Girl on the Line

by Faith Gardner

  “Sorry!” the girl says, dropping her enormous bag and guitar at her feet. She looks around the room with a grimace. “What can I say? I like to make an entrance.”

  This girl carries the sun in her hair. I wish I glowed like her. As if she senses my envy, she meets my gaze and smiles.

  “Nice jellies,” she says, pointing to my glittery, see-through shoes.

  “Nice leopard-print flats.”

  “Gracias. I’m Etta,” she says.

  “Journey,” I tell her.

  “Don’t stop believin’,” she belts out with pop star pizzazz.

  “Never heard that one before,” I say.

  “Seriously?!”

  “No.”

  We giggle. Etta introduces herself to Willa and Francie. “I am in love with your hair!” she almost yells. Then they giggle. Etta has that effect on people, apparently. She’s like human laughing gas.

  When Davina comes back in, she hands the four of us brick-heavy binders and begins by walking us through the chapter list and outlining what we’re going to learn, all the sections with their laminated pages on everything from mental illness to bullying to eating disorders. She explains how hotline shifts work. It’s like a teacher going through a syllabus. Then she turns to us and asks what made us want to come here and volunteer. She asks me first, smiling, waiting for my answer. The silence seems to deepen as everyone listens. Davina asked me this same question in the interview. I wasn’t expecting to have to share my answer with Etta and Willa and Francie, too. But I repeat the same story.

  “I have a friend who recently tried to kill herself,” I say. “I, uh . . . I just want to be able to help her if she ever needs it again. And people like her.”

  “Willa and I got sick of the soup kitchen,” Francie says. “You wouldn’t believe the drama that goes on there.”

  “Politics,” Willa says, shaking her head.

  “Yes, that’s the word. Politics. We’re just little old ladies who want to help people.”

  “You two are the cutest,” Etta says. “I can’t even handle it.”

  Willa and Francie giggle.

  “And you, Etta?” Davina asks. “What about you?”

  “I, um . . . well.” She twists her hair. “I guess it’s because I feel like I suck at helping people. I’m no good at it. And I—I’m afraid to. I want to be better. But honestly, I don’t even know if I can. Okay, that probably makes no sense.” She emits a tiny scream. “I’m so nervous right now!”

  She doesn’t seem nervous. She seems ebullient.

  “You’re doing just fine, dear!” Willa says.

  “Well, whatever your reason, I’m so happy you’re here,” Davina says. “I promise the experiences will be intense and frightening and sometimes heartbreaking, but they are also incredibly rewarding.”

  “More rewarding than handing out rolls at the soup kitchen, I hope,” Francie says.

  “Only one roll per person, Francie!” Willa says, mock yelling.

  “Oh, yes, how could I forget.”

  The two women giggle at some inside joke.

  “You two,” Davina says. “Do I have to separate you?”

  More laughter. Davina lets the room get quiet before putting her hand on the binder in her lap.

  “Let’s open up to page two,” Davina says.

  We begin the work. It’s not easy work. It’s not work that really has right answers all the time, besides some rules that are spelled out up front. We walk through a scripted call where Davina role-plays and acts out possible scenarios, and then discusses our responses with us.

  After this first day of training is over, Willa and Francie go follow Davina for a tour of the back garden. Etta and I stand up and with our bags.

  “That was so intense,” Etta says.

  “It was.”

  “Do you think you’re going to go through the full training?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Sure. It’s just . . . a lot of hours.” She slings her guitar on her back. “But then again, Willa and Francie are here, and they’re my favorite people I’ve ever met in my life.”

  I smile.

  “Do you think they’re a couple?” she asks. “That would make me love them even more. I hope when I’m their age I’m as cute as them with a cute little wife who dyes her hair blue with me.”

  Wow. A girl who is into girls. Took me two years of high school before I met anyone at school who was openly queer.

  I think I love it here.

  The next day, the second day of training, I come back and it’s just Davina, Willa, and Francie.

