“Come with me,” he says, taking the bottles of aspirin from my hand, and putting the Orange Crush down on the floor even though it’s two aisles away from the cooler I got it from.
“Margie!” he calls out. “I’m taking a break for ten!”
“Yeah, okay, Phil,” comes a response from the front of the store.
Phil, the pharmacist, leads me behind his counter and through a door in the wall of the elevated platform from which he dispenses pills and potions more dangerous than the aspirin I’m trying to buy. That I will buy. As soon as he lets me go from whatever he has in mind.
He’s out of luck if he’s trying to bust me. I didn’t put anything in my pockets. He can pat me down. And you can’t call the police and turn someone in just because you think they might steal something.
Phil the Pharmacist is nothing but a speed bump in my road, not a dead end in the progression to my dead end.
“Here,” he says. “Let’s sit down.”
I look around and don’t see much of the rough-walled break room area. He’s brought us to a card table that has four folding chairs around it, and I take a seat because I am suddenly exhausted. He joins me and offers something forward. It’s a paper towel that’s folded in quarters.
When I look at him in confusion, he says, “You’re crying.”
I fumble to get the Bounty to my cheeks. I’m ashamed. It’s one thing to melt down on the inside. Showing this kind of emotion outwardly, I’m naked in front of a stranger.
As we sit in silence, I sniffle. I don’t want to look at him, but I have to check to confirm that I’m being judged.
I’m not. His eyes are kind. And sad.
So is his voice. “You go to Ambrose, don’t you.”
I nod. I don’t answer him verbally because I’m unsure of my voice.
“I’ve seen you in here before.”
I nod again.
“Can you tell me what’s going on for you?” When I shake my head, he says softly, “What do you need all the aspirin for?”
As he poses this question, we both know exactly what they’re for. He probably knows exactly why I chose the Orange Crush, too, some kind of continuing education he’s forced by the state to take flagging the soda when it’s purchased along with two bottles of fifty-count 325 mg pills of aspirin by fifteen-year-old girls in all-black clothes who are in tears and don’t even know it.
“Were you going to fill this?” he says.
I stare at him blankly. He’s holding out the piece of paper that I thought was a five-dollar bill, and when I don’t respond, he turns the slip around to face me. It’s my lithium prescription. The one that I’ve been meaning to bring down here for how long now? As my mind does a quick calendar check, I’m shocked at how many days it’s been since my supply of pills ran out. How did I lose track of the time?
“Who can I call for you?” he says.
“Nobody.” I clear my throat as the implications of going off my medication start to roll in, and I must reject them one by one to stay on track with my boiler room plan. I also have to get out of this conversation. “I’m okay. My roommate is on the field hockey team. She needs the aspirin. It’s not for me.”
The lie flows off my tongue smoothly, and I’m impressed with my destructive side’s ability to cover for itself.
Across the card table, Phil the Pharmacist looks doubtful. Perhaps the lie isn’t as convincing as my need for it to be tells me it is.
“Do you want me to call your doctor?” He points to the top of the prescription where the address and phone number of Dr. Warten are printed. “It’s inside of business hours.”
“I’m fine.” Of course I am. Even if I’m still catching tears with the paper towel he gave me. “I’ve just had a bad day. I’m not suicidal, if that’s what you’re worried about. I swear to God, I’m not going to hurt myself.”
It’s easy to back up a lie with that kind of vow when you’re an atheist, and yet throwing a little religion at the situation seems to relieve Phil. He sits back in his folding chair.
“How long have you been off your meds?” he asks.
“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.