I feel something that must honestly fall somewhere high on the happy scale. Definitely eight or nine territory. This definitely matches the kiss. And today’s shit-in-my-pants story time.
Wait a sec. Maybe I misread her text. Maybe she wasn’t really inviting me. Maybe she was just bitching about going. Uncertainty floods me. Quickly, I reread the conversation. Yes. There it is: “Do you want to come with me?”
Humming, I click on Michael’s Sunday-night text: “I’m glad we finally met this year! ” I had responded with a “ME TOO” and a smiley face. I keep reading the texts over and over. And thinking about that kiss. I’m so ready for another one.
“Cath, honey, dinner!” Mom calls.
She has set the table with two bowls of chili, a small pile of mini corn bread loaves and two salads. She’s laid out at least five different types of Wish-Bone salad dressing. Our glasses of water are filled with ice and a lemon slice. She makes a production out of dinner most nights. It’s our only real time together, she’ll say.
And every night as I approach the dinner table and see this, her grand gesture, darts of guilt fly at me. Mom shouldn’t have to make culinary amends because she works her ass off and can’t be with me every second of my nonschool day. She shouldn’t have to pour every ounce of her love into me, her emotional and financial black hole of a daughter.
I force a smile that she instantly returns. “I made plans for Sunday, okay?” I say, sprinkling shredded cheddar on my chili.
“With Kristal?” Mom asks, eyebrows arched.
I nod, my mouth full.
Mom does a good job of repressing any whoops of delight. She just smiles, but it reaches her eyes and takes ten years off her face. Another dart. “What are you doing?” she asks ever so nonchalantly.
“Her mom works at a museum in New Haven and there’s some event there,” I answer.
“Well, I’m off, so no problem driving you in,” Mom says. “What time?”
“Kristal will let me know tomorrow.” I sip some water. “Maybe you can do something on Sunday? Maybe a movie? With Aunt D?”
Please, please do something for yourself. For once.
Mom shakes her head. “Nah. I can do the food shopping and clean the bathrooms. I’ll get a head start.”
“What about Bill? You could give him a call?” I suggest.
Mom flushes and shakes her head quickly, picking up a corn bread and buttering it with the precision of a surgeon transplanting a new kidney. Eyes glued to the task, she asks lightly, “So Kristal, is she a junior too?”
I grab a corn bread and dip it in my chili. “A senior.”
Mom suppresses a little smile. “Is she in one of your classes at Cranbury?”
“No. I met her at St. Anne’s.”
The buttered corn bread en route to Mom’s mouth stalls. She puts it down untouched next to her bowl, her face transformed into a mask of worry. “Kristal is a patient at the intensive outpatient program?”
I already know where this is going. She’s going to shoot it down. Oh no! Not her precious Catherine mixing with the other mentally unstables. Especially when it’s not an official therapeutic program sanctioned by Pope McCallum.
“Yes. She is. And she’s really nice.”
Please, Mom, let me have this. Let me have this piece of normal before Zero hits again.
“Oh, I don’t know about this, Cath,” Mom starts, dread filling her eyes.
“What?” I ask, placing my spoon down, suddenly no longer hungry. “What don’t you know?”
“It might not be the wisest of ideas,” she answers.
I rise from my chair. Suddenly, I am furious. And desperate. “Why? Why the fuck not? We’re not shooting up heroin. We’re going to a museum!”
“Catherine, please sit down,” Mom says, also standing. “Can we try to talk about this?”
“There’s nothing to talk about!” I’m shouting now. “I’m going!”
“Catherine, please. I don’t want to fight with you.” Mom sits down and picks up her corn bread, attempting to resume normalcy. “Just hear me out. Can you at least tell me a little about her?”
Oh my God. Normal kids never have to deal with this shit. Their parents would be jumping over the freaking moon that it’s a museum and not a dumb mall. But still I answer her.
“Kristal’s nice. She’s a senior. She goes to Chapman.” I swallow, trying to calm myself down. “I really want to go. We have fun together.” I leave out that I know this thing with Kristal, this fetal friendship or whatever you want to call it, has a shelf life. Once this girl gets to know me—Catherine, not Cat—and the fact that I have a mood disorder that affects how I behave rather than something that stays hidden behind closed doors like cutting or vomiting, she won’t stay around. No one does. Because my disease is a public one. Just ask Rodrick. Any friends I might have are guaranteed to see and feel the impact of it too.
