The St. Ambrose School for Girls(44)

“I don’t know.”

This is because, rather than counting the calendar, I’m trying to calculate what will appease him more: the idea that I’ve missed only a few days or that I’ve missed a few weeks. The former suggests I may be very mentally ill, but perhaps he’ll feel as though I can quickly get back on track. The latter would mean I’m less mentally ill, but may have a harder course to return to the stasis point that allows me to be out in the world under my own auspices. I can’t decide which is better, what is worse.

“You need to take these pills every day.”

“I know. I won’t make the mistake again.”

I have no idea what I am saying. I’m just trying to agree with everything that comes out of his mouth because I’m hoping he’ll take acquiescence as a sign that I’m open to his advice and will follow it. This is what adults want to hear from girls like me who are in a crisis. They want to believe that they’ve had a positive impact and effected a change of course away from impending disaster—and if you can’t impart this illusion to them with your words, your tone, and your affect, then they’ll escalate the warfare and call in for reinforcements. You’ve got to make sure they feel heard and give off the impression that their well-intended logic is the sort of thing that you’re uniquely struck by, some combination of their syllables knocking down the barrier to your recovery. It’s the way they live with themselves after a bad result, the solace they take as they go home at night to be with their spouses and children and mortgages and groceries.

At least I tried, they tell themselves.

“If you could fill my prescription now, that’d be great,” I say. “I’d really appreciate it. I’ll even take one of the pills right here, right now.”

Phil gives my face a good, thorough examination, and I make sure that my features are arranged in a pleasant mask, as if there’s nothing going on behind my eyes and between my ears that should worry him: I have no suicide plan. The Orange Crush is because I like orange soda. The aspirin really is for my roommate. And the tears are because I’m a hormonal teenager and about to get my period.

“Suicide is not the answer,” he says. “It really isn’t. It’s a permanent solution to a temporary mood.”

Bingo.

I almost smile because I’ve heard this preamble to a release from custody before, but I make sure I retain the receptive, open expression I’m faking. Temporary mood, huh, I want to say. I’ve had two years of hell, preceded by a decade of a lesser version of the torture, and I’m staring down a double-barreled, normal life span loaded with only more of the same. Even on the lithium, my disease is getting stronger, and if I don’t put the boiler room plan into action today, it’ll happen sometime in the near future.

This inevitability is typical of patients like me. What I have, I overheard Dr. Warten once say to my mother, is like childhood cancer. Sooner or later, the drugs won’t work anymore, and then I’ll die.

“The thing is,” Phil the Pharmacist hazards, “you have to think of what you leave behind. How the people you love will feel.”

Nice advice, Phil, I say to myself. But with the way things are going right now, I don’t have room in my brain to consider the ramifications of my funereal pursuits on anybody but Margaret Stanhope.

“What will your mother feel? Your father?”

They’ll be fine, Phil. They’re going to get back together and move to Bel Air—hey, can I call you Phil? Is that okay? I figure, given what we’re discussing, we might as well be on a first-name basis even though you’re a grown-up and I’m a kid.

“How about your roommate? How will she feel?”

My roommate will be—

Abruptly, I frown. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

I’m so busy conversing with him in my head that it’s hard to hear what he’s actually speaking.

“Your roommate. How will she feel?”

An icy dread comes over me, hitting my head and flowing throughout my hot, numb body. The change in temperature wakes me up, the feel of the hard chair beneath my bottom, the run-down interior of the break room, the smell of Phil’s vastly diminished aftershave, all of it barging in, as if the sensations have broken through a door.

My iron-clad purpose, my clarity of mission, is shaken.

Strots. What about Strots.

I put my hand to my mouth, horrified.

I’ve been so focused on taking Greta’s toy away that I’ve forgotten Strots. If I leave this store—and buy two bottles of aspirin somewhere else—and go back to my dorm, and take the pills in that boiler room, and hold them down, and am in that lucky one to two percent who get the job done, Strots will think it’s her fault. She’ll think her kiss was the reason. She’ll blame herself for the rest of her life.

With ultra-clarity, I see my roommate’s face as she pulled away when I didn’t respond to her kiss. I relive the shame and blame in her eyes. Jesus. If she can’t handle the repercussions of what she perceives as a relatively minor violation of personal boundaries, she’ll never make it through my dead body, and nothing I can say in my suicide note will expunge her of this sense of false responsibility. What’s more, she’ll feel that guilt even if I’m in the open field of ninety-eight percent who can’t get the job done. If I’m found unresponsive in the boiler room in a pool of my own vomit, and I’m eventually revived, waking up in a hospital bed with charcoal in my stomach and bags of saline being forced through my veins, she’ll still feel responsible. With Strots’s sense of honor, she’ll view a failed attempt as something that’s just as bad as an actual success.