by Jamie Sumner
“Count on Me,” Bruno Mars
“Stubborn Love,” The Lumineers
“Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken,” Pink
“Say Something,” Justin Timberlake featuring Chris Stapleton
“Lean on Me,” Bill Withers
“Roar,” Katy Perry
“Washed by the Water,” Will Hoge
“Best Day of My Life,” American Authors
“Imagine,” John Lennon
“Don’t Stop Believin’,”Journey
“Awake My Soul,” Mumford & Sons
“A Million Dreams,” The Greatest Showman soundtrack
“Livin’ on a Prayer,” Bon Jovi
“Everything’s Okay,” Lenka
“We’re Going to Be Friends,” The White Stripes
My phone beeps with another text. It’s Well again: U don’t get 2 give up yet, Suzy Lee. I let my finger hover for just a second. And then I hit play.
12 All I Want for Christmas Is You
It snowed in Nashville while we were gone. We drove up late last night to a blanket of white over the bushes and the roofs. Everything looks iced in sugar. And now I’m sitting in Andrea’s office waiting while she fetches tea. I decided to come back. I called Well after listening to his playlist, and he talked me into giving it one more shot. Well could talk anyone into anything. He also convinced me to talk to Andrea. “Feel your feelings, Lou,” is his new mantra for me. It’s annoying, but effective.
Except now that I’m here, it all feels different. Like the world I came back to is not the one I left.
“Here you go, Lou. I hope chamomile’s okay.”
I take a sip. It reminds me of Tahoe and Joe. In her white turtleneck with her hair tied up in a silvery scarf, Andrea looks like a winter fairy. She’s waiting for me to speak. I’m the one who requested this meeting. But I don’t know where to start.
“The fire drill. I know it was… traumatic.” She’s trying to get me going. But this is not the right road.
“I don’t want talk about that.”
“Okay.” She puts down her tea. “What do you want to talk about?”
“I want to talk about the sensory processing stuff. I want to hear your plan.”
“Oh, well, let me just—” I’ve frazzled her. She’s been trying to get me to talk about this forever. Now I’m the one bringing it up. To her credit, she stands and starts rifling through her file cabinet without mentioning that I’ve been avoiding her like the plague for weeks. She pulls out the Adolescent Sensory Questionnaire and hands it back to me. I force myself to look at it. All the boxes I checked and all the ones I didn’t that I probably should have.
She uncaps a red pen and begins to circle different questions. She seems excited, the kind of excited adults get when they’re cutting coupons or doing sudoku.
“These…” She points to bothered by “light touch,” someone lightly touching your hand, face, leg, or back and distressed by others touching you. “These indicate sensory issues related to touch.”
Duh.
Now she picks up a green pen. “And these”—she circles bothered by noises other people do not seem bothered by, sensitive to loud sounds or commotion, and avoid crowds and plan errands at times when there will be fewer people—“are related to sound and crowds.”
I look at the page. There is hardly anything left that isn’t covered in red or green. She sees the look on my face.
“This is good, Lou. We know your triggers—touch and sound. There are people with additional sensory issues related to taste and textures of food, light, the whole gamut. This is manageable. That’s what I’m trying to show you.”
I’m not so sure. It obviously hasn’t been manageable so far. “So, what now?” I ask.
“Now we get you an appointment with an OT sometime in the future to work on developing a sensory diet.”
This must be the person Dan was telling Ginger about.
“What, like vitamins?”
“Not quite,” she laughs. “A sensory diet involves exposing you to certain triggers, but in a safe environment. It helps you develop strategies to cope.”
She’s got to be kidding. That sounds terrible, like volunteering to get an extra flu shot.
She keeps going. “I have a few we can work on today if you like? Can I try something?” She’s too eager. She holds out her hand, and I jerk back. She puts it down again. “Lou, I promise I will not lay a hand on you without your permission. Do you understand?”
I nod, but I don’t scoot forward again.
