And then Britt, who was unexpected. “A gift from heaven,” she heard her grandma Stanley say as she stood there, holding baby Britt. It was the first time she’d seen her grandma since she was a baby. It was like Britt came along and suddenly she had grandparents. She never understood that.
Dad changed. It was slow and then it was fast. No airplane and split time with her sister, which was fine because she got to watch him make Britt feel so happy, and that made Tillie happy, too. But then her teen years, and Dad went away, almost like. It was subtle at first. He was there but not there. Questions about her day at school at the dinner table, but no roller coaster anymore. That was for Britt only. And sometimes it felt like they were roommates instead of father and daughter, and she’d see him putting Britt to bed and the bottom would drop out and she was all alone in the world, even with her mom the locomotive always there, ever present. And then Amir, and the big fight, and Dad washed his hands of her.
“How’s the choreography coming?” her dad asks, not looking up from his corn pudding.
“Good,” Britt says, and for a nanosecond Tillie wants to push Britt off the George Washington Bridge. Then she realizes the awfulness of this and she makes that thought disappear.
“Awesome,” Dad says, and he digs out a big spoonful of corn pudding and shovels it into his mouth and Tillie watches out of the corner of her eye and she is just out of ideas about how to survive this cold war anymore. This war of no words that plays out, every night, at the dinner table. The war she does not understand even a little. It makes her think of the boy falling, and that just makes it worse, and suddenly she can’t breathe. She gasps involuntarily, and thankfully Britt is going on about the dance competition and how she hopes her new choreography will win Spence first place, because no one seems to notice.
But then Tillie’s mom gently puts her hand on Tillie’s wrist. Tillie wants to pull away because it’s like, no, don’t. Don’t get too attached to this wrist, please. You’re already too attached. It might not be here tomorrow. She tenses up slightly and she feels a slight squeeze.
The squeeze means, I see you’re struggling. We’ll talk after dinner, okay?
Her mom. Winnie. The only reason Tillie still is. And even with her mom’s love, Tillie almost wasn’t. And she’s gonna wind up telling her, and that’s gonna suck. Tillie always tells her mom everything.
Tillie looks at her dad. She feels sorry for him, in a way. She was plan B, and seven years later plan A happened, and this particular plan B is so not what he would have signed up for. It’s a shame that adoption agencies can’t say shit like, Now, just so you know, this cute infant will one day get über dark and do monologues at talent shows about having sex in which she likens herself to a cow, and you’ll be super embarrassed in front of the other well-heeled parents. Shall we still proceed?
She tries to communicate to him through telepathy. To sear into his brain that she’s sorry she’s so difficult, and she knows she’s lost him, and by the way it’s not a manageable loss, and she’ll change, she’ll do anything if he’ll love her again. He looks up toward her. Face blank. Eyes boring right through her. Not seeing anything. And her whole body shivers because it puts her right back up on that bridge again.
On the Upper East Side, a girl named Molly lazes in her room, thinking about how sucky it is that Spence’s zero-tolerance policy on bullying doesn’t consider nuance.
No doubt it’s bad to roast someone for being fat, but that was so not the point. The point is there were three girls there that day. Gretchen’s and Isabella’s things were way worse, but they didn’t get leaked.
Gretchen’s sex kitten video totally roasted Tacy Evans, and even though Tacy is a slut and not in the empowering way but in the you’re bringing down the entire gender with your lack of standards way—she does married men, so come on—it was still way over the line and Molly knew that. It was way worse than what Molly did minutes later. And in between, Isabella’s thing on Savanya was way over the line and they didn’t even record it, thank God. Molly was embarrassed to be in the room when Isabella was doing it, to be honest.
But then it had been her turn. And yeah, making fun of someone’s weight is obviously not cool, but it wasn’t meant for public consumption, okay? It was basically a dare. So. Goodbye, Brown. Adios, Michigan. And all over a stupid cow.
Up at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, Michael Boroff is finishing up his notes after seeing a girl with severe bulimia when the phone call comes. It’s a number he doesn’t recognize, and usually that means a telemarketer. For some reason, he answers.