Mom doesn’t understand. She doesn’t know that I told Riley and Olivia about my diagnosis this past summer. Ten months after my suicide attempt and one month after the mania-inspired shopping spree—more than one year of basically no contact from them—and suddenly, out of the blue, they both texted me, asking to come over. They had heard I got my hair cut, that it looked “really cute.” I was pretty stable by then. Courtesy of my then-new shrink, Dr. McCallum, and a prescription for Abilify. Of course I said yes. I was desperately lonely. I could ignore their defection; I could repress the memory of their radio silence after my sweet-sixteenth birthday invite. This would be our friendship 2.0. Yes, it had shattered in the wake of Grandma and Zero, but I thought it could rise like a phoenix, in time for the last two years of high school.
Riley and Olivia came to my house and we sat on the floor in my bedroom. Just like old times. It seemed like they cared again. Why else would they come see me? So I told them. I did. I allowed the word “bipolar” to leave my lips. I thought they’d get it.
Riley picked up her phone and Googled “bipolar” right in front of me. She glanced a couple of times at my hair and then, with barely a word, she and Olivia both left. For good. But armed with fresh info to report to their theater friends, a small group of nasty, spiteful people collected freshman year when Riley and Olivia were in the chorus in Fiddler on the Roof.
Mom has no idea what that did to me. Now, she runs her index finger up and down her water glass, obviously debating her next move. “And…um…what’s wrong with Kristal?”
There it is. What’s wrong with her? The ugliest of questions hangs in the air, filling me with the familiar sickening realization of what my life is. Damaged.
I look at Mom. “She likes me.” I exit the kitchen slowly, like an old woman, and mount the stairs to my room, toward my soldiers.
My fingers itch to reach under my bed, to push aside the barrier I’ve constructed of books, magazines and mateless socks, and retrieve my shoe box. But it’s too dangerous with no lock on my door.
“What’s wrong with her?” Mom’s question has lodged itself in my chest.
Mom raps on my door. “Catherine? Can I come in?”
“No.” I don’t have the energy for this.
“Please, Catherine,” Mom says. “I know I majorly fucked up.”
This gets my attention. Devout Catholic Jody Pulaski dropping the f-bomb? In front of her mentally challenged daughter? This has never happened. Ever. I’m beyond stunned, and even worse, I feel a laugh gurgling up from somewhere inside me.
Mom opens the door. Our eyes meet, and I can’t help it. I have to smile. “I cannot believe you just said ‘fuck.’ ”
“It fit the crime,” she says, leaning against the doorframe but not entering. “I wish…I wish I could just delete our whole conversation downstairs.” She shakes her head. “I did not mean for it to come out the way it did.”
“It’s okay. I’m not going,” I say, the goodwill between us evaporating. Breaking eye contact with her, I lie down on my bed and roll away to face the wall.
“Oh y
es you are,” she says, moving forward to drop my phone on my bed. “You have enough on your plate without adding my baloney to it.”
What does that mean? “My baloney”?
“Look, Cath.” Mom sits down on the side of my bed and places her hand on my upper arm. She seems a little angry. “You are going with Kristal on Sunday. End of discussion. I…I think I’m going to start therapy.”
I roll back toward her and sit up. “What?” I ask.
“Dr. McCallum has been telling me for a while that I’m extremely anxious. You know that. I need to stop hovering, lighten up, all that stuff. And based on what just happened downstairs, it’s clear I need to get a grip. You’re moving on. Your life is picking back up. I refuse to be the one who…who is bad for you.”
Who are you and what did you do with my mother?
“So you’re going because of me?” I ask.
Her answer sends me reeling again. “No. I am going for me,” she says. “You are going to be fine, Catherine. Dr. McCallum is really happy with how you’re doing. He thinks you’re especially perceptive and observant, and that is really going to help you in accepting your condition. He keeps telling me I need to trust you, and I am going to start doing that. Right now.”