“Lou, I am going to put my right hand firmly on your left shoulder for five seconds. You can count with me or count in your head. Is that okay?”
I shake my head no but then say yes before I can think more about it. I channel Well and get ready to feel my feelings as she puts her hand firmly on my shoulder.
“One, two, three,” she counts, and my whole arm feels like it’s seizing up, like I’ve stuck my finger in a socket. “Four…” This is torture, torture disguised as therapy. “Five!” she says, and takes it away. “There. See. You did it!”
“Yeah.” But I just stood here like a cyborg and now I’m exhausted and my arm is tingly and how is this worth celebrating? I think.
“Lou, I know you think this wasn’t a big deal,” Andrea says. “But it was. A lot of people do well with specific parameters like this where they know what’s coming. And also, the pressure matters. Soft touch is often harder than a firm handshake or a high five.”
“What about the noise?”
“That’s another thing that does better with warning. A little advance notice goes a long way.”
I think about the fire drill. “What if I don’t get advance notice?”
Andrea gets up again and walks behind her desk to pull something out of her top drawer.
“That’s what these are for.” She places two purple foam earplugs on the table. They look like mutant caterpillars.
“You want me to wear earplugs?”
“Well no, not all the time. But if you keep them with you, you can use them when you hear a triggering noise. It might help stop the downward spiral. They also make noise-canceling headphones, but I thought these were a little more discreet.”
I take the earplugs and put them in my pocket. I cannot imagine a scenario where I will ever let people see me using them.
“Lou, I know this all seems a little silly, but give it a shot. What can it hurt? Let’s get you in with the OT I know, and we can write up a plan. And if it seems reasonable to you, we can share it with your teachers. I promise they will be sensitive and will not divulge this information to anyone.”
I look into my teacup. No answers there. But I can’t keep running away from my problems. I won’t be like Mom.
“Okay,” I whisper.
“Okay?”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll try.”
* * *
Well is waiting for me outside math class just like on my first day. His nails are a deep plum color. I grin. It’s hard not to like a guy who makes you a playlist.
That is, until he holds up a sign that says APPLAUSE! in capital letters.
“What is that?”
“This is me, clapping loudly for your prodigal return. Get it?” He waves it around.
“Ha-ha.”
Well isn’t the one I’m worried about. He gets what it’s like to be an outsider. His dad treats him like that every day. It’s the thought of everybody else that makes me want to hide. I take a deep breath and order my feet to move.
Math and geography go exactly the same. No one looks at me, but I can feel them wanting to look at me. I stare at my desk, fiddling with the purple earplugs in my pocket. At lunch, I convince Well to buy snacks from the vending machine so we can skip the dining hall. I need a break from all the “not staring.” We sit in the empty stairwell and look out at the snow. Another half inch and we would have gotten a snow day. I could still be in my pajamas right now.
“I don’t know if I can do it,�
�� I say.
“Do what?” he asks through a mouthful of Cheetos.
“Go to theater class. Mrs. Nicky told me on my first day that theater wasn’t for the faint of heart. The show’s in three weeks, and I missed two rehearsals. She’s going to think I can’t handle the pressure.”
“Can you?” He points a plum nail at me. The thing about Well is he doesn’t ever let you off the hook.
“Yes. I mean, I think so.”
“Fine.” He shrugs. “Then don’t let anyone bully you.”
“Besides you, you mean?”
“Well of course, besides me.”
* * *
Mary Katherine is the first one to openly stare. I walk in behind Well and Tucker. Jacob gives me a wave without looking up from his computer, and Geneva winks and holds out her arm. She’s written Louise in cursive under a rabbit doing a one-armed push-up. But Mary Katherine pokes Evan in the ribs, and they both stare. For an eternity. It’s like that game where you try not to blink first, except I would be happy to lose if they’d let me. Finally, Well sees it and says, “Whatchu lookin’ at?” in his best Jersey accent. They roll their eyes, but at least it gets them to stop staring.
