Doctor Carroll sank back into his chair. “That’s it for the day. I’ll tell you, I’m exhausted. I give you guys my all, you will see that, every week. I am unstinting in my desire to help you. And now, we will finish off with a meditation. Much like Savasana in yoga, we always end our sessions with a meditation to allow the fruits of our work to take seed. Now, remember, if you don’t show up for a session, you owe me $50 per, so that’s $550 if you decide you’re not coming back. You signed up for this; you made a commitment. You can back out but then you must pay the price, that’s the way it goes in life. Any questions before we end?”
He looked around, but the group was stunned and mute.
“Excellent!” He grinned. “I’m going to ring this bell and we’ll do a ten-minute meditation and I’ll set my phone alarm because sometimes I fall asleep during this part. But try to think about what happened and try to contextualize it in terms of your own phobia. I can only do so much. You have to do the rest.”
He set his phone alarm and rang a bell.
“I’ll walk you through the start,” he said and he yawned. “Your feet are planted firmly on the floor, your eyes are closed, and you’re aware of your breathing, in and out. You feel your back against the chair and you can feel the blood tingling in your veins. You open your mind to receive the fruits of what we have learned today. You open your spirit to the acceptance of learning and you open your arms wide to receive the healing of the light.”
With that, he promptly fell asleep and snored ever so gently.
Amelia opened her eyes and saw that the others had their eyes tightly shut and were following the rules. All except for Mike, who grinned at her. She gave a small wave. They sat there, desperately trying not to giggle, and the alarm eventually sounded and woke Dr. Carroll.
“Off you go, then,” he shouted. “Have fun with it, D.T.O.T. wherever you can, and see you next week!”
The group scuttled out and much to her consternation, Amelia found that Mike was walking next to her. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
“What did you think?” Mike asked Amelia, breaking the silence.
Mike was even more handsome up-close than Amelia had thought. His grey eyes were clear and wide-set and he had dimples when he smiled. And oh, that mouth. Never had a mouth had such an effect on her.
“It was interesting,” she said. “But since I don’t have a problem, I find therapy irrelevant.”
“But you’re here,” he said. “There must be someone who thinks you have a problem?”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean anything. We’re forced to live according to social constructs and rules that we did not create. Those rules don’t work for every individual. Some of us never agreed to them in the first place.”
“But if we didn’t have rules, there would be anarchy,” Mike argued.
They were standing with the others from the group, waiting for the elevator to arrive. The others were trying to persuade Shannon to get on the elevator with them. “I don’t know,” Shannon said doubtfully. “It’s taking an awfully long time to get here. It’s a sign that it’s going to get stuck and I shouldn’t take it.”
“All it means is that there are too few elevators for a hospital this size,” Gino piped up eagerly.
“Exactly why I shouldn’t take it,” Shannon said.
“They may be slow but that doesn’t mean they get stuck,” Gino countered.
“Who made you come here?” Mike whispered and his mouth was close to Amelia’s ear and she thought it felt delightful.
She sighed. “I’ll lose my welfare benefits if I don’t come,” she told him. “And we can’t afford that. I’m working toward my Masters in English literature and unless I get welfare, I can’t afford to do it. Therefore, I don’t have a choice but to be here. I am writing a thesis on Joan of Arc and the pervasive impact she has had on the image of female heroism in literature. I am quite obsessed with Joan and I can’t lose my place at university.”
“She was an epileptic and a schizophrenic,” Mike commented and Amelia shrugged.
“Perhaps, but she was also so much more than that.”
The elevator arrived with a noisy ping and the battered steel doors shuddered and shook themselves open.
“Come on,” Gino said. “You can do it, you can!”
But Shannon took one look at the crowded steel box and turned and ran the other way.
“Not going to get better like that,” Gino remarked.
“Very chatty for a person who’s scared of public speaking,” Mike whispered to Amelia who smiled and nodded.
They reached the ground floor.
“There’s my gran,” Amelia said, reluctantly. “She’s waiting for me. No one trusted me to come. Frankly, they were right.”
“Hello, I’m Mike,” Mike said, going straight up to Ethel. “I’m in the group with your granddaughter.”
“Nice to meet you, Mike,” Ethel said, smiling.
“I thought you were shy?” Amelia countered. “You don’t seem very shy to me.”
Mike laughed. “I have trouble in boardroom situations, not person-to-person interactions. See you next week?”
Amelia was disappointed. She had been hoping he’d ask for her telephone number or email address.
“Yeah,” she said. “See you next week. Come on, Nana, let’s get the heck out of here.”
They headed towards the revolving doors at the entrance, and Amelia spotted Shannon staring at the triangulated glass cage with distrust. Shannon finally gave up and pushed her way through the wheelchair-access door and left, looking despondent.
“That young man looked very nice, dear,” Ethel said. “How was the whole thing? It took longer than I thought it would. I guess the doctor’s not particular about keeping exact time.”
“It was weird, Nana, it was very weird. I don’t want to talk about it. Can we get Swiss Chalet for dinner?”
