Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets (22 page)

“That box. James, there’s some things that other people shouldn’t know,” she says.

I wait for more but nothing follows.

“I worry about you,” I say.

“I don’t want you to worry about me. I don’t want to think that every time I do anything it might make you worry.”

“I can’t help it,” I say. “But doesn’t it feel better to know someone cares about you?”

“No!” She’s serious. “I can barely care about myself. But I don’t want you to take that personally. I haven’t been Super-Communicating Girl. It’s not because I don’t want to be there for you. I just only have so much of myself that I can give.”

I am okay with this because it’s better than guessing about her feelings.

We talk about music and laugh a little. I tell her about Derek’s love life; she doesn’t believe how I saved the day with the threat of blackmail.

All the while my brain urges me to bring up Gina Best and that whole mess, but I don’t want to ruin the night or trigger another panic attack that destroys us both.

Still, what feels like curiosity on my part might actually be necessity.

“We don’t have to talk about this, but I tried to blackmail the principal. I told him I knew he knew Gina was a drug dealer. I thought he’d freak out and let you walk at graduation, at least.” I look at her ceiling. “It didn’t work. Plus Mom and Dad won’t let you move back home.”

“James!” She’s got my attention but still yells my name. Then, her voice is normal. “I don’t want to go back home. Please tell me I’m being heard.”

“I hear you.” We are making eye contact. Fixed, strong, important. We are hearing each other, seeing each other.

“I just feel like it was always me against you guys,” she says. “I know it’s not on purpose. They just always made you out to be on their side.”

“I’m sorry.” This apology feels necessary.

“It’s not really your fault. Why would you back me up when it would just piss them off more? I get it. In the grand scheme of things, it makes sense. You protect yourself by agreeing with them or just not arguing with them. But I hope you understand that it
really
messed me up. I have all these things I never thought I could tell anyone.”

“I think you could have told me some things. Maybe not everything. But I’ve been going nuts trying to just figure out what happened when you got kicked out. It’s like no one thinks I can handle it.”

“Why?”

“Please tell me there’s a big conspiracy or something.” I’m serious and also kidding. “I need to know that all my obsessing was worth it.”

“You might be disappointed.”

I go right to the key question: “Why the hell did you beat up Gina Best?”

Jorie looks up at the ceiling. I know the impulse—answers live on ceilings. When she looks at me again I can see that the answer requires controlled emotions.

“She overheard me talking to Mrs. Yao. She told a couple of her friends that I was a psycho who cuts herself. It was . . . I couldn’t even tell
you.
”

I feel sick. The Cutter! Gina and her damn friends joked about it and I believed Gina when she said it was just because Jorie beat her up.

“I’m
so, so, so
sorry,” I whisper.

“I should’ve told you.” She blows her nose and throws away the tissues, then returns to her seat with the box of pain. “It wasn’t Gina’s place to tell anyone, but that’s the way she is. She says what she wants. So one of her friends says something to me and I track her down and she’s oblivious. So I tried to beat the crap out of her.”

Jorie says Kunkel threatened her for sending Gina to the hospital.

“Why didn’t you just tell him Gina was selling drugs in the library the day before?” I ask, recalling what Gina’s friends so easily revealed in the senior lounge the other day.

“Who told—? Never mind,” Jorie says. “If I ratted Gina out, why would he believe me?”

“So is that why he expelled you?”

“I told him to expel me, James.” Jorie bends her left fingers against the palm of her right hand. I hear quick pops and cracks.

“You
asked to be expelled?
” I can’t believe it.

“I wasn’t going to make it. I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t doing my work. I was full of angry thoughts anytime someone looked at me. I felt hyper-visible even though most people didn’t know who I was until I was expelled.”

“Didn’t you think that Mom and Dad would freak when you got expelled?”

“They kicked me out for a thousand reasons. It doesn’t matter why.” She ponders the box of pain on her lap. She doesn’t look me in the eyes, then she does, then she doesn’t.

