Obsessed

by Allison Britz

  The tiles are squares, about six inches on each side. I eyeball my flip-flop against it. There is no way I can step flat-footed without encountering a crack. I will have to tiptoe. I nod to myself, envisioning the path to my desk. “¿Señorita? ¿Estás bien?” I jerk my head up. Her hand resting casually on her hip, Señora Ramirez is looking at me with gentle concern as I sway in the doorway. The rest of the class only stares. I crack the knuckles in my fingers and take a deep breath.

  Placing my toes in the center of a square about three feet into the room, I glide forward with my eyes searching for the next foothold. Balancing on the ball of my right foot, I thrust my arms to the side like a tightrope walker and aim the toes of my left foot at a safe spot ahead. I am again in a dramatic dance number, the spotlight highlighting my perfect form against a curtained backdrop. In my head I pirouette to my desk to the approving applause of my classmates. Everyone is smiling and clapping because not only have I discovered the truth about cracks but also I’m just so darn graceful.

  A coughing fit from the back row draws my eyes upward to reality and the crooked lines of occupied desks. The entire room is staring at me. Some look confused, some look interested. I glance at Señora Ramirez. She, too, is watching me. She steps toward me and tries to say something but stops herself when we make eye contact. Heat builds under my collar as I balance between tiptoed feet spread across the tiles. I am roasting under the pressure of their attention. I have to say something. A distraction, a cover.

  “I’m sore!” I blurt out into the silence, the words bursting out of me. “Sore from cross-country practice!” I quickly bend down and grimace, placing my hand on my hamstring with a quick glance at my audience. I am a specimen. A curious sideshow. I add a bit of a limp to my next steps, a slight hop and a pained expression. “Walking on my tiptoes really helps!” I make a show of gritting my teeth and point down at my legs, just to reinforce the message. Reaching my desk, I flop into my seat and massage my calves. “Maybe I’m dehydrated? I’ll get a Gatorade after class. That should help.” Eddie Chester turns completely around in his desk and peers at me through narrowed eyes. He looks first at my calves, then at me, and, with a final furrow of his eyebrows, turns around to Señora Ramirez, who has begun her lesson. My cheeks flush a deep shade of crimson.

  What am I doing? A sinking feeling opens in my heart and I allow myself to fall into it and curl up in self-pity. What started as a horrible nightmare last night has today somehow mutated into an irrational fear of cracks. I open my Spanish binder and flip to last night’s homework assignment. Every day, I reason, thousands of students traipse carefree across Samuelson’s crack-laden campus, and yet there is no cancer epidemic ravaging the school. I have been stepping on cracks, both large and small, for more than a year now and have not yet contracted any sort of disease. At least not as far as I know. It doesn’t even make any sense! What do cracks have to do with cancer? Frustrated, embarrassed, I slide down into my desk and stew for the rest of class. I hear nothing Señora Ramirez says.

  The class bell draws me from my stupor. I stay seated until the room has cleared out—no need to perform for my classmates if I don’t have to. As the room empties, I lift myself onto my tiptoes, pushing up off my metal desk. The maze of cracks lying before me asks, What now? I imagine myself walking flat-footed out of the classroom and into the hallway. No stares, no raised brows. The thought triggers a deep rumbling, and I suddenly hear the muted beeping of hospital monitors, the hushed weeping in the hallway. My mother caresses the thick bandages wrapped around my head. I press hard on the nurse’s button for more morphine.

  “Allison, do you need something?”

  I whip around to see Señora Ramirez sitting at her desk in the corner of the room. I had no idea she was still here.

  “Nope! No, just packing up,” I say with a start. “I’m leaving now.” I grab my book bag. “¡Adios!” Thoughts of revolution quashed, I maneuver the tile floor in tiptoed leaps and jump into the safety of the hallway.