Two emotions flare inside me. The first is a perverse pride because Dr. McCallum thinks I’m observant and perceptive. But there’s also a deluge of guilt over my fraud in Dr. McCallum’s office and, even worse, Mom’s new campaign to trust me. There’s a shoe box not twenty-four inches below us chock-full of my deceit.
She nods. “Okay? And when I asked about what was wrong with Kristal—”
“Forget it,” I say. I don’t want to hear this.
“No. I need for you to hear me.” Mom’s voice rises. “I know that you’re meeting kids with different issues like eating disorders or cutting or bulimia—”
I interrupt her. “Bulimia is an eating disorder.”
“I know that,” Mom says huffily. “It just came out wrong. I worry that you’ll be vulnerable to them. That what they’re saying will sound good to you and that you’ll…uh…start doing it.” She takes a deep breath. “But I will not go that route. I’m trusting you, Catherine, and you will go on Sunday and you will have a great time whether you want to or not.” She leans forward to hug me and I break the hold quickly. Her hugs usually feel desperate to me, too intense, like all her worry and anguish is transferred into her shoulders, arms and fingers. I try to avoid them. But she takes it in stride, used to it by now.
To soften the blow, I tease her. “You better get yourself over to confession, Miss Potty Mouth.”
Mom stands and points at me. “I’ve learned from the best. C’mon downstairs. I’ll heat up our chili. I’m hungry again.”
—
After dinner (take two), homework, shower and two Lamictal tablets (Dr. McCallum upped my dosage again so that I will peak at the targeted 250 milligrams by the end of the month), I check my phone. There’s one text from Michael and one from Kristal.
I click on Michael’s text. He wrote “Hey,” so I type back my standard smiley-face emoji.
Right away my phone choos. Michael has sent two smileys back.
I type: “See you in history tomorrow,” with another smiley.
Kristal wrote: “Do you want me to pick you up on Sunday? ”
New, “trusting” Mom would still probably veto a ride from a girl, a St. Anne’s one at that, so I text back: “It’s ok. Will get a ride. What time and what museum”
Kristal: “New haven museum of history. On chapel st. 2:00”
I type, “Great—thx for asking me,” but then delete the “for asking me.” Too pathetic-sounding.
Kristal: “Great! Have to study physics now. Did I mention I hate high school? See you at St. As ”
In bed that night, after the parade of my troops, I open up the D-Day List on my phone and add a third entry.
1. L.V.
2. First Kiss, Michael Oct. 11
3. New Haven Museum Kristal Oct. 19
And something weird happens. Looking at this list, actually staring at the two newest entries, calms me. Maybe even more than my shoe box. Because it’s proof, tangible proof that I might be able to experience some really good things before Zero moves up the Catherine coastline. After the troops are secured under my bed, I stand in the middle of my room and try a couple of fouetté pirouettes just for the hell of it. Just to see. And surprisingly, they’re not too shabby.
As soon as Michael and I walk into history class on Wednesday, I can feel it. Everything looks normal, but there’s a tension, an undercurrent of something in the air. Michael, oblivious to it, gives me a quick, “See you after,” and heads to his seat on the other side of the room. Something’s off and it’s not just the blessed absence of Louis Farricelli’s Incredible Hulk body looming behind my desk for the second day in a row. There’s a tittering that increases as I approach my seat. A folded sheet of paper is waiting for me. “Catherine” is written on it in block letters.
I knew it. It’s from those theater fuckheads again. Instinctively, my eyes fly to Riley. She’s got her white-blond head on her desk, shoulders spasming with laughter. I shift my gaze to Olivia. Her cheeks are flushed and her head is turned to hiss something to Riley. Next to Riley, some skinny guy with dyed black hair openly smirks at me. I spin to face front and slide down fast in my chair, trying to hide the burn in my checks. Mr. Oleck stands at his podium with another student, momentarily lost in the cyberworld of his iPad.
