The Bridge

by Bill Konigsberg

  Tillie chews her cuticles.

  Dr. Brown goes on. “You know what I think? I think he would have been terribly sad.”

  Tillie’s throat tightens. She holds her breath. Nope. And then Dr. Brown does something she almost never does. She shares her opinion.

  “I think you tell yourself a story about your father, and that it’s terribly difficult for you because some of the story is true. Your father doesn’t react to you the way you would like, and I think you feel terribly alone, as if there’s a gulf there. And I want you to know I hear that. Your father is not there for you in the way you might like.”

  Tillie’s eyes fill up with water. Nope. She moves her teeth from her cuticle to her finger. She bites down. Ouch.

  “Tillie?”

  Tillie stares straight ahead.

  “I’m concerned you’re going to draw blood there. Your pinkie.”

  Tillie opens her mouth, pulls her finger away, looks at it. No blood. She stares at the clock next to Dr. Brown.

  “How much more time do we have today?”

  Dr. Brown sighs. “Sometimes it feels like you’re not even here. Are you angry? Are you angry at me, for example?”

  Tillie feels like laughing. This is a thing adults do. They make it about them. Everything. It’s not about you, Dr. Brown. Go take a long weekend in East Hampton with your perfect family, Dr. Brown. Feast on fava bean chips and water with electrolytes as you motor east on the LIE in your electric car, Dr. Brown. You fuck.

  “Are you angry?” Dr. Brown asks again.

  “Nope,” Tillie says. “Not angry. Don’t worry about it.”

  Dr. Brown smiles a bit. “But I do worry about it. My gut instinct—and your mother agrees—is that you ought to go somewhere until you feel a bit more stable. Can I bring her in here so we can discuss that?”

  Tillie winces. She should never let her guard down. You let your guard down and suddenly you’re en route to some horrifying facility in Minnesota. That’s a bottom-line no right there. She will jump in front of the first taxi she sees outside if they actually think they’re locking her away somewhere. Absolutely one hundred percent fucking not.

  “I’m fine,” she says, looking directly at Dr. Brown. “I mean, I’m not fine. Obviously. But yesterday I—I guess yesterday was a test and I passed. Or I failed. I mean. Depends which shoulder you’re on. Part of me is definitely not fine and definitely wanted things to end yesterday, but the other shoulder? It’s a fighter, okay? I’m not going to die. I just want things to be—”

  She swallows. The feelings have jumped to her chin and she doesn’t want them there. She wants them down. This isn’t get real time. This is stay out of institution time. She swallows, again and again, tasting the salty tears in her throat.

  “It’s okay,” Dr. Brown says. “Let it out, Tillie. Let it out.”

  No. No. She can’t. She won’t.

  She’ll swallow it down again and again and again until the end of time.

  “I’m fine,” she says again, forcing a smile that feels like death to her face.

  Dr. Brown writes something down in her book, and Tillie vows to spend the rest of the session elsewhere in her head. A happier place. Because this place?

  Nearly unbearable.

  “I’m going to bring your mother in now,” Dr. Brown says. “We need to put our heads together. I hear what you’re saying. You’re saying you didn’t attempt suicide yesterday, and that you were on the bridge because you’re out of ideas. But that’s a problem, too. How do we know that you don’t wind up there again? This is a hard time for you, Tillie. And as I said, I think we need to protect you right now. Get you on the right track, and I know a place that I’m pretty sure can admit you today. In Vermont. It’s private, but I think that’s going to be the best choice and I know your parents are on board and no price is too much for your safety. Can I bring her in?”

  She hears her father’s voice: Who’s gonna pay for your goddamn psych bill?

  Tillie’s entire body has gone numb. She pictures herself in a different bed tonight, in Vermont, without her stuff, and she just … can’t. It’s like with a few words, Dr. Brown has torn what’s left of Tillie’s world down, and her feet and her legs and her arms and her hands buzz and she cannot feel them, and her head is filled with static.

  This is it. The big fear. Coming true.

  She’s all alone in this world.

  “Tillie?”

  “Let me,” Tillie says, barely loud enough to be heard. “I need to tell her something first.”

