I’m still drying my hands with a paper towel as I come up to my door. I knock. There’s no answer. A flash of panic goes through my body as I enter and close myself in. Her bed is still made, the pillow still in place. I open her closet. Her team jackets and her jerseys and the one dress she brought with her are where they’ve always been. Thank God. And her bureau is still full. Lastly, I revisit her cigarettes, which are exactly where they’re supposed to be.
Relieved, I fall onto my bed, letting my limbs lie where they land. I should take my jacket off, but I’m breathing hard and dizzy from not having eaten. It’s also hot in our room, that boiler I intend to die next to doing its job. But so much for the maintenance man finding me; he’s already turned the great beast on for the season. But at least, when I follow through with my plan, I’ll be warm.
The pills. I need to put my lithium away.
Sitting up, I shed my jacket and open the bottom drawer of my desk. I put the full bottle next to the one that I emptied without being aware of it, and I’m relieved there’s no crinkly little white bag to throw out. I refused one when Phil the Pharmacist handed the prescription over to me.
It’s too much effort to lie back on the bed. I stay at the edge of my mattress, propping my head in my hands.
The lithium is supposed to ward off the mania, and it seems silly to take a pill now when I’m at the low ebb of mood. What exactly am I bringing myself down from? More to the point, if I’m just going to kill myself later, why do I care what my mood’s trajectories are?
But some quiet, rational voice is talking to me, and it forces me to recall what Dr. Warten said about the highs and the crashes that follow. I’ve been overstimulated with change, with Greta, since coming to Ambrose, and my efforts to keep a semi-regular sleep schedule have clearly not provided enough support to the adjustments I’ve been required to make to my new environment. I see now that I’ve been kindling, my thoughts racing, my inner life so much more involved and involving than anything I find in outside reality.
Surrounded by fresh faces and unfamiliar territory, I’ve fallen back on the only friend who’s never deserted or judged me. Too bad she is so destructive.
And the fact that I forgot to refill my prescription and keep to my medication schedule has allowed my madness to get a serious foothold on me.
As I reach this conclusion, it should be the end of the analysis. I should stop right here, take my medication, and call Dr. Warten, which was the plan he and I agreed to when he signed off on me attending Ambrose. My illness, however, likes to argue with facts and it’s a debating expert that always wins. Even when its logic is ridiculous, the lilt of its faulty reasoning is a song I find irresistible, and I’m not even sure what it is telling me right now. I just know that resuming the medication is not a good idea. It won’t really help me. It offers nothing but side effects, whereas my boiler room plan is a slam dunk, a certain score, a predictable win. Provided I do it right this time.
I stare down at the drawer I just closed. I think of the empty prescription bottle that’s already in there, and recall my anxiety over its disposal. I’d decided that I was going to take it home with me out of an abundance of caution. Not during the upcoming Columbus Day weekend, though. I’ve already set it up with my mother that I’m staying and working in the dorm for some money. No, I’m going to wait until Thanksgiving break to throw it out, and I try to find optimism in the fact that I am contemplating anything in November, even a hypothetical. Yet the thought of home brings up the futility of my considering any sort of future. Even on the lithium, I’ve only made it for a year and a month without having any major suicidal thoughts.
And you’ll get more of them tonight, someone in my head points out. And tomorrow. And every day until you take care of this problem—
My hand plows into that desk drawer and I grab the pills like they have an expiration date measured in seconds, not years. I pop the little lid, check they are the right ones—not that Phil would have made a mistake—and I take one, swallowing it dry. When it gets stuck, I go into Strots’s closet and I borrow one of the bottles of Coke she keeps there. I twist off the top, suck some gulps that sound loud in the quiet room, and I’m shaking when I sit back down.
I’m not sure where the impulse to take the pill came from, but it feels like a flimsy savior compared to the glaring, blaring force of the suicidal thoughts and their rugged, persuasive logic.
I drink some more, the bottle vibrating in my grip from the tremors that rack me. The sugar perks me up and sort of clears my mind, and I grasp on to the revival of both body and consciousness, telling myself that it is my pill already going to work. This is a lie. There is nothing therapeutic going on, at least not in a medicinal sense. It’ll take time to rebuild the levels of the drug in my body, to get to a saturation point where my mood is chemically altered for the better. But the placebo effect is real. I feel as though I have taken a treatment for suicide that is fast-acting and dispositive. With it in my system, I will not go into the boiler room.
Glancing around my room, I think maybe it’s best that I leave St. Ambrose. For one, Strots doesn’t know what town I’m from. She’s never asked. I’ve never told. If I go back home to take care of business, she may never hear about my death. And even if she does, I’ll be sure to wait long enough so that she’ll ascribe the bad outcome to someone or something else’s fault. For another, it will be a relief for her to not have to be the one who leaves this room. She can stay here by herself until somebody transfers in next semester or the school year comes to its natural conclusion.
Problem solved without my having to reveal anything. This is a good result for a lot of reasons. Dr. Warten says that inherent to bipolar with mania is both lack of self-awareness and impeded decision-making. He often maintains, at least to the parents of the kids he treats, that he must repeatedly convince the sick that they are, in fact, sick. I say I have too much awareness about myself. I say that in this moment, my disease is all I see, a shroud between me and everyone else, and it has been a lifetime since twenty-four hours ago, when I was down by the river watching those girls flick ashes into the current and feeling indignant at their lack of ecological awareness.
Sitting here in my dorm room, in a sunken pit of my madness, I long to get confused by the sight of our residential advisor standing with Greta in the trees. Or to become annoyed by my geometry teacher’s lunch of coleslaw and only coleslaw.
But there is nothing I can do. I am where I am. At least I have a new plan, and any minute, Strots will come through that door.
Any minute—
When I hear her knock, I sit up straighter and consider hiding the bottle of Coke, but I don’t think she’ll mind. I hope she doesn’t mind.
“Strots,” I say. “I’m here.”
The door opens and a dark head of luxurious hair leans in.
It’s not Strots.
Hot RA’s brilliant green eyes seek me out and his smile is tentative. “Hey. You got a minute to talk?”
I jump to my feet, even though he’s not a sergeant, and I haven’t been called to attention. “Strots isn’t here.”
“I’m not looking for her. I’m looking for you.”