I unfold the paper. It’s a photocopy of a DVD cover, Girl, Interrupted, an old movie about psycho girls in a mental hospital. The hum of white noise rises in my ears and the surface temperature of my skin rises to scorching. Who are Riley and Olivia now? Doesn’t our history count for any decency? Why couldn’t they just scrape me off their lives like I was a piece of shit on their shoes instead of inflicting this constant torture? Maybe our history does play a part, because they can’t quite let me go. Like I turned bipolar and depressed on purpose. Like I rejected them.
The paper wilts where my hot fingertips make contact. I want to crumble it into a ball and whip it right at Riley’s face. I swallow compulsively to loosen the lump in my throat and slip the poisonous sheet into my binder.
Maybe I should bring this to St. Anne’s today. Sandy would undoubtedly ask her typically dumb question, “How did this make you feel, Catherine?” And Tommy would get all riled up and curse a blue streak. Since the IOP started, I’ve passed Garrett a few times in the school hallway and he always acknowledges me with a polite “Hey, Catherine,” giving me an unexpected sense of solidarity. Maybe the Cranbury High contingent of St. Anne’s—me and Garrett and John—could gang up against Olivia and Riley and the theater geeks. John could enlist his wrestling buddies, Garrett could get the stoners and, atop the roof of St. Anne’s dirty white van, we could all do a sing-off or something to prove my worth. Just envisioning this twisted Pitch Perfect scene cools me down.
The classroom door swings open. It’s Louis Farricelli, stiff and awkward with a thick white brace encasing his neck and one around his right knee. He moves slowly, crutches wedged firmly under his muscled arms. An aide, a woman in her forties, trails him like a serf, lugging his weighty backpack. The class is stunned into silence. Even the theater demons in the back are still. Cranbury High’s Moses, perched to lead the Hornets to the promised land—a second consecutive state football championship—has fallen.
“Jesus, Farricelli, what happened to you?” is pitched from a boy behind me.
Another yells, “Tell me you’re not out for the season? We need you, man!”
Instead of basking in the spotlight of their concern, Louis Farricelli ignores them. I don’t turn around as he passes and apparently he’s having trouble sitting down because the aide is saying in a tense whisper something like, “Put the crutches aside and I’ll help you,” to which Louis growls a typically classy, “Back the fuck off. I got this.”
Mr. Oleck gives
the aide a little shake of his head as she exits the classroom in a huff. Good for her for not putting up with Louis Farricelli’s spew. In a low voice, Mr. Oleck asks Louis, “Want me to tell them?”
Louis grunts and Mr. Oleck interprets that as an affirmative response because he says, “People, Louis cracked a vertebra in his neck and tore his ACL. It happened during a workout. Freak accident kind of thing. He’s gonna be out for the rest of the season.”
Immediately, the room resounds with the herd’s horrified reactions.
“What the eff happened?”
“Can you even play anymore? What about your scholarship?”
“But it’s your senior year!”
And the lone, reasonable: “You’re so lucky you’re not paralyzed.”
There’s not a word from Louis until some guy spouts, “So that freshman, Gordon, he the new quarterback?”
Louis Farricelli responds in a tight voice, “I have no fucking clue, dude. This happened like two fucking days ago. Why don’t you go ask him yourself?”
“All right, Louis,” Mr. Oleck says, displaying a newfound tolerance for Farricelli’s favorite and maybe only adjective. “Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about your biography projects.”
My moronic classmates have a hard time refocusing after the earth-shattering news, their fingers alerting the rest of the Cranbury High community via text, Twitter, FB and a few covert photos of the injured hero on Snapchat. Michael and I make eye contact, and he subtly rolls his eyes. I feel the corners of my mouth lift.
After some repeated commands to focus and then threats to confiscate everyone’s phones, Mr. Oleck finally gets the class to shut up. Before returning to the scintillating topic of the rise of the consumer pre–World War II, he rattles off another biography assignment. “I want a detailed outline on your soldier, with all the basic stats that we talked about before, like birthday, birth city, schooling, childhood, family, job and military service, including length of service, locations of service and specific rank. Was he a gunner aboard a B-17 or a paratrooper, a member of the infantry? Include any details regarding his death. And then I want a road map. Give me the next steps of your research: What do you need? Where is it? Stuff like that. The more detailed it is, the easier it’s going to be to write this.”
The Weight of Zero Page 9