  • • •

  Because my locker is so close to the gym, I am always the first member of the cross-country team in the girls’ locker room after school by at least five minutes. Located in the oldest section of campus, the locker rooms have no AC and even less air flow. The humid, thick air calms me as I sit down with my gym bag on a long wooden bench. The heat has a sedative effect on my worn brain. My tensed muscles relax for the first time all day. I breathe in, eyes closed, and enjoy the silence of the empty room. These thoughts, these messages—I can tell they are not my own creations. They appear like foreign parcels in my psyche, arriving clearly and forcefully from an outside sender. Is it God? Mother Nature? Balled-up paper towels litter the floor near the sinks. There is a faint dripping in a shower around the corner. Who is trying to protect me?

  The locker-room door swings open, and my silence is shattered by wild conversation. Maddie’s face lights up when she sees me. “Hey, girl! How was your day?” she asks, setting her gym bag beside me on the bench. She unzips the top and begins unloading her sneakers, socks, and sports bra at the same time she slips off her sandals.

  I shake my head and pretend to mentally run through the day’s events. “Eh, you know, the usual. Just another Friday.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “Why are you walking like that?” Sara asks, annoyance dripping from her voice. Her eyes are scanning the hallway, taking in the sidelong glances and open stares as we stride toward our next class.

  “Walking like what?” I leap diagonally, arms thrown outward, into the concrete square directly in front of her. She slams into my back with a grunt.

  “Walking like . . . this!” She gestures at me and then zigzags her hands wildly in the air. “Like you’re playing some sort of crazy hopscotch or something. Walk straight. Stop being weird. You were doing this last week too.”

  She is really not happy with me, but, strangely, I don’t care. “Oh, I’ve just got blisters from practice,” I say as I slide my left foot into an open space back on my side of the pathway. “It hurts when I put my foot down a certain way. Helps to kind of tiptoe.” I point generally at my heel, the site of the fake blister.

  “You just look like a crazy person. Maybe find a Band-Aid? People are going to start looking at you. . . . At us.” She shifts her cross-body bag self-consciously. Sara has always been attuned to our social standing. Where we sit at lunch, who talks to us at football games. I care, in the general sense of not wanting to be an outcast, but for most of our lives I’ve simply followed her lead. She finagles the invites to the cool-kid parties, and I happily plod along behind her as we maneuver long, dark driveways leading to big basements and out-of-town parents. Sara is the glimmering, sparkling headliner, a perfectly developed, closely curated representation of high school popularity. My job is to look nice, dress well, and not say anything too weird. Don’t talk about school or books.

  I nod my head, pretending to take her advice. I have been evading cracks for almost four full days and I can tell a difference in my brain. It feels lighter. The tumor is shrinking. I am healing myself. Each step over a crack is one of cancer’s soldiers killed.

  Sara mumbles a quiet good-bye, more a multisyllable grunt than words, and veers toward her next class. She doesn’t turn around when I yell, “Text me later!” Her mess of curls disappears into the crowd.

  • • •

  The school cafeteria is located in the heart of campus in a cavernous building that is also home to the auditorium and band room. The enormous brick structure could pass as a cathedral if there were anything remotely attractive about it. Its sprawling ceilings tower fifty feet above my head, the chipping green and orange exterior paint from decades past reminding me how old this school actually is, how many tens of thousands of students, some now much older than my parents, have lived out their high school years passing through these exact doors. There is the smell of pizza and chocolate chip cookies. The roar of voices, tension and excitement. A long, white, hand-painted bann
er screaming HOME OF THE BULLDOGS! hangs above the never-ending row of burgeoning trophy cases, tagged here and there with permanent-marker graffiti.

  The student population rotates through the lunchroom in three “rounds” between eleven a.m. and one p.m. every day. In August, I hugged my friends and cross-country teammates Jenny and Rebecca with glee when we discovered we were in the same lunch round. It was a relief to know I would have someone to eat with all year. The only thing worse than walking alone is sitting alone.

  The cafeteria has a pulsing, raging heart. When you enter, you become part of the storm. And it’s also one of the most dangerous locations on campus. Not only is the entire floor the same evil that spans all the classrooms, but the walls are covered in green and white ceramic subway tiles. I almost sense the beams of cancer radiating from the cracks surrounding me. They emit a constant, low-toned static.

