When I go to take the pills back, her hand releases them freely. My heart is pounding as I return them to their hidey-hole in my desk, and after they’re safe, I sit down in my chair. I’m horrified about doing this, but I’m compelled to speak for reasons I cannot fathom.
Or maybe the reasons are so simple, I miss them in my quest for complication.
Strots may not like me after this. She may want to switch roommates. She may never speak to me again. But she will not betray me. She will not use this against me. And she will never tell anyone.
And those convictions as to her character are the only reason I can go on.
“I need you to know,” I say clearly and calmly, “that it’s not about you. No matter what happens, none of it’s your fault and you bear no responsibility. And it’s got nothing to do with what happened down by the river last night.”
Strots takes a draw on her cigarette, and as she exhales, the guarded look on her face dissipates along with the smoke. “What exactly are you talking about?”
I can’t bring myself to say all of it. But I try to say enough.
“It doesn’t matter that you kissed me.” I shrug. “I know it wasn’t me you were kissing. I was just surprised and I didn’t know what to do. But I’m not upset, I’m not freaked out, and I didn’t say anything about it to Mr. Hollis.”
I keep the call-me-Nick part to myself, protecting the space he and I shared this afternoon.
“The last thing I ever want to do,” I say, “is have anyone know the truth about me. I want to keep it quiet. I have to keep it quiet. People already think I’m a freak. If they find out I’m crazy? It’s all over for me.”
I have to shift my eyes to the floor as I consider the ramifications of Greta finding this out.
“I don’t know if I can make it at this school.” I shake my head. “It’s hard for me. But I want to try.”
I realize this is the first time I have an opinion about my time at Ambrose, and I surprise myself. I do want to stay, although not because I have friends. Not because I enjoy myself. Certainly not because I think I can win against the self-destructive side of me. I want to stay because my mother may be right. The part of my brain that functions well may need this, and I will do anything to encourage the non-insane pathways under my skull. Provided I can keep things level.
“Wait, so you’re…”
“Bipolar. The lithium keeps me… normal. Well, normal-ish.”
At least in theory. At least if I take it.
“I’m not dangerous to anyone,” I rush to add. “Definitely not to you.”
Although this is another stupid thing to say. Strong as she is, Strots can snap me like a twig if she wants to.
“So why did your mother come today?” Strots asks.
“She was worried about me.”
“I saw you sitting on the bed. Earlier.” She bends down and takes her soda bottle ashtray out from under the mattress. “I thought you didn’t want to talk to me. I thought you didn’t want to see me.”
The pain in Strots’s face is something she hides by making a production out of uncapping the Coke, ashing into it, and taking another drag.
I am shocked that she cares one way or the other.
“It wasn’t that at all.” I shake my head even though she’s looking at what her hands are doing. “I’m sometimes not here. I sometimes go away.”
She looks up. “And that’s part of the…”
As she motions in the air next to her head, I nod. “Yeah. It is. It’s what the lithium helps with.”
“You tried to kill yourself?” she says as she nods at my wrists.
I resist the urge to pull my sleeves back down. But why bother? The cat is out of the bag. Or its scratches, at any rate. “Yes. Twice.”
Her eyes flare. “Twice?”
“I’ve been institutionalized a couple of times.”
“Jesus Christ.” She taps her ash into the narrow mouth of the bottle. “That’s fucking awful.”
As she stares across the divide between our two sides of the room, she’s calm and interested, but not rattled. She is also sorry. She is very, very sorry.
I feel the tension leave my body. I have done the right thing.
“I don’t want to freak you out by all this.” I shake my head again. “It’s just I don’t know how things will go for me, and that’s true wherever I am. It’s important to me that you know it’s not about you. It’s not about anybody. It’s not even about me. I’m sick where it doesn’t show on the outside, and the illness I have isn’t curable, only treatable. And sometimes treatment doesn’t work. And sometimes things happen.”
She frowns at the end of her cigarette. “I’m sorry I did that. Down at the river.”
“It’s okay. I was just surprised, honest.”
“I thought that maybe you’d told them.” There is no reason for her to define “them.” “And you know, if it gets out, I’m out. No matter who my family is. People don’t want gays here. Hell, it’s even in the bylaws or whatever the fuck they’re called. Christian values, you know.”
“But they’ll keep the Gretas around. That’s stupid.”
She laughs without smiling. “That’s the world. And goddamn, my father would be pissed.”
“So you told Keisha what happened?”
“Not about the, you know, by the river. I just said you’d found out what I am. That I’m gay.”
“You can tell her about me. If you want.” I pull my sleeves down over my scars. “I really don’t want her to beat me up.”
“She won’t.” Strots looks over at me. “And I trust her with everything.”
“If my illness gets out?” I shake my head once again. “I won’t survive.”
The two of us stare at each other. And then she nods.
“Don’t worry. You’re safe.”
The words are spoken directly and she’s looking me right in the eye. In response, I rub my face to cover my emotions. She’s going to protect me, and not just by staying silent.
She is truly my friend.
Strots refocuses on the bottle in my hand. Funny, I wasn’t aware of taking it back out. When did that happen? I return it to where it belongs a second time, and as I close the drawer, I am wondering how to wrap this up—
“Greta was my roommate last year,” Strots says softly.
My head whips up to level. “Really?”
Strots nods. “We lived together on the first floor.”
“I didn’t know that.”
It’s always interesting for me to watch someone else recede into their own mind, a view from the outside of myself when I disappear. And as I witness her go deep into her own memories, I’m glad that Strots does not travel to the places I go, the fantasies, the distortions, the worlds away. She’s merely in her own past, remembering events from the previous year.
I think back to her staring through the V in that tree last night, her eyes on Greta, the yearning on my roommate’s face not subtle in the slightest.
“You fell in love with her, didn’t you.”