by Katie Henry
Maybe they were angry too.
“It didn’t matter that she had a following. Probably made things worse. She got hauled up in front of this big council of bishops and they told her it was heresy, what she was saying. That she didn’t have the right to say it, or anything else about God, because she was just some peasant girl. They made her say some priest told her to do it. They didn’t even believe her words could be her words.”
“And then?”
“And then she was publicly beaten and thrown out of town. And that’s it.”
“No one knows what happened to her after?”
“Someone did. She did. But the priest who wrote down her story didn’t, because he didn’t care.”
“Why do you think this is so upsetting for you?” Martha asks. “Thiota’s story?”
“They erased her. They erased her even more than if she’d never been in history books at all. They made her an example of someone who shouldn’t have dared to think she was anything more than what they told her she was. They made her a joke. They made her a footnote.”
“History is long. Lots of people don’t make that cut.”
“But it’s not fair. Why are some people allowed to have a vision and other people aren’t?” I ask. “Why do some people get religions and churches and songs praising and hailing them as a prophet, and some people get dragged through the mud and treated like a joke?”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know,” I say, even though I do. Some people have power, or magnetic personalities, or unbelievable luck. Some people are the right kind of people to change the world. Some people aren’t weird teenage girls with the charisma of a chainsaw.
“If it’s okay, I’d like to circle back to you, here,” Martha says. I’d rather not, but I can’t really say so. After all, we’re here because of me.
“Okay,” I say, picking at the couch threads again because I have a feeling I know what we’re going to circle back to.
“Your mom said you’d agreed to stop talking to your . . . new friends,” Martha says. “She says you came to accept that the world was not ending in December.”
I nod.
“Is that what you told her?”
I nod.
Martha hesitates. She purses her lips. “And is it true?”
There’s heat on the back of my neck, pressure in my shoulder blades. “What,” I say, “you don’t believe me?”
“I’d like to,” she says, “but you answering a question with another question lowers my confidence.”
I look down at my lap.
“Tell me if I’m off base here,” Martha says, “but I think maybe you felt like you had to tell your parents what they wanted to hear. That there wasn’t another option. So you did what you had to.”
When I meet her eyes again, she’s watching me carefully, waiting for my answer. I have to be careful too. She can’t tell my parents what we talk about in sessions, except if I’m a danger to myself or others. I’m not going to hurt people—if anything, Hannah and I will be helping people—but Martha might not see it that way. So I stare back at her, lips pressed shut.
“Ellis. I’m not here to judge you.”
“No. Just to tell me I’m delusional.”
“You’re not delusional. That’s a real condition, and it’s not one you have.”
“Then what do you think is wrong with me? Because you do. Everyone does.”
“I think you’re feeling scared. And overwhelmed. And misunderstood.”
Don’t you dare cry. Don’t you dare tell her she’s right. Don’t you dare let her see inside you, don’t you dare let her get any closer.
“I think you’ve been feeling that way for a very long time, and I think you’re so sick of feeling like that, you’ve latched on to something, anything that doesn’t make you feel that way.”
Don’t you dare believe her. You’re fine, and if you aren’t, you brought it on yourself. Stitch yourself up tighter and cut the thread.
I chew on the inside of my mouth. “It’s not that simple.”
“I’m sure it’s not.”
“You haven’t heard her—” I stop. No Hannah talk. “I really believe this. I know what I believe.”
Martha sighs. “Will you do one thing for me?”
“Okay.”
“For the next week, here’s what I want you to do: instead of research, instead of looking at what happened before, I want you to make a plan.”
“A plan?” I have plenty of plans, plenty of ideas about how to survive the winter, plenty of lists and facts and worst-case scenarios in my head.
“I want you to consider the fact that the world may not end.” I open my mouth, but she holds up her hand. “You don’t have to believe it, just consider it. And I want you to think about this: What will you do if it doesn’t? If you’re given the gift of more days, or years, or decades, what will you do with them?”
I don’t know what I’d do with a future wide-open like that. It fills me with an inexplicable, inescapable feeling of pure dread.
“Can you do that for me?” Martha asks again.
I smooth my hand over the couch cushion. “I’ll try.”
Mom is twenty minutes late to pick me up. I could have taken the bus. But Mom texted me after school informing me that I was to wait right outside Martha’s office. So that’s what I’m doing.
She finally pulls up on the wrong side of the four-lane street, just across from the office. Then she waits. And I wait. Does she really expect me to dash between the cars? Sure, maybe it’s not super busy right now, but that’s dangerous.
You could get hit and die.
You could cause a three-car collision and be named in a civil suit after one of the passengers is paralyzed.
You could get yelled at by an angry cyclist.
It’s just not worth it.
So I keep waiting. And when it’s clear Mom has outright refused to circle the block and re-park on the right side, I walk the half block to the crosswalk, cross with the green light, and walk the half block back to her car.
“Hi,” I say, sliding into the front seat.
“What is wrong with you?” she snaps back as I pull my seat belt tight.
“What did I do?” I ask, though I guess it would be more accurate to ask, “What did I do now?”
“I’ve been sitting in this car for five minutes waiting for you to cross.”