My pulse is high and fast when Mrs. Nicky marches in. I’m worried she’s going to pull me aside in front of everyone. But she just launches straight into her preproduction speech of the day, giving me a quick wink as she begins.
“Three weeks, people. Three weeks. And we are going to need a miracle beyond fairy-tale proportions to get us show-ready in that amount of time. Lou, pass out the scripts with the stage directions we were working on before the Thanksgiving holiday so rudely interrupted our schedule.” I start passing the black binders around the room. “And if one of you, just one of you, flubs a line that reveals you are not, in fact, off book, and you have not memorized your lines completely and to perfection, I’ll have a fifth grader recruited in your place. Is that understood?”
Everybody says, “Yes, Mrs. Nicky,” and for once today, nobody is thinking about me. Then Mrs. Nicky takes up her own binder, and that’s that.
* * *
“Aren’t you freezing?”
It’s the end of the week, and Well and I are sitting on the curb out in front of school, waiting for Dan to pull the bus around for the boys’ last tennis match of the season. Well is in the gray shiny T-shirt and navy shorts that are the tennis team’s uniform. He also has a neon-green knit cap with googly eyes pulled down over his ears.
“Of course I’m cold. And more to the point, why, for the love, are we still playing in December? Tennis is a fall sport. Fall. Golden leaves and mellow sunshine. Not snow. Surely you should call a match for snow?”
“Aren’t they indoor courts?”
“That is not the point. The point is that I’m telling my dad I’m quitting next year. What?” He reads the doubt on my face. “You don’t think I will? I’m doing it tonight. Three-second, firm-pressure pinky promise.”
This is Well’s new thing. I made the mistake of telling him Andrea’s coping strategies.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“It’ll be good for you, and it will bring me luck.”
I roll my eyes but take off one mitten. Mittens are one of the reasons I love winter. More outerwear equals less physical contact. Normally. Unless you are Well, and then nothing will stop you.
“Two seconds,” I say.
“Fine.”
I take his freezing pinky in mine and shake one, two times without breathing.
“Happy?” I say, pulling away. It’s not so terrible when I know it’s coming. Which I guess makes Andrea right, which is incredibly annoying.
“Happy,” he says as the bus pulls up and the doors shoot open before it even comes to a full stop.
“Hurry up, kid! We’re late,” Dan yells, and Well hops onto the first step. He has just enough time to shout, “And good luck with your thing!” before Dan waves at me and pulls away. My thing. My meeting with my mom. Who I haven’t seen in two months. Who is probably only here because the court is making her. Yes, my thing. I gulp the dry, cold air. I’m going to need all the luck I can get. I spot Ginger’s Lexus winding down the magnolia drive.
Here we go.
* * *
The Good Cup is a small, out-of-the-way coffee shop that Well and I have gone to before to work on our English papers. It’s always almost empty, but today there’s a crowd. I’ve never seen so many people here before. The shop next door is having a holiday open house. Great. More people. More noise. More of all the things I didn’t want to manage today while also managing my mother. Ginger circles the small gravel lot, searching for a parking place in all the madness.
I picked this place because Melissa told me to choose a “neutral spot” and because the first time I came here and saw the walls lined with coffee beans, it reminded me of Bagels and Joe. But it looks like everybody in the world is trying to find a neutral spot today.
We are half an hour early, which was also my idea. Andrea says the sensory stuff is harder to manage in unexpected and/or high stress situations. I already knew this would be high stress, so I figured we could show up early, stake out the place, pick a table in the quietest corner, and get rid of as much of the “unexpected” as we could.
Once we’re inside, Ginger pushes her way to the back of the line while I make a wide loop of the room and find two tiny round tables toward the back. I sit. I tuck my mittens into my pockets and hug Mom’s guitar in its case between my knees. I haven’t touched it in weeks. But this morning, against my better judgment, I pulled it out and tuned it. It was like meeting an old friend again.
