by Pepper Pace
Troy grimaced. The session continued for nearly ninety minutes and by the time it had ended everyone was emotionally drained. Yet, Troy was happy that he’d joined. Though they never got around to speaking of his problems he found that there were so many common problems that each of them shared beyond tics and headaches and seizures.
He hurried out of the room but Jace caught up with him. “Hey, Troy I’m headed for the lounge. Want to play a round of checkers or chess?”
“Um…no. I don’t have patience to sit in one spot. I need to make a phone call.”
“Ok.” Jace tried to hide his disappointment. He went in search of Magnus who had ducked out and gone in a different direction.
“Troy!” Harold called him and he hid a groan and headed towards the big man. “Great session. Look, Dr. Barren and I were talking about you and we’d like to get you in to see a neurologist. How about tomorrow morning?”
His eyes brightened. “Really?”
“Clearly, you aren’t exhibiting symptoms of being bipolar.”
“Clearly?”
“Well we talked to your Mom and Dad; who haven’t really been around you in years. But…” He consulted his clipboard, flipping through several sheets. “…we spoke to a Miss Juicy Robinson. And she corroborates what you’ve said; no highs and no lows. Bipolar disorder mimics so many others.” He couldn’t focus on anything else that Harold said. He’d spoken to Juicy. He wanted to ask how she sounded but didn’t dare. For some reason he didn’t want Harold to know that Juicy wasn’t talking to him.
After chatting with Harold for a few more moments, he decided to go to the lounge. Jace had a cell phone and if he could use that he wouldn’t have to sneak and use a restricted phone and risk getting caught—and further, risk pissing someone off.
He searched the lounge on this floor and didn’t see Jace or Magnus, so he went to the other lounge and when he still didn’t find them he headed back to the room in hopes that they’d be there. “Oh!” He said quickly upon opening the door. “I thought you were gay…or…” Jace was making out with Magnus and they came apart quickly with the sound of the opening door. Troy turned to leave but Jace stopped him.
“You don’t have to leave. She’s leaving, right Magnus?” His voice was pretty cold to have just been sucking face with the girl. She gave him a hurt look. Quickly she jumped to her feet and hurried out of the room, brushing past Troy who closed the door slowly after her. He gave the boy a disapproving look.
“That wasn’t cool.”
“You’re right.” Jace flopped down on his back. “But I told her that I’m not gay. Dude, I’m straight.” He sighed in exasperation and then looked at Troy who rocked on his feet in confusion. “I don’t feel anything when I’m with a girl…except sick to my stomach. I’m not even bi. I’m straight.”
Troy was trying to figure out what he meant by his declaration of being straight. Straight guys went with females. Transgendered or not he was still a guy, or was he? “You are a guy, right? Because I assumed since you were sharing my room-”
“I told you that I was transgendered.”
“I…don’t know what that means.” He admitted. He thought he did, but obviously he didn’t. “I mean I know that you’re in the wrong body…” But did he have a penis or a vagina? It was all so confusing when all he wanted was to borrow a cell phone!
Jace sat up. “Imagine me as a girl; in a girl’s body.” Troy peeked at the miserable looking young man, trying hard to picture what he’d asked. “As a girl, I want what every girl wants. I want to get married to the man of my dreams. I want to look pretty. I want kids. But I’m stuck in a freaking man’s body!” Jace jumped off the bed and began to pace. “Magnus is nothing but a whore! I just want a friend and she just wants…” He walked to the small window and stared out with his back turned towards Troy.
Troy stared at the boy and then looked at the door. All he’d wanted was the phone…He sighed.
“I…I’m…I-I-”
“I’m not attracted to you.” Jace said absently. He looked over his shoulder at him and there was a bland expression on his face. “I like black guys--like the one that was in group. Magnus is the one that thinks you’re hot, not me.” Jace sighed and turned back to the window and Troy let out a relieved voice.
“I’ll be your friend if you don’t mind the fact that it will have to be a long distance friendship. I don’t live here, I live in Cincinnati, and pretty soon I’ll be heading back home. You seem like a good person, and that’s all I judge by. It doesn’t matter to me if you’re transgendered…I mean, as long as you aren’t attracted to me then it doesn’t matter.” Jace smirked.
“You seem like a nice guy, too.” He turned and leaned against the window sill and watched Troy. After a moment he seemed to come to a conclusion. “When I…you know…”
“Tried to commit suicide?”
Jace nodded. “I wasn’t trying to die. I thought I wanted to, until I saw blood everywhere. Then I knew that I wanted a chance. I’m not ever going to give birth to a baby or marry a straight guy, but I didn’t want to give up my chances for…something.”