“I don’t see why not. We’ll see what your mother says.”
Amelia gave a snort. “She’ll say it’s fine for us but then she’ll have some stupid protein drink or something. Don’t you think she looks more bizarre than ever, Nana?”
Megan’s body building obsession had progressed to the point where she did, in fact, look bizarre. Ripped and taut, her skin glowed a strange orange from tanning lamps, and her face had the odd rictus of a botoxed smile.
“I hate it,” Amelia said. “She looks like a freak.”
“It makes her happy, dear,” Ethel said. “It makes her happy.”
“She’ll get cancer from that all that stupid tanning,” Amelia predicted. “And she smokes like a chimney to stay skinny. The whole thing is sick, if you ask me. She should be in here, doing this stupid group thing, not me.”
Ethel privately agreed with her but couldn’t admit it out loud. “We all have our issues, dear,” she said.
“You don’t,” Nana, Amelia said.
“Tell me about Mike. He seems like a nice young man,” Ethel said, trying to change the subject as Amelia was in a funk.
Amelia shrugged. “Nothing to tell. What’s the bet he’s got a girlfriend? I can’t imagine him being single.”
“He probably thinks the same thing about you, dear.” They reached the car and Ethel beeped it open.
“You’re very lovely, you know,” Ethel said, putting the key in the ignition. “In fact, you’ve grown into a beautiful young woman. Your hairstyle is a bit unusual, but I do like it better all one colour and the black is very nice.”
“I’m not bad looking, Nana, but I’m not right in the head, am I?” To Amelia’s disgust and Ethel’s surprise, Amelia started to cry. “Mike could never go out with me, even if he wanted to,” she wailed, “because I don’t do things right. I’ll be alone the rest of my life.”
“Aw, honey, that’s not true,” Ethel said and she unbuckled
her seatbelt and hugged Amelia. “Come on, dear, don’t cry. If you ask me, you’re perfectly fine. It’s just that society has a bunch of rules and we’re expected to play by them. You can learn the rules, dear, you can. You may not like them or understand them, but you can learn them. I know you can. You can do anything you want to in this life.”
“But what if I end up like Dad?” Amelia blew her nose loudly.
“He’s different, dear, he always has been. Different from you, I mean. Henry’s troubles always ran much deeper. He’s a wonderful, tragic, sad boy, and he always has been.”
Amelia laughed. “Dad, a boy! He’s practically middle-aged.”
“And I’m a geriatric,” Ethel started the car and smiled. “But seriously Amelia, you don’t have what your Dad’s got. You’ve got your own brand of unusual, but it’s not like his, you don’t have to worry about that.”
She pulled out of the hospital parking lot. “He loved you so much when you were a baby,” she said. “I never saw anybody love a child like Henry loved you. But then Grampa died and Henry just went away.”
“I don’t want to end up like him, Nana, or, even worse, like Mom. She’s so bitter, so angry. I don’t want to be like either of them.”
“And you won’t, dear,” Ethel sounded certain.
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because, dear, you’ve got a large helping of your grandfather and me running through your veins and neither of us is anything like your parents, so there you go!”
Amelia gave a small laugh. “Yeah, okay. Swiss Chalet?”
“Swiss Chalet it is.”
Take the right bus, take the right bus. Amelia consulted her notepaper.
Nana had helped her. If I am going to the university, I need to take the 55 East. If I am coming home, I need to take the 55 West.
She had a list of instructions for all the places and bus routes she could possibly take.
“Try to pause before you act, dear,” Nana had said. “Don’t give in to impulse. Even if you have to wait for the next bus, that’s fifteen minutes, so what?”
“Fifteen minutes is forever, Nana!”
“Read a book, listen to music, but don’t give in to impulse, dear.”
Take the right bus, take the right bus.
Amelia stood at the bus station, waiting for the 55 East to come along.
Oh, the temptation. Bus after bus pulled up, each promising a new adventure and a brand new experience. It was true that she had taken many of them before, but who knew which stop would call out to her? Who knew which person she would follow home, just to see where they lived, and what their lives were about.
“That’s creepy,” Megan had said, piling lettuce onto her plate at dinner one evening when Amelia tried to describe why she felt the urge to explore the way she did.
“It’s not creepy,” Ethel had defended Amelia. “She’s interested, curious. You should write books,” she told Amelia. “Make up stories about people and their lives.”
“I’m not interested in fiction,” Amelia said. “I like to witness real people’s lives. But most of them are so boring. I wish they could see how boring their lives are because then they would change them.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” Megan commented, her lasered-white teeth glowing eerily in her tightly-stretched orange face. “Because they wouldn’t think they were boring. Most people are happy as clams. Clams who don’t know how bored and boring they really are.”
But catching a random bus was a thing of the past. Today, there could be no whim-sponsored rides and no following of arbitrary people home. And why? Because of Mike, that’s why.
Amelia clutched her piece of paper. Mike wouldn’t take a random bus or follow people home. He just wouldn’t and she wanted to be like him, so he would like her.
