R.I.P. Eliza Hart

by Alyssa Sheinmel

  “I guess. Maybe.” The truth is, I have no idea how being on a sports team works. If I were actually athletic, I’d have sought out a sport that didn’t require much teamwork. Maybe running. You have to join a team, but you mostly get to compete on your own.

  I guess the swim team is kind of like the track team that way.

  “Anyway,” Sam continues, “she didn’t seem the type. Squeaky clean and all that.”

  There’s only one car ahead of us now. “It’s not like she seemed the type who’d be involved in illegal tree-poaching, either.”

  When it’s finally our turn, the cop asks for Sam’s ID first, then mine.

  “Samuel Whitker,” he mutters, looking at a list of names on his clipboard. “Elizabeth Sokoloff.”

  I hold my breath, but he just puts checkmarks and the time of day next to our names on his clipboard and lets us go.

  I exhale.

  Sam turns left on Highway 1 and starts to circle the campus perimeter. Our plan is simple: find the truck Mack mentioned and follow it. Sam thinks he knows which entrance they hiked up from (a rarely used gate that abuts the park beside the campus, for students who want even more of a challenge than Hiking Trail Y). We guess the truck is parked as close to the entrance as possible so they won’t have to carry the wood any farther than absolutely necessary.

  “What if they’re already gone?” I ask.

  Sam shakes his head. “Even with the buzz saw, it’ll take them a while to cut through that tree.”

  I spot a green pickup truck parked on the shoulder of the highway. “That must be it.” Sam pulls over and parks, his small Camry partly hidden by some branches that hang over the road.

  “Now we just have to wait,” Sam says. He drops his hands from the steering wheel and leans back in his seat. “How did the claustrophobia start?”

  “Huh?” I ask dumbly.

  “Just trying to distract you. You seem agitated.”

  “And you thought bringing up my phobia would calm me down?” The words sound meaner than I intend them to. I shake my head. I shouldn’t be mean to the one person at Ventana Ranch who doesn’t hate me, especially when he’s willing to follow men with chain saws to God-knows-where with me. “Sorry,” I mumble.

  “No worries.”

  “It started in an elevator on West Seventy-Eighth street the summer before second grade.” Every therapist I ever had opened our first session with this question. At one point, I considered prerecording the answer to save time.

  “No, I don’t mean where. I mean … how? Why do you think small spaces scare you so much?”

  “You know, there’s a school of argument that says that claustrophobics are actually right.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I read an article about it once. Small spaces are potentially dangerous. Elevators do plummet to the ground sometimes. Trains do get stuck. Tunnels flood.” I once read about a now-defunct underground train in London without windows and with doors that could only be opened from the outside. They wouldn’t have gotten rid of it if it was perfectly safe, would they? “Maybe claustrophobics are the rational ones and everyone else is crazy.”

  Sam cocks his head to the side. The ends of his dreadlocks tap against the glass of his window. “Do you really believe that?”

  Sane people don’t think they’re drowning when they’re on dry land. “Not even a little bit.” I grin.

  Sam laughs. “My therapist would say you’re using humor to keep from answering my question.”

  I look at my roommate with surprise. “You have a therapist?”

  “I did. After my mom died, my dad insisted. I always thought it was his way of getting out of having the tough conversations with me himself. But without having to feel guilty about it, you know?”

  I nod.

  “This way, he could still feel like he was doing the right thing—” Abruptly, Sam stops. “Look,” he whispers, pointing.

  The two men emerge from the woods, struggling to carry a bumpy slab of wood between them. It’s just one burl, but it’s enormous, perhaps big enough to be carved into a tabletop.

  Their backs are to us, so I can’t make out their faces in order to give the police a description. They load the wood into the flatbed of the truck. They’re working so fast that they don’t bother glancing around to see if anyone’s watching. They scramble into the front of the truck and start driving north.

  Sam shifts from park into drive and starts to follow, careful to keep a few car lengths between us and the truck.