“I didn’t really have some grand plan, James. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened. When Mrs. Yao asked me about my arms . . . I just felt like my life was so stupid and miserable.” She rolls her hand as if I’ve heard all of this already, though I haven’t. “Getting expelled and kicked out let me work full-time. I earned money and got this apartment. I stayed with some friends and cried for about two weeks straight, first, but I manage. Kind of.”

“So is that why Gina went to the hospital for no reason? To make it seem like you beat her up really bad and make the expulsion seem more valid or something?”

“No idea.” Jorie shrugs.

“Why didn’t the principal just
tell
me this? I thought there was some huge conspiracy!” I rub my eyes. “I feel like such an idiot!”

“Maybe he didn’t want anyone to know that I volunteered to leave? So he keeps his authority?”

Whatever the case, Jorie achieved an escape in the heat of anger and shame. She could have been immobilized, but instead she acted to defend and even define herself.

I’m being forced to do the same. I’m not going to survive another year at home if I spend it in my room. I need to be out in the world. I need to appreciate the people around me. I need to actually care about myself, as lame as that sounds.

I can’t keep pretending like my life isn’t worth living. It hasn’t even fucking started yet.

I must look zonked, because Jorie gets me a glass of water and a beer.

“Take your pick,” she says.

I turn down the beer, afraid that my return home will already be a mess without Pabst Blue Ribbon on my breath.

“Are you seeing my therapist yet?” she asks. “She really helps me when I can get over there.”

I tell her a bit about Dr. Dora, though not too much. That feels like something I want to keep on the edge of mystery. To keep it powerful. If I go around talking about therapy, I’ll end up destroying the effect it has.

“How does Dr. Bird feel about it?” Jorie smiles.

“Dr. Bird is always around.”

“I’m glad Mom and Dad are paying for you to go. They always told me it was a waste of money and blah blah blah.”

“They don’t know,” I admit. “I got a job to pay for it. I had a job, anyway. I’ll get a new one and keep going.”

“That’s good! I never thought I had the ability to do that—to take care of myself. I always felt like I needed permission to do good things for myself, even just to buy new shoes or something. I never knew how to do stuff.”

Jorie looks at me. I expect a smile, but there’s just a soft look on her face. I feel like she’s a little proud of us. That we’ve survived so far.

“James, I needed to get out of there. This looks like a shitty place to live and junk, but for me it’s
better.
I am a paycheck away from being homeless most of the time, but for me that’s better. Because then I know whose fault it is if things go sour. I don’t know if moving out of the house will be good for you. But I couldn’t spend another day trying to figure out all the invisible rules that Mom and Dad made up and changed. I tried telling them about things and they just talked right over me.” She makes a gesture around her head. “It’s like they don’t believe my brain works different from theirs.”

“I just thought that if you came back home that it might be easier for both of us. Us versus them, you know?”

“I know. But it wouldn’t really be that. They treat you different.”

“They pretend I’m okay.”

“You will be okay.”

“I think we’ll both be okay.”

We probably should hug and cry or something, but we sit there in silence for a bit, sipping drinks, being alone together. Comfortable. Almost like adults, but sort of like when we shared a room as kids and we couldn’t fall asleep. We both knew we were awake but we didn’t always say anything. It was not a profound silence. Just nice.

I text Derek:

I NEED YOU TO HELP CLEAN
UP ALL THE PEOPLE I JUST
MURDERED.

I think I can hear him laughing his ass off.

DEREK DROPS ME OFF
at an hour that many parents would consider decent, though maybe not on a school night. Still, it’s not yet midnight, and my parents begin talking at me like I’ve come home from a rave with the stink of sweat and confusion and thumping beats.

They talk at me from the kitchen table, where much teeth-gnashing has apparently happened since my departure. Instead of fleeing upstairs, I go to the fridge and get the components for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I glance at the kitchen sink and see that the plate discus has not been cleaned up.

“I don’t think you understand what we’re trying to say, here, kiddo,” my mom says in that strange way she merges casual words with a stern angry voice.