“I would have been quicker if you’d parked on the right side of the street.”
She glares at me. “You could have crossed three times while I was waiting.”
“Mom! There is no crosswalk! I could have been hit by a car!”
“That’s the problem with you, Ellis,” Mom says, jerking the car into drive. “You want everything covered in Bubble Wrap. And if you can’t have that, you shut down. Well, that’s not the world. I’m not letting that slide anymore.”
She has never let a single thing slide.
“It’s not just about you,” she says, a death grip on the steering wheel. “It’s not just about your comfort. Do you have any idea how much I have on my plate? I have laundry and a meat loaf dinner just waiting to be done at home.”
Oh good, meat loaf. My absolute least favorite.
“Not to mention I’m bringing meals to three people in the ward this week, Emmy needs to be fitted for new ballet shoes, and I have to train the new receptionist who is, bless her heart, completely incompetent.”
I’m starting to think this isn’t about me at all. I’m just a safer target.
“How was your day?” I ask, hoping she’ll land on another person to be mad at.
She shakes her head. “Oh, don’t even try that with me.”
I wonder what her friends would think, if they saw her like this. My mom is such a smiler at church, at dinner parties, at parent-teacher conferences. She’s almost aggressive in her cheerfulness. I’m the only one she gets this angry at. I’m the only person she can get this angry at.
&
nbsp; “I was just asking.” I slump back in my seat.
“You couldn’t care less. You couldn’t care less about my day.”
“Could you give me a break? For once?”
“Sometimes I feel like that’s all I do.”
My mother has many talents. She can bake a perfect root beer Bundt cake, embroider the most delicate flowers on a baby gown, and slice me off at the knees in six words or less. There’s a lump in my throat and salt in the corner of my eyes, but I swallow it down, brush it away. She keeps going.
“I can’t talk to you the way I can with— You can’t handle things. Anything could make you melt down. So we walk on eggshells, the whole family, you know that? We do. We handle you with kid gloves. And now you start with this— I don’t even know what to call it. A cult?”
“It’s not a cult.”
“No, it’s not, it’s a cry for attention. As if you don’t get enough. As if Dad and I don’t spend half our lives worrying about you, trying to figure out what on Earth to do with you.”
She talks about me like I’m a rug that clashes with every room in the house. Like a cat that won’t stop clawing at the curtains. She talks about me like she has buyer’s remorse.
“You can blame him for this, by the way. He was the one who insisted I drop everything and pick you up.”
“Maybe he thought it would be nice,” I say. Maybe he thought you would be nice, I don’t say.
“He didn’t rearrange his schedule for it, did he?” Mom asks.
“If he could have, he would have,” I mumble.
“He could have.” Mom steals a glance at me. “He’s not perfect. I know you need me to be the villain in your life, but he’s not perfect, either.”
Martha would call that “deflection.”
I roll my eyes. I would call that “a fair response.”
“I bet that’s what you tell your therapist,” Mom says. “I bet you tell her your father is perfect and your mother is a monster. Well, let me tell you, my mother didn’t do half of what I do for you.”
Grammy Kit isn’t in a position to contradict this super-convenient story. She’s in a nursing home in Salt Lake City.
“She didn’t chauffeur me around, not when I was your age. And why do I have to do this, Ellis? Why do I have to cart you around like this?”
“Because I can’t drive,” I mumble.
“Because you won’t drive. It scares you. So you just won’t.” She huffs, gathering steam. “It’s my fault. I can only blame you so much, because I allowed you to get this way. I got my license on my sixteenth birthday. I was independent. My mother didn’t care how my day went; she didn’t pick me up, talk to me.”
I watch the houses pass by, trying to imagine who lives in them. I picture myself on the second-story porch of a classic Berkeley brown shingle, in the overgrown front garden of a light blue cottage, reading on the window seat of a gorgeous modern house my mom would hate.
“So with all I do . . .” Mom says, starting in on me again, but quieter this time. “I don’t think it’s wrong of me to want some appreciation. Is that so terrible? Does that make me so terrible to you?”
I don’t know what to say. How did we even get here? How did she take it from me not crossing the street to me not appreciating her? And I almost ask that, but then I think—is that how my logic seems to other people? Is that how my catastrophizing makes me sound? Maybe this is Mom catastrophizing. Maybe—the thought catches me by surprise—maybe my mom feels like I do. Like her life is spinning out of control too. I plan and prepare and worry, and she arranges and prods and perfects.
My mom and I could not be more different.
Or maybe we could.
“Thank you,” I say, breaking the silence, “for picking me up from therapy.”
“All the way across town,” she adds.
She’s not making this easy. “Thank you for picking me up from therapy all the way across town.”
Her shoulders drop a half centimeter. She looks at me. I try for a smile. She frowns. Shakes her head.
“I’m sorry you have to,” I say, because maybe what she really wants is an apology. “I’m sorry I have a mental illness.”
She stops at a red light and twists to look at me. “You don’t have a mental illness,” she says. “You have an attitude problem.”
“You sent me to a therapist all the way across town for an attitude problem?”
Mom shakes her head. “Schizophrenia. Psychosis. Dementia, like Gammy Kit has. Those are mental illnesses. You do not have a mental illness.”
