by Chase Connor
“Who’s Steve, Tom?”
“My counselor.”
“You don’t have a counselor, Tom.” Dr. Renfro sat forward. “You only have me—I’m your psychiatrist—Dr. Sahman, your medical doctor—and you go to group with Jeff. He is a counselor, but you only see him in group. Does this all sound familiar?”
I was trying to breathe steadily.
“Who’s Steve?” I shook my head.
Dr. Renfro frowned and sat back.
“What do you and Steve talk about, Tom?”
I thought about that.
“Lies, mostly.”
“When do you go to see Steve?”
I had to think about that, too.
“Um, once a week on Thursdays before I go to work.” I said. “Sometimes on Wednesdays, I think. He usually sets my appointments up before work so that I can go from the appointments right to work and don’t have to disrupt my sleeping schedule to come see him. His office is over on…um…”
I trailed off. Where was Steve’s office?
“What’s Steve’s last name, Tom?” Dr. Renfro asked.
“I…I don’t know…”
“How long have you been going to see Steve, Tom?”
I just stared at Dr. Renfro.
“When did you first start going to see Steve, Tom?”
“You can stop.” I chewed at my lip, fighting so hard to not cry. “I know what you’re doing. I know Steve’s not real now.”
“He’s real to you, isn’t he?” Dr. Renfro said. “I’m not mocking you, Tom. I need to know when Steve first appeared. This could be related to your medication.”
“I started doubling up on my anti-anxiety medication.” I said. “Because I’ve been more anxious than usual. About two months ago. I…I guess that’s when I first had a dream about seeing Steve. I think I’ve been taking extra anti-depressants, too.”
“Those dreams seemed real?”
“Very.”
“Do you think you know why you talk to Steve about lies, Tom?”
I nodded.
“Do you feel like you want to tell the truth to someone, but you don’t know how to do that without sorting through the lies?”
I nodded, my eyes dropping to look at my feet.
“Would you like to tell me a real truth, Tom?” Dr. Renfro asked. “A small one for now?”
“I don’t know.” I said, then shook my head. “Yes. I want to tell you a truth. I just don’t know which one.”
“Tell me why you didn’t discuss upping your anti-anxiety and antidepressant medication with me first.” Dr. Renfro suggested. “How about that truth?”
I looked up at him.
“Because I didn’t know why I was becoming more anxious.” I said. “Because I thought that would put me back in the hospital. Because…Steve…suggested I should go back into the hospital, and that scared me and made me really anxious, Dr. Renfro.”
“And here we are, right?” He smiled.
I nodded, my head not quite so water balloon on a stick-like.
Dr. Renfro smiled at me and studied me for quite a while, allowing me to get control of myself before he continued.
“I want to make a deal with you, Tom.” He said. “You don’t have to tell me the truth about you and Dally and John until you’re ready. But you can’t lie either. We’ll talk about your feelings, your emotions, how you are getting along mentally, but the rest is off limits until you want to talk. You won’t modify your medication routine unless we discuss it first so this doesn’t happen again, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good.” He smiled. “Let me ask you why you ran away from group the day you were taken to the hospital. If you can’t tell the truth, just tell me you aren’t sure. Don’t lie.”
“One of the guys there—um, Jared—he OD’d.” I said. “I think, anyway. And I was already really anxious and there’s another guy in group who is falling in love with me and he’s crazy, too, and everything in my head was really loud and I was starting to have a panic attack. Finding out Jared was dead…that someone else lost the game…it was too much.”
Dr. Renfro nodded.
“That was very honest of you.” He said. “Thank you, Tom.”
I sniffled.
“Jared, the boy you are talking about,” he sighed, “he was buried six days after you were brought in. It was an unintentional overdose. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. But we never know what might have gone through someone’s head in those moments before they shoot up, right?”
I looked down.
“Did he intentionally give himself a large dose?” Dr. Renfro asked no one. “Did he make a mistake? Was he just tired? No one knows but Jared—and he’s gone now so we’ll never know for sure. Did Dally go out to the park and slit his wrists because he thought you’d show up again and save the day? Or did he think the second time was a charm and he could finally escape the weight of everything on his mind and in his heart? We’ll never know. But…you didn’t show up because you didn’t know. How were you to know? How do you know that if you saved him a second time there wouldn’t be a third? A fourth? A twelfth? Tom…all you are responsible for is you. Dally and Jared didn’t lose the game because there is no game. Life and death aren’t games. Lying—that’s a game. And it’s a game everyone loses. And you’ve been playing hard for a very long time. You can lie to other people until the day you die, but you can’t lie to yourself for long. We all know our own truth—and it can only be pushed down for so long before it comes bubbling up. Do you want to keep playing that game and see how long before the game wins—or do you want to lose on your own terms?”
“I just want to tell the truth.” I swallowed. “I want to learn to tell the truth again—I want to be Tom again.”
“Then let’s work on that.”