My father cuts in. His words do not register as language in my mind. Instead, I think about how no one in Whitman’s poetry ever seems angry. He never sounds like he’s going to catch on fire. Surely Whitman had arguments; surely he saw people yelling, frustrated, angry. But he didn’t bother putting it in poetry. It’s as if the energy couldn’t be captured. Or, better, it wasn’t worth capturing.

So, I spread jelly and peanut butter and cut my sandwich diagonally because I’ve seen it done that way but never done it myself. I stand and eat my sandwich. My parents seem confused by my lack of response. Especially because I’m not just staring at my food like a quiet participant, nodding along as they badmouth my sister or yell at me for some minor infraction. I’m eating, making eye contact, not speaking, not agreeing.

I must be quite unnerving.

“And if you think your sister is coming home, you are dead wrong,” my father growls. “She’s proven incapable of living here.”

I eat a potato chip and then clear my throat.

“Well?” my father says.

“That’s not a problem,” I say. “She doesn’t want to come back here.”

“Why not?” my mother asks.

“She’s
not allowed
back here,” my father asserts.

“No. She made the decision. She’s gone for good.” I continue eating. “And you should know that she got expelled on purpose. That’s how much she hated living here.”

I don’t go so far as to say Jorie hated
them.
I’m not sure if that’s to save myself some trouble or to spare a little part of my parents’ feelings. Or maybe to avoid putting words into Jorie’s mouth. She could hate them. She could also be indifferent to them. That might actually hurt my mother the most, but it’s not my place toss out insults on Jorie’s behalf.

My mother’s face suggests she’s not happy that people might know her house is bad enough that one of her kids would prefer to be branded an expelled loser.

My father tries, again, to assert that he has the power to ban her or welcome her.

I make one last attempt to explain.

“I need to say something to both of you. Jorie is gone, and it was her decision. I am not in the best shape mentally, either. What you need to do is to promise you will help me get better. I am seeing a therapist and I cannot afford to pay for it all by myself. I will pay some, but I want you to help out.”

My father begins objecting.

“HEY!” I yell. The volume of my voice goes to eleven.

I have everyone’s attention. Even the foundation of the house waits for me to speak.

“This is not really negotiable. I have serious issues that I need to talk to a professional therapist about. I have already gone a few times, but I can’t make enough money to go see her on a regular basis.”

“You can tell us what’s wrong,” my mother says with conviction.

“No. I really can’t.”

I tell them that we just don’t have that kind of family. Some families might share things and support each other through emotionally rough times. That’s not us. But I stop before it seems like I hate them. I have reasons I can cite in support of hatred, but I’m not ready to do that. It seems counterproductive since I’m going to get them to pay for my therapy.

“You kids,” my father begins. “You kids think it’s so hard. You think you have all these things to be depressed about.”

“That’s not it, Dad. It’s not a rational thing. It’s not that I don’t
know
I have an okay life. A place to live, clothes, friends. It’s my brain and my body. I’m wired funny. I can’t help it. I need to learn how to think and feel. So stop telling me that I’m being depressed on purpose. I can’t
fucking help it.
”

My father’s face doesn’t change, so I assume he doesn’t understand. Without another objection or insult, he lopes upstairs. I expect him to hurl down a punishment like a lightning bolt from Zeus. Instead, nothing.

My mother stays at the table until I’m done eating. She moves to take my plate and I tell her I’ll clean it up.

“The one in the sink, too,” I say.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she says. I do not see sadness or tears. I see that she’s insulted, and trying to believe she knows better than I do. I’m being condescended to.

I repeat that I’ll clean up the mess.

She lingers, then leaves.

At the sink I stare at the spaghetti sauce stains and plate pieces. The easy thing to do is turn on the faucet and wipe all the small pieces into the mouth of the drain. Enough would escape to make it work, but there’d always be little pieces in the gunk of the plumbing. Little pieces would snag on other things being washed away. So it makes more sense, despite the plodding, painful pace, to pick each stray piece up one by one for the next hour.

It will help me practice patience.