On Thin Ice 1

On
Thin Ice 1

On Thin Ice 1

Victoria Villeneuve

Copyright 2013 by
Victoria Villeneuve

Smashwords Edition

I stared at the clock
on the other side of the wall. Its monotonous ticking let me know
time after time that another second of my life had slipped away,
another second was gone that I could never get back. It didn’t
matter though. As far as I was concerned, the closer I was to
death, the better. After all, what was the point of being on this
earth for however many more seconds? In the end everyone dies, most
of us having done absolutely nothing noteworthy to either help or
harm mankind.

These sombre thoughts
were normal for me these days. I’m sure it’s the sort of thing my
therapist would love to hear, the sort of thing she would
encourage. I smiled to myself as I thought about her encouraging me
to speak, encouraging me to speak my mind. I knew my complete lack
of interest in telling her about my thoughts, in telling her about
what goes on in my head, frustrated her.

“Kylie, you need to
allow yourself to heal. You can’t continue to punish yourself, or
you’ll never move on with your life.”

What Doctor Emma, as
everyone called her, didn’t realize, was that I didn’t want to
heal. I wasn’t going to heal. I wanted to wallow in my depression,
I wanted to punish myself. I deserved every terrible thought that
crossed my mind, no matter what anyone said.

Finally, enough ticks
of my life had slipped past that the minute hand was veering closer
and closer to the top of the clock. I was going to be late if I
didn’t get going soon. I got up off the couch I was lying on and
made my way through the hallway.

Sometimes I wondered
why they painted the hallways in this place beige. It was so
sterile, so boring. It was like they did the absolute bare minimum
they had to in order to make this place seem like not a doctor’s
office, and justify the prices they charged to attend this place. I
always thought to myself that maybe the people in here would be
happier if the walls were purple, and blue, and red, and yellow. Of
course, there was always a chance some of the people who were
addicted to substances far more mind altering than I would think
they were high, and perhaps it wasn’t the best idea. Still, I
didn’t think it would kill them to add a bit of color to the
place.

I guess rehab centers
in general aren’t supposed to be homely. They’re supposed to be a
place where you go in, get off whatever you were addicted to, and
get out, hopefully with a better mindset to tackle the problems of
real life without a relapse. In my case, it was alcohol. For me, as
with so many other people, the addiction to alcohol was a reaction
to something in my life. I had never had a problem with alcohol
before, until I did. The real problem was getting over what had
happened, and I knew that wasn’t something I was going to do. I
didn’t want to do it. If I let myself get over it, that was letting
me off easy. I didn’t deserve to be free from those memories.

When I was maybe thirty
yards down the hall I reached the door I wanted, turned the knob
and let myself in.

As always, the room had
a bit more than a dozen chairs spread in a circle, half of them
already filled. I sat about as far as I could from Doctor Emma, who
took the chair facing the door. I vaguely looked around, all of the
faces in the chairs the same familiar ones as were there every
Tuesday and Thursday afternoon.

Sitting next to Doctor
Emma, as always, was Sam. He had been in a car accident about a
year ago and gotten addicted to painkillers. When his wife left, he
finally realized he had a problem, and checked himself into the
clinic. He had a beard now, and his black hair was getting pretty
scraggly, but I could still tell there was a handsome man lurking
under there somewhere. When he went back to the real world, I
always thought Sam would be fine. He had run a successful business,
which I think his son was now in charge of while he was here.

Amanda sat next to Sam.
She was what most people think of when they think of drug addicts.
She got in with a bad crowd in high school and became addicted to
meth. She pimped herself out for a while, but her rich family found
her and forced her into rehab. The brown roots of her platinum
blonde hair were showing, but at least it had stopped falling out
as much as it had before. She was starting to put on weight, but I
could still see her ribs through the tight tank top she wore with
skinny jeans that somehow managed to look loose on her. I had never
seen skinny jeans look loose on
anyone
before. Amanda was
nice enough, but quiet. She mostly kept to herself, and I was fine
with that.

Two chairs to Doctor
Emma’s left was Fiona. She was an alcoholic like myself, although
she was about fifteen years older, and probably the closest thing I
had to a friend in here. She had brown hair down to her shoulders
in one of those trendy cuts you might expect Victoria Beckham to
wear, and eyes of the exact same shade. Her face was always
perfectly made up. Even when she was at her worst, she always wore
so much makeup sometimes I wondered if I’d ever seen her real face.
I didn’t know why she was in here apart from the alcoholism. I
didn’t know if she had a deep seated secret that led her to
drinking, if something in her life, a memory had made it worse. She
was like me, she didn’t like to share, and I think that was why we
found ourselves making a connection. We never spoke about what we
were in here for. I only knew her addiction was alcohol, like mine.
She nodded at me as I caught her eye. We would speak about
banalities, about things that didn’t matter, and it made us both
happier.

I sat down in my chair
and stared at the floor. There was a piece of dirt almost exactly
in the center of one of the tiles, and I willed it to move an inch
to the left to be in perfect symmetry with the rest of the floor. I
had always been a little bit crazy like that. Time to zone out for
an hour. I never participated in these group therapy sessions. Why
bother? I was broken, I didn’t want to heal. What was the point? I
was vaguely aware of a slow procession of more people, another half
dozen or so coming in. Chairs screeched against the linoleum floor
as the residents of the Charles Madison Center for Sobriety all
took their seats, ready for the biweekly session of sharing their
lives with strangers.

