“Uh, no.”
“Smoking helps with my ADD. It keeps me from kicking the crap out of people who piss me off.”
I thought about that day at school when he had beamed the tennis ball so hard, it broke the window. Then it made sense that Thayer was seeing a shrink. He had attention deficit disorder. ADD. Those three letters explained why he couldn’t sit still in class.
The pipe crackled. Thayer said, “If everyone smoked weed, there would be more peace in this urban wasteland.”
I laughed. Then I said something I immediately regretted.
“Did you take, like, medication? I mean, for your ADD?”
“I’ve been eating Ritalin since I was ten.”
“Oh.”
“But it makes me want to puke.”
“I know,” I told him.
He stared. “You on anything?”
My skin tingled. I couldn’t think of how to sidestep his question, so I told the truth.
“I’m taking Paxil.”
“Yeah?”
In the distance, the boater revved his engine. It’s against the law to run a boat up on a flat, but that didn’t stop them.
“Actually, I don’t want to take it anymore.”
Thayer nodded. “I would eat Ritalin like candy before I’d mess with Paxil again.”
“You’ve tried it?”
“Sure. Paxil, Wellbutrin, BuSpar, Zoloft, Prozac,” he said, tapping his fingers. This was enough to make my own fingers itch. I buried them in my pockets.
“Geez. Why so many?” I said.
“Because they don’t work,” he said. “At least, not for me.”
Did they work for anybody?
“How long you been on it?” he asked.
“A few weeks.”
“Even my mom’s been on Paxil,” he said. “Didn’t do her any good.”
Too many words. I couldn’t concentrate. My own mother would be waiting in the school’s empty parking lot, on a rampage if the nurse followed through with her phone call. I had to get out of there fast.
“Let’s go back,” I said.
Thayer flicked ash into the canal. “Ever see a manatee?” he said, staring down into the water. “They’re like dinosaurs. They move so slow, the boats just plow them over. People act like manatees don’t belong in this city, like they’re outcasts or something. But they’ve been here a long time, doing their own thing, you know? You’ve got to give them props.”
“I’ve never seen one,” I said. “Have you?”
Thayer slipped the pipe into his pocket. He slunk ahead, in some other time zone.
When we got to school, the streetlights were burning holes in my eyes. Maybe I had inhaled too much of Thayer’s secondhand smoke. It was late, but the sky was blank, pure static.
Thayer stopped in front of the parking lot. Mama’s rustbucket, a 1980s Nissan Stanza, flashed its headlights at us. I had to sneak away.
“That’s my mom,” I said. “I gotta go.”
Thayer ambled toward the street. I could still see him, the way sparklers left marks in midair.
Seconds after he left, it started to drizzle. When I was trapped in the car, Mama asked about the “boy.”
“I don’t really know him,” I said.
The windshield wipers squeaked. Mama put on the turn signal, pulled into the left lane, and let an ambulance pass. I spotted those flashing lights and imagined Mama in the hospital, pale walls in a pale room. I started counting traffic lights. One, two, three.
“Are you okay?” she asked, rubbing my head. “Do you want to tell me what happened at school today?”
No, I didn’t.
“You used to be a straight-A student.”
I watched the ambulance vanish into the rainstorm. Mama was driving too slow, white-knuckling the steering wheel.
Her tone dropped a notch. “Why are you behaving like this?”
“Like what?”
“Your voice is filled with anger all the time. You snap at me over nothing and then somehow it’s my fault for feeling attacked,” she said.
Of course my voice was filled with anger. I was angry at my parents for taking me away from my friends and then expecting me to behave like it was no big deal.
She pulled off at the exit. Although it never felt like autumn in Miami, cold-weather fashions crammed the store windows. Not that I could wear those fur “diva” coats or corduroy jackets. Not here.
Rain rolled off the dashboard, defying gravity. I picked at a hangnail.