She wondered what he did for a living. She felt certain that it had to do with computers. He had that look about him, clean-cut, like he liked the world to be neat and tidy and defined by lines of ones and zeroes.
Amelia was twenty-two and she’d never had a boyfriend. She hadn’t wanted one either, until Mike. She wondered if perhaps it was the setting in which they had met that had sparked her interest. She had considered that him being there indicated that he himself must have issues, in which case he would hardly be in a position to judge hers.
But when his issues turned out to be less warped than hers, it was back to being an unequal affair, not that anyone matched Amelia on the warped scale of equalities, and she recognized that. And she knew that her attraction had very little to do with his being able to stand in judgment of her or not. It had to do with sheer physical attraction, which, for her, was a first.
If I can just take the 55 East and then come straight back home at the end of day on the 55 West, then maybe he’ll like me, she thought. It will be a test, a test of our future.
She shook her head. What future? There was no future for Amelia Chameleon, not with anybody. The boy who had called her that had liked her, but he had admitted that her inability to control her erratic lifestyle was more than he could take. “I need to know that if you say you’ll meet me somewhere, that you will,” he had said. “Not that you fell asleep and turn up four hours later. Or, that you decided to go for a walk instead. You live inside your head and I can’t go there with you.”
But she hadn’t liked him, not like that, so it hadn’t mattered. But she liked Mike and so it mattered now.
The 55 East eventually arrived and Amelia found herself unable to get onboard.
I can’t do what I should. I am allergic to shoulds. Shoulds are for losers. Losers do what they should. I do what I like. I am free, they aren’t. Don’t get on the bus, don’t follow lists, don’t follow rules, don’t be boring like the rest of the world, be me, be free.
Amelia watched the 55 East bus pull away and then she turned and walked home.
“I couldn’t do it,” she said to Nana, despondent. “I couldn’t do it.”
“Did you take another bus?” Ethel asked.
“No. I waited and waited for the 55 and then when it came, I couldn’t get on. It would have been like admitting to the biggest failure yet, that I am doomed to be boring, doomed to live a boring stupid life like everybody else.”
“Back up a moment,” Ethel said. “That you didn’t get on another bus was a big step forward. You would have, you know. In the past, you would have.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“No maybes,” Ethel insisted. “You’d be halfway to hell and gone, phoning me at midnight to come and get you from wherever you ended up.”
Amelia grinned. “I usually find my own way back,” she said.
“Yes, dear, for the most part you do. And for the record, I never mind coming to get you. Now off you go again. Go and try again.”
What? Now?
“Yes, dear now. Off you go, go and catch the 55 East.”
“But I’m tired!”
“Who said life was easy? I’m sure it wasn’t me. Come on. I’ll walk there with you.”
“Ah, no, Nana, you don’t have to, I’ll go, I will.” She kissed her grandmother on the cheek. “I’ll try to come back with a positive report.”
“Good luck!” Ethel called after her and she felt a wave of sadness as she watched Amelia’s determined form disappear around the corner, setting off to try again.
This time, when the 55 East came to a stop, Amelia rushed at it, clambered on and sat down, her heart pounding. What had Dr. Carroll said? “You will experience unpleasant body sensations. You will feel as if your sanity is being threatened. You will feel sick. You will feel vulnerable. Identify these feelings in your body and notice them, but know they are not you, they are just feelings, just sensations. Imagine if you were in a room and the fire alarm kept going off by mistake and every time it did, you leapt up and ran out? That’s what this panic is. I
t’s an over-active fire alarm going off when it shouldn’t.”
Thinking about this made Amelia feel slightly better although her heart was still racing. Who on earth felt this level of panic simply because they took the bus they were supposed to? But it didn’t matter about anybody else.
When she arrived at her destination, she got off the bus and waited for the return ride to take her home. She was exhausted and she spent the journey back leaning her head against the window with her eyes closed. It was easier to manage when she did not see all the places that beckoned her to get off.
“Well done, dear!” Nana exclaimed when she got home.
“I’m shattered.” Amelia slumped down in her chair.
“It will get easier,” Ethel told her. “Everything does, with time.”
“Time and your macaroni and cheese,” Amelia told her. “Hint, hint.”
Ethel smiled. “With pleasure.”
“I’m going to play some video games,” Amelia said. “I need to lose my mind for a bit. Dr. Carroll says we mustn’t engage with our problem areas, so I’m having nothing to do with my mind for the rest of the night.”
“Sounds good, dear. Of course you can always watch Murder She Wrote reruns with me.”
“Nana! Kill me first!”
When the day of the next therapy group arrived, Amelia got up early and washed her hair.
“You don’t need to take me today,” she told her grandmother. “I will get there by myself and don’t worry, I am going.”
Ethel hid a smile. “Fine, dear. Call me if you want a ride home. But wait, it’s ten in the morning! Why are you leaving now? Your group only starts at one!”
“So I’ll be a bit early,” Amelia said. “I’ll read a book or something. Don’t worry Nana. I’m focused, I promise you I am.”
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