A List of Truths
Things weren’t always bad with Dally after The Summer of John. In fact, things were good quite often. Probably more often than I told myself, but when things were bad, they were so bad that they overshadowed the good in my mind. The relentless rehashing of the past, the demands for sexual gratification—physical affection—the need for attention, the need to be anything and everything that Dally needed or wanted overshadowed life, generally. Dally’s suicide attempt. Dally’s suicide. Running into John at the movies—all of it made the good stuff slide to the background, so far back that I couldn’t even see it for a long time.
One time, Dally and I had gone to see a movie and have pizza. It was right after I had turned sixteen and Dally was still a month away from being able to drive himself. We had gone and seen some horror movie because it was close to Halloween—I can’t even remember what the movie was about it was so similar to others—and then we went out for pizza. We had gone to a place that a lot of kids at our high school went to on Friday nights. We ran into other kids we knew from school at the pizza place and they had been to see movies, too. We all sat around, eating slice after slice, chugging sodas, taking turns on the antiquated video games in the old school pizzeria, taking turns playing pool on the only table in the place.
All of us took turns filling the rest of the table in on the movies we had seen, if they were any good, whether or not we’d recommend them. It was a really good night out. There was a lot of laughter and comradery and just being high school kids. John and summer camp never came up, Dally didn’t pick a fight and neither did I, and we just enjoyed being with our friends. When I dropped Dally off at home—slightly past curfew—we said our “goodbyes” and promised to see each other the next day.
It was a really good day. One of the best. And nothing had really happened that was particularly spectacular—but we were just normal teenagers doing normal teenager things. That’s all I really wanted out of my high school experience. To be out from underneath that gloom and terror that the shadow of John had cast. I just wanted to go to school, spend time with friends, think about finding a first love, holding someone’s hand, getting a kiss that wasn’t about comfort, ha
ving sex that wasn’t about trying to forget the past—just live life like billions of other people do.
Those days weren’t really all that scarce. Dally and I did a lot of things where I felt like a normal teenager. But, with all of the lying, those good things were just hard to remember. It was hard to push the curtains of lies aside and say “Oh, yeah, things were okay sometimes, too. In fact, sometimes they were great.” And that wasn’t Dally’s fault. The lies weren’t Dally’s fault. Dally had asked me to start lying back in summer camp, but I had agreed to do it. I kept doing it even when Dally wasn’t there pleading with me to do it. I even did it after his death—his suicide. When Dally’s coffin had settled into the grave, the lies settled into my heart. I had promised myself that the lies would become my standard way of behaving from day to day.
That was something that I would have to take responsibility for—the lies I told because Dally asked me to tell them, and the lies I continued to tell after Dally was dead. The lies after Dally were dead were told because I felt a sense of loyalty to something that I shouldn’t have felt loyal to really. I didn’t have to be loyal to Dally and I didn’t have to be loyal to his memory. I had to be loyal to the person Tom was supposed to be. But…Tom was a problem, too. I wasn’t sure who Tom was supposed to be. Years of lying had stunted the development of Tom and left me wondering who it was I was supposed to be.
So, I had to make the decision to pick a Tom and become that version. I wanted to be honest, happy, and good. And I didn’t want to be crazy anymore. Being crazy isn’t a choice and I know that. But making myself crazier than I was had been a somewhat active choice on my part. I had told lies and forced myself to keep telling lies and forced myself to believe those lies. Hell, I overmedicated myself without talking to my doctor until it became almost impossible to tell the difference between reality and dreams. Much longer and I probably never would have been able to remember what had been real and what hadn’t.
Going over the timeline of my trauma and everything that led Tom ending up in the hospital a second time was difficult. But Dr. Renfro and I worked on that timeline three times a week in the hospital. We worked on making a list of truths so that it would be easier to separate the lies.
The Summer of John happened. Truth.
Dally asked me to lie about it happening. Truth.
Dally and I agreed to lie about it happening. Truth.
Dally and I continued to lie when it continued to happen. Truth.
Dally and I left summer camp as friends with a shared trauma. Truth.
Dally and I went to high school and carried that trauma with us throughout all of high school. Truth.
Dally became more and more aggressive throughout high school, demanding physical, emotional, and psychological comfort from me. Truth.
I ran into John because he was working at the movie theater. Truth.
I kept that from Dally for over a year. Truth.
I eventually told Dally about running into John. Truth.
I told Dally’s parents everything about The Summer of John. Half-Truth.
John was questioned and eventually arrested, bailed out, and a trial date set. Truth.
Dally went into a tailspin and attempted suicide at the playground. Truth.
I found Dally there because we were supposed to meet for one of our late-night talks and I did my best to stop the bleeding as I screamed for help. Truth.
Dally and I told everyone that John had stabbed Dally. Truth.
Everyone knew that was a lie but pretended they believed us. Truth.
John was found dead in his apartment days later. Truth.
I told myself the lie that John had actually stabbed Dally to keep him from talking to the police anymore and then I told myself I had stabbed Dally because…I don’t know why. Maybe to deal with the guilt of everything that was at least partially my fault. Truth.
Then I told Dally that I wanted to start telling the real truth. Truth.
Dally couldn’t handle that so he committed suicide. Truth.
Everything else was pretty much a lie. Truth.