“This isn’t like you, Fin. I don’t understand why you’re acting out.”
She stroked my hair. I had to be good, she said, and square things away.
“Just try a little harder,” she said.
That was so much easier said than done.
Total Constant Order
What would you like to talk about?” asked Dr. Calaban. She gestured toward the bookcase, crammed with her African violets.
I couldn’t talk. It meant too much to her. I was holding back to maintain control over the situation, yet I never felt in control of anything.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll go first.”
She asked about my visit to the school nurse, but I didn’t feel like spilling my guts. Now Dr. Calaban had other plans.
“I’d like to talk to your regular physician,” she said, pronouncing the word like my French teacher, “fah-zeesh-yon.” Dr. Calaban was a non-native like me. I wanted to ask if Haiti was dangerous, like they said on the news, all those murders and kidnappings. That’s what a friend would’ve asked. But we weren’t friends.
“One doctor is bad enough,” I said.
She frowned. For a moment, I almost worried about hurting her feelings. “Let’s get back to your routines.”
“Who doesn’t have routines?”
She watched my fingers.
“I can’t stop counting,” I admitted. “I even dream about numbers. Invisible armies of them.”
Dr. Calaban wrote in her notebook.
“Frances, are you familiar with OCD?”
Did she say ADD? No, that was Thayer’s problem.
“I think you might have obsessive-compulsive disorder.” She peeled a Post-it note off her computer monitor, ripped a thin strip, and scribbled on it. I took the note and gawked at the words. The stickiness stayed on my fingers no matter how much I rubbed.
“Does that mean I’m losing my mind?” I asked.
Dr. Calaban folded her smooth brown hands. “No, you’re not losing your mind. OCD is also known as the doubting disease. This means that you often find yourself stuck on the same thoughts, spinning your wheels in circles.” She made a loopy gesture, the bone bracelet clattering.
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“I’d like to up your prescription. Paxil has been known to help those with OCD. Should we give it a try?”
The last thing I needed was more Paxil. The side effects had grown so bad, they even leaked into my dreams at night. It was getting harder to tell the difference between my nightmares and my world when I was awake. Every morning, I found moon-shaped fingernail marks in my palms. My jaw ached from clenching my teeth. The pain seemed to last all day, although I never remembered when it began.
“Will the medicine make me feel any different?” I asked.
“Different in what way?”
I didn’t answer.
“Are you talking about side effects? Because Paxil can sometimes cause headaches.”
I kept staring at her creepy skull bracelet.
“Frances, how is the Paxil making you feel?”
“Like crap,” I told her.
“Okay,” she said. “Can you give me more details?”
“There’s no escape from it. Even my dreams are painful. I wake up with a stomachache, my head won’t stop throbbing, everything tastes weird. I thought the meds were supposed to make me feel better, not worse.”
Dr. Calaban looked surprised. “If you don’t share what’s going on, I ca
n’t help you. That is, if you want my help. What do you think? Can we work together?”
I thought for a second. “Yes,” I said.
“Good. Then let’s start by adjusting the dosage of your medication.”
I groaned. “So I have to keep taking it?”
“For now,” she said.
“How long is ‘now’?”
“There are some people who choose to remain on antidepressants. But that’s your decision. I would like you to continue taking it in conjunction with our sessions.”
Who cared what she wanted? I had my own plans. That’s when I decided to quit taking Paxil altogether. Not that she needed to know.
Her bracelet rattled as she scribbled in the notepad.
“What are you writing?”
“Should I share it with you?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Your obsessions are a means of gaining control. You couldn’t stop your parents’ divorce. I want you to see that you can take control in a more constructive way.”
“How? Slitting my wrists?”
Her expression didn’t change. “Are you being facetious?”
Dr. Calaban waited and didn’t look away.
“Just kidding,” I said. “I’m doing better, really. I’m not counting the clock so much anymore.”
I stared at the potted violets. I wanted to slide my tongue across their whiskery leaves.
