Waiting for Fitz

by Spencer Hyde

  “Two years? Wow,” I said.

  “Yeah. Well. It’s not like I’m cured or anything. I still hear things all the time. Some things are funny. Willy can make me laugh, and Lyle is often spot-on with his observations. Toby is usually nonsensical. Others are cruel. Some scare me. Most are stupid. But it’s not like they show in the movies, with fun characters who follow around the brilliant, beleaguered hero. Sure, I’m brilliant, but those movies tend to leave out the shame, the conflict, the doubt. Like that OCD detective on TV—they never show him crying over his obsessions. He’s just fun and quirky. And that’s not the truth.”

  I started scribbling on my piece of paper, afraid of looking him in the eyes. I wasn’t sure how to handle the seriousness of his tone or the intricate nature of his condition and all the pieces I didn’t understand. I didn’t really have time to process that kind of disorder, but I gave it a shot by trying to connect on some level.

  “I know what it’s like to be afraid of your next thought,” I said. “Sometimes, I hum real loud or sing or even shout because I know the next thought is going to be one I obsess over for hours. Just one word, and I’ll drop everything to obsess. That means lots of washing and ticks and rituals and repetition.” I fiddled with my pen and then folded the paper in front of me. “But I shouldn’t compare mine to yours.” I wasn’t sure if I’d upset Fitz because he didn’t speak for a beat.

  “Part of my behavioral work has been to respond to the voices and make a joke of it. I think it’s helping. It definitely suits me better than ignoring the voices entirely. But the episodes have been much less frequent since I started on the new medications,” he said, pausing for a minute. “I also think I should stop being afraid of what could go wrong and start thinking of what could go right.”

  He looked past me to the wall on the far side of the little nook.

  I turned to follow his gaze. Afternoon light bathed the far wall, and I saw the lame quote exactly as he’d stated it, word for word, in bold, glossy letters framed in this flowery décor. It looked like, way too kitschy.

  “Ugh. I knew that last line wasn’t real. I hate that phony, cotton candy crap,” I said.

  He started laughing. “Go!”

  He removed his paper from atop the letters on the Boggle board, knocked my pen onto the floor, and began writing down words. I laughed, too, and grabbed my pen. I knew he was avoiding talking about his disorder. I didn’t blame him. In fact, I did the exact same thing.

  But seeing him do it made me realize how many walls I’d put up in my own life, and how those walls might be keeping me away from any real improvement in my therapy. Whatever. I had to hurry and catch up to his word count.

  “Cheater,” I said, looking down at the board. It did actually contain those letters, but I was mostly saying it to goad Fitz.

  “Marsupial,” he said. “Acrobatic, quantity, humidity. And I haven’t even looked at the board for that long.”

  “You’re so arrogant,” I said. “But it would be impressive to see all those words on one Boggle board. Not likely, but whatever.”

  We wrote down words as fast as we could. I bit my lower lip—something I did when concentrating or nervous or anxious.

  “How are we timing this?” I said, realizing again that we had no clock.

  “I’ll tell you when I can’t find any more words, then we’ll both stop.”

  He laughed, deep in his throat, and it made me smile. You know the kind of laugh that makes you want to laugh? It was one of those.

  We both set our pens down a few minutes later, recognizing that we’d run out of words.

  “So, Addie Foster,” said Fitz, pushing his paper away, “tell me about yourself. A little more, I mean. Something you don’t usually tell people. C’mon. We’re wearing booties. Can it get worse?”

  I looked at Fitz and back at my paper and started doodling because I wasn’t sure if I was ready to open up just yet.

  “You know Group Talk will bring it all out anyway,” he said.

  He had a point. And I was hoping we’d get to know each other better, so I decided to tell him part of my story.

  When I was much younger, I found myself counting things, concerned with proportions, worried about cleanliness and germs at school, and constantly sniffling. I don’t know why certain ticks stopped, but it was one tick that started me off on an endless journey. I knew that my mind raced all day, every day, but I was so young, I figured every kid was dealing with the same thing. Who knows enough to ask if something’s wrong with them at such a young age?

  Anyway, I grew into the obsessions and started spacing the hangers in my closet, and counting all the steps in the house each time I walked to a different floor, and the sniffling got worse. Throat clearing was added as a new cast member around that time. Hey! Come join the play, everybody! I hired new cast members by the day, it seemed.

  I started taking on so many ticks that I started losing friends. Like, my obsessive cast was growing, but my cast of real-life friends was dwindling because of my selfishness. It wasn’t because they disliked me or judged me, but because I was afraid to be with them. I left them; I didn’t lose them. I replaced them with obsessions, compulsions, thoughts, ticks, rituals, worries. I had to turn inward, to face the thoughts and bend to their will. My will. Whatever. I was too in my head. I was holding on to ghosts meant to save me from the hauntings in my mind. It was embarrassing.

  Truly though, things were like, abysmal. My routines began taking me three hours to complete every morning. I couldn’t sleep at nights either, because I kept getting up to wash my hands after a new obsessive thought entered my head the moment I set it on the pillow.

