Burnout (3 page)

“Have you seen my shoes?” I ask.

He shakes his head, hesitates, and then says, “Do you remember what you took?”

I blink at him, pretend not to understand. “I can’t find my shoes.”

“I know, hon, but you need to remember what you took. The drugs,” he says.

The drugs!
He said it like he was saying
the boogeyman!
Or
terrorists!

“I don’t do drugs.” I say firmly, just like we role-played at New Beginnings. He doesn’t understand. “I made a promise.
And
I went to rehab,” I assure him. “I’m just having an emergency.”

I’m not making sense.

“It’s . . . it’s going to be all right,” the MTA guy says,
trying to sound reassuring. “The cops will call your parents for you.”

“My mom’s upstate,” I tell him. “She’s painting at a friend’s cabin. She can’t come get me.” My voice cracks.

It happens again. Darkness crams itself between the seconds and I tumble right in. “Did you say something?” I ask, when the seconds splice themselves back together.

“I said, everything’s going to be okay.”

“My mom didn’t want to leave me alone in the apartment, but I told her she could trust me, and now look what happened.”

“I’m sure she’ll understand.”

“My dad will come first. He’s in Greenpoint, but he’s not my real dad. He’s the Tick’s dad. My dad was a sperm donor. But I call the Tick’s dad
Dad
, you know? Because he is. Even if we don’t live with him.”

The MTA guy blinks at me, and I want to stop talking, but I can’t.

“I’m clean. Clean as a whistle. They tinkle-test me at school. I leave the sample with the school nurse.” It is killing my throat to talk this much, but he doesn’t believe me. “Something happened to me,” I tell him, “you have to help me. I didn’t do this to myself.” I hold my arm out again.

“Help is coming. You need to calm down now.” I hear a slight hint of a Southern accent.

“You think I’m on drugs?” I ask him.

He manages to shake his head and shrug and sigh all at the same time.

“Is that what you told the cops when you called them?”

“I just told them there was a girl that needed help. That’s all.”

“Do you think they’ll put me away?” I groan. “I bet they try to put me away again. Rehab’s no joke, mister, even the one I went to, which was like the neutered version. It’s not Nan’s Fun-Time Musical Sing-Along, you know. I don’t want to go back there. I don’t
need
to go back there.”

“And you won’t go back,” he tells me, “because you haven’t done anything, right?”

I smirk at him. “You know that’s not how it works. I’m a kid.” I make a zero shape with my hand and hold it up. “I have zero rights. They’ll send me just because I
look
like a screwup, when really I’m just having . . .”

Darkness.

“An emergency?” he asks, and his voice brings things back into the light.

“Right! An emergency.”

“I think you’re going to be just fine. The cops are going to be here soon.”

“The cops,” I repeat. “It’s all going sideways, isn’t it? I
mean, I’m sitting here, suffering from some kind of non-drug-induced amnesia, and my brain is all funny and I’m hearing myself talk and it sounds like somebody else is talking, except it’s coming out of my own mouth, you know? And all this is happening and you’ve called the cops and they’re going to put me back in rehab and my mom is going to be so upset and my little brother is going to cry. But I’ve been trying so hard and I haven’t hung out with Seemy in months because I’m not supposed to anymore and I don’t hang out with
anyone
. I’m like a self-declared leper. I’m getting Bs this semester, did you know that? So . . . I think I’m just going to go.”

The MTA guy stopped paying attention, but now he looks at me. “No, I think you should stay.”

“Nah.” I stand up, cringing at the pain in my body, and try to smile at the guy. “I’m just going to bail. You’ve been awesome. Seriously, they should, like, promote you or name a train after you or something.”

“The cops are on their way,” the guy says, and even though he says it like it’s supposed to be reassuring, it sounds like a threat.

“Come on, man,” I say, “I’m fine. Really. I’ve got to get to school. It’s Halloween, you know.”

“Halloween was last night,” he says, shaking his head a little.

“It was?”

He nods.

“Well,” I say, “I guess that explains the dress.”