  “Okay,” Dr. Brown finally says. “Sure. Okay.”

  Tillie slowly crosses the room. Part of her wishes for a nuclear bomb right now. All of her prays her mom has somehow disappeared, like a black hole swallowed her up in the last fifteen minutes.

  She opens the door, steps out into the waiting room.

  Somehow, her mom isn’t here.

  Maybe a black hole?

  More likely the bathroom.

  Tillie doesn’t hesitate. She walks straight out of the office, out onto Park Avenue, out past the skinny doorman with his American flag pin, and south toward who knows where.

  Anywhere but here.

  Molly is jonesing for her secret love, and her stupid mother just won’t leave.

  Her mom is lingering over breakfast and Molly is like, Go! Go to Pilates, please, woman! She pushes an organic blueberry around her cereal bowl while her mother spoons her morning soft-boiled egg, which sits nested in a pewter egg holder. Molly’s thoughts are about interruptions.

  People have secrets. A lot of those secrets are about drugs and alcohol and cheating. Molly’s secret is … not those.

  Molly’s secret is the wrong thing, on so many levels.

  Michael Boroff sits and stares at the fishbowl in his son’s room.

  Britney Spearfish. Tina Tuna. Carpi B.

  He stares until his eyes go blurry. He puts his head in his hands and silently weeps.

  His ex is coming down from Massachusetts later. He called her. Not a fun conversation. Not the person he wants to see. The other failed parent in this equation.

  When his hands are drenched in his own tears, he wills himself to look up, and he takes a deep breath. Okay. Okay.

  He picks up the little shaker of fish food and sprinkles some flakes into the water.

  The least he can do is keep his son’s fish alive.

  Sarah Palmer sobs in the cafeteria. She is surrounded by her friends, and snot is running down her face.

  “He was just—why didn’t I just say ‘you were good’? He was like a wounded puppy, and I just. You know, it’s my gut instinct, because, like, I would NOT want to have an elevated sense of who I am, and he seemed to think he and Kelly were like equals and they so weren’t, but. Why didn’t I just?”

  Renee Hampton puts his arm around her. “You didn’t know. Nobody knew.”

  “But maybe we should have known?” Sarah asks.

  “Well, who were his friends?”

  No one says much. The thing about Aaron was that everybody was okay with him. And nobody was a close friend. He was the kid who was super nice and kinda funny and a bit of a geek and he really, really, really tried on those songs and, like, Sarah’s grandmother who was from Dallas would say—bless his heart. You had to kind of love a kid who was that earnest. Who put it out there and seemed totally okay with being, well. Maybe he wasn’t. Obviously, he wasn’t.

  “I just. I will be playing that stupid conversation over and over in my brain forever,” Sarah says.

  And the response is supportive pats and rubs, because the answer is so obvious.

  Yeah, of course you will.

  The text from Mike comes in during English class.

  Amir Rahimi smiles and shudders. Binge refers to bingeing on girls, which means skulking two blocks up Park Avenue and hanging outside Hewitt. While the girls there seem to tolerate the Browning boys, they probably don’t know about the points system, about how Mike is at forty-eight, and how
Amir has finally gotten away from zero by getting with Tillie, and how not okay he was after, and how a little bit of his soul dies every single time he has to stand there and act interested in whatever every normal boy in the world seems interested in.

  Sure, Amir texts back.

  There are choices to be made in life. Sacrifices. Being gay is just not—normal. Or even if it is normal, it still isn’t—acceptable. At least not to his friends and definitely not to his mom. So that isn’t something that’s going to happen. Some things are just not possible.

  And if wanting to jump out of his skin a little bit every day is the price, so be it. And if hurting Tillie Stanley, whom he truly, really liked, is the price, that is a price he’s willing to pay.

  Apparently.

  Tillie scurries down Park Avenue, hardly breathing, her face numb in the chilly morning breeze. She passes joggers in spandex pants, an old lady walking her pug, and two girls wearing long skirts and blazers with a Loyola School insignia on them. She wonders what things would have been like if she’d gone to school there, a school with boys as well as girls. Maybe that would have made the girls in her class nicer.

