“Are you mad at me?” she said. “You can’t be.”
She’d pulled her pants up, sat down, and curled herself into a ball, her arms locked around her legs. Her eyes were big, looking up at me. She had dropped her usual mask of indifference. I saw her in all her sadness and vulnerability; she was my mirror. She was as lost, alone, and in need of love as I was. I almost sank down to her and wrapped her up in my arms. But I didn’t. I was that selfish, that cruel. That’s the problem with damaged, broken people. We’re unpredictable. We’ll draw you close, then shove you away. It’s nothing personal. Emotions are painful, frightening. It’s so much better to be dull and blank. There’s less risk. Don’t open yourself wide; they can’t hurt you if you don’t.
“I want to go,” I said. I fastened up my coat. When I looked at her again, she was crying.
“You felt it,” she said. “I know you did. You love me.”
She stood and brushed herself off. The look on her face-it was a grimace of disappointment and disbelief.
“Give me a break,” I said. “It was sex.”
That’s when she yelled at me, when her voice rang out into the night, angry and sad. How can you be so cold?
The anger inside me, the twisted thing that wanted to hurt and strike out, that wanted to say cruel things and wreak destruction… it was so powerful. I hadn’t felt it in so long, I had to marshal all my resources to control it. It frightened me, the things I wanted to do to her, the things I wanted to say. I imagined striking her hard in the face. I saw myself digging her grave. I heard myself calling her unspeakable names, things that if I said I could never take back. I was shaking with it. She saw it; she saw it in my face and she recoiled from me. Her eyes were a mirror where I saw myself. I was a monster. I ran from her, from myself, and from everything we were together.
I left her there-in the dark, cold night… I left my best friend crying. She was sobbing actually, from pain that I had caused her. And now she was gone. I thought she had run off, that she was punishing me, as I heartily deserved to be punished. I thought she’d turn up all sassy and victorious to see the pain she’d caused. Because Beck liked that. She liked people to hurt for her. That was how she knew they cared. But now I had to wonder. Who else had been out there that night? And what had he done to Beck?
I was sunk deep into the beanbag, flipping through that old book that maybe no one but Luke had ever read. The silence seemed to expand. And then I heard a door open and close downstairs.
I froze, listening to slow, heavy footsteps resonating through the wood floor of the attic. Not Rachel, not Luke-the footfalls were too heavy, too deliberate. Rachel was soft and light on her feet, tapping out quick staccato beats. Luke was all banging-tossing his bag and coat down, storming into the kitchen.
Whoever was in the house was moving carefully down the hall. I heard the copper gong that hung in the hallway give off a hum. I thought of my bag on the floor, in plain sight. There was a terrible pause, a moment of silence. I forced myself to breathe deep. Then I heard him (it had to be a man) move back down the hallway toward the staircase. I’d left Luke’s closet door, the attic access, wide open. If someone were looking for me, it would be very easy to figure out where I’d gone.
There was another agonizingly long pause, in which I thought maybe whoever it was would leave. Maybe the front door was open for some reason, perhaps it had swung ajar and a neighbor came to investigate. Or perhaps it was the handyman Rachel had mentioned. The man who was hanging her paintings, erecting bookshelves, hauling away junk left by the former residents. It could have reasonably been any of those things.
But then I heard someone on the stairs. I put the book into my pants and started crawling quietly along the dusty floor. Maybe the handyman had a quick errand to do in the house, or had to drop something off. I just had to stay quiet, undetected.
From my vantage point on the floor, I saw the other exit from the attic. There was an identical hatch with an attached ladder that opened down the hallway from Luke’s room across from Rachel’s. I moved over toward it slowly, my mind ticking through options.
I’d have to wait. If I heard someone come up from Luke’s access, I’d exit quickly and run. If I got caught, I had the Mace in my pocket. But then there was only a silence that stretched on so long I began to convince myself that I was alone after all. I thought of my medication in my bag, how I hadn’t been good about taking it at precisely the same time every day. How I’d already passed the time for my dose this morning. My mind played tricks on me when I went off my medication, something I hadn’t been foolish enough to do in years. Maybe that was what was happening now, a crack in my chemical armor, demons leaking from my subconscious to my conscious mind. Funny how, in certain circumstances, the worst-case scenario becomes the best.
Oh, how the seconds snake and crawl when you’re afraid. But how attuned are your senses, how your blood pumps to fuel your muscles for flight, how your focus tightens. The brain releases its flood of chemicals to increase your chances of survival. There’s a certain power in the prey response, a rush that nothing but fear will deliver. Then there was a soft sound that lifted up through the open hatch to Luke’s room.
I realized in that moment that Luke could get out of his room anytime he wanted, even when Rachel locked him in. I knew from snooping around that she took pills at night; so her sleep must be sound and impenetrable. All the banging he did, all the pounding at those cheap locks, pulling them out of their mounts. It was just theater; how it must drive Rachel crazy. Not that it was the best choice to lock your kid in his room. Maybe she deserved the anger he felt toward her. But what did I know?
My parents, so distressed by my behavior, sent me to board part-time at a school for troubled children. The school was forward thinking for its time, blending education with talk and medical therapy. It was a safe place, and I got well there.
I don’t have any horror stories of abuse to recount-but the staff locked us in our rooms at night. We each had our own space to sleep in, and it was actually a relief to know that no one else could get in. It was a school for crazy kids, after all. I had been staying there four nights a week, spending weekends at home. At first I was distraught, nearly doubled over with despair at missing my mother. I know that, but there’s no real visceral memory of pain. It’s honestly kind of a blur. There was class, then therapy-group and individual. There was the new cocktail of medications I took, and what they gave me to sleep at night. Initially I was overwhelmed and foggy. But eventually, it all normalized and it became my life. There was a certain measure of relief in being away from my parents. It was quiet-no more fighting.
The kids there were all handpicked because Dr. Chang believed that we would benefit from his program. We were all gifted. His critics accused him of “creaming,” skimming the least disturbed kids, the most intelligent, those who were most likely to respond to medication and therapy, in order to obtain the best results for his program.
Whatever. It worked. The raging creature that lived inside me quieted. The voices, the nightmares, the sick daydreams and bizarre ideas, ceased. Or at least they were buried, deep, deep below soft fuzzy layers of consciousness, a hard pea beneath a stack of mattresses.
On the weekends, I was so happy to see my parents, my mom especially, that I worked hard not to stress her out. And she did the same for me. We would go for walks and talk. She would read to me as she had always done, lie on the floor of my room while I fell asleep. The things that used to frighten us both were gone, and we got to know each other for maybe the first time.