Dr. Calaban cleared her throat. “What do you mean ‘counting the clock’?”
“That’s why I can’t sleep.”
“Frances,” she said. “Why can’t you sleep?”
I shifted in the chair, squeezing its legs like I’d done during our first session.
“I count while I do things.”
“Like what?”
“Like brushing my teeth.”
“Can you tell me what it feels like?” she asked. “Counting?”
“I can’t stop doing it. If I lose count or finish on an odd number, then I have to start all over again.”
Dr. Calaban locked her dark eyes on mine. I decided not to tell her the other part of my tooth-brushing obsession. I couldn’t stop thinking about germs. A toothbrush is crawling with microscopic bugs. Amazing what you learn by watching the Discovery Channel.
“Do you know when you started counting?” she asked.
It was the last month of school before we left Vermont. I was lying in bed, unable to move.
When I think about my old room, I imagine it exactly the same, only dustier. There was a stuffed hound dog slumped by the door—its sole purpose, keeping my room open. Beside it was one of those cheesy lamps that glowed like a movie screen. (It depicted a forest fire, not the most comforting bedtime scene.)
A thought popped into my head. “I wish Dad would die.” So I said the words out loud. “I wish Dad would die.” The words just bubbled up. I tried to ignore them, but they kept rolling: “I wish Dad would die, I wish Dad would die.” I tried thinking, “I love Dad,” but it didn’t help.
I glanced at the clock. If I could squash the words before the next minute rolled around, everything would be okay. I squeezed my arms against my chest and counted.
Eight minutes. Nine minutes. An uneven number. For some reason, it looked wrong, so I counted again. And again.
I couldn’t go to class and concentrate on A Tale of Two Cities or the life cycle of a fruit fly or El Niño’s effect on global weather patterns. I started counting everything in the room. I counted the boys with unlaced sneakers and the girls with curly hair. I counted stains on the ceiling and fingerprints in the window.
It was never enough.
NOVEMBER
14 15 22 5 13 2 5 18
Chester Copperpot
Thayer passed notes to me in class. Not the junior high variety, with felt-tip boxes along the margins: “Check ‘yes’ if you’re bored.” Thayer had other questions.
“If you could be happy for a year,” he wrote, “but remember nothing, would you do it?
“Would you put up with horrible nightmares for the rest of your life if you could win a million dollars?
“Which is better: to die like a hero or in your sleep?”
I honestly didn’t know.
For the entire week, Thayer would pass me a note before science class. His random thoughts took this order: electronic voting booths, the difference between Haitian voodoo and Cuban Santeria, night swimming, Internet blogs, and hairless cats. Soon I had a collection of notes hidden in my desk. I read them over and over until my eyes blurred.
At lunch, I sank back to earth. I knew that everyone was staring at Thayer and me. So we hid in the music room. Thayer materialized there with his binder and markers. He picked the lock with a paper clip and snuck into the empty room, with its thicket of music stands. We cranked the stereo, a dusty Panasonic that only played tapes. It was a relief dodging the lunchroom, with its sour popcorn smells and gossipy caste system.
Thayer wasn’t born in the ’80s, but he had memorized the decade in movie quotes.
“Come to me, son of Jor-el. Kneel before Zod.”
“I’m a mog. Half man, half dog. I’m my own best friend.”
“Chester Copperpot, Chester Copperpot.”
“Sir, you are a vulgarian.”
He could be Chunk in The Goonies, Barf in Spaceballs. Gasping, he ranted about Klingons and Kryptonite. He knew all the music: the stuttering beats of Kurtis Blow, the robotic bass lines of Big Daddy Kane.
His energy had an edge, as though he might combust, Wile E. Coyote–style, if I stopped paying attention. I was his audience, a human laugh track.
Thayer Pinsky could quote lines from commercials so ancient, they pre-dated the Internet.
“Crisp and clean and no caffeine.”