A businesswoman steps onto the train, looks at us. The train conductor shakes his head slightly at her, and she steps back off, says something to the other people that were going to board behind her. I watch them in the reflection of the far window, looking in at me as they walk to the next car.

“I’m really just going to . . .” I trail off, catching my reflection in the window behind him. “What happened to me?” I ask, leaning forward to stare at my reflection. My hair is gone, or most of it, anyway. What’s left is chopped into short, uneven chunks. And my face is painted like a skeleton. White, with messy black circles around my eyes and mouth. And my eyes. There is something wrong with my eyes. “Ah, hell,” I groan. “I’m going to scream now.”

I
scream so loud the MTA guy shoots out his hands like he wants to keep me from screaming myself to pieces. But I jerk sideways, out of his reach, and even though I’m screaming and I’m scared, I think,
You can run now,
and I do.

I go for the open door at the end of the train, but I overshoot it and smash into the end of the car. I grab on to the doorjamb and launch myself out of the subway car and onto the platform, though I don’t make it far. I land on the strip of little nubby yellow things that line the edge of the platform, meant to keep people from slipping and falling into the pit and getting creamed by a train.

The nubs dig into the soles of my bare feet, painfully separating all the little bones, until I get to the smooth tiles in the middle of the platform. I slip immediately, crash to my knees, and when I look behind me, I see the MTA guy running out of the train, talking on his radio. There are a bunch of other people on the platform, and some spread out away from me, some step forward like they want to help. I scramble back up and go for the stairs.

My mom says bodies like ours are made for football and slaying dragons.

Dollface, don’t you know the big-boned girls are the ones who’ll save the world?
I don’t need my body to save the world, I just need it to save myself, and right now it’s doing a piss-poor job. Mom says I shouldn’t curse my body, I shouldn’t wage a war I can’t win, but right now, trying to heave my big-boned glory up these stairs, all I can do is hiss, “Come on!” I am a bear lumbering up a mountain. I am the mountain, too.

I want to shoot like fireworks from the subway station; I want to explode in the air above Manhattan before all of my color sizzles away and I dissolve into nothing. But by the time I see the light of day above me, I am gasping for breath, using the railing to pull myself up one step at a time, my body heavy like wet sand. It is rush hour, so people pushing their way to the surface surround me, and
a few of them look back at me after they pass. I want to say,
I’m fine
. I want to say,
Help me
. But I can’t breathe, so I don’t say anything at all.

I worry the MTA guy is behind me, so when I finally make it out of the subway onto the sidewalk, I force myself to start walking.

Calm down, calm down, calm down,
I tell myself, my breath still catching in my throat, tears still streaming down my face no matter how fast I wipe them off. The paint on my skin is so thick I can’t even feel my hands on my face. Under my fingertips the paint feels like hard plastic that’s been shattered with a thousand hairline fractures, a puzzle that refuses to come apart even though I dig at it with my nails. People look at me in alarm, and I pretend not to notice.

Car tires pull up the confetti carpet from last night’s Halloween parade as cars dodge and weave down Sixth Avenue. My bare feet pick up torn bits of papier-mâché, dried Silly String, and other, more organic things I try not to identify. I should figure out where I’m going. I should figure out where I’ve been. The scar on my forehead itches underneath the face paint, but I can’t seem to dig down enough to scratch it, so I rub it with the coarse fabric of the MTA coat sleeve instead.

I want to stop walking now, but I’m afraid to. It feels like if I stop, everything will stop. All the people around
me, the cars, the noise, the wind, the world, it will all just stop and everything will fall over like cardboard cutouts and I’ll be standing on this freezing cold sidewalk by myself in a city full of dead things.

I keep walking.

I shouldn’t have gotten off the subway. That was a “bad choice.” That wasn’t a “good decision.” Dr. Friedman wouldn’t approve. She would want to know why.
Why would you get off the subway, Nan? That man was going to help you.
She’d give me that same puzzled look my mom always gave me when she wanted to know why, why, why I did the things I did. And the answer would be the same.
I don’t know. I just did them.