Troy pulled out one of the desk chairs and sat in it backwards, watching Jace. “Are you going to get surgery to turn into a woman?”
“Yes. But it costs a lot. I want it while I’m young. I don’t want to be a fifty year old wrinkled woman before I can afford it. And my parents are…not on board with this.” He waved his hands dismissively. “The money is not the issue.” Jace opened and then closed his mouth. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” His voice cracked and his eyes watered.
“What don’t you want to talk about? Because, Jace, you are in a mental hospital so…you might as well do this now. It’s now or never time.”
He didn’t respond, but he did sit down in the other chair and very neatly crossed one leg over the other. His hand rested on his knee as he stared into space.
Troy waited. “Do you like some guy, but he doesn’t like you?” He prompted. Isn’t that what most teenage angst centered on?
“I like a lot of boys that don’t even notice me.” He shrugged dismissively and then swept his long black hair out of his eyes, still refusing to continue.
“So you know that you’re going…go-g-…” And then the world began to slip away from Troy. He knew it was going to happen an instant before it did, but there was nothing that he could do to stop it. One second he was talking and the next his mouth was hanging open. However, thirty seconds later his eyes cleared. They had never even shut. He took a few breaths and continued as if he hadn’t just lost consciousness. “…you’re going to get surgery. You know you’re going to become a woman. So-so wh-why commit suicide?”
Jace was staring blankly at nothing in particular, as if the man sitting across from him hadn’t just stopped talking in order to have a black out. “I tried to commit suicide because the only friend that I ever cared half a damn about dumped me.”
Troy waited.
Jace glanced at him, maybe waiting for him to say something that would cause him to clam up again. But Troy just watched him with interest. “We’re both in an online role-play group; you know what that is, right?”
“Yeah. I was in Wow.”
Jace nodded. “Well, we play in an online group where our avatars mimic real life. We have friends, we own a club. Our avatars…” He looked down at his hands. “We got married online.” His eyes suddenly flashed back up to meet Troy’s defiantly. “Yeah it’s stupid, but I looked forward to being with him! I can be myself with him and he doesn’t care that I have this…male body! I’m a woman when I’m online. I’m beautiful and I can have the dream. And I know it’s not real, okay?! I get that.”
“How long were you two together?”
Jace closed his eyes. “Two years. Not a day went by that I wasn’t with him at least to say hello. And most times we were together for hours and hours. I’d do my homework while we watched movies or danced on our private island. We’d do voice chat
so that neither of us would have to be trapped to the computer screen. We had an entirely separate life online. Better then the life I have in real.”
“What happened?”
“He freaking dumped me!” Jace’s eyes were glassy again and it was plain that he fought not to cry. “It was like…he had been trying to pick fights. So one night we had a disagreement and the next day when I signed back in he had me blocked from everything that we had owned together. I was asking our friends what was going on and to go and check his home page and they told me that…um…” He sniffed and tears splashed from his eyes. He wiped them away angrily. “They told me that he had another person listed as his special someone. He had written this message about how he had walked in darkness until her light…HER.” He covered his eyes and sobbed. “It said that she was his light…” He cried as if his heart was breaking all over again.
Troy slid out of his chair and knelt by the boy. His own heart was breaking, listening to him weep. He didn’t always like to touch, but he placed his hand lightly on his back and pulled him into his arms. Jace slid into them easily and he cried freely while Troy held onto him. Troy murmured the soothing words that one says to people when they want them to know that it would get better…though he didn’t know if that was true for Jace.
“Do you think I’m a freak?” He whispered a long while later after the tears had dried up and after he had retreated to the restroom to splash his face.
“Why would I think that?” Troy gave him an amazed look. “No, you’re no freak. You’re a person that’s lost someone you loved and trusted.”
“Some say that I’m being foolish because it was just avatars-” Troy snorted.
“The avatars represented the two of you. Behind the avi’s are living, feeling people that feel no less pain than anyone else. I read somewhere that your brain doesn’t differentiate between the feelings that you experience in real versus what you experience as an avatar. If you love online it’s the same feeling of love that you have outside of the computer.”
Jace’s lip twisted into a half grin. “Thank you for listening. I mean, I’ve told this story before to other people, but…they think I’m a freak.” There was a light tapping at the door. Troy stood to answer it while Jace wiped at his face one last time.
“It’s time for dinner. You guys ready?” It was a new lady, not Rebecca. Her name tag said Joyce. Troy looked back at the boy to see if he was okay, but already the smile was in place on his face. Obviously a bit of the weight that he’d carried on his shoulders had chipped away.
