  But it’s too late. Ming and Tracy are looking at her with more interest than they have in ages, and Natalie’s brow is rumpled with concern. “So wait—did you tell the neurologist about your visions?” Natalie asks. “Is that why you had to get an MRI?”

  “Visions?” Tracy’s voice is whispery and dramatic. She peers curiously at Olive. Her hands tug at her blond hair, which is burnished to a trophy shine in the filtered sunlight. The shimmer in her face lotion sparkles in a distracting way.

  “Guys, Olive is psychic. She’s been talking to her mom and…stuff.” Natalie glances sideways at Olive, eyebrows raised as if she’s asking for approval for this revelation, although clearly, it’s too late for that. She leans across the table, sliding her hands palm-down toward Ming and Tracy, as if inviting them into the secret. Olive shrinks in her seat, uncomfortable with this. “So wait, did you have another vision on Monday? Is that why you fainted?”

  Olive nods, her face burning. Ming is staring at her, brow furrowed, as if Olive has just revealed herself to be a peculiar new life-form, and Tracy’s jaw is ajar in a fairly moronic expression that she is attempting to conceal by drawing her hair across her mouth. Olive knows they are going to talk about her the second they leave the table.

  “Of, like, what?” Tracy breathes.

  Olive glances at Natalie for reassurance. Natalie is smiling back at her, seemingly unconcerned, so Olive relaxes a bit. “Fire,” she says. “I saw a giant wall of fire.”

  Tracy’s face falls. “Just—fire?”

  “It was a huge fire. Really hot,” Olive says, feeling defensive. The tiny hairs at the back of her neck tingle as she recalls the dread that she felt in the moment when she first came out the front door of the school: The familiar falling sensation, the burning smell, and then her mother suddenly standing next to her. Trees all around them, so dense that the sky was blotted out and the whole world seemed to go dark.

  Something in her mother’s hand: a match.

  Her mother had looked at her sideways: “Whatcha think? Should I do it? Burn it all down?”

  No, Olive thought. Don’t.

  But it was too late, because already a wall of flames was jumping across the horizon, so real that she could have sworn she felt the heat of it pressing her backward. She could hear an ominous rumble nearby of something collapsing, or maybe just the sound of the flames devouring the oxygen; a sickening sense of danger hung in the air, a sensation of bodies at risk. Her mother’s? Her own? And then the next thing she knew, she was lying on the ground surrounded by a circle of girls, punctuated by Mr. Heron’s uncharacteristically worried face.

  “So, what? Is that supposed to mean something? The school’s going to catch on fire?” Ming does not bother to conceal the note of skepticism in her voice.

  Olive shrugs, looking at Natalie for backup. But Natalie leans back on the bench, her hands braced behind her, waiting for Olive’s explanation.

  What is the vision supposed to mean? A fire is just a fire unless you know where or when or how or to whom. As the three girls look at her, demanding logic or mystery or insight, Olive thinks of the vial of Depakote in her backpack, of the amorphous gray mass in the MRI, of the neurons in her head pinging erratically. Her specialness sliding away, leaving her as just a mental case with a dead mom.

  And yet even with the pills sitting in her backpack in rebuke, nothing feels as true as—no logical hypothesis or medical technology can compare to—
this feeling of her mother lurking somewhere just out of sight. It has lodged there, in her chest: the tether binding them. She isn’t going to give anyone—not the doctor, not Ming and Tracy, not her father—the opportunity to take that away.

  She squints at Ming and Tracy. “I think I saw you in the flames,” she says to Tracy. “You were screaming and your hair was on fire.”

  Tracy clutches at her precious hair, her eyes wide, and Ming throws Olive a disgusted look; but Natalie giggles beside her, and Olive feels a little surge of vindication.

  “Oh, come on, that’s such bullshit,” Ming says. “You’re faking.”

  “Swear to God,” Olive says, but she’s lost the high ground already, so it comes out as a squeak.

  “Whatever, wacko.”