  We head north on Highway 1. Traffic slows as we get closer to Carmel, and I give thanks that California is a state with more bridges than tunnels. (The constant risk of earthquakes makes tunnels too dangerous.) I don’t think I could stand sitting in traffic inside a tunnel. In Manhattan, just knowing that the ground beneath my feet was filled with tunnels where the subway sped along was enough to make me shudder.

  I’m pretty sure I’m the only person in the state of California who actually takes comfort in the fact that the ground here is unreliable.

  “I know what you mean,” I say as we slow to a crawl.

  “About what?” Sam never takes his eyes off the green truck.

  “About how your dad expected therapy to cure you. My mom—” I take a deep breath. Sometimes I think my mom wished that my mental health was something she could just check off a to-do list. “I mean, she wasn’t like that at first, you know? But after the fifth or sixth therapist—”

  “How many therapists have you had?”

  I don’t even have to think about it. “Eight.”

  “Eight?” Sam echoes.

  I nod. I got a new therapist with almost every school year, the way other kids got new teachers. (Of course I got new teachers, too.) It felt like every September there was a fresh recommendation from the school nurse or my pediatrician or even sometimes from the last therapist, after his or her form of therapy didn’t fix me. After a few months, Mom would start asking why I was still avoiding elevators and subway cars—hadn’t the new therapist helped at all? Eventually I’d give a small space a try, have an attack, and we’d move on to someone else.

  “Why aren’t you still in therapy?” Sam asks. “Couldn’t you have found someone out here?” I don’t answer right away, and Sam rushes to apologize. “I didn’t mean that you, like, needed a new therapist. I wasn’t calling you crazy.”

  I fold my arms across my chest and put on an authoritative voice. “Didn’t your therapist ever tell you that therapy wasn’t just for crazy people?”

  Sam laughs again. He has a deep, throaty laugh. I like the sound of it. “Yeah, she said it the very first day. That I shouldn’t be worried about the stigma of therapy, or whatever.” My first several therapists told me the same thing. (Not that I ever believed them. I was crazy, and we all knew it.)

  There are a few cars in between us and the truck now, but traffic is moving so slowly that I’m not worried about losing it.

  “Anyway, I think my parents lost faith in therapy after the last specialist didn’t work out.”

  “Why?”

  Things did not get off to a good start with therapist number eight, whom I started seeing right before the start of my sophomore year. She insisted that I call her by her first name, which was Cami with an i, and I think my mom gave up on her the day she introduced herself. Cami, in my mom’s silent opinion, was not a therapist’s name. Cami lacked gravitas. Cami wasn’t going to save me.

  But Cami was the latest on a long list, so I went every week—Wednesdays at three-thirty, right after school let out—for seven months. Mom didn’t give up on Cami until last April, when a particularly severe attack at my old school made it painfully clear that I wasn’t getting any better.

  I don’t really blame the kids at school for picking on me. I mean, I wasn’t weird in the traditional sense—I didn’t wear weird clothes over my uniform skirt or make disgusting concoctions in the cafeteria. My oddity didn’t really show on the outside. In fact, I always
tried to wear the right clothes and say the right things in class. But no matter what I said or wore, I would never blend in. Everyone at school knew about me.

  I may as well have been wearing a sign that said Class Freak.

  There were mean girls at my old school, cool girls who made our uniform look stylish, unlike mine, which had been fitted when I was thirteen. I’d long since grown out of it, but my mom didn’t seem to notice.

  The mean girls didn’t tease me the same way they teased the girls who wore the wrong things and had the misfortune to be born with the wrong hair. They didn’t pick on me when I got the answer wrong in class because I was a straight-A student who almost always got the answer right. In fact, more than halfway through sophomore year, I thought they’d lost interest in me altogether.

  I was wrong.

  Afterward, I remember thinking that this was the cruelest thing anyone would ever do to me.

  Of course, that was before Eliza.

  “Earth to Elizabeth, earth to Elizabeth.”

  I blink. “Huh?”