  That thought makes her laugh. Yeah. As if the girls were nicer at coed dances. As if they hadn’t made it a fucking death-blow competition to scoop up the cute boys, and hadn’t shoved it in Tillie’s face that she’d wound up standing on the sidelines with Marcia Fishbaum and Savanya Booker. As if they hadn’t called them the Three Nuns. Fuckers.

  She isn’t sure where she’s going, but one thing is for sure: She is not sticking around to submit to forcible commitment to inpatient or whatever.

  Her phone buzzes in her pocket. Twice. Three times. Her whole body shudders. She’s upsetting her mom and that’s horrible. She knows it. But her hand is being forced. She instinctively grabs for her phone but then stops herself. First she needs to get as far away as she can so they can’t find her. Then she can respond.

  When she is on a side street several blocks away, under some of New York City’s ubiquitous metal scaffolding—do construction projects ever get finished?—Tillie pulls out her phone. There are four texts already.

  Tillie’s heart twists in her rib cage. She is a terrible, terrible person. But then she remembers, once more, what she’s running from. And she knows that on some level, she’s right to run.

  Her mom writes her back immediately: Please tell me where you are. Let me think with you, okay? I want to protect you and I can’t if I don’t know where you are. Please!

  Tillie responds: I need to do this, Mom. I need some time. I’ll be okay. I promise.

  Her mom doesn’t write back right away and Tillie stares at her phone, waiting. Then it comes.

  Tillie goes numb again. She doesn’t respond, and when she doesn’t, her mother writes more.

  Something about these words makes Tillie study her screen more carefully. That’s when she sees the weird icon. Up near the battery icon, next to the one for location. Little black glasses she’s never seen before.

  Shit.

  Her mom must have put some sort of tracking thing on her phone last night after she went to bed. Just like Winnie, she thinks. She never trusts—

  Oh. Well.

  She powers the phone off, then realizes that’s probably not enough. Shit. She looks left, looks right. She’s standing between Park and Lexington on Eighty-Third Street, under scaffolding that looks semipermanent to her well-trained New York City eyes. She spies a divot in the sidewalk, behind a metal scaffolding pole. It goes about four inches below the concrete. She winces, thinking about what lives down there. She looks around her once again, doesn’t see anyone watching her. She cringes, unable to imagine life without her phone, but even more unable to picture life in some cold institution, her freedom taken from her. Shit. She leans down and carefully places it in the divot. It barely sticks out. Bye, phone. I’ll miss you. Hope to see you later today, but probably you’ll be gone.

  She runs toward Lexington Avenue, her beige skirt blowing in the wind, feeling dangerously, thrillingly free. Her heart is in her mouth and her eyes dart all around her to see if she’s been made, as if she’s a spy or a covert operative in some movie.

  No one will find her. Not today.

  Once Molly’s mom mercifully leaves, Molly quickly grabs her laptop, folds her conscience up into a neat little pile, and watches the most recent video of Jasmine. She skips to minute four, watches twenty awful seconds with bile rising into her esophagus, and pulls out her phone.

  She texts Gretchen.

  Gretchen texts right back.

  Molly swallows down bile.

  It’s only when she’s satisfied that she’s done what she needs to do to not be thrown into Spence’s scrap heap that she puts her phone away. A smile creeps across her face. An actual smile. Rare since this thing with Tillie.

  She pulls the book out from under her mattress.

  Molly will finally be doing the thing she loves so much: lying in bed, totally ensconced in the world of Adarlan.

  This is the part she loves the most: This is where Celaena Sardothien sort of splits in two, and there’s the tough girl, the assassin who kicks ass, and there’s the terrifyingly hot girl who the prince is totally into, and you know she’s likes him, too, and the tingles she gets reading these pages are not normal, but man. What she wouldn’t give to just let her inner Celaena out.

  Just once.

  She looks up from her book. She puts it down. No. She can’t. She went through this last year. Last year she started around February, pretty sure she’d finally go, and then, by April, she’d chickened the fuck out. The day of, she walked around furious with herself, that she was at Sephora with Isabella and not at the Marriott Marquis.