  “Language.” Olive feels a hand on her shoulder and looks up to see Vice Principal Gillespie looming over her. She’s wearing yet another of her scratchy-looking suits, the ones that Olive suspects she wears to repel any unwanted bodily contact. The girls all freeze in their chairs, running through the rest of their conversation to see if anything un-Claremont-like has been uttered. Gillespie’s index finger taps gently on Olive’s collarbone. “Can I speak with you for a moment?”

  Olive stands and grabs her backpack. Ming, Tracy, and Natalie watch her go with sympathetic eyes, and then their heads inevitably swing toward each other, their hair once again forming privacy curtains for their whispered conversation.

  Olive follows Gillespie out of the cafeteria to the courtyard. It’s sunny out, a respite from the rain, the air clean and crisp.

  “I just spoke with your father,” Gillespie says. She smells faintly of lemons and damp wool. “He told me about your appointment with the neurologist; that you’re having seizures. Are you feeling OK?”

  Olive nods, flustered.

  “You have your medication on you?”

  “My father told you about that?”

  “Of course,” Gillespie says briskly. “School policy. No medication on campus unless we’ve been informed. We’ll keep a copy of the prescription on file, so there’s no misunderstanding, and monitor its consumption. You’ve taken it already today?”

  Olive shakes her head. “I’m supposed to take it with food.”

  Gillespie gestures toward the cafeteria. “I’m pretty sure I just saw you eating your lunch.”

  Olive stares at her, uncomprehending. “You want to watch me take it? Seriously? Because honestly, that’s a very Orwellian move, Vice Principal Gillespie.”

  Gillespie laughs toothily. She runs her hands along the edges of her skirt as if making sure there aren’t any errant fibers or dust flakes. “You’re a good student, Olive. I know that. But lately you’re failing to show up to class, and your teachers are saying you seem distracted. I assumed it was related to your…family situation and was going to suggest some more sessions with Mrs. Santiago. But, well, seizures, that’s a different story. It’s my job to make sure that whatever health issue you’re dealing with doesn’t get in the way of your education. And the first step is making sure you’re taking your medication. So”—she forces a smile—“let’s not wait.”

  Olive reaches slowly into her backpack and pulls out the bottle of pills. “I don’t have water,” she says.

  Vice Principal Gillespie points at an ancient water fountain on the edge of the courtyard, jammed with abandoned gum and soggy leaves. “I see a water source right there, Olive.”

  Olive trudges over to the fountain. It smells like mold and rust. She glances over her shoulder to check if Gillespie is watching. She is. Olive fishes out a pill and puts it on her tongue and then takes a gulp of water from the fountain, surprisingly cold and crisp. The pill sticks briefly in her craw, making her gag, but with a second gulp it slides down her throat. She stands there staring at the shingled siding of the cafeteria wall, royally pissed. What will happen now? What if the visions do stop? What if her vision that morning was the last time she would see her mother?

  She turns around and shoulders her backpack. “Please tell me we aren’t going to do this every day, Vice Principal Gillespie. Is it too much to ask for a little trust here? I’m sixteen, not twelve.”

  “Don’t think of it as a trust issue,” Gillespie says. “It’s about taking good care of one of my favorite girls.” She pats Olive crisply on the arm and walks back into the cafeteria.

  As the door to the cafeteria swings open and closed again, Olive can see Natalie staring at her through the glass, eyebrows wrinkled into furry question marks. What’s going on? she mouths. Olive shrugs, so Natalie repeats herself—What’s going on?—as if Olive didn’t understand her the first time. Olive gives up and turns away. She takes a shortcut across the lawn and around the edge of the building, grinding her sneakers into the soggy grass, leaving muddy size-seven divots marking her path. She thinks she’s walking aimlessly until she reaches the front entrance to the school and finds that she is still walking, right out onto the sidewalk, and only then does she realize that she is leaving for the day.

  Let them expel me, she thinks. I don’t care if I ever go back.

  When Olive was eleven years old, Billie left us. That’s really what happened, isn’t it? For years I’ve been painting the whole episode as “Mom needed time to herself,” just a hiccup in the history of our lives together, but the fact of the matter is this: She left and didn’t tell us where she was going. For three days, she didn’t answer her phone. And then, out of the blue, she was back.

  So where did she go?