  The entrance is clogged and chaotic. The first lunch round is shuffling past the line of trash cans on their way to class while the second round is stampeding forward toward forty minutes of freedom. With a shove from behind, my face is smashed into someone’s navy book bag. I teeter perilously on my tiptoes, trying to maintain a safe footing, swaying at the mercy of the mass around me. I catch occasional glances of my feet through the sea of book bags and bodies, but I have no control over them as I am pushed, pulled, and knocked by the crowd. I know I am stepping on cracks. I can feel them searing my toes. I can hear the cells in my brain pop-pop-popping into malignancies. The crowd thins, and, spat out into a space between two lunch tables, I come to a flat-footed stop. I stand frozen, breathing and recovering, as the tumor in my brain reinflates. My cells are the giant exploding bubbles in a pot of boiling water.

  The noise of the cafeteria echoes off the tile walls and back again. Looking down at my shoes, each planted across multiple cracks, I am slammed with an intense pain deep in my head that screams outward through my ears. The soles of my sneakers burn against the carcinogens. A slow, creeping feeling of doom rolls over the horizon. Alone, trembling between crowded lunch tables, I’m filled with a heavy dread. Looking at the cracks, it’s horribly obvious: I just brought the cancer back. I am suddenly furious at myself, furious at my clumsy feet and gangly legs. I have ruined everything.

  The students sitting at the surrounding lunch tables begin to turn around and look at me. I haven’t moved positions since I lurched out of the crowd, and, wrapped in my own riddle, I have no sense of how long it has been. Ten seconds, a minute, two, five? Strangely, it’s not their curious stares or craned necks that draw me from my thoughts, but instead the quieting of their usually all-consuming chatter. The loud laughter and raucous conversations thin out quickly as more and more heads pop up to look at me. The muscles in my body tighten under the weight of their eyes. Everything inside me is screaming to save myself. From the gossip. From the rumors. (Did you see Allison at lunch yesterday?) Out of reflex my legs twitch, ready to move. Escape, escape! But I am trapped. To move and to stay are both equally dangerous. Remaining here, I risk pumping more cancer evil into myself. I risk more embarrassment, more stares. But to leave? To leave is cracks, steps, the unknown. Book bags, accidents, the unpredictable.

  I look up, intentionally avoiding the eyes of anyone around me, and scan the cafeteria for inspiration. Fifty feet across the room, Rebecca is waving at me from our usual table near the soda machines. I glance away without acknowledging her. Heat radiates up my legs from the cracks. My head throbs against the hard kernel of cells taking shape in my temporal lobe. What do I do? Where is my protector? Frantic, I look around the cafeteria as if the being sending me secret messages might be winking at me from the corner. My previous moments of divine inspiration just appeared in my mind on their own. The dream, the alarm, the cracks. But, right now, everything is silent. I have no guidance, no cleverly hidden messages. I tilt my head back so I am looking toward the ceiling and close my eyes. Opening my palms to the sky, I stretch my arms out wide, imitating the worshippers on Sunday morning televangelist broadcasts. Something about it feels unexplainably right. I hope it is a sufficiently pitiful plea for help. Protector, please. Guide me.

  And in the back of my mind, with my eyes closed, my face turned toward the ceiling, I hear it. If avoiding cracks can help prevent cancer, there must be something else, some other action, that also has an unknown meaning or power. Like a crack, it may seem arbitrary, but it wields a hidden magic. There have to be more secrets waiting to be discovered. I hold my plea stance like a yoga position, asking patiently for more. People shuffle by me on both sides, squeezing between my outstretched arms and the students eating at the cafeteria tables. “Um, what’s going on?” a girl says to my left. From the seat directly beside me: “Is she praying?”

  Am I praying? I ask myself.

  Silence.

  I lean my head as far back as it will go and stretch my arms out completely to my side, palms up. I am begging for a message.

  It hits me. It’s like I have discovered something I already know. I immediately understand that the idea is perfect: It is not only avoiding cracks when you walk that matters, but also how many steps it takes for you to reach your destination. If where you place your foot is important, clearly how many times you do it is just as meaningful. While still significant, avoiding cracks is only one part of the overall equation. I need to think bigger! If, after I step on a crack, I can still reach my final destination within the “correct” or “safe” number of steps, then the danger is negated. It is all so obvious.