  “Whatcha thinking about?”

  I don’t want to lie, but I also don’t want to keep talking about my phobia. I train my gaze on the truck in front of us. “I was thinking that we might be about to get ourselves killed.” The school catalog promises a world of unexpected adventures awaits you here. I don’t think this is what they meant.

  “Huh?”

  “You know, following the guys that we think might have murdered our classmate?”

  “What does that have to do with why your parents gave up on therapy?”

  So much for changing the subject.

  “I had a really bad attack last spring,” I answer finally. “Worse than any I’d ever had. I couldn’t catch my breath even after I was out in the open again. They had to bring me to the hospital. Sedate me. After that, my parents figured therapy hadn’t really been helping.”

  “Wow.” Sam whistles. “What brought that on?”

  “Being in a small space, obviously.”

  I expect Sam to laugh or at least roll his eyes at my lame joke, but he stays serious. “No, I mean, why was that attack so much worse than the others?”

  I tuck the hair that’s fallen out of my ponytail behind my ears.

  That time, I wasn’t just imagining that I was trapped. That time, I really was. That time, they were holding me captive, and they wouldn’t let me out.

  “These girls at my old school thought it would be funny, I guess. They locked me—” I take a deep breath. Shrinks always want you to talk about what’s bothering you. But sometimes talking about it makes it worse. Sometimes talking about it takes you back to that terrible day, to the tears streaming down your face that your lungs took as further proof that you were drowning. To the lump in your throat so huge that it was choking you. To the feel of the bathroom tile growing hot beneath your knees.

  “They thought it would be funny?” Sam echoes incredulously.

  I nod, but I’m only half listening.

  There were certain places in my old school that I avoided. The elevator, obviously. The darkroom in the basement (I took ceramics instead of photography). And most of the bathrooms. The two bathrooms where I felt safest were on the fifth and sixth floors—they had windows just outside the stalls. Most of the other bathrooms weren’t that bad, actually, but I still avoided them for the most part. They had large enough stalls but no windows.

  There was one bathroom I never set foot in. On the third floor, beside the junior lounge. It was one of those individual-size bathrooms—no stalls, just a door and a toilet and a sink. It was so small that the taller girls could literally touch the sink with their knees while they sat on the toilet. I mean, they said they could. I wouldn’t know.

  I don’t know what made these girls—Sascha, Stacy, and Katie—decide to do what they did. They must have planned it, because Sascha asked me to meet her by the junior lounge so she could take a look at my chemistry notes after lunch. Maybe I should’ve seen it coming because Sascha and I weren’t really friends. We weren’t even juniors, so why would she want to meet in the junior lounge? I shake my head now, just thinking about it: How could I have been so clueless?

  Sascha had made fun of me before—giggling the word freak, whispering about me loud enough so that I could hear: weirdo, wimp, has to leave Field Day early for therapy—but the teasing died down after middle school. I honestly believed that my phobia was too lame—old news and all that—to interest her anymore.

  There were three of them on one side of the door and only one of me on the other. Tears were streaming down my face before the door even clicked closed.

  Later, one of the girls told the headmaster that they’d been trying to help me. Claimed she’d read an article about immersion therapy. You just had to get someone to face her fears in order to force her to overcome them. I could’ve told her that therapist number five had already tried immersion therapy, to no avail. But the excuse was enough to keep the girls from getting expelled.

  If those girls had really been trying to help me like they claimed, maybe they’d have shouted words of encouragement. You can do it! It’s okay! Hang in there!

  I tried. I wanted my brain to work like theirs. I wanted a normal brain and normal lungs.

  I still do.

  Later, I was shocked to hear that I’d been locked in the bathroom for only nine minutes. I honestly thought it had been at least a half hour, maybe longer. But they let me out in time to make it to their fifth-period classes.

  I guess I should be grateful they didn’t just run off when the bell rang. They actually got a teacher instead of leaving me on the floor alone, barely breathing. I hate to imagine what I must’ve looked like when they finally opened the door: eyes bulging, skin blotchy, gasping because I was trying to get some air in, any air in, just a whisper of air in.