You’d think that knowing those truths would make it easier to talk about the lies and the real truths. And, maybe it did a little. But when you ask someone to tell some hard truths after years of them covering them up with lies, it gets a little complicated. But, as I’ve mentioned before, I know my biggest truth and I know that I’m crazy. So, the big truth was where I had to begin if I wanted to start to recover from the trauma of my past. My past with Dally and my past with John. My past of lying to myself and everyone else in an effort to keep everything from crashing down on me.
But I was also tired of the feeling of nothing holding me down, too.
Regardless, no matter how much I hated everything and nothing and the lies and the truths and the trauma, I knew one thing to be true above all others. I just wanted to be okay again. I wanted to be a better version of Tom and to move on from the trauma. I wanted to wake up in the morning and not automatically assess the condition of my mental health. I wanted to wake up and not plot out in my head the lies I would have to keep up with throughout the day. I wanted to go to Dally’s grave, and even if I didn’t feel him there, I didn’t want to be angry with Dally.
I wasn’t angry at John.
He was dead.
Justice, I guess. Or at least, closure.
So, I needed closure with Dally. And the only way to get closure was to stop feeling like I would betray his memory by telling the real truth.
No Big Truth
I was actually singing along to the music coming from the radio as I swept the floor in the convenience store. Being happy wasn’t something I wanted to categorize my mood as since that would feel like jinxing myself, but yeah, I was happy. I had been out of the hospital for six weeks, allowed to go back to work, my mom was giving me slack and no longer taking her own advice to use psychology on me. That had been another lie I had made up—my doctors hadn’t talked to my mother. At least, not about anything private, like my feeling guilty about Dally’s death. That had all been a product of my own imagination and machinations.
Dr. Renfro assured me that he had never given my mother any information other than an overall idea of how I was doing mentally and physically. And I believed him. He wasn’t the liar. I was.
Being able to truly admit that I was a liar telling unwarranted lies made me feel…free, of all things. It made me happier. Sure, I had known I was a liar, but admitting that I was making bigger and more elaborate lies for no reason since Dally’s death lifted a weight off of me. Knowing that I had made some progress since entering the hospital, where I had stayed for ninety-three days, and even more progress in the six weeks since, put a smile on my face. I had found a way to trust my survival instincts, to let go and let God. To allow my body and mind to do what they knew how to do naturally so that I had the time and energy to focus on my therapy.
After the hospital, Dr. Renfro actually reduced my medication doses. Of course, that made me anxious, because in the hospital, I had started out being in a medication fog for the first half of my stay. I felt like the medication was keeping that wave of everything from crashing down. But, halfway through my stay, Dr. Renfro began working on cognitive behavioral therapy with me again, which we often just called “CBT” since it’s such a long goddamn phrase. I began to work with him and other providers, learning tools and techniques to deal with my anxiety and depression. Because, as Dr. Renfro said, medication couldn’t be a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
I wanted to become Tom two-point-one at the least, and I couldn’t do that if I was Tom on medication therapy full time.
It was tough. God-fucking-damnit, it was tough. CBT, I mean. Learning to challenge my thoughts and emotions that came out of nowhere. The destructive thoughts and emotions. I had gone so long letting them guide me and control me that I barely even knew how to acknowledge them, let alone challenge them. But I was making progress. And with the help of the low doses of me
dication, I was…managing. Maybe one day I would be Tom two-point-one who doesn’t take medication at all. Tom who knows what is real and what is fake and tells the truth even when it’s hard.
That’s what I wanted, anyway.
I really, truly wanted that.
And that isn’t a lie.
My first night back at the convenience store where I got to work by myself was a blessing, really. I was tired of being at home, watching T.V., going to see my doctors, having my mom watch me out of the corner of her eye. I just wanted to do something productive that wasn’t about my mental and physical health. My mom was nervous seeing me leave for work, but I felt free and calm and ready to just do what a guy my age would do.
When I got to work, it started out as a quiet night. Mondays usually are. And the quiet didn’t bother me. Even in the silence, sporadically interrupted by beeps and hisses and whooshes of machines, I didn’t feel my mind getting loud. And, that too, made me feel happy. Tom could be quiet and not feel like he needed to fill that quiet with something so that he wouldn’t have depression or destructive thoughts. But it did get boring, so I turned on the radio and started cleaning. And I felt light. I didn’t feel anchored down by nothing or overwhelmed by everything. I just felt like Tom.
There’s really no way to describe the feeling of coming back to oneself after struggling with trauma and mental health issues for so long. Maybe, you could say, it felt like coming home. Or maybe you could just say that it felt calm. Most importantly, you could say it feels like seeing an old friend you’ve been longing to see.
Do you know how ridiculous it feels to be overjoyed at just not being depressed and anxious? I mean, I couldn’t even say that I was super happy or excited or joyful or anything—I was just happy. Simply happy. And it felt ridiculous and embarrassing. Which made me smile as I swept the floors and sang along to some stupid pop song on the radio that I normally wouldn’t want to be caught dead listening to, let along singing along to. I liked ridiculous and embarrassing. It was so much better than anxious and depressed.
