The Weight of Zero (12 page)

I feel something that must honestly fall somewhere high on the happy scale. Definitely eight or nine territory. This definitely matches the kiss. And today's shit-in-my-pants story time.

Wait a sec. Maybe I misread her text. Maybe she wasn't really inviting me. Maybe she was just bitching about going. Uncertainty floods me. Quickly, I reread the conversation.
Yes.
There it is: “Do you want to come with me?”

Humming, I click on Michael's Sunday-night text: “I'm glad we finally met this year!
” I had responded with a “ME TOO” and a smiley face. I keep reading the texts over and over. And thinking about that kiss. I'm so ready for another one.

“Cath, honey, dinner!” Mom calls.

She has set the table with two bowls of chili, a small pile of mini corn bread loaves and two salads. She's laid out at least five different types of Wish-Bone salad dressing. Our glasses of water are filled with ice
and
a lemon slice. She makes a production out of dinner most nights. It's our only real time together, she'll say.

And every night as I approach the dinner table and see this, her grand gesture, darts of guilt fly at me. Mom shouldn't have to make culinary amends because she works her ass off and can't be with me every second of my nonschool day. She shouldn't have to pour every ounce of her love into me, her emotional and financial black hole of a daughter.

I force a smile that she instantly returns. “I made plans for Sunday, okay?” I say, sprinkling shredded cheddar on my chili.

“With Kristal?” Mom asks, eyebrows arched.

I nod, my mouth full.

Mom does a good job of repressing any whoops of delight. She just smiles, but it reaches her eyes and takes ten years off her face. Another dart. “What are you doing?” she asks ever so nonchalantly.

“Her mom works at a museum in New Haven and there's some event there,” I answer.

“Well, I'm off, so no problem driving you in,” Mom says. “What time?”

“Kristal will let me know tomorrow.” I sip some water. “Maybe you can do something on Sunday? Maybe a movie? With Aunt D?”

Please, please do something for yourself. For once.

Mom shakes her head. “Nah. I can do the food shopping and clean the bathrooms. I'll get a head start.”

“What about Bill? You could give him a call?” I suggest.

Mom flushes and shakes her head quickly, picking up a corn bread and buttering it with the precision of a surgeon transplanting a new kidney. Eyes glued to the task, she asks lightly, “So Kristal, is she a junior too?”

I grab a corn bread and dip it in my chili. “A senior.”

Mom suppresses a little smile. “Is she in one of your classes at Cranbury?”

“No. I met her at St. Anne's.”

The buttered corn bread en route to Mom's mouth stalls. She puts it down untouched next to her bowl, her face transformed into a mask of worry. “Kristal is a patient at the intensive outpatient program?”

I already know where this is going. She's going to shoot it down. Oh no! Not her precious Catherine mixing with the other mentally unstables. Especially when it's not an official therapeutic program sanctioned by Pope McCallum.

“Yes. She is. And she's really nice.”

Please, Mom, let me have this. Let me have this piece of normal before Zero hits again.

“Oh, I don't know about this, Cath,” Mom starts, dread filling her eyes.

“What?” I ask, placing my spoon down, suddenly no longer hungry. “What don't you know?”

“It might not be the wisest of ideas,” she answers.

I rise from my chair. Suddenly, I am furious. And desperate. “Why? Why the fuck not? We're not shooting up heroin. We're going to a museum!”

“Catherine, please sit down,” Mom says, also standing. “Can we try to talk about this?”

“There's nothing to talk about!” I'm shouting now. “I'm going!”

“Catherine, please. I don't want to fight with you.” Mom sits down and picks up her corn bread, attempting to resume normalcy. “Just hear me out. Can you at least tell me a little about her?”

Oh my God. Normal kids never have to deal with this shit. Their parents would be jumping over the freaking moon that it's a museum and not a dumb mall. But still I answer her.

“Kristal's nice. She's a senior. She goes to Chapman.” I swallow, trying to calm myself down. “I really want to go. We have fun together.” I leave out that I know this thing with Kristal, this fetal friendship or whatever you want to call it, has a shelf life. Once this girl gets to know me—Catherine, not Cat—and the fact that I have a mood disorder that affects how I behave rather than something that stays hidden behind closed doors like cutting or vomiting, she won't stay around. No one does. Because my disease is a public one. Just ask Rodrick. Any friends I might have are guaranteed to see and feel the impact of it too.

Mom doesn't understand. She doesn't know that I told Riley and Olivia about my diagnosis this past summer. Ten months after my suicide attempt and one month after the mania-inspired shopping spree—more than one year of basically no contact from them—and suddenly, out of the blue, they both texted me, asking to come over. They had heard I got my hair cut, that it looked “really cute.” I was pretty stable by then. Courtesy of my then-new shrink, Dr. McCallum, and a prescription for Abilify. Of course I said yes. I was desperately lonely. I could ignore their defection; I could repress the memory of their radio silence after my sweet-sixteenth birthday invite. This would be our friendship 2.0. Yes, it had shattered in the wake of Grandma and Zero, but I thought it could rise like a phoenix, in time for the last two years of high school.

Riley and Olivia came to my house and we sat on the floor in my bedroom. Just like old times. It seemed like they cared again. Why else would they come see me? So I told them. I did. I allowed the word “bipolar” to leave my lips. I thought they'd get it.