  By the time my mom got to the hospital, the sedatives had kicked in and I was breathing normally. I’d even washed my face so she wouldn’t see how much I’d cried.

  “I can’t believe we’re here again,” Mom said. An attack had sent us to the hospital only once before: that first one, when I was seven years old. “All this time, and nothing has changed.”

  She paused like she was waiting for me to say something. I could’ve pointed out the things that had changed: I’d gotten older, Mom had gotten married, Wes had been born—but that wasn’t the kind of change Mom was talking about. She didn’t even want to hear how good I’d gotten at avoiding small spaces, so that I hadn’t had an attack in months. Avoidance wasn’t the same thing as getting better.

  “We sent you to the best therapists. To every single person that your teachers and doctors recommended.”

  For years, every time someone suggested a new doctor, a new mode of therapy, my parents acted like the cure was just around the corner. I’d been through everything from hypnosis to immersion therapy, been put on antianxiety medication and even a special macrobiotic diet that made Wes gag.

  That day at the hospital, Mom didn’t sound angry, just tired. “Do you know how much your therapy has cost over the years?”

  I didn’t.

  She sighed. “How is it possible that you’re still not over this, Ellie?”

  I shrugged. I was tired, too.

  “You know the walls aren’t really closing in. You just have to try—”

  She stopped herself then, but it was too late. My mother was sick and tired of having a daughter with a Problem with a capital P. And she blamed me for not trying hard enough to be normal.

  Now, I open my window. The air in California is so different from the air in New York: It smells like the ocean, and even though the state is famously dry right now, there’s moisture in the breeze coming off the Pacific. California air is thinner somehow, like it doesn’t hold on to all the smells and sweat and sounds the way Manhattan air does.

  I tell Sam, “Anyhow, after the incident with the other girls, it seemed like the Ventana Ranch School would be a good idea.
”

  Mom was so proud of me when she found out I applied. Like it was proof that I was trying. “A change of scenery will do you more good than a dozen therapists,” she said. She had no idea how close her logic was to my own. If she knew what it was like here—how miserably I’d failed—she’d be disappointed in me all over again. And she’d never understand if I told her that what Eliza did was worse than what those girls did that day. At least what those girls did was based on something true. At least I understood why they hated me.

  Sam says, “My dad thought so, too.”

  “Huh?” I ask dumbly.

  “That Ventana Ranch would be a good idea. I mean, we came to the decision together, at least that’s what we tell ourselves, but the truth is, living with him just wasn’t working out. He has a whole other family—did I tell you that?”

  I shake my head.

  “Yeah, he got married when I was six years old. They have two kids who’ve lived in Mill Valley all their lives.”

  “Why did you choose Ventana Ranch?” Sam is the only African American boy at our small school. There are two African American girls in the senior class, and a teacher and an administrator, but that’s not the same thing. “Isn’t it just as bad here?”

  “You mean just as white?”

  I feel myself blushing. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Sure you did,” Sam interrupts. “And you’re right. But it’s different because these people aren’t my family, you know what I mean?”

  “Not really,” I admit.

  “Every time my dad introduces me to someone as his son, I can tell there are a dozen questions dancing around that person’s brain. Am I adopted? What happened to my mother? Where was I born? That kind of thing. They’re usually too polite to ask, but it doesn’t make a difference because I know what they’re thinking.” I nod. “And whenever they do ask, I have to explain what happened to my mom, and I don’t exactly feel like discussing her with a stranger, you know?” I nod again, realizing that it’s not entirely my own antisocial fault that Sam and I have lived together for months and I only just found out that his mom passed away. From the look on his face, I can see it’s something he prefers to keep to himself. “Plus, I have this younger brother and sister who look nothing like me—Dad’s second wife is white like he is. Which leads to another ton of unasked questions.” Sam takes one hand off the wheel and fidgets with the bandana wrapped around his dreads.