by Elise Juska
“What took so long?” he said, walking toward her. “Are you crying?” Then he stopped. “Jesus, you’re not—”
“No,” she said. “Of course not. And anyway, you don’t find out for two weeks.” The crook of her arm still pulsed faintly. “I fainted. I told you I’m not good with needles. I got dizzy and the nurse gave me juice and was really worried about me. She wouldn’t let me leave.”
“Oh.” Then, “Come here,” he said, and stepped toward her, reaching for her hand. She hated this. Hated him, suddenly. She walked away, arms tucked across her chest. “Anna, come on. Where are you going?”
“Class,” she managed, though poetry didn’t start for another hour. She continued past the dining hall, the student union. James followed. She was tempted to keep lapping the quad just to see at what point he would give up, but her anger slowly ebbed, and after a few minutes, she began feeling silly. When he reached for her again, she stopped. “Come on,” he said. “Can we talk?”
She followed him to a bench near the library, under a sprawling maple. The tree had leaves the size of hands. They sat close but not touching, facing the quad, which was red and golden, splashed with sunlight. It looked like the stage of a play. He said, “What’s going on?”
It was a cool afternoon, but Anna’s face was burning. If I’m going to be with someone, it has to be honest, James had said. She watched the students strolling along the brick paths, sunlight filtering through the branches, and knew she had to tell him. Worst-case scenario: He took it badly; he broke up with her on the spot. If so, she knew Alexis would gladly meet her back in the room to explain why she was better off without him. She wouldn’t have to worry anymore about STDs, or this pressure she felt to impress him all the time, to never just relax and be herself. The worst-case scenario was survivable—in some ways, it might be a relief.
“Well, so”—she was trying to keep her tone light, despite the flush prickling her neck—“I was thinking about what you said, the other night, about being honest, and in the interest of full disclosure I should probably tell you that, back in high school, I struggled with some things.”
She fixed her eyes on a long crack winding along the bricks, but sensed his nod. “Okay,” he said.
“I mean, it was nothing cataclysmic,” she said. “It was eating stuff, mostly. An eating disorder, officially.” She glanced over at him, palms pressed between her thighs. “Please don’t freak out.”
“I’m not freaking out,” James replied. In fact, his face, beneath the sunglasses, looked unbothered, possibly even unsurprised.
“It’s a cliché, I know. It’s embarrassing.”
“How bad was it?”
She shrugged, tears rising sharply. “Bad, I guess.”
“How much did you weigh?”
At this, she couldn’t help but laugh. It was a question, the question, nobody ever asked. “One eighteen,” she said. “And now I’m like one fifty. So, there you go. I’m not starving myself anymore. I’m over it. Obviously.”
“How did you get over it?”
“I had, you know, a therapist,” she said. “A nutritionist. But mostly, I just realized I was thinking about it too much. It was taking up too much space in my brain.” This was partly true. It was also an answer she thought James might appreciate. In James’s brain, there probably wasn’t an iota of wasted space.
But James was slowly shaking his head. “It’s such bullshit,” he said. “Another false narrative perpetuated by the media. Selling a celebrity culture that warps people into thinking they have to attain these unrealistic standards of perfection.”
Anna made a small, halfhearted non-sound. She knew James was being supportive, but the fact that he saw her as vulnerable to these standards of perfection made her feel gullible. And that he obviously saw her as falling short of them made her feel, absurdly, hurt.
“Anyway,” she said. “I just thought that I should let you know.”
“I’m glad.” He smiled, giving her knee a squeeze, and as much as she’d dreaded telling him, his reaction left her feeling empty. Maybe, in the hierarchy of the world’s problems, things worthy of solicitude, eating disorders ranked among more shallow and unserious.
Anna stared out at the quad. “And, well,” she said. “Since I’m confessing past afflictions, in the interest of full disclosure I guess I should probably mention I had some issues with anxiety too.”
James chuckled. “Who doesn’t? If you’re a rational, thinking member of this country you’d better be feeling a little fucking anxious.”
“Yeah,” she said. “But this was more than that. It was real. It was scary. Like panic attacks.”
James looked at her, pushed his sunglasses on top of his head. “Really? What were your triggers?”
“Um, everything?” Her laugh was a catch in her throat. “Robbers. Fires. Highly improbable abduction scenarios.”
“B minuses,” he said, and she smiled, grateful for the joke.
“And needles,” she added. “And sexually transmitted diseases.”
“Anna. Jesus. You have to tell me these things. If you don’t, how am I supposed to—”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m telling you now. And I mean—it’s not like I can’t handle it. I handled it, didn’t I?” She felt light, shaky with emotion. James picked up her hand and put it in his lap, rubbing his thumb along the inside of her wrist. He was looking at her closely now, expression folded into concern. Clearly, anxiety was a more respectable problem, darker and messier, more intellectual somehow.
“Are you medicated?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Not anymore. I was.”
“Klonopin? Ativan? Zoloft? Lexapro?”
“Lexapro,” she said. “And Ativan.”
“My brother was on that.”
“Oh,” she said. “Right.” She paused. “Well, now I take it only for real emergencies.”