  The day that she left, she and Olive got in a fight. It wasn’t their first one. They weren’t joined at the hip anymore, not since she started at Claremont, but I figured, well, that’s what happens with moms and daughters, right? The daughters hit puberty and pull away. They need to individuate. They get in screaming matches about skirt length and curfew and doing their own laundry.

  But the thing was, they weren’t fighting about that kind of stuff.

  “Natalie invited me to go to church with her this Sunday,” Olive announced at breakfast on the morning that Billie left.

  Billie, busy getting food on the table, dropped the milk jug down with a thud. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” she said.

  “I think that’s the general idea,” I quipped.

  Billie didn’t look amused. She sat down on the other side of Olive. “You are not going to go to church, OK? You know who goes to church? Sheep. People who can’t decide things for themselves. People who are too cowardly to take responsibility for their own lives, so they shunt it all off on some deity. You are stronger than that, Olive.”

  Olive frowned. “Natalie goes to church.”

  “Maybe it’s time to find a friend who doesn’t, then.” Billie picked up the milk and poured a giant glug over the Rice Krispies in Olive’s bowl. “You forget, I was raised in the church. I know things that you don’t know.”

  Olive’s face brightened. “But, Mom, it’s different, see? Natalie’s church—it’s progressive. So it’s OK.”

  “God is God.” Billie stood up, milk in hand. “We’ll go hiking on Sunday instead, how about that?”

  “I hate hiking,” Olive muttered.

  Billie froze halfway to the fridge. The cereal in front of Olive fizzed and popped in the silence.

  I jumped in. “Hey,” I said. “If she’s supposed to be deciding things for herself, we should let her start by deciding about church.”

  Billie turned to face me, her face red with fury. “Don’t. Undermine. Me.”

  I was acutely aware of Olive sitting next to me, a soggy spoonful of cereal dripping en route to her mouth, wide eyes flicking between us. I felt something then, a faint but distinct pressure on my toe; the heel of a sneaker making deliberate contact with mine. A message from my daughter. Maybe she was trying to thank me, maybe she was trying to tell me not to worry, maybe she was warning me to back off: The exact intention being expressed through her foot wasn’t clear. What was obvious was that some invisible shift of alignment in our ho
usehold had just occurred; and where once it had been Olive and Mom, with Dad watching from the perimeter, there was suddenly the possibility of an Olive-and-Dad alliance.

  “If you want to go to church, go to church,” I told Olive, and then looked at my wife, who stood there with a hand on the hip of her jeans, staring death at us. “One sermon. It’s not going to kill her. Bore her to tears, maybe, but it won’t kill her.” And then, gentler, because I thought I knew what this was all about: “Not everyone in the church is like your father. I know you’re worried about that.”

  But instead of softening, Billie went stiff, as if someone had shoved a garden rake up the back of her T-shirt. “I don’t appreciate you using my past as a weapon against me,” she said. Her voice was neutral, but underneath there was something deathly sharp. She turned deliberately away, putting the milk back in the refrigerator, sweeping the cereal box back in the cupboard. By the time she turned back to face us, she was smiling again. “Banana, anyone?” she asked, dangling a bunch from her forefinger.

  That night, when Olive and I got home from school, Billie was gone, along with her suitcase. A note: Back soon. So that’s what I told Olive: that her mom was taking a little time to herself. That she’d be back soon. Wasn’t that what Billie said in her note? I didn’t have any solid reason not to believe her, even after Friday turned into Saturday, and Saturday became Sunday, and soon became not soon at all. Annoyance turned to worry, and then to hurt, and then to fury.

  And then Billie came back. She walked into the house Sunday evening with her arms full of groceries, as if she’d just popped out for some milk. Acting as if nothing had happened at all.

  I remember standing there in the kitchen when she waltzed in the door and feeling like I’d been hit in the face with a plank. Staring at Billie, tanned and glowing and beautiful, like a model advertising some fancy lifestyle retreat, I was filled with a kind of rage: How can you look like that after what you just did to us? And yet, as she locked eyes with me, lighting up with apparent delight at my presence, I felt her emanating some curious magnetic draw on me. It reminded me of how I felt that first day on the J Church in San Francisco, as if I were being sucked blindly into her vortex.