Go Ask Alice

by Beatrice Sparks

  June 22

  Last night a bunch of kids were picked up at a party and today they’re blaming it on me. Jan rubbed up against me in the drugstore and told me that this time I wasn’t going to get away with this finking shit. I tried to tell her that I didn’t know anything about it, but as usual she wouldn’t listen.

  I don’t know what I’m going to do if they start on me again. I really don’t think I can take it, even with Joel and my family behind me. It’s just too much.

  June 23

  Everything is wrong and I can’t go on anymore. I really can’t! Today I was just walking down the street by the park when a boy I don’t even know grabbed me and threatened me. He kept pulling on my arm and twisting it and calling me every rotten thing in the world. Lots of kids were walking by and I wanted to scream but I couldn’t. Who would help me? The straight kids don’t even know I’m alive. Then he pushed me around to the back of the clump of bushes and kissed me. It was totally humiliating and disgusting. He pushed his tongue into my mouth and he just kept rolling it around until I was crying and gagging. Then he said that all I needed was a good fuck and that I’d better not tell anyone or he’d come back and really talk things over with me.

  I was so frightened I ran to Mr. _____’s law office and asked him to drive me home. He and Mom thought I was sick and she put me to bed. I am sick. Even now I can’t stop throwing up and I can’t concentrate. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? I can’t tell Mom, after Gran and Gramps this would be the last straw. Oh, what am I going to do!

  A car just drove by with its lights flashing and the horn blaring and the whole family ran outside to see what was going on, except me. I don’t care anymore.

  June 24

  This morning at breakfast I told the family that I was really being pushed again by the kids. Dad offered to go and talk to some of the parents, but I begged him not to because it would just make things worse. I even told Dad to lock his car because someone threatened to plant marijuana in it. Of course, I had to warn Tim and Alex again, but nothing helps. I feel like we’re under seige and no one else seems to be taking it very seriously. Dad really thinks the kids are just putting me me on and that they wouldn’t do anything to hurt me. I couldn’t tell him what happened yesterday, so I guess I’ll just have to let him go on thinking that everything is really okay.

  Later

  Sweet Mom drove me to the university this afternoon to see Joel. She said she had to pick some things up at Dad’s office, but I know she was just being thoughtful. She’s really very nice.

  After I talked with Joel for a while, I don’t know why I did it, but I asked him to walk with me and with a completely disintegrated heart, I told him the partial truth. I didn’t mean to tell him, but now I guess I’m glad I did. His reaction was just like I always knew it would be. He said that he really cared about me and that he was sure I could handle it because I was basically a good and strong person. Maybe he just said that because he’s going home now that the university renovation is over, but he gave me the gold watch his father had given him and I gave him Gran’s ring. It was awful. And now I feel like the grayness in all the gray days in the world.

  June 25

  Today our area was a nut house with everyone running around preparing for tonight’s annual “School Is Out” bash. None of the grass gang paid the least attention to me and I am glad. Maybe they’ve got another project. It’s strange that a big high school like this can be divided into two completely different worlds which seem to know nothing about each other. Or are there many worlds? Is the school actually like a minor galaxy, with a little world for each minority group and one for the poor kids and one for the rich kids, and one for the dopers, or maybe even one for the priviledged dopers and one for the dopers who come from not so wealthy backgrounds? All of us being completely unaware of the other worlds until a person tries to step from one sphere to the other. Is that the sin? Or is the real problem in trying to get back to the original globe? Surely all kids who have experimented with drugs don’t have this problem, or do they? I guess I shall find out in the future, at least I can try. Chris was lucky, her folks just moved to a town where no one knew her.

  P.S. I saw three of the square kids and they asked me if I were going to the bash and everything. Maybe the ice is breaking. I hope, I hope.

  June 27

  I didn’t wake up until 11:30 and I feel so wonderful I could burst. The birds are chirping outside my window. It’s summer, dear friend, and I’m alive and well and happy in my own dear bed. Hooray for me! ! ! ! I think I’m going to go to summer school and take some extra courses. Then maybe next summer I can take some summer classes on the university campus. Won’t that be fun!

  July 1

  Imagine the first day of July. I wish Joel were here to see how lovely everything is. He writes very lonely letters already. His mother sounds sweet, but apparently she isn’t very intellectual and he longs to have someone to talk to like my mother and father who are very stimulating. He made me promise to enjoy and appreciate them enough for both of us. I stopped taking piano lessons many months ago and I started again today. My teacher gave me an incredibly difficult concerto, but I guess I’ll eventually catch on. I want Joel to be proud of my musical abilities as well as other things!

  P.S. Tim and I took a long walk yesterday and we saw Jan at the drugstore and Marcie in the park and neither one of them paid any attention to me. Yahoo! I guess now that school is over they’ve given up on me. They’ve given up on me and I can finally be really free. Won’t that be the most wonderful of glorious feelings in the entire universe? I’m so happy I could die.