She’s wrong. I know she’s wrong. If she’d take a half second to research it, or just listen to me for once, she’d know she was wrong, too.
“This doesn’t have to be your life,” she says, stealing a look at me. “You aren’t helpless. You can change, if you want to, and I hope Martha can help you do it. That’s what makes this different. You can get over this, you can have a normal, happy life. You just have to try.”
I see it, all of a sudden, with the clarity of a key in a lock. My mom is scared. Her fears don’t look like mine, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have them. And she’s wrong, she’s still so wrong about everything, but it’s not because she’s unfeeling. I thought she couldn’t see the way I struggled and hurt and clawed against my brain, but she can. And it might scare her more than it scares me. She’s scared I won’t get to have the life she imagined I would. She’s scared I’ll let myself suffer forever. She’s scared to see me suffer.
I do try, I want to protest.
I’m not going to get over this, I want to tell her.
I can get better at living with it, I want to assure her.
But I just stare out the window.
The rest of the car ride passes in silence. When we reach home, I half expect Mom to beat me to the door and lock me out of the house, but she waits patiently for me to gather my things and get out of the car.
“Wash your hands when you get inside,” Mom says. “I need you to grate cheese for the tuna casserole.”
Tuna casserole? Mom hates tuna casserole. She can’t stand the texture, and Em isn’t a fan either, but it’s my favorite. I ask for it on every birthday, and that’s about the only time she’ll make it.
“I thought we were having meat loaf.”
She locks the car. “I changed my mind.”
I hold up my hands and walk away from the car. I won’t argue with tuna casserole.
At the top of the stairs, with the key already in the lock, Mom stops and looks at me. Her mouth is still in a hard line, but her eyes are softer. “Ellis,” she says, and sighs, and I hold my breath. “I’m—” She swallows. “Your hair looks very nice today.”
It doesn’t. It’s frizzy and messy and tucked behind my ears. But I know what she means. I know that sometimes you say one thing when you mean another.
“Thanks, Mom.”
Thirteen
MOM’S ULTIMATUM CHANGES very little about my life. It means I have to lie more—or maybe just better.
The next Monday, as soon as I leave sixth period, I text my parents saying I’m going to math tutoring after school. It’s barely a lie. I should be going, and I would be going, if the world weren’t ending. But I highly doubt knowing my sines from my cosines is going to help, and sticking close to Hannah might. So I choose that.
Well, as close as I can get, when she’s up in her tree. Staying on solid ground and playing Five-Word Books appeals to my need for self-preservation, anyway.
“Rodents who were monks, weirdly,” Sam says, counting five words on his fingers.
“Redwall,” Tal says. “God, you’re right, why were they monks? What were they worshiping? Was there a mouse Jesus?”
“Maybe they pray to Cheesus,” I suggest. Tal laughs, and my stomach leaps for no reason at all.
“Okay, okay, I’ve got one,” Theo says. “Exiled prince defeats demon king.”
We all look at Theo blankly.
“It’s Ramayana,” Theo
says. “The ancient Indian poem? Epic? Super important to the, like, six million Hindus of the world?”
The three of us shrug guiltily in unison.
“You are all,” Theo declares, “a bunch of colonialist monsters.”
“The Brazilian half of me is offended,” Tal says.
“If you just say ‘colonialist’ I think the ‘monster’ part is implied,” Sam adds.
Suddenly, Hannah jumps down from her tree. The boys keep playing, but she peers out across the Park, then drops down next to me.
“Hey,” she says to me, low. “Do you have a dollar?”
“Yeah. What for?”
She points out a man walking through the park with his arms full of newspapers. I think it’s the same one I saw her talking to before. “I want to buy a Street Spirit.”
Street Spirit is a paper run by homeless people in Berkeley. The reporters get paid for their work, and it’s sort of an alternative to panhandling. A product people living on the street can sell. It doesn’t cost much, and I know it helps, so I dig four quarters out of my backpack and hand them to her.
“Thanks,” she says, and walks off. The boys are still deep in Five-Word Books.
“Okay, okay, how about this,” Tal says. “Sociopath child slowly dismembers friend.”
“The Giving Tree,” Theo answers, with a touch of horror. “Jesus, Tal.”
“Am I wrong, though?”
Sam nods his head over at Hannah. “What’s she doing?”
I shrug. “Buying a Street Spirit.”
“From the guy who hangs out by Ashby BART and tells you he knows when you’re going to die?” Tal asks.
“That’s a different guy,” Sam says. “They look kind of the same, but the dude at Ashby BART’s way shorter and has that green Army jacket.”
“Oh yeah, you’re right.”
“Why is that?” I wonder out loud. “Why are all the homeless people you see men, usually middle-aged, living alone? Or maybe with a dog.”
Theo scoffs. “Those are the only homeless people you think you see.”
“What?”
“Not everyone who’s homeless sleeps in a park,” Theo says. “They live in their cars, or on friend’s couches because they lost their house or apartment because shit happens. Most homeless people are families. With kids. You’ve definitely been on a bus or in a class with one, and just didn’t know it.”