“Is this Michael Boroff?”
He rolls his eyes. What are they selling this time? “Depends who’s asking.”
“Hello, sir. This is Lieutenant Jonathan Riggs from the Twentieth Precinct. We’re at your home and it seems like you’re not here. May I ask: Where are you?”
He laughs because his first thought is so … not right. Off target. His son, Aaron, shoplifting dirty magazines, which is actually a memory from his own teen years, back when dirty magazines were a thing. Ridiculous idea. Anyway, he’s not at all the kind of kid—
“Mr. Boroff?”
“Oh. Right. Um. Can you at least—is my son in trouble? What did he do? He’s never done anything—”
“Mr. Boroff. Could you please come home? We can send a car. Would you like that? Would you like us to send a car?”
Michael Boroff loses control of his legs a little. It’s so sudden and drastic and unexpected. His head and his body are operating completely on their own. His legs buckle and turn to jelly, and he laughs and then the laugh turns into another sound Michael has never heard from his body before. It’s a sound of protest, like he’s protesting whatever this is, this unwanted call that has made his legs do one thing, his mouth another, his brain a third.
He says, “What? What’s happening?”
“Where are you, Mr. Boroff? We’ll come get you and bring you home.”
“No. Tell me. You have to. What’s going on? Please?”
“Where are you, Mr. Boroff? Please tell us where you are. We’re coming your way, okay?”
After dinner, Tillie goes to her bedroom, lies on her bed under the sheets, and puts the comforter over her face. In her little cocoon, she tries to imagine where the boy is now. Bottom of the Hudson? Is his soul gone? Is it in outer space? In some kind of heaven place?
It could just as easily be me. It should have been me.
Ten minutes later, she hears the door open and shut softly and hears her mom take her usual seat in the desk chair, rolling it over to the bed. It’s gotten so it’s embarrassing, how often Winnie has to do this. Tillie is seventeen, and still her mom has to talk her down. Tell her that she is loved, she is appreciated. Why can’t it stick?
Tillie pulls the comforter down and stares up at the ceiling. She doesn’t say it for maybe a minute. Says nothing, calculates what will happen if she doesn’t speak, and what will happen if she does. Finally, she blurts it out:
“I went to the George Washington Bridge after school and thought about jumping.”
“Till!” her mom says, and she climbs onto the bed next to her and holds her tight from the side. Tillie can’t feel it. Can’t feel anything.
It’s the right tone, the right movement. The totally wrong feel. She loves her mom to death and she knows her mom loves her back every bit as much. So why does it feel like she’s the girl in the bubble, the girl no one can touch?
What’s wrong with her?
“Did you really do that, Till?”
“Yeah,” Tillie says, monotone.
Her mother starts crying. Tillie can’t.
“I just—I don’t know what to do, sweetheart. Has Dr. Brown helped at all?”
Dr. Brown. Tillie thinks it’s perfect that her psychologist has the same name as her favorite brand of cream soda. She has been about as effective as soda at helping Tillie deal with, as she says, her core belief that she doesn’t deserve love.
Tillie shrugs.
“I wonder if we need to put you in someplace. Inpatient, I mean.”
This makes Tillie sit up. “No,” she says. “No.”
The idea of losing her freedom is … inconceivable to her. A total deal breaker. Patently unfair. Like it’s not enough that she lives her life underwater. She should also, apparently, be told what to eat, when to eat. Who to see, when to sleep. She’d rather die than go inpatient. Martha Sorenson went inpatient for her bulimia. Now Tillie walks in on Martha disgorging the contents of her stomach in the third-floor bathroom twice weekly at a minimum.
“We need to come up with a plan.”
Erase what happened with Amir? With the video? Maybe figure out how to get Dad to pretend I’m still alive?