  That’s also when I started worrying more about the safety of the people around me. My mind was telling me that if I didn’t complete the rituals, Mom or someone in my extended family, or even a close friend, might die. Absurd, right? But I felt that washing was an act of saving, of love. It made perfect sense.

  Mom took note of my odd behaviors early on, but she didn’t know it was serious until I started crying about not finishing my rituals. If she tried to rush me out the door, I’d totally lose it and start saying someone would get hurt or she might die and I couldn’t live without her. What a joke of cosmic proportions, right?

  She was able to afford a psychologist visit for me twice a month, so I lucked out in getting some basic medication. However, that medication only slightly lessened the obsessions and made me incredibly tired. I hated it. I started cutting the pills in half or not taking them at all because they changed me so much. It was like my brain had to act as some traffic controller, and the pills slowed down the flow of the planes or cars or whatever.

  Then the real godsend came. Dr. Wall, though he wasn’t all that great, took the initiative and contacted an old med school friend of his about an OCD case that he couldn’t figure out—hint: me. I’m the conundrum wrapped in a mystery and deep-fried in an enigma. Dr. Wall’s friend happened to be Dr. Riddle, the leading adolescent psychiatrist in the entire country. What a friend to have, right? I know. I know.

  Telling Fitz all this made me like him a bit more. I mean, he was a great listener, and I could tell his walls were not as high or as impenetrable as I first believed them to be. But maybe I was wrong. It was just a facial and body-language read anyway.

  I left out all the depressing nights and long talks with Mom where I could hear the hopelessness and the worry and the sadness in her voice like gravel, the rocks turning and her voice losing the soft edge, the vowels elongating and wandering, but c’mon, I was talking to a guy I was kind of digging—he didn’t need all the facts at that point.

  Fitz nodded as I spoke, smiling in a wistful way. “It’s pretty amazing what our brains can do to us, you know? Like, here’s this thing sitting in this dark room that is just lighting up our world and making us do things we find absolutely off the wall. But we do them. We
listen— Shut up, Willy!” he yelled, interrupting himself, his eyebrows lowering. I was surprised at his anger, but he quickly softened.

  “Willy?”

  “Just another voice. Sorry about that. He kept making jokes while I was trying to listen.”

  I patted Fitz on the arm. “So far I know of Lyle and Willy and Toby. You got something you need to tell me, cowboy?”

  Fitz tilted his head back and laughed, a real sardonic grin on his face. I couldn’t get past those amazing gray eyes. Maybe it’s weird that I notice eyes first and last and in-between whenever I meet someone. Maybe that’s how I get such a good read on people.

  “I gave them all names of country singers so I wouldn’t feel so bad about yelling at them. I hate country music. Willy Nelson is always telling dirty jokes.”

  I laughed and watched as he shifted in his beanbag chair, showing me that handsome gap.

  “That sounds like Willy,” I said. “What you really should go for are his pigtails. Braided pigtails. Super studly.”

  The sunlight was spangling the wall where there was a bunch of artwork hanging—mostly stuffy quotes and overly decorated garbage, but there were also some paintings of boats that I didn’t mind too much. One in particular was called The Boat Graveyard and showed these two washed-up boats totally falling apart on the shores of a Scottish isle. The colors had faded to the point where they blended almost perfectly with the landscape. Maybe that’s what I wanted—to lose the extremes of my disorder and blend in, to be normal, to change my colors.

  Fitz looked at his list of words. I could tell he wasn’t all that interested in discussing those voices, but he was also pretty open with me, emotionally. He was incredibly hard to figure out, but those kind are the most fun, in my opinion.

  “Did you get ‘chartreuse’?” he asked.

  “Get real, guy. What do you really have?”

  He started listing his words off: Berry. Err. Yarn. Brawn. The list went on. I crossed off some of mine, having doubled up on a few. Then I read my list until I got to the seven-letter words I was most proud of.

  “‘Warbler,’” I said. “That’s a good one, eh?”

  I looked at Fitz and alternated my blinks because I was excited. I waited for his smile to mimic mine, for him to make some joke about warbling in the shower and maybe mock country music again. But he didn’t.

  He threw his pen down on the table and said, “See you later, Addie.”

  Then he stood and walked away.

  Just like that.

  I saw his silhouette bathe the opposing hallway wall as he faded from my view. I heard the wind push against the windows, the breeze a living thing that beat like a heart against the glass.

  Was he really that competitive? Did I offend him in the way I said it or something? Was he just a sore loser, or did he think of something that upset him at that exact moment?

  I didn’t see him for a week.

  Warbler. Seven-letter word. A type of perching bird.

  Maybe I was finally sniffing around the right place if I was going to eat that truffle in the second act.

  Three

  I was sitting in the Study Room one morning when Martha came in. She walked over to Leah Garza, a young Mexican-American girl with short brown hair, like almost a buzz cut, and beautiful brown eyes, a shade darker than her tan skin.

  “You owe me. We made a bet, and you lost,” Martha said with a smile.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll put my money in the horse’s mouth,” Leah said, smiling back.

  Martha raised an eyebrow.

  “Just kidding,” Leah said. “I know it’s really ‘Put your money where your china shop is.’”