  July 3

  Today is another beautiful, beautiful day except that Dad got the pictures of Gran’s grave and the tombstone which was finally placed there. It’s a beautiful tombstone, but I keep wondering how decayed her body is by now, and what about Gramps, his must really be a mess! Someday I’m going to get a book on embalming from the library and see just exactly how these things do happen. I wonder if Mom and Dad and Tim think about these things or is it only me? Do I have a morbid mind because of my past experiences? I guess I don’t because Joel said he wondered the same thing when his dad died and he was only seven years old.

  July 7

  Mrs. Larsen broke her leg in an automobile accident and I’m going over there every day to clean the house and cook for Mr. Larsen and take care of the baby until Mrs. Larsen’s mother can get there. (Good practice for the future!) Little Lu Ann is a sweet little thing and I’m going to love it. I gotta go now to start my new job. (I hope Mr. Larsen doesn’t eat at the hospital all the time because I want to practice cooking.)

  See ya.

  (?)

  My dear precious friend,

  I am so grateful that they would let Mom bring you to me in your battered, padlocked little case. I was terribly embarrassed when the nurse made me use the combination and dump both of you out and my extra pencils and pens. But I guess they were just being careful and checking to see that you weren’t filled with drugs of one sort or another. I don’t even feel real. I must be somebody else. I still can’t believe that this has actually happened to me. The window is filled with heavy wires, I guess that is better than bars but I still know that I am in some kind of hospital jail.

  I have tried to piece the whole thing together but I can’t. The nurses and doctors keep telling me I will feel better, but I still can’t get straight. I can’t close my eyes because the worms are still crawling on me. They are eating me. They are crawling through my nose and gnawing in my mouth and oh God . . . . I must get you back in your case because the maggots are crawling off my bleeding writhing hands into your pages. I will lock you in. You will be safe.

  (?)

  I am feeling better today. They took the bandages off my hands and changed them and it is no wonder they hurt so much. The whole ends of my fingers have been torn off and two nails have been pulled out completely and the others are torn down almost in half. It hu
rts to write, but I shall lose my mind if I do not. I wish I could write to Joel, but what could I ever tell him and besides no one could ever read this scrawling since both hands are bandaged like boxing gloves. I am still crawling with worms, but I am beginning to be able to live with them, or am I actually dead and they are just experimenting with my soul?

  (?)

  The worms are eating away my female parts first. They have almost entirely eaten away my vagina and my breasts and now they are working on my mouth and throat. I wish the doctors and nurses would let my soul die, but they are still experimenting with trying to reunite the body and the spirit.

  (?)

  Today I woke up feeling rational and sound. I guess the bummer is over. The nurse says I have been here ten days, and when I read back what I have written I really must have been out of it.

  (?)

  Today my hands were placed under a kind of sunlamp to promote the healing. They haven’t given me a mirror yet but I can feel that my face is all clawed up too, and my knees and feet and elbows, in fact most of my body is wrenched and battered and bruised. I wonder if my hands will ever look like hands again. The ends of my fingers look like hamburger cooking under the sunlamp, and they’ve given me a spray to use to ease the pain. They are no longer bandaged, but I almost wish they were because I have to keep looking closely to be sure they aren’t getting wormy.

  (?)

  A fly got into my room today and I couldn’t stop screaming. I was so afraid he was going to lay more maggot eggs on my face and hands and body. It took two nurses to kill him. I can’t let flies get on me. Maybe I will have to stop sleeping.

  (?)

  I just got out of bed and walked to the mirror. I have splints on four toes so I guess they are broken too, but anyway I hardly recognized myself. My face is puffed and swollen and black and blue and scratched, and my hair has been pulled out in big patches till I have completely bald areas. Maybe it isn’t really me.

  (?)

  I refractured two toes getting up so now both feet are in casts. Mom and Dad come by to see me every day, but they don’t stay long — there isn’t much to say, till I get my mind working again.

  (?)

  I’m really dizzy but the nurse says that is just from my brain concussion. The worms have almost gone away. I guess the spray kills them.

  (?)

  I found out how I got the acid. Dad says that someone put it on the chocolate covered peanuts and I guess that’s right because I remember eating the peanuts after I’d washed the baby. At the time I thought Mr. Larsen had left me a surprise. But now that I think about it I don’t remember why I thought Mr. Larsen had been there and gone without saying anything. That part is a blank. Actually I’m amazed that I remember anything. But I guess no matter what kind of damage I pile on myself, my mind keeps working. The Doctor says that’s normal because it really takes a lot to knock your brains loose permanently. I hope that’s right because I feel like I’ve taken a lot already.