“How frequent are real emergencies?”
“I mean, never, basically. I haven’t had one in almost a year,” she said, but then remembered that night in the Grange. It had been only August, not even a month ago, but already felt surreal, a distant memory of a different person. It was almost not worth mentioning, but she had decided to be honest, and she had come this far. “Actually,” she admitted, “if we’re being totally thorough, there was a minor incident that happened this summer. Not a full-blown panic attack. Just—a little thing.”
“A little thing,” James replied. He squeezed her fingers once more, then let go, propped a boot on the opposite knee. “Let’s hear,” he said.
“Do you remember that ex-boyfriend I told you about? Gavin?”
“Mister Mainstream.”
“Right,” she said, with a jolt of remorse. “Well, there was this party at his house, right before I left to come here. A going-to-college, good-riddance-to-high-school kind of thing, and we decided to go for a walk. Just the two of us.” She stole a look at him, hoping for a trace of envy, but he was looking down, peeling the gauze from the inside of his arm. “So we took this walk,” she went on. “In the woods near his house. And it was just incredibly—spooky. It was eerie. It was pitch black. It’s hard to explain, but you literally couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.” James said nothing, and she felt a stab of regret—for telling such a stupid story, chipping away at her credibility. “I realize it sounds completely childish,” she said, and James didn’t contradict her. He looked distracted, even bored. The gauze pad, white but for a single dot of blood, perched on his knee. “But also,” she said, “it had been a really stressful day. Because of this shooting.”
James turned to her and frowned. “What shooting?”
It alarmed her, to have said it, but James was now listening carefully. “It was a few weeks ago,” she explained. “In the mall, in my hometown. This guy just walked in and started—”
“Hold on,” James said. “Nathan Dugan?”
For some reason, this made her laugh. “You know about i
t?”
“Of course. It was national news.”
“Oh,” she said sheepishly. “Right.”
James angled toward her, sliding one knee up onto the bench. “That was in your hometown?”
“Well, not technically the same town. But only a few miles from my house. I go to that mall all the time.”
“Anna.” James stared at her for a full minute. “Holy fucking shit.”
“I know.” She knew that it was wrong: using the shooting to deflect attention from her stupid panic attack in the woods that night, to explain it, justify it—but it was true. And also, it was working. She could see the boredom disappearing, the interest deepening on his face.
“Did you know any of the victims?”
“No,” she said. “No, thank God. But a good friend of mine, Laura, she was there.” No matter that the extent of her friendship with Laura Mack was drinking with her at the basketball team parties she occasionally tagged along to with Janie. Whenever Anna let her guard down and thought about the shooting, even for a second, it was that dressing room her mind rushed into: the mirror, the screams, and then the frightening silence, the sense of the walls closing in.
“There, where?” James asked. “Right at the scene?”
“No, not exactly.” For some reason, she stopped short of mentioning the Gap. “She was in the mall, though. She wasn’t far. She heard it all.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I know,” she said. “I hate even thinking about it, actually—”
“That’s how these guys operate, though,” James cut in. “Crowded public places, random victims. Maximum anxiety. So nowhere feels safe.”
“Yeah,” Anna said. She hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms, but this explanation made a terrifying kind of sense. For that was the fear, the core of it: that these things could happen anywhere, to anyone. No warning. You could even know the person and still not see it coming.
“Well, anyway,” she said. “That’s why I was freaking out that night, at the party. I mean—we all were. It was the same day as the shooting. Everyone was really shaken up.”
“Yeah,” James said. “Of course.”
He was looking at her closely now, almost admiringly, as if her proximity to this event cast her in a new and more interesting light. Much as Anna didn’t want to keep talking about it, the promise of James’s reaction was too much to resist. “And actually, the most disturbing part—this is truly crazy—he was my mom’s student.”
“He?” James paused. “He, who?”
“The, you know, shooter.”
James raised his eyebrows and held them there. “Dugan.”
“Yeah.”
“Nathan Dugan was your mother’s student.”
“Right.”
“Anna,” he said. “Holy shit.”
“I know.” She felt a rush of something uncomfortably like pride. “What did I tell you? So—”
“Wait, hold on. When did she teach him?”
“I mean, he was a fifth-year senior. So, four years ago, I guess. But she definitely remembered him.” She drew a breath. “Anyway, you can understand why I was so freaked out—”
“And what did she say?”
“She said he was, you know. Different.”
“Obviously,” James said. “What else?”
Anna racked her brain for the few words her mother had parsed out in the kitchen that afternoon. “She said he was kind of tightly wound, I think. He didn’t have friends. But she didn’t say a whole lot. She was annoyingly evasive about it, actually.”
“Why would she be evasive?”
“Well, no, not evasive, I just mean—she didn’t say much. That’s how she is.” She paused. “But he definitely sounded strange.”
James looked disappointed there wasn’t more to report, and Anna felt annoyed retroactively that her mother hadn’t been more forthcoming. She knew she shouldn’t keep talking, her mother had actually asked her not to, but she blurted, “The next day, though, I found her looking through some old stuff in our barn and she had dug up this old paper that I’m pretty sure was his.”