  “Etta wasn’t able to commit to the time the training requires, unfortunately,” Davina says. “But we’ll carry on without her.”

  I’m kind of shocked at my disappointment. Etta was so intriguing. We could have been friends. And the next weekend, I come in and it’s just Davina and another empty chair.

  “Willa and Francie decided to go back to the soup kitchen,” Davina says.

  “Geez, people are dropping like flies,” I say, taking my seat.

  “I hope you’re not thinking of leaving, too?” she asks.

  “No way,” I tell her. “Unlike my last boyfriend, I’m committed.”

  She laughs.

  I like Davina. She has a kind, helpful air about her not unlike my therapist, Wolf—a tendency to lean in and listen and allow for thoughtful pauses after I speak. Good thing I like her, too, because this training is fifty hours. FIVE OH HOURS over two weeks. I learn about empathy and transference and validation and mirroring until my brain is bleeding. Bonus: some of this stuff will come in handy, like active listening skills—definitely plan to whip those out during excruciating conversations with my parents. I can’t even imagine what this is like for Davina, who has worked here for years and led dozens of these trainings. The feedback she gives doesn’t feel like criticism, but like she’s simply offering another perspective. Most of what we discuss are hypothetical scenarios, page-long scripts with made-up people struggling with suicidal thoughts or abusive partners or financial stresses. If I learn anything from the binder and its endless hypothetical scenarios, it’s that there are so many ways to suffer. And, as Davina points out, the binder can be useful—“a toolbox” to refer to—but most people and situations don’t fit neatly in one page or one section.

  After our two weeks together, I come back on a Tuesday night and it’s time for me to answer my first calls. It happened so fast. It was such a whirlwind, and now I don’t know if I’m truly prepared. But Davina sits next to me and smiles, sliding on her headset.

  “Nobody feels ready,” she says. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. I’m right here.”

  In the background, a couple other folks are in the middle of hotline calls.

  “Busy night,” she says. “But that’s Lydia, JD, and Beatriz. They’ll be your shift buddies.”

  One of them, don’t know who, a hippieish woman in a long skirt, waves at us and turns back to her call.

  The first call I get is not a suicidal person, an abused person, or a teen suffering from online bullying. She’s not a person in financial distress or a homeless person or anything else there is a clean-cut section for in the binder. She’s just . . . exhausted.

  “I’m a goddamn mess,” she says, crying. “I work too much. I hate how irritable I am, how tired I am, how little my own kids want to be around me.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, looking at Davina, who is listening in.

  Tell me about your support network, Davina writes on a pad of paper for me.

  “Tell me about your support network,” I recite.

  Davina nods, like I’ve done so well, when all I did was read off her paper.

  The woman tells me about her sister, who’s been incredibly kind to her but who lives on the East Coast and has her own life. She weeps loudly and I feel for her. I feel Fremdschämen for her, vicarious embarrassment, because she’s in such an unraveled state. Spontaneously, I ask her about other social
connections she has outside of work and family. That’s the first time the woman stops crying for a moment and sniffs, thinking.

  “There is this woman Noelle in my Zumba class,” she says. “We’ve exchanged numbers. She has kids my age, too.”

  “I wonder if you might try to schedule a time to have coffee with her, just to connect with another person who might understand what you’re going through?” I ask.

  I look up at Davina, who’s giving me two thumbs up and a big grin. This is such a roller coaster. Even a few minutes into the call, I go from complete imposter syndrome panic to I am amazing at this confidence.

  Davina writes down a question about calling her doctor. I talk to the woman about what she’s happy about in her life right now and she tells me about her Chihuahua, her job as a flower shop owner, how lucky she feels to be alive sometimes.

  There’s a long pause where I hear nothing, no sniffing, and I wonder if I lost her.

  “Hello?” I ask.

  “Oh, sorry,” she says. “My husband just came home. Anyway, thank you. I do feel better, just talking about it.”