“When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the red ones last? Do you suck them very slowly or crunch them very fast?”
Thayer said that it all started in elementary school. Fed up with his miserable grades, Thayer’s mom dragged him to a doctor.
The doctor asked a lot of questions. “Do your thoughts bounce around like a pinball machine? Does your brain feel like a TV set with all the channels on?”
The night before a test, he found himself battling man-eating robots on the PlayStation or walking Bozo, his English bulldog. He wasn’t lazy. When he studied between video game sessions, he felt okay. But when he sat at his desk, he couldn’t concentrate.
The doctor offered Thayer a weapon.
Ritalin.
When Thayer swallowed the pill, he went to school and waited for the static to return when the meds wore off. Instead, he got a tingle between his eyebrows. In class, sitting quietly at his desk, he crunched up math equations like Pac-Man.
In the final hour of school, waiting for his second dose, his mood turned sour. Ritalin’s magic didn’t last long. At home, he took another pill. Soon he was tingling, though not like before.
He began to lose weight. His long, flat feet no longer fit his sneakers. He missed the way he used to feel, his needle hovering at ninety miles per hour. Most often, he floated in space.
“A group of foxes is called a ‘skulk,’” Thayer said at lunch.
We were hiding in the music room, listening to gloomy old jazz records. It was getting late. Soon lunch would be over. Mr. Clemmons would shove his key in the lock any moment now.
“Sometimes they’re also called a ‘leash,’” he added.
Thayer reminded me of an orphaned animal. His dad had split once Thayer started walking and talking. His mom worked in a hospital all the time, helping sick kids.
“She sees them more than me,” he said. He was fiddling with his glove. If Thayer was in a bad mood, he wore a mechanic’s glove on his left hand. He’d growl, “I’m agga-rah-vated.” He’d been wearing that stupid glove for a week. Finally he took it off.
When I asked why, he said, “Because I’m not agga-rah-vated anymore.”
Thayer couldn’t’ve cared less about his SAT vocab. All day, he
had doodled robots during class. Sometimes he’d write down his dreams. In them, he was always an animal—a lion, a dolphin, a fox. He believed that he morphed into these creatures.
“It’s not the fact that my mom’s dating,” he told me. “It’s the fact that she’s replacing my dad. I don’t need more adults in my life.”
“My dad’s dating someone. It’s weird. But I guess it’s good that my parents aren’t together and fighting,” I said.
“Yeah. I just wish Mom would wait until I was older.”
I turned off the record. The melody spiraled out of measure. “Thayer, you’re like one of the smartest people I know. Why are you bombing English?”
He shrugged. “Because it’s tedious and I really don’t care.”
“You should care.”
“Who gives a crap about mapping sentences? It bores me spitless. And poetry sucks beyond comprehension. My interpretation is always ‘wrong’ because it doesn’t match the teacher’s.”
“But what about rap?” I asked. He was always writing rhymes on every available scrap of paper. “Isn’t that poetry?”
That got his attention. “Look, I can handle writing on my own time. In class, it’s different.”
“True,” I said.
“Besides…English is my last subject of the day. That’s when my Ritalin wears off and I zone out.”
I wanted to tell him about my Paxil nightmare. If anybody would understand how it messed with my head, it would be Thayer. But he had already switched gears.
“It doesn’t help that I’m dyslexic,” he said.
“Does that mean you see words backward?”
“No. That’s what most people think.” He jiggled his foot. “Really, it means I’m ‘memory impaired.’ Written words don’t stick. So I bring a tape recorder to school.”
A knot tightened my throat. I said, “Do you think you’re, like, dependent on Ritalin to help you study?”
Thayer stared right into my eyes. Maybe he was examining his own reflection. “If you’re trying to say I’m addicted, you’re wrong.”
“Don’t get mad. I didn’t mean to be in your face about it.” I studied the clock on the wall. “We should get going.”
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