Doctor Emma said
nothing, flipping through the notes on her lap as people entered,
absentmindedly playing with a strand of her straight, long black
hair, until all of the chairs had been filled. Then she looked
around the room, cleared her throat and began to speak.

“Welcome, everyone.
Thank you for coming.” Right. She said this every week, as though
we had any choice in the matter.

“Before we begin, I’d
like to introduce you all to the newest member of our group.
Daniel, we would all appreciate it if you told us a few words about
yourself.”

I dragged my eyes away
from the speck of dirt on the floor to see who the new guy was. I
looked up and noticed everyone looking to my left. He was three
seats away from me, and as soon as I saw him, my breath caught in
my throat.

Daniel was hands down
the sexiest man I’d ever seen in my life. I was pretty sure I just
stared at him for a while, my jaw hanging wide open. His eyes were
dark, deep pools of mystery. His hair was of the same color,
scruffy, but not overly so. It gave him that perfect
just-got-out-of-bed look. His jaw had a hint of stubble, but his
cheekbones, as perfect as if they’d been carved from marble, were
still noticeable underneath.

A shiver shot down my
spine, a shiver unlike any I’d felt in a long, long time. My eyes
moved away from his perfect face down to his body. The tight, long
sleeved sports shirt he wore showed off the fact that he was
incredibly muscular. I could see the ripples and bulges in all the
right places, and although I couldn’t tell for sure, I wouldn’t
have been surprised if there was a six pack under that fabric.
Despite the athletic top he wore jeans and sneakers to finish off
his outfit, and as he shifted in his chair to start speaking, my
mouth went dry.

“Hey, I’m Daniel. I,
um, I’m here because I’m addicted to pain meds, and because my boss
says I can’t go back to work until I’m over it.” He smiled when he
said that last bit, and I thought I was going to melt right there
in my chair and ooze down to the floor. What the hell was wrong
with me?

“Hi Daniel” came the
monotonous chant from everyone except me; I was busy trying to
figure out why my heart rate had suddenly shot through the roof and
why my blood felt like it was simmering inside of me. This wasn’t
the sort of reaction I was used to having when new people were
introduced. Hell, this wasn’t the sort of reaction I was used to
having, at all. For months now I had only felt pain, guilt and
sadness. Feelings like this, feeling like something inside of me
was tingling, feeling like my entire body was on fire, this sort of
thing wasn’t what I was used to.

“Excellent. We welcome
Daniel to our group, and we hope to share in his journey of
healing” Doctor Emma continued, before she began to flip through
her notes.

I couldn’t take my eyes
off Daniel. I have no idea what Doctor Emma said next, all I could
think about was that man sitting only a few feet away. I didn’t
understand what these feelings running through my body were. I had
never felt anything like this before. What was my body doing? Why
was I staring at this guy? I began to squirm in my seat, feeling
the heat building up inside of me. Suddenly, I heard my name
called.

“Kylie? Kylie, are you
listening?”

“Sorry Doctor Emma. I
must have zoned out for a second. Could you repeat that?”

“Kylie, today we’re
discussing the impact sports have had in our lives. I’m wondering
if there’s anything you would like to share with us on the topic?”
Doctor Emma asked, her hazel eyes earnestly looking at me, hoping
against all hope that today would be the day I would spill, that
today I would reveal all of my secrets and start to heal.

I wasn’t going to. I
had come in here planning on giving my usual excuse as to why I
didn’t want to participate in the discussion. But I looked around
and saw Daniel’s face expectantly looking at mine, and something
made me tell a story. For the first time in the months that I had
been here, for the first time after coming here twice a week and
making up reasons as to why I didn’t want to share, I spoke. After
all, sports had nothing to do with the history of my life. Sure, I
played some as a kid, but it had nothing to do with my life now,
and it certainly wasn’t going to help me heal. I figured I could
tell one little story. I couldn’t remember the last time I had
actually done something like this, actually tried to impress a man.
I couldn’t deny that was why I did it. I was trying to impress this
Daniel guy, and I had no idea why.

“I didn’t play a lot of
organized sports when I was little, but I would play soccer with my
friends at recess or after school, and I rode my bike along the
road a lot. There was another girl in my class though, Kirsten
Gill, who played every sport imaginable. One day she came to class
with her leg in a cast. She had broken it that weekend skiing, and
she got so much attention I was unexplainably jealous. I have no
idea what got into me, I had never been jealous like that
before.”

I paused and smiled to
myself slightly at the silliness of what I was about to admit.

“That afternoon,” I
continued, “I took my bike out onto the road and decided to pedal
as fast as I could and jump off, in the hopes that I would also
break something, and that I would get as much attention as Kirsten
did. I went all the way down the hill at the end of the street as
fast as I could, then lost control and went tumbling to the ground.
When I got up, there were blood and scrapes all over me. My entire
body stung, and I cried the whole walk back to the house. The only
good thing was I looked so awful I was certain I was going to get
at least as much attention as Kirsten did, even though I didn’t
have a cast. Well, my mom made me stay home from school for a week
while I recovered, so no one ever even got to see my injuries. I
cried every single day from a combination of the pain and the
sadness at not getting to have everyone fawn over me. It’s so silly
when I think about it now, I can’t even imagine why I would have
thought it was a good idea, but there you go.”

“Thank you for sharing,
Kylie” Doctor Emma told me. If she was pleased or surprised at my
sharing, she didn’t show it at all. I looked around. Daniel was
looking at me, a small smile on his face that I couldn’t quite make
out. I could feel a blush crawling up my face. Did I have a crush
on this guy?