  Is it possible? Should she check? No. Yes. No.

  Ah, fuck it. She picks up her phone and types in the words, and soon she’s looking at a date, two weeks from tomorrow, and a list of guests.

  And yes, of course, she’ll be there.

  Sarah J. Maas. At FanCosCon, the biggest, geekiest gathering of fantasy cosplayers in New York.

  She imagines Sarah J. Maas herself, seeing Molly in her getup as Celaena and giving her a hug. She imagines the resulting selfie, just the two of them. And yeah, maybe she doesn’t have a single person to show it to, not a single friend who wouldn’t laugh-in-a-bad-way at it. But she’d have it.

  Could she get up the courage to just go alone?

  She looks around her room, thinks again about her friends, and her shoulders droop.

  Of course not. Get real. Molly Tobin at something called FanCosCon? Fat fucking chance.

  On the corner of Lexington and Eighty-Third, Tillie sees a red awning for Tal Bagels. A black sign hangs above the door. It reads, APPETIZING. It is unclear to her whether it is a blurb for the bagels or part of the store name. Appetizing Tal Bagels? Normally she’d look on her phone, but. Oh well.

  She pops in and orders a sesame bagel with strawberry cream cheese and a large coffee. She sits down in the back and tries to figure out what to do next. What do you do when you have to be off the grid? When you have one day left?

  Today she’s going to be different, better, more aware, more awake, more—

  Her stomach flips. Who is she fooling? When have things ever been different, really?

  She laughs when the thought crosses her mind to go to school. She imagines walking into second-period calculus and just sitting down and pretending nothing is wrong. Going through a day like usual, and then going home and when her mom rushes to the door and says, Sweetheart! I’ve been so worried, she could be like, Why? What’s wrong? And her mom would be like, This morning? At Dr. Brown’s. And Tillie would be all, Mom. We didn’t go to Dr. Brown’s today. I was at school. All day. I have proof.

  She shakes her head and smirks. Nope.

  School used to be … adequate. Seventh grade was a nightmare, sure. Eighth not much better. But then high school came and Tillie found ninth-grade drama and Ms. Dawson, who saw her. She’s th
e only one, really, who ever has.

  Ms. Dawson took an interest in her monologues. Tillie performed, and she wrote, and yeah, some of the other girls thought she was weird. Big fucking deal. Ms. Dawson approved. Ms. Dawson applauded. And then Ms. Dawson left, and Tillie was alone again.

  Until this year. Eleventh grade. Ms. Cruz in English encouraged her again to write monologues, and for the first time in a while she was seen. Which was good in one way, and bad in another. Because in Tillie’s experience, when you’re visible, bad things tend to happen.

  Molly’s video, like a dagger in her heart. Who takes a person’s trauma and makes it into a joke? Who does that?

  Molly Tobin does that. Former best friend, from like a lifetime ago. And Tillie almost died yesterday, just because—what? Because Samantha Quinn walked by Tillie as she sat alone at lunch and put the back of her hand up against her forehead and said dramatically, “Go, cow”?

  It had all started at the talent show two weeks ago. Most of the acts were your basic sexy lip-sync numbers and choreographed dance moves. Kat Lopez did standup that was moderately well received, and a couple of girls sang with piano accompaniment. Tillie’s was the only act of its kind.

  She had written a monologue that Ms. Cruz had said was “powerful.” Tillie had written it in a fit of anger after the Amir debacle. Amir, the fuckhead from Browning. Somehow a teacher’s simple compliment led into a decision to perform the piece. And you know what? She performed it damn well. She did it up, and while she was doing it, she could feel the power in her legs, in her arms. She was alive onstage in a way she wasn’t anywhere else, and she knew, yeah, that it was dangerous to give girls ammunition. She knew it was vulnerable. But she believed that some things were more important than that. And that if something was good, and real, it deserved to have its moment. She somehow still believed that, against all evidence, people were basically good, and if they saw pain put forth on a stage, they’d see it, and hear it, and honor it for what it was.