“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.
For godsakes, the girl offered to beat up Greta for me. She has principles.
“So who can I call for you?” Phil says. Like he’s had to repeat the words a couple of times.
I gather he’s been speaking to me again and I haven’t been responding, and as a result of this, what little persuasive ground I’ve gained on the I’m-not-crazy front has probably been lost. But that doesn’t matter now. My course has changed, and it is because of something he’s said, although not in the manner I’d assume he intended. This isn’t a permanent alteration in my goal. Only a delay so that I can set a different foundation for my actions.
“I’m not going to kill myself,” I tell him. “That is not what’s going to happen.”
As I stare the pharmacist right in the eye, I’m lying about absolutely nothing at all.
Well, almost nothing. I will not kill myself right now.
Right now, I have to talk to Strots. Immediately. I don’t know how long I have before the darkness comes back for me, and I’ve got to find my roommate before the shifting decks of my mood tilt at the plunging angle again.
Phil nods slowly. “Okay. I believe you.”
chapter FOURTEEN
I’m racing up Main Street, heading back to campus, my refill of lithium in the pocket of my jacket, absolutely no aspirin or Orange Crush on me because Phil is not as dumb as I thought he was. I’m on Medicaid because of my mother’s low income and my diagnosis, and I was able to cover the co-pay for my prescription refill with my five dollars. On my way out of the CVS, I put my forty-three cents in change on the counter in front of Margie, the cashier. She seemed surprised. It’s a shame that I couldn’t promise I’d be back to repay the rest of what I was given to meet the cost of the Rit dye and the ColorStay, and also that I didn’t have the time to report on the success of the advice she and Roni had given me.
I have no idea how long I’ll be able to keep the wolves away, and making preemptive peace with my roommate is my paramount purpose.
As words that start with the letter p circle my mind like a flock of birds, all flapping wings and squawks, I steam up the hill to Ambrose, chugging along in my heavy boots, making good time that nonetheless feels slow. It’s two fifteen in the afternoon. I want to get my pills hidden and be in position on my bed well before Strots returns to drop her books off and have a cigarette before her home game starts. She does this because she can’t smoke anywhere near the playing fields. And her cigarettes were under her pillow when I left, a first base that she will have to slide back into.
As I pass by the theater building and zero in on Tellmer, there are no students walking around. This seems right, as I feel utterly alone.
I am on the swinging pendulum between the living and the dead, and this is not an experience I believe I am sharing with many of my cohort here. It is also not hyperbole. When you begin to dance with the idea that you can take your own life, when you have tried on a number of plans for size and not talked to anyone about them, when you’ve actually attempted to kill yourself a couple of times, when you are mentally ill and messing around with your brain chemistry with mood stabilizers because it’s the best of the bunch of weak solutions that the doctors can give you, you’re very aware that what drove you to go down to CVS one hour ago is a switch that gets flipped with greater ease every time it’s used. The first crank is rusty and there’s some resistance; you may have to put both hands into it. But you quickly wear that off until the gear is smooth and the toggle itself entices.
That’s where I am now.
The realization that I’m in a separate class of citizens makes me feel self-important. I’m a critical problem, not just an alienated girl on scholarship at a fancy prep school who wears black clothes and is growing out a drugstore dye job on her brown hair. Still, beneath that surface gleam of special status, I’m absolutely terrified.
I’m completely out of control. And in spite of this insight, I’m not sure whether I’d want to take the wheel if I could.
Arriving at Tellmer, I surmount the steps up to my dorm’s front entrance, and as I wrench open the shoulder-straining weight of the door, I think about Ms. Crenshaw. Shit, I pray that she’s not lying in wait for me at the base of the stairs, or in the open doorway of her apartment, or, even worse, leaning against the wall next to my room upstairs, all because of some loser simpatico that has her instinctually aware of my trip down into town.
There’s no one at the bottom of the stairs, and her door is closed. I don’t waste time. I don’t check my mailbox. I take the staircase two steps at a time, the loose pills chattering in their hard-sided bottle in my pocket as if they’re clapping for me, cheering me on. Up on the second floor, I speed down my hall. No one is around. I stop at the bathroom because I don’t want to be disturbed by a call of nature once I get to my room.