  Anyway, I remember that the candy reminded me of Gramps because he was always eating chocolate peanut clusters. And I remember starting to get dizzy and sick to my stomach. I guess I tried to call Mom to ask her to come over and get me and the baby when I realized that somebody somehow had tripped me. It’s all very unclear because when I try to think back it’s like I’m looking through fuzzy, colored lights but I do remember trying to dial home and taking eternities to get each number to the end. I think the line was busy and I don’t really remember what happened next except that I was screaming and Gramps was there to help me, but his body was dripping with blazing multicolored worms and maggots which fell on the floor behind him. He tried to pick me up, but only the skeleton remained of his hands and arms. The rest had been picked clean by wriggling, writhing, slithering, busily eating worms which seethed on his every part. They were eating and they wouldn’t stop. His two eye sockets were teeming with white soft-bodied, creeping animals which were burrowing in and out of his flesh and which were phosphorescent and swirled into one another. The worms and parasites started creeping and crawling and running toward the baby’s room and I tried to stomp on them and beat them to death with my hands but they multiplied faster than I could kill them. And they began crawling on my own hands and arms and face and body. They were in my nose and my mouth and my throat, choking me, strangling me. Tapeworms, larva, grubs, disintegrating my flesh, crawling on me, consuming me.

  Gramps was calling me but I could not leave the baby, nor did I want to go with him for he frightened me and nauseated me. He was so badly eaten I could barely recognize him. He kept pointing to a casket next to his and I tried to get away but thousands of other dead things and people were pushing me inside and forcing the lid down on me. I was screaming and screaming and trying to claw my way out of the casket, but they wouldn’t let me go.

  From the shape I’m in now I guess when I tried to get the worms off me, hunks of flesh and hair came out in my own hands. How I cracked my head I don’t know. Maybe I was trying to beat the bummer out of my skull, I really don’t remember it seems like such a long long time ago and writing this down has made me incredibly tired. I have never been so tired in my life.

  (?)

  Mother and Dad believe that somebody tripped me! They do, they do! They believe me! I have a good idea who it was but I guess there will never be any way of finding out. I must just try to rest and get well as they suggested. I will not think about what happened. Thank God I didn’t hurt the baby. Thank you God.

  (?)

  In a few days I am going to be transferred to another hospital. I was hoping I could go home because my hands are healing and most of the bruises have started to fade. The doctor said it will be a year before my hands are completely better with the two nails really grown out but in just a few more weeks they should be fit to look at.

  My face is almost back to normal and little fuzzy hair is beginning to grow on my bald patches. Mama brought some scissors and she and the nurse cut my hair really short, short, short. It’s almost like a shag cut and isn’t quite professional, but Mama says I can go to the beauty shop and have it trimmed in a week or two or whenever I’m released from the other hospital, besides I wouldn’t want anyone to see me looking as dingy as I do now.

  I still have nightmares about the worms, but I am trying to control myself and I never mention them anymore. What good would it do? I know they aren’t real and everybody else knows they aren’t real, still at times they seem so very real that I can even feel the warmth and slimy fat softness of their bodies. And every time my nose or one of my many scabs itches, I have to fight myself to keep from screaming for help.

  (?)

  Mother brought me a packet of letters from Joel. She had written and told him that I was in the hospital very ill, and he has written every day since. He even called one night on the phone and not wanting to get too involved she told him that I had had kind of a nervous breakdown.

  Well, that’s one way to put it!

  July 22

  I could tell Mom had been crying when she came to see me today, so I tried to be very strong and put on a really happy face. It’s a good thing I did because they are sending me to an insane asylum, a loony bin, a crazy house, freak wharf, where I can wander around with the other idiots and lunatics. I am so scared I cannot even take a full breath. Daddy tried to explain it all very professionally but it was obvious that he had been completely unhinged by the whole thing. But not as much as I am. No one could be.

  He said that when my case was taken before the juvenile judge, Jan and Marcie both testified that I had been trying for weeks to sell them LSD and marijuana and that around school I was a known user and pusher.

  Circumstances really were quite against me. I have a drug record and Daddy said that when Mrs. Larsen’s neighbor heard me screaming, she and the gardener came over to see what was happening and thinking I had gone insane they locked me in a small closet, ran to check the baby who had apparently also been awakened by my screa
ms, and called the police. By the time they got there I had injured myself severely and was trying to scratch the rough plaster off the walls to get out and had beaten my head against the door until I had a brain concussion and a fractured skull.

  Now they are going to send me to the Boobie Hatch which is probably where I belong. Daddy says I probably won’t be there long and he will immediately start proceedings to have me released and put into the hands of a good psychiatrist.

  Dad and Mom keep calling the place where I’m going a youth center, but they aren’t fooling anybody. They aren’t even fooling themselves. They are sending me to an insane asylum! And I don’t understand how can that be. How is it possible? Other people have bad trips and they don’t get sent to an insane asylum. They tell me my worms aren’t real and yet they’re sending me to a place that’s worse than all the coffins and the worms put together. I don’t understand why this is happening to me. I think I have fallen off the face of the earth and that I will never stop falling. Oh, please, please don’t let them take me. Don’t let them put me away with insane people. I’m afraid of them. Please let me go home to my own room and go to sleep. Please God.

  July 23

  My parole officer came and got me and took me to the State Mental Hospital where I was registered and catalogued and questioned and everything but fingerprinted. Then I was taken to the psychiatrist’s office and he talked to me for a little while. But I didn’t have anything to say because I couldn’t even think. All that kept running through my brain was I’m scared, I’m scared, I’m scared.