  With a relieved sigh, I open my eyes and drop the pose. I have a way to escape my misstep and its attached death sentence. I have been given a second chance. But how do I know the safe number of steps? Where do I find this magical number? How will I—

  42.

  The number appears in my brain. Its arrival sounds mechanical, like it was fed to me by the machines that spit out tickets in parking garages. The outline of the number blocks out all other thoughts. I know this is my safe number.

  I surface from my discovery to the burn of a heavy, newly familiar heat: the pointed stares of my classmates. I have just put on a show for at least a hundred students. “That girl is in our English class!” No one moves. They are waiting for me to say something, to explain myself. Eyes fixed, mouths open. “Is that Allison?” I have nothing to hide behind, no veil of an excuse.

  With a blank face, eyes down, I pivot on my back leg and move to tiptoe out of the cafeteria. Alarms blare as I move my leg, 42 flashing behind my eyes. COUNT IT! The message is a silent explosion, an angry voice over a police megaphone. My protector is screaming at me.

  One, I say to myself, as I place the toes of my left foot in an open tile. Shifting my weight, I move my—

  OUT LOUD!

  “Two,” I say as I set my foot down. “Three, four.” The entire cafeteria continues to roar, but the two tables near the windows sit in awed silence, listening to me count.

  LOUDER!

  “Five!” I yell. “Six!” I place one foot in front of the other, methodically counting my steps, attracting more attention with each one. Bobbing up and down on my tiptoes, I’ve screamed my way to twelve before reaching the edge of the tiled floor.

  Safely in the hallway, I run to the women’s restroom, still counting aloud, and slam myself into a stall. It smells like cigarettes and urine. The tears start as I slide the metal lock into place. Winded, leaning lightly against the stall, I can feel where their stares had burned my skin. Kelsey Jameson was actually laughing. And Maisey and Madeline. I spent the night at Kelsey’s house last month. We stayed up all night talking about prom, college, the future. Eating pizza and Cheetos. Bitch.

  I dab my face with a wad of toilet paper. My phone vibrates:

  Rebecca:

  Hey is everything ok?

  What just happened?

  Me:

  Yeah, fine.

  Completely forgot about homework for next class . . . gotta do it real quick

  I wonder how much
she and Jenny could see from our seats as a wave of embarrassment sweeps through me.

  I stare through my tears at the back of the stall door. I know Kelsey is whispering with her lunch table. How many people will she tell by the end of the day? And what will she say? I can see her gossiping in the parking lot after school. She was like, counting, or something. A chorus of gasps. But not even counting—like, yelling! And tiptoeing? It was so weird. Sara is going to hear about this at some point today for sure.

  I hit the toilet paper dispenser with a clenched fist. The noise it makes rings off the cinder-block walls so nicely that I hit it again. Harder. A new emotion is flowing through my gut, pumping upward with a power I haven’t known before. Anger. It doesn’t matter if they stared! I roar to myself. They’re the ones who are crazy. Walking on cracks all the time. They don’t know. They don’t even know what they are doing to themselves! I nod my head in agreement as the edges of my outburst slowly wear down.

  Fist unclenched, I pick at the top layer of paint on the bathroom wall. What they saw or thought didn’t matter. It only matters that now I have the full picture. Now I might be safe.

  I use a handful of toilet paper to wipe my nose and bend down quickly to look under the walls of the stall. I’m alone. Thank goodness. I open the door and tiptoe out. The bathroom is painted a sickly 1970s orange. There is a single fluorescent light hanging from the unfinished ceiling and exposed pipes. Three dingy mirrors sit above three pedestal sinks. I dab at the eyeliner and mascara puddles under my eyes. If I looked pretty enough, smiled big enough, I had thought this morning, maybe no one would mind that I tiptoed and skipped and jumped through campus. Clearly, that was wrong.

  The heavy wooden door swings open, and Latisha Simones saunters into the bathroom, humming. She beams at me with a huge wave.