If I had stayed on the subway, the cops would have come. And if the cops had come, they would have asked questions, and I wouldn’t have had any answers. And grown-ups hate it when you don’t have answers. They’d have brought me to the hospital. They’d have called my mom.
Ma’am, your daughter is an idiot. You’d better come quick.
They’d have poked me and prodded me and tried to make me remember.

What if I don’t want to remember?

Why would I want to?

Why would I want to know a story that ends with me waking up half naked with no memory and most of my
hair hacked off? That’s what people don’t understand about blacking out. Most of the time it’s for your own good. Why would you want to remember stumbling into Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and puking into the holy water in front of a busload of horrified Japanese tourists?

Just for example.

That’s the sort of thing that’s funny only if someone else is telling the story, telling you what you did, laughing with you about it because it’s actually so terrible you think you might cry. That’s the sort of thing your best friend and you could laugh so hard over you pee your pants.

But I don’t have friends anymore. On purpose. I’m a lone wolf. And I’m stoic. I’m a stoic lone wolf who walks quietly through the halls of her new school, talking to no one. It’s better that way. Nobody gets hurt. Especially me.

My stomach hurts. Cramps. Like I ate something bad.

I turn down a side street to puke, and get slapped in the face by a screaming gust of wind. It stops me in my tracks, its chill so sudden and so cold it feels like my body is finally being shocked into wakefulness. The urge to puke is gone.

It is freezing, and it is wonderful. It feels like it knocks the darkness right out of me.

“What do I do now?” I ask the wind, but it only howls in response before dying down, leaving my skin tingling with its absence. I look up at the sky. It’s an ocean of gray clouds,
low and flat and swollen with unfallen rain or maybe snow.

The wind comes again, this time from behind, and I let it move me forward. I slip my hands into the coat pockets to warm them. The fingers of my right hand brush against soft paper. It’s a five-dollar bill. I stare at it and then down at my bare feet.

I should buy some shoes.

And then I should go to school.

Most stores are closed at this early hour, but down the block I see a bright red awning being rolled open by a guy in jeans and a T-shirt. He must be freezing. The awning says 99
CENT PLUS
! As I approach, the guy yanks up the metal security gates covering the front windows and door, and starts pulling things out of the entryway onto the sidewalk—two white buckets of fake flowers, a torn cardboard box filled with black vinyl belts, a stack of white plastic lawn chairs.

I’m not sure he’s officially open yet, so I just walk right by him inside before he can stop me.

“Do you have shoes?” I ask, turning as I hear him walk in behind me. “I need some shoes. And maybe a hat.” He just stares at me. “It’s real cold outside.”

“Slippers are by the dog food,” he finally answers, going behind the counter so he can watch me in the security monitor. “End of the first aisle.”

I follow his directions, my feet breaking out in pinpricks of pain as they warm up. “Just slippers? What about shoes?”

“No shoes. Just slippers. By the dog food,” he answers. “Hats are there too.”

At the end of the first aisle I find a plastic bin overflowing with pairs of pastel slippers made out of cheap terry cloth. They are the kind with just a strip of fabric that goes over your foot, leaving your heel and toes exposed. They’ll do until I get to school and put on my gym shoes. I pick out a blue pair in my size and then study the knit hats that are hanging above the slippers. There are eight of them, and they are all bright orange.

I bring the slippers and a hat up to the counter. The man studies me for a moment, taking in my chopped-off hair, the makeup, the MTA coat, the dress, my disgusting bare feet, and I know in a second he’s going to pick up the phone and call the cops. He surprises me, though, and asks. “You want socks?”

I sigh gratefully. “Mister, that’s the best idea I’ve heard all day.”

“What color?” he asks, gesturing to the hanging strip of socks behind him. I’m not sure why socks warrant the extra security of being kept behind the counter, but I’m not about to ask.

This time, I can feel the darkness coming. I grab on to the counter as my vision narrows to pinpricks, and then to nothing. My brain takes a second to catch up when I come to. The man behind the counter is saying something. He looks annoyed. “Color?” he asks again.