The St. Ambrose School for Girls(14)
Today, however, in all this heat, exhaustion is something I drag behind me. I just don’t have it in me to tangle with the cafeteria. I go back to Tellmer.
“No lunch for you?”
As I arrive at my dorm, Greta is coming out of it, a bounce in her step, her hair loosely knotted on top of her head, a ball of flaxen silk. Her perfume changes daily, something she accessorizes to her outfits, I assume, and today her sartorial stylings are a version of the belly shirt, short skirt, and leggings Francesca had on in geometry, only executed in bright blue and pink, no doubt to set off the tan she regularly refreshes out on the lawn my mother liked so much.
“You know,” Greta tells me as she pauses by my side, “you’re not the kind of girl who has to bother with a diet. Lucky, lucky you.”
Continuing on her way, her smile, like her comment, is a casual middle finger, a screw-you that she feels the need to share but isn’t inclined to put much effort into. I don’t respond because my mind has gone blank and I’m therefore grateful that she seems distracted by whatever pressing matter awaits her at lunch.
In her perfumed wake, I’m even more tired.
So much for being grateful for her bullying distraction. Today, she deflates me.
On dragging feet, I go up to Strots’s and my room. Given we don’t have a lock, I’m instantly paranoid because Greta was here in the mostly empty dorm with access to everything I own. Gripping the knob with a sweaty palm, I open things up slowly, as if she might have jury-rigged the door with something that belongs in a Stephen King novel.
Nothing happens, and yet I remain careful as I step inside. I am also anxious for another reason. Heart in my throat, I go to my dresser. Although I don’t want any of my meager belongings tampered with, there’s one thing that I absolutely cannot have somebody violate. I yank open the top drawer, shove my black cotton underwear out of the way, and push my hand all the way to the back. When I feel the little cylindrical container, I shake with relief, and then I pull it out to double-check something isn’t wrong with its contents.
The prescription bottle emerges from the drawer with the label facing me. I see my name, my birth date, the address of my mother’s house, and the name of the drug, lithium. I see the dosage and the notation that I am to take one 300 mg tablet twice a day. Back when things were bad, I was taking pills three times a day and they were at a higher milligram count. We’re on maintenance now.
Tightening a hold on the white top, I push down and turn at the same time. Inside the bottle, there are a reassuring number of the chalky white pills, perfect circles with a stamp on one side and a line on the other. I lean down and take a sniff. The chemical bouquet is faint and unpleasant, but as I’ve never smelled inside the bottle before, I don’t know whether it’s normal or not. I pour a few pills into my hand. They seem fine. In any event, I have no choice but to take them.
I look around my room. Hiding them in my top drawer seems stupid now. Everyone hides things in with their underwear, don’t they? I decide to put them somewhere else. I choose the bottom left-hand side of my desk, under my extra folders and my backup notebooks. Much better. If someone comes looking for my medication, they will have to hunt and peck now, and maybe this will give me time to get back from wherever I am.
As I close the drawer on the newer, hopefully better, hiding place, I push my hair out of my face with fingers that tremble. I don’t like being on lithium and I sure as hell don’t like taking it here at school. I’m always afraid someone, even Strots, will burst through the door halfway through the swallow. I typically retreat into my closet and close myself in, popping the top off in the darkness and pulling them down dry, the pills getting stuck to the back of my throat so that I have to repeatedly swallow to usher them along.
Even if somebody isn’t poorly opined of me, such as Strots, the news that a girl in this dorm is on a psychotropic drug is too tantalizing not to share, and share, and share.
The sound of someone talking in the hall brings my head up and I’m momentarily surprised by the fact that I’ve taken out the pills again and am reexamining the bottle with my door open to anyone who might pass. The lithium that helps me stay on the planet may look like aspirin, but given the orange bottle it comes in, you don’t need to be a genius to know it’s a substance that requires dispensing by a physician’s order, and therefore treats something far, far more serious than a common cold, a common ache.
Jesus, I hope whoever was talking didn’t see me.
A moment later, I hear the back door to the dorm open and close. I go over to the window and look down. Hot RA is walking to his sports car, his hair gleaming in the hot and heavy sunlight, his blue jeans once again worn and washed to the point of paling out, his shirt long-sleeved but white and diaphanous, like a veil for his torso. He looks fresh and sexy, and as my senses dance, I realize that even though he’s married, I live for the moments I catch a glimpse of him.
And I ache at the thought that I am not the only one who does this. The impact of his presence is so great on me that its intensity seems to demand a special carve-out for me. I feel as though I should be the only one who is allowed to notice him. But that is not realistic, and as I consider how many others covet our residential advisor, I have a theory that part of the allure is the impossibility of it all. Nick Hollis is totally unobtainable to any of us because of his age and employment, and then there is his marriage. Plus I’ve heard his wife is part of a federal task force on AIDS and that she lectures around the nation to cities and hospitals. I’ve already decided she’s a Miss America beauty queen in addition to being an intellectual giant and a resplendent humanitarian.