The way her dad has washed his hands of her? Too much. Over lunch, she’d texted her parents about the A-minus she’d gotten on her report on Prohibition. Her mom immediately responded with a “Yay!” No response from Dad. Which in and of itself meant nothing, because of course the cold war, and she wasn’t sure if he’d just say a quick good job or ignore it, and sometimes he got busy at work. But then she looked on Facebook, and who do you think was posting pictures of Britt from their weekend outing to Barnegat Lighthouse? Like a half hour after her text? And then a response to a comment about how beautiful Britt was, an hour later, when Tillie checked again after calc class?
Light of my life, he wrote to Uncle Gorman.
Nice, Tillie thought. But no. Not nice. Because sometimes these things made Tillie dark, and sometimes when Tillie got dark, she found herself sitting in the hallway between the senior lounge and the lunchroom, scribbling on a piece of paper because she worried if she stopped, if she lifted the pen a centimeter off the page, she might stand up, walk somewhere, and do something way worse. Because the hollow feeling in her gut actually hurt, like outsize pain, like way worse than it should just because her dad didn’t love her as much as he loved his actual, real biological daughter. This sort of thing was the reason weak people hurt themselves. Meanwhile strong people would be in a war and watch their best friends’ heads get shot off and be basically fine. She’d read a book about girl soldiers fighting in World War II, and about a million times she thought, This. This is why I suck. Because these girls kick actual ass, and I would have basically walked into oncoming enemy fire to end it all.
She hated how weak she was.
“What kind of plan?” Tillie finally asked.
Her mother pressed her hands into the sides of her face, like she was trying to keep her head from exploding.
“Just … something that will get you through this hard time,” she says. “Maybe have you see a psychiatrist. See about medicine.”
Tillie laughs, slightly relieved that at least this plan isn’t a freedom-losing one. But still. No. Apparently a therapist like Dr. Brown isn’t enough—she’s going to need a psychiatrist who can prescribe pills. This was everyone’s answer. How many of her friends were on Ritalin or Zoloft or Wellbutrin? Oh, Mandy has the sadness, give her a pill. Oh, Tonya gets nervous when she has to give an oral report. Shoot her full of diazepam.
“No,” she says.
Her mom says something she rarely says, and she says it in a tone she never uses.
Her mom shouts, “No!”
This gets Tillie’s attention.
“No, Tillie,” she says. “No to your no. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t hear, every day, that you’re suicidal, and keep allowing you out of my sight. I know how much you’re hurting, darling. But do you have any idea how scared I am every day you go off to school, and I have to hope you’ll make it back home?”
Tillie throws the blanket over her face. She can’t let her mom see the way her face contorts hearing these words. She can’t let anyone see. Ever again. She wishes she were under the water in the Hudson. She wishes she were anywhere but here.
Her mother tries to pull the blanket down, but Tillie is too fast. She holds it tight.
“Tillie,” her mom pleads.
Nope. She’ll hold the blanket over her head until her mother leaves.
No one will ever see her face again.
CHAPTER 2B: APRIL 18
Dr. Brown’s office is down the steps just to the side of the entrance of a fancy prewar building on Park Avenue. The skinny, dark-skinned doorman with an American flag pin on his lapel nods at Tillie. He always nods at her, every time, and she wonders just how much crazy he sees, and how privileged he must think she is, because, well, she’s not exactly sure what a session with a Park Avenue shrink costs, but she’s pretty sure it’s more money than a doorman makes in a day, or maybe even two days. For an hour of whining to a doctor who could not care less.
“I’d like you to ask Dr. Brown if I can join you for the last fifteen minutes,” her mom says as she digs through her pocketbook.
Tillie doesn’t respond. It feels like she doesn’t care, but in a way she does, because she’s busy doing math. Dr. Brown plus Winnie equals a brainstorming session about a plan.
“Sweetheart?”
“Fine,” Tillie mutters.
“I know this is hard,” her mom says, putting a thin, muscular arm that feels a bit too much like a snake right now around her back. “I know. But we need to get you better.”
Tillie pulls out her phone and goes to Snapchat, only to realize she had utterly no interest in seeing pictures or communicating with anyone in the entire world. She turns her phone off and glances over at her mother. Winnie’s face is like what you might expect of a soldier stationed in Afghanistan. Someone who has been through a long war. Someone who has seen things. Tillie is now at least part of that war. This is an unfortunate result. She looks away. She can’t deal with it at all.