Riley picked up her phone and Googled “bipolar” right in front of me. She glanced a couple of times at my hair and then, with barely a word, she and Olivia both left. For good. But armed with fresh info to report to their theater friends, a small group of nasty, spiteful people collected freshman year when Riley and Olivia were in the chorus in
Fiddler on the Roof.

Mom has no idea what that did to me. Now, she runs her index finger up and down her water glass, obviously debating her next move. “And…um…what's wrong with Kristal?”

There it is.
What's wrong with her?
The ugliest of questions hangs in the air, filling me with the familiar sickening realization of what my life is. Damaged.

I look at Mom. “She likes me.” I exit the kitchen slowly, like an old woman, and mount the stairs to my room, toward my soldiers.

My fingers itch to reach under my bed, to push aside the barrier I've constructed of books, magazines and mateless socks, and retrieve my shoe box. But it's too dangerous with no lock on my door.

“What's wrong with her?”
Mom's question has lodged itself in my chest.

Mom raps on my door. “Catherine? Can I come in?”

“No.” I don't have the energy for this.

“Please, Catherine,” Mom says. “I know I majorly fucked up.”

This gets my attention. Devout Catholic Jody Pulaski dropping the f-bomb? In front of her mentally challenged daughter? This has never happened. Ever. I'm beyond stunned, and even worse, I feel a laugh gurgling up from somewhere inside me.

Mom opens the door. Our eyes meet, and I can't help it. I have to smile. “I cannot believe you just said ‘fuck.' ”

“It fit the crime,” she says, leaning against the doorframe but not entering. “I wish…I wish I could just delete our whole conversation downstairs.” She shakes her head. “I did not mean for it to come out the way it did.”

“It's okay. I'm not going,” I say, the goodwill between us evaporating. Breaking eye contact with her, I lie down on my bed and roll away to face the wall.

“Oh yes you are,” she says, moving forward to drop my phone on my bed. “You have enough on your plate without adding my baloney to it.”

What does that mean? “My baloney”?

“Look, Cath.” Mom sits down on the side of my bed and places her hand on my upper arm. She seems a little angry. “You
are
going with Kristal on Sunday. End of discussion. I…I think I'm going to start therapy.”

I roll back toward her and sit up.
“What?”
I ask.

“Dr. McCallum has been telling me for a while that I'm extremely anxious. You know that. I need to stop hovering, lighten up, all that stuff. And based on what just happened downstairs, it's clear I need to get a grip. You're moving on. Your life is picking back up. I refuse to be the one who…who is bad for you.”

Who are you and what did you do with my mother?

“So you're going because of me?” I ask.

Her answer sends me reeling again. “No. I am going for me,” she says. “You are going to be fine, Catherine. Dr. McCallum is really happy with how you're doing. He thinks you're especially perceptive and observant, and that is really going to help you in accepting your condition. He keeps telling me I need to trust you, and I am going to start doing that. Right now.”

Two emotions flare inside me. The first is a perverse pride because Dr. McCallum thinks I'm observant and perceptive. But there's also a deluge of guilt over my fraud in Dr. McCallum's office and, even worse, Mom's new campaign to trust me. There's a shoe box not twenty-four inches below us chock-full of my deceit.

She nods. “Okay? And when I asked about what was wrong with Kristal—”

“Forget it,” I say. I don't want to hear this.

“No. I need for you to hear me.” Mom's voice rises. “I know that you're meeting kids with different issues like eating disorders or cutting or bulimia—”

I interrupt her. “Bulimia is an eating disorder.”

“I know that,” Mom says huffily. “It just came out wrong. I worry that you'll be vulnerable to them. That what they're saying will sound good to you and that you'll…uh…start doing it.” She takes a deep breath. “But I will not go that route. I'm trusting you, Catherine, and you will go on Sunday and you will have a great time whether you want to or not.” She leans forward to hug me and I break the hold quickly. Her hugs usually feel desperate to me, too intense, like all her worry and anguish is transferred into her shoulders, arms and fingers. I try to avoid them. But she takes it in stride, used to it by now.

To soften the blow, I tease her. “You better get yourself over to confession, Miss Potty Mouth.”

Mom stands and points at me. “I've learned from the best. C'mon downstairs. I'll heat up our chili. I'm hungry again.”

After dinner (take two), homework, shower and two Lamictal tablets (Dr. McCallum upped my dosage again so that I will peak at the targeted 250 milligrams by the end of the month), I check my phone. There's one text from Michael and one from Kristal.

I click on Michael's text. He wrote “Hey,” so I type back my standard smiley-face emoji.

Right away my phone choos. Michael has sent two smileys back.

I type: “See you in history tomorrow,” with another smiley.

Kristal wrote: “Do you want me to pick you up on Sunday?
”

New, “trusting” Mom would still probably veto a ride from a girl, a St. Anne's one at that, so I text back: “It's ok. Will get a ride. What time and what museum”

Kristal: “New haven museum of history. On chapel st. 2:00”

I type, “Great—thx for asking me,” but then delete the “for asking me.” Too pathetic-sounding.

Kristal: “Great! Have to study physics now. Did I mention I hate high school? See you at St. As
”