  Martha started laughing, then, and patted the girl on the arm.

  I moved over to sit next to Leah Garza. I didn’t really know her all that well, but she looked nice. Besides, it’s not like I had a crazy amount of options when it came to conversational partners. And I needed that. I mean, I could easily get lost in a movie or book, but I needed conversation to remind me why I was fighting to get out of my own head.

  Leah and I did the usual war-story-let’s-hear-why-you’re-here talk, and she told me she was recovering from glioblastoma. She said it super loud and slow, like I was a foreigner and didn’t speak English. She said it was basically like having a constellation of tumors in her brain, and I could think of it like “Glee, maybe this thing isn’t so bad,” then “Oh Blast, it really is that bad,” then an “Oh man” at the end.

  “I have to add the n to make it work,” she said.

  I liked her sense of humor and the way she was able to laugh, but I figured it was another case of doing so in order not to cry.

  It was weird having a twelve-year-old in the psych ward because she seemed so young, but I guess I was only five years her senior. Whatever.

  I told her I didn’t know the psychiatric ward was for that kind of sickness, but she said it was for the depression she couldn’t kick.

  I moved closer to her and put my arm around her. She was a quiet girl. Small yet so strong—I could see it in the way she carried herself. She often talked about her mother at home and how she lit multiple candles each day for Leah’s recovery. I thought of Mr. Shakes and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Leah was little, sure, but she was fierce.

  The Study Room held two tables and a few chairs and some posters that were trying to sound inspirational but just ended up sounding corny. You know the drill. Same as every other room there. But these posters were more focused on hard work and learning and determination. The one hanging closest to where we were sitting was of this massive bald eagle and below the picture it said, “Your attitude, not your aptitude, determines your altitude.” What a cheeseball of a poster. I hated that crap.

  “What are you working on, Addie?” said Leah, closing the book she’d been reading. It looked like a fun sci-fi series for children and had a spaceship on the cover with a warrior holding some sort of weird, neon weapon.

  “Trying to ignore the beautiful alliteration of that poster,” I said, pointing at the eagle.

  I realized Leah maybe wasn’t old enough to get the joke, so I quickly adjusted my mannerisms and my delivery, as well as my tone.

  “Sorry. I’m working on some English homework. I’m trying to get at least some credits so I’m not too far behind for graduation. I want to go to college when I get out of here.”

  “That’s cool,” she said, looking back at her book. “I hope I can go to college.”

  I kept reading because I didn’t know what to say. I mean, how do you deal with a head full of tumors when you’re so small and just getting a grasp on things? I felt awful. But the doctors said they’d gotten all her tumors, so she would definitely be okay, right?

  “You’ll definitely go,” I said, giving her a half-baked smile that I could tell was overly showy. Stupid. I felt stupid.

  I could tell that she wasn’t done asking questions because she kept glancing over at me and then at my book like kids do, waiting for you to notice them.

  Yes, I was still taking classes, mostly AP English Lit from my favorite teacher, Dr. Morris, but Mom brought me packets of work each week so I could finish up some credits while I was still in the psych ward.

  Yes, Dr. Morris was nice about it all. He knew me, and understood that I couldn’t attend class but still wanted to be involved. He knew that words were the thing that saved me from getting lost in my obsessive thinking. Words were my savior. Sounds weird, but it’s true.

  Think about it. All that matters in life are the right words in the right order. We make meaning with words, and we base everything on meaning and understanding. Words—that’s all we’ve got. We’re tied to them, inexorably. And I wasn’t about to lose a full year of school. I knew I’d end up a little behind, but a little was better than a lot.

  Dr. Morris had sent three books that first
month, along with a syllabus. We would be reading a couple plays every week, so clearly senior year AP English Lit was going to be all about dramatic texts. Maybe that’s why I was so interested in becoming a playwright at the time. I mean, my trajectory or goals or whatever tended to change because of the impulsiveness I lived with. I think it was some ridiculous OCD side effect.

  Dr. Morris sent the complete works of a specific author along with these really awesome introductions he wrote about the author’s history and everything. It was especially cool because everything he sent got automatically approved. I mean, he was an English teacher, so they didn’t question his recommendations. Also, Mom had already talked with Dr. Riddle about Morris and my homework and got some special hookup or something. Whatever. I loved it, is all I’m saying. I was really digging the work.

  “You looking at my book?” I said to Leah. It was Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett.

  “Yeah. Looks weird,” she said.

  “It is. So far. It’s a play about a couple of dudes waiting around for something and making elliptical jokes. Nothing’s happening,” I said. I remembered I was talking to Leah and changed my words. “They’re just talking and sitting. Seriously. I bet yours is way cooler.”

  Leah nodded and went back to her sci-fi book.

  I wish I had more of a talent for that kind of interaction. Kids are so awesome when it comes to doing what they want, when they want. They’ll ask a question, get their answer, and then move on to the next thing without bothering to reply.

  She was a cute little girl—look, twelve isn’t that young, but I felt like two decades older for some reason. I felt this like, motherly instinct to protect her from the world. But I couldn’t even do that for myself, so what did that say about my situation?