  A little dog barks in the background and we say goodbye, hang up. Davina high-fives me.

  “Look at you!” she says. “A natural.”

  “That was . . . something.”

  “Very good first call.”

  “I didn’t feel like there were answers.”

  “Exactly,” says Davina, smiling.

  I’m still high from that call when another comes in. This woman simply whispers to me that her boyfriend is going to kill her and then hangs up. Immediately, my emotions get torn in the total opposite direction. Maybe this woman is abused. Now she’s unreachable and I did nothing to help her. Davina takes me into her closet-sized office upstairs, walled with tapestries, filled with tiny cacti thriving under artificial lights. We sit on beanbag chairs and discuss.

  “I hate that I couldn’t help her,” I say.

  Davina nods. “Yes. Tell me more.”

  “Like, I should have said something. I should have told her to stay on the line, asked if she was safe—that’s the first thing I’m supposed to ask.”

  “She didn’t give you a chance to ask,” Davina reminds me.

  “I could have done something.”

  “Sometimes, everything goes wrong, and we still did everything right,” Davina says. “You’re here to support, not to steer. You get that? You’re here to offer a kind, compassionate place for people when they are ready. She was not ready.”

  I thank Davina, give her a hug. She says I’m going to do great when my real shift starts next week, but I’m not so sure after tonight.

  Maybe it’s me who’s not ready.

  Past

  The summer before last I fell stupid in love with my best friend, a boy named Jonah who lived around the corner from me since fourth grade. At first I thought falling stupid in love with my best friend was the worst idea ever. But it actually turned out to be the opposite. At first.

  Dear past self, you can be so dumb, you can be so smart.

  See, when you crush on someone and haven’t shared history, you have this whole gap of knowledge to fill with the fluff of fantasy. We’re all so many versions of ourselves, but the only version you know of your recent crush is the right-now one. You don’t know who they were a year ago, what debatable fashion choices they used to rock, what the insides of their house and room look like. But with Jonah, I knew all his versions: the sandy-haired boy with the slight stutter and the video game collection who showed me his tree house and let me swim in his pool; the boy who was bullied by kids in elementary school, and then bloomed suddenly into this effusive, magnetic chatterbox in junior high, the one who ran for student body president, and then in high school became too cool for politics and learned guitar. Who grew his hair longer than his chin and wore band shirts and a lopsided smile. Carried a skateboard around with one hand, held mine with the other. The first time he kissed me under the same oak tree where later I’d try to die, I already knew what brand of ChapStick he wore, exactly what he’d have eaten for breakfast, and how he would pet my short hair as we made out. The only thing I didn’t know was what a great kisser he’d be, but that part I guessed at and guessed right. I’d seen him smooch enough girls over the years, the way his freshman girlfriend Carla’s fingers curled when he kissed her goodbye in front of English class.

  I was afraid to fall in love with my best friend, afraid that I would lose him; but I was more afraid of missing the opportunity to love him back when at the end of sophomore year, he confessed he’d always loved me, always would. By the time the choice to be his friend or his girlfriend presented itself, my mind had made itself up already.

  So ours was an extraordinary love, the kind with roots, the kind with hindsight, the kind you walk into with your eyes wide open. He used to love my wildness, my unpredictability. Then, after my parents broke up, my highs got higher, my lows got lower, and I became “a lot for him.” He let me know that. Often.

  “Babe,” he’d say. “Maybe dial it down a notch?”

  Or, “It’s not Armageddon, you know?”

  Or, my favorite of all, asked in the gentlest of tones, “Is this a period thing?”

  Oh, the rage that question would evoke, even if it happened to be true.

  Once the car accident happened this summer, I fell off the deep end.