It’s been two months since I saw Mom. Two months. Before that I hadn’t gone a day without her. I tuck my hair behind my ears. I got it cut, just a little. I catch myself hoping she’ll like it. But that’s stupid. Because if she cared about me at all she would have shown up or picked up the phone at least. She doesn’t get to have an opinion about my hair.
“Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” is playing on the overhead speakers. It was already too loud, and now someone just turned it up. I squish the purple earplugs in my pocket over and over again and try to get used to the noise. I check the line. Ginger is only halfway up. My stomach rolls.
Getting here early was supposed to make me calm, but the wait is killing me. I look toward the bright red exit sign over the door, like the fixed point they tell you to find on a boat when you’re seasick. Mom loves to make an entrance, but she’s always been better at exits, hasn’t she? Leaving my grandparents. Leaving Biloxi and all the other towns over the last twelve years. She’s always leaving. I wonder how she’ll do with this. I told myself I shouldn’t care. So why can’t I stop looking at the door?
After a thousand years, or maybe ten minutes, Ginger makes her way back through the crowd with two giant gingerbread lattes and a plate of vanilla scones. The front door jingles, and I catch sight of Melissa’s dark head in the open doorway. Then I look down again. I’m not ready. I’m not.
“It’s going to be fine,” Ginger whispers. This is another thing adults say when they don’t have the answer.
“Good, you found us a spot,” Melissa says when she reaches us, tucking her motorcycle helmet under her arm and rapping her knuckles on the table. It wobbles, and a tiny wave of my latte slurps out. All the adults look around for napkins they don’t have. Then a hand reaches forward with a crumpled tissue.
“Here. This ought to do it.” It’s her hand and her nails, long and painted red. There’s a glittery snowman on her pinky nail. She always did do a good job on her nails. More careful with them than she was with me. A sliver of anger shoots up my spine, and I straighten up to look at her.
“Hi, Lou.”
I open and shut my mouth like a fish. Here she is. Right in front of me. It’s her, but it’s not her. She looks different. Thinner—so thin her collarbones poke out at sharp angles. A couple of inches of dark roots show in her hair. I g
uess she hasn’t bleached it in a while. Or maybe she’s stopped. Maybe that’s two months of time marked right there. And her denim jacket, the one with the fake rhinestones along the collar, looks dirty and not warm enough for the weather.
And then something clicks as my heart hammers away. She doesn’t look different at all. She looks exactly like she always did. I’ve just never been away long enough to see her like a stranger would.
“Hi, Mom.” When my voice cracks on “Mom,” she looks down. Her eyes settle on my cup, and she points.
“That’s a fancy coffee you got there, baby girl.” I can see her adding up the price in her head, and I want to shake her. She will not make me feel guilty for this.
“Can I get you anything, Jill?” Ginger steps forward for the first time and looks, if possible, more nervous than me.
“Ginger.” The way Mom says her name seems kind of mean. But I’m not sure how. She doesn’t answer Ginger’s question.
Nobody knows what to do now. We shuffle from foot to foot in our sad little triangle. When the song switches over to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You,” Melissa steps in, breaking up the silence.
“Ginger, why don’t you and I take that table, and Jill and Lou can have this one?”
Ginger nods, relieved, and follows Melissa. My stomach drops. I don’t want to be left alone with Mom. I don’t know what to say to her. How do you make small talk with your mother after she becomes a stranger?
“You look good, Lou. Real good.” Her voice is raspy and lower than normal, like she’s caught a cold. “You’ve got some meat on your bones now?” It’s a statement, but she says it like a question. I stay quiet.
“Is that a new jacket?” She points a red nail at the North Face that Ginger bought me in Florida. I fight the urge to tell her it was on sale. Why should I? Why should it matter? I shrug. She doesn’t seem bothered that I’m not talking. Which bothers me.
When she takes off her own jacket, I spot a little round sticker on her bicep. She catches me looking and pats it.