It worked: James shifted back toward her, the energy returning to his face. “Paper?” he said. “What kind of paper?”
“You know, for Freshman Comp—”
“One of those personal tragedies?”
She let out a mild laugh. “Yeah, probably.”
“Probably?” he said. “Did you read it?”
“Well, I wanted to. Obviously. She wouldn’t let me.”
“Wouldn’t let you?”
“I mean, there are issues around it. Ethical issues. She doesn’t let people read her students’ stuff.”
James frowned. “You told me you read tons of those papers.”
“Yeah, when she wasn’t looking. She would never have let me if she’d known—”
“Did you ask?”
“Of course I asked. But my mom follows the rules. That’s just how she is.”
At this, James scoffed lightly, then sat back on the bench, surveying the quad. Anna’s palms were damp, and she pressed them to her thighs. “Wait,” James said, turning back to her abruptly. “Maybe it was the paper that guy wrote about online. On Facebook.”
Anna felt a surge of panic but managed to shake her head. “I highly doubt it.”
“But you saw that post, right?”
“I don’t know,” she stalled, remembering the scary spill of comments she’d glimpsed once and hidden from sight. “I don’t think so.”
“Yes, you did. You must have. The guy talked about this class he had, a writing class. And Dugan wrote some paper—fuck. It probably was.” He stared at her. “How could you not read it?”
“I’m not a big Facebook person,” she lied.
“I mean the paper, Anna. That paper might be really important. It might shed light on this guy’s motives or his mental state—”
“It doesn’t exactly matter now,” she snapped. “He’s dead. He killed himself. You know that too, right?”
This didn’t warrant a response; clearly, James did. “Things turn up after the fact,” he told her. “That’s how these things go. These guys leave a paper trail because they know it’ll get found eventually and they’ll be famous. I mean, you read about the crazy shit he put online, right?”
“Honestly,” she said, “I haven’t been following it too closely.”
“How is that possible? It was your mom’s student. Your own town. You want to be a writer, for God’s sake.”
“I know,” she said, stung. “I just—it’s the anxiety. Like I was telling you. Sometimes knowing makes it worse.” Her pulse was tripping in her veins. “Plus,” she added, “my mother actually asked me not to tell people about it. I probably shouldn’t have even told you.”
“Why would she ask you not to tell people about it?”
“It’s just, you know,” she said. “It’s a sensitive subject.”
James gripped the back of his neck, then sat forward, elbows on his knees. He studied the ground as if considering a chessboard. “Maybe there was something in it she didn’t want you to see.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe it was some kind of a manifesto.”
“It wasn’t a manifesto.”
“How do you know? You didn’t read it. She wouldn’t let you.”
“I know because I know,” Anna said. Sweat was blooming under her arms. “Because I’m telling you, my mother is just like that. She’s a private person. An ethical person. And I know because there’s no way one of her students wrote a—a manifesto—and she didn’t do anything about it. Like I told you, she’s obsessed. And when I asked her she said it wasn’t about anything. She said it was about hanging out with his dad or something—”
“His dad?” James pounced. “His dad wasn’t around. He lived with his mother. Which is why she got ripped apart online. When you know there were plenty of other people who were fully aware this guy needed help. Because that’s how the
system works. It protects some people and ignores others—”
“Why do you know so much about this?”
“Because it’s a national crisis!” James practically shouted. “Because it’s important. Because I read. Because it interests me.”
“What does? Shootings?”
“No, Anna. Not shootings. Just—the world. What’s actually happening in the world. Which most people choose to ignore.” He spread both hands in an exasperated flourish. “Life. Real life.”
“Why are you getting angry at me?”
“I’m not angry at you.” He pulled at the skin beneath his eyes, then dropped his hands to his lap. “I’m just saying. This shit is a big deal and you’re acting like it isn’t.”
“That’s not true,” Anna said. She fought the urge to pick her lip to shreds. “Did I not start this whole thing by telling you it was serious? That’s the whole reason I was so freaked out, the night of Gavin’s party.”
“Well, you’re right to freak out. Everybody should be freaking out. Most people just choose to look away and ignore things until something happens and they’re forced to confront it. In fact, you should freak out more.”
Across campus, the bell on the chapel was gonging. Her heart was pounding. Students exited the buildings, backpacks slung on shoulders and phones pressed to ears, heading to lunch or confirming plans for later. A weekend, a Friday. Anna felt as if she were looking at them from a vast distance. A girl walked by in sweatshirt and sunglasses, speaking into her cell phone: I just wanted to hear your voice.
“I feel kind of sick,” Anna said. Her voice sounded unsteady, even to her.
“Sick as in you don’t want to talk about this?”
“No,” she said. “Sick as in sick. I fainted at the health center, remember? And my arm,” she said. “It still hurts.” She located the throbbing in her elbow, distant but still there. “I’m going to go back to the dorm.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Actually, I just want to be alone.”
She stood up, hoisting her backpack to her shoulder, and James looked up at her face. “Anna, if you’re upset, you can tell me.”
But Anna was finished telling James things. Since meeting him, it felt like all she’d done was tell him things. “I’m not upset.”