  It was a few weeks after the car accident that my mom took me to see Dr. Shaw. Dr. Shaw’s office was tiny, brown, ill lit; it made therapy feel like it was occurring inside a hole. His desk was a city of haphazard paperwork towers, his wall a chaos of neon Post-its. He sported a beard that looked either too long or too short and he did not meet my gaze ever, just sort of glazed over it as if he were simply scanning part of the room. I saw him only once. It was my first time ever seeing a psychiatrist, someone my parents found through our insurance network. Let’s just say I had been having a lot of big feelings—crying for no reason, wondering what the point of everything was, not caring about the future, even when I had the best boyfriend and life I could ask for. It came out of nowhere, bit me like a snake once senior year started. It was September. It was supposed to be the month of new beginnings.

  “Tell me why you’re here,” Dr. Shaw said, clipboard balanced on khaki knee.

  “I feel . . . not right,” I told him. “Like everything is meaningless. I used to be so happy, I could do anything. I felt important. Then this depression hit me. This thought struck me out of nowhere: the world would be fine without me.”

  Dr. Shaw shifted a few papers around in his stack and reclipped them to his clipboard. Clack. “On a scale of one to ten, how depressed would you rate yourself right now? Ten being extremely, one being not at all.”

  I sat slack-jawed for a moment, the words stuck in my throat. Because I had come prepared to lie on the couch and talk about my dreams and how I felt about my mother. And now he was asking me to reduce my tornado of inexplicable emotions down to a number between one and ten.

  Was that one to ten on the grand scale of happiest person in the world to saddest?

  Was that one to ten relative only to my own experience? Like, how happy I’d ever been to how sad I had ever been?

  If this wasn’t ten, did that mean there was a way to feel worse than this? I didn’t even want to know.

  He said “extremely.” Ten equals extremely. I was extremely depressed.

  “Ten,” I said.

  He nodded and marked it down. I opened my mouth, ready to talk about the car accident, to say, I’ve always been moody, a handful, but my emotions veered to scary recently. I figured Dr. Shaw should probably know that about me.

  “Recently, I was in a—”

  “Let’s finish the survey,” Dr. Shaw said, tapping the clipboard with a pen.

  “Don’t you want to, like, get to know me?” I asked.

  Another pen tap. “That’s what the survey’s for.”

  Oh . . . kay. I glared at the certificates on his
walls, thinking, the world is a sham. This man is a crappy psychiatrist, and now we can add one more to the list of lies grown-ups tell: that psychiatry will make you feel better. That a degree and a “Dr.” before your name means anything.

  “Sometimes I am very spirited and/or irritable,” he said.

  At first I thought he was telling me this. About himself. And in my head, I was like, okay, sir. I’m the one having a session here. But after a long stare-down, I realized he was waiting for me to answer.

  “On a . . . scale of one to ten?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I’m feeling pretty irritable right now, Dr. Shaw. And spirited? What did that even mean? Of course I was spirited. I’d skinny-dipped in freezing ocean water on a December evening. I loved my boyfriend so much I wanted to puke on him sometimes. The right song at the right time could make me weep like a banshee, whether it was a damn commercial jingle or not. Yes, I was spirited.

  “Ten,” I said.

  “At times, I feel extremely self-confident, and others, I feel full of doubt.”

  It was like a line from my imaginary autobiography. Sometimes I was mighty; sometimes I was a mote. I thought this was teenage-girl universal, but guess not? “Ten.”

  “Sometimes I am much more interested in sex than others.”

  I raised an eyebrow. Seemed pervy for a middle-aged male stranger to ask. There were times when Jonah complained I wanted it too much. We did it at school once during fourth period, my suggestion. But lately, Jonah had been complaining that I didn’t want it enough. “Ten,” I said quietly.

  “Sometimes I am despairing, others I am vibrant and creative.”

  Lately, despair had been the word of the day. I used to dance around my room hanging Christmas lights and FaceTiming with Jonah or Marisol all night long, devouring poems, talking to myself in the mirror and putting on lipstick for nobody but me at one a.m. Now I soaked my pillow with tears for no reason.