In the cafeteria they saw Magnus but she ignored them and sat with two older women who didn’t appear to have ever seen her before.
“You should apologize to her.” Troy said while crushing crackers into a bowl of chili.
“I will. After dinner.” They talked amicably, mostly about music, which they both liked. Both were into alternative and liked groups like The Killers and Coheed and Cambria. Troy hadn’t kept up much with the music scene, but Jace had an MP3 player back in the room and he promised to let Troy listen. Then he remembered about the phone.
“Hey, do you think that I can use your cell phone to call my girlfriend? She lives in Cincinnati but I can’t make a long distance call from the phones in the lounge.” Jace shrugged apologetically.
“Sorry, dude. I don’t have long distance. The parent’s foot the bill for it so it’s pretty basic. I can’t even text.”
“Oh, okay.” Troy said in disappointment. Jace stood and picked up his tray.
“I’m going to catch up with Magnus, see if she’ll forgive me for being an ass. See you back in the room tonight?”
“Yeah. Good luck with her.” Troy was heading over to the lounge to call his folks again when a receptionist called out to him. He had never seen her before but she seemed to know him. Damn, why was it so impossible to move around in this place without gathering someone’s attention?!
“Troy, Dr. Barren has some papers that he would like you to fill out before your appointment tomorrow. She hefted a huge blue folder and handed it to him. She also handed him a small cup containing two pills. “This is medicine that the Doctor would like you to take an hour before bedtime. There is an informational printout about the medication and if you’d like to have someone read it to you then-”
“No, it’s fine. I think I can do it.” He headed to his room instead of the lounge, curious about the folder that he carried in his hands. He carefully pulled up the chair to the desk and withdrew the contents.
Frowning, he stared at the thick sheath of forms and documents. They listed every medication that he’d ever taken in his entire life and a request for a history of their effects. There was a place for him to document how he did every imaginable thing in life while on medication, as well as off of medication. There were questionnaires asking him to rate things from one to ten, there were questions that asked, ‘how true is this statement…’
As he considered the forms and documents, he thought about all of the work that it would take to make these questions work for him and for his family. He would not complain. He gnawed on his lip and searched the drawer for an ink pen and he thought deeply about every answer before writing it down.
***
The next morning Troy was again awakened by Jace nudging his bed. “Dude, you sleep too heavy!” Troy sat up in bed weakly. Damn he was still tired. “I can’t eat breakfast…I’m too tired.”
“You slept through breakfast. But I brought you some eggs and bacon and stuff that I saw you eating yesterday.” His eyes opened wide and he jumped out of bed.
“Shit! I have a Doctor’s appointment!” He looked around, but not sure for what. He had slept in his clothes and so was already dressed. He quickly ran his hands through his hair.
“Relax. Someone will come down for you when they’re ready for you.” Jace moved towards the folder and picked up the thick file. “Damn, you finished this all?”
Troy took it from him, almost protectively. He’d spent most of the night working on it. “Yeah.” He hugged it.
“What time did you go to bed?” Troy shrugged and sat down at the desk where a tray of cold breakfast sat. “You’re the only one with the time.” He forked eggs into his mouth without tasting them. He was hungry and didn’t care that they tasted like styrofoam.
Jace seemed in deep thought as he tried to figure out a timeline. “Well I went to sleep about 11:30.” He’d given his MP3 player to Troy to listen to and he’d been happily nodding his head in time with the music as he completed his task. Then he took the medicine, by that time Jace had been asleep for about an hour and he figured that he’d be about another hour working on it, but he’d been a lot closer to three.
“What time is it now?”
“9:15.” He responded after checking his cell phone.
“I think I worked on it until about 3 am.” He scooped up fried potatoes with his toast and chewed them quickly. “Thanks for breakfast.”
“You’re welcome. You know…I don’t think they expected you to do that all in one day…”
He didn’t respond, he was thinking about slipping back into bed; lack of sleep was bad enough but add to that the drugs and he felt half dead. He didn’t even get a chance to get to his coffee before there was the knock on the door. He cursed under his breath, jumping up and hurrying to the restroom. “Tell them I’ll be right out!”
Five minutes later he’d washed his face, brushed his teeth and used the toilet and then he and Rebecca were back in the elevator and going down to the main floor where he’d last seen his father two days before.
Rebecca was holding his folder and it had not been easy for him to let it go. He felt pretty anxious about it…and this is what he disliked about medication; this anxiety was not his anxiety but the medication’s.