Dr. Brown opens the door and peers her vegan face out. “Tillie? Oh, hi, Winnie. How are you?”
Tillie’s mother offers as much of a controlled smile as she can in this situation. “I really want to be part of this discussion, if that’s okay. We need a plan.”
Dr. Brown looks at Tillie. Tillie looks at the floor.
“Let me chat with Tillie for a bit and see where we are,” Dr. Brown says in her best Mondo Zen Buddha Bitch voice.
Tillie, head down and without looking back at her mother, whose very presence is sucking the air out of the world, follows Dr. Brown into the danger zone.
“So how are you doing?” Dr. Brown asks as she sits down. As she always asks.
“Pretty good,” Tillie answers as she sits down. As she always answers.
“Your mother called me and told me what happened, so I don’t think you’re ‘pretty good’ at all,” Dr. Brown says, as she’s never said before.
“Oh.”
“What’s going on under the hood?” Dr. Brown asks, and Tillie suppresses a grimace. She does not like to be referred to as a car. It makes her feel, for one, fat. She’s a human being. She doesn’t have a hood.
“I don’t know,” Tillie says.
Dr. Brown nods and nods. She keeps staring at Tillie in an unnerving manner, and she makes a note in her notebook. Tillie fidgets in the plush red-leather recliner.
“Well, let’s start with what you do know.”
Tillie takes a deep breath and resists rolling her eyes.
“I went to the bridge. George Washington. I don’t know. I wasn’t really going to jump, I don’t think. It’s like. I don’t know. Like I’m an artist without a canvas or something.”
Tillie’s class read Sula by Toni Morrison last month, and that was her takeaway: Like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous, the line had read, and when Ms. Cruz asked about it in class, Tillie perked up. It had been like reading about herself—and that was before the satire video that forever ended her performance career.
“An artist without a canvas,” Dr. Brown repeats, and it sounds totally wrong coming out of her mouth. Tillie just wants to say, Yes. My canvas was taken away. Now I am dangerous.
It’s so typical that Dr. Brown doesn’t elabora
te. She almost never does. No advice that would help, even though sometimes Tillie wouldn’t mind someone telling her what to do. It’s like it’s Dr. Brown’s only job to get Tillie to say all the really bad things, as if that will make the bad things go away. It won’t.
So Dr. Brown doesn’t reply, and she writes something else in her book. As much as she sometimes loathes Dr. Brown, Tillie would give, like, a zillion dollars for an hour alone with that book. Maybe it has the answers.
Finally, after Tillie digs into her silence, Dr. Brown relents her own silence to say, “So you went to the bridge, but you weren’t really going to jump. What were you there for?”
Tillie crosses and uncrosses her legs. She squirms in her seat. This is the part she can’t explain.
There was no other option. That’s the truth of how it felt. She literally did not know what else to do with the pain so deep down in her throat, the pain that sometimes feels like a string is pulling her shoulders down from the center of her gut. The tension is so taut that she can’t even fight against it.
“I thought about it, okay? I thought about it and it wasn’t worth it.”
“What stopped you?”
Tillie gulps. She doesn’t know why but she cannot share about the boy jumping. It feels like that’s hers, and hers alone, and also like maybe her not reporting it might be a crime or something. If nothing else, it was a sign that she’s too selfish to live.
“I don’t know,” she says.
Dr. Brown tilts her head sideways, like she’s trying to figure Tillie out.
“Well, say one thing about it. One thing you were feeling up there. Or a thought you had.”
“That my mom would literally die. That Britt would be sad.”
Dr. Brown smiles. “Good. Yes. And what about your father?”
Tillie shrugs and stares at the ceiling. Nope. Ever since the fight with her dad, Dr. Brown is always trying to get Tillie to go there. Reduce that relationship to something understandable, which it most certainly isn’t.
“Do you think he would have been sad, had you died by suicide, Tillie?”
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