by Sara Polsky
“Yeah,” I say as I stand up. “See you Monday.”
—
When I walk into my mother’s hospital room the next day, I don’t have to study her for signs she’s breathing. She’s sitting up, staring at a tray of hospital food on the rolling table that extends over her lap. She isn’t eating anything, and I can understand why. The meat—I think it’s meat—is floating in an unidentifiable brown gravy, and the dessert, some kind of cake with a layer of “fruit” that might be jam, looks like it’s trying to wriggle its way off the plate.
“Mom, hi,” I say. “It’s me.”
She lifts her head, refocuses her eyes on my face.
“Hello, Sophie,” she says. She doesn’t sound happy to see me. Her voice has no expression at all. It’s flat and slow, like it’s about to run out of batteries.
I speak more quickly, as if that will somehow make her do the same. “Are you done with that? Why don’t I get it out of your way?”
I slide the rolling table down the bed and into the corner. I don’t think my mother actually cares, but I don’t want to look at the mystery meat and wobbly dessert if I don’t have to.
“How are you feeling today, Mom? Have you eaten? Has the doctor been by?” I hear my own voice coming out louder than it usually does, even though I know my mother can hear me perfectly well. I take a seat next to the bed, slinging my backpack off onto the floor. I lean in.
My mother lifts her shoulders, managing half a shrug, and then a half-shake of her head. “Tired,” she says. “My head feels cloudy. Full of fuzz. Can’t think clearly.”
I nod. “Dr. Choi said this would happen, remember?”
I don’t mean to talk to her like she’s a child, but that’s how my voice comes out. Basic words, small sentences, loud and lifting up brightly at the end.
“It’s the medication making you feel like that. Some of the side effects will wear off once you get used to it, or the doctors will try you on something else.” I say it like it’s easy: one medication doesn’t work, that’s okay, there’s another one we can try. Even though I know it’s not so simple.
I stand up. “Do you want to go down the hall to the lounge and play a board game with me for a little while? Or I have a deck of cards in here.” I reach down for my bag and pull out the small cardboard box I found in Aunt Cynthia’s guest room.
But my mother slowly drags her head from one side to the other. No, no board game or cards. She doesn’t want the TV on either.
I suggest every activity I can think of. Sketching, listening to the radio. I could go downstairs to the cafeteria and pick up a snack. Maybe some fruit? Something healthier than the dinner she didn’t eat. But my mother just keeps shaking her head. No, no, and no.
And for a second, just one second, I want to shake her, to lean in close to her ear and shout until she snaps out of it. Even though I know from years of watching her that her depressions aren’t the kind of thing a person can snap out of, I still want to yell. Hello, it’s me! Remember me? Your daughter? That person who lives with you and takes care of you and who you completely forgot about the other day when you decided to try to—oh yeah—kill yourself? In my head the words get louder, until I’m sure my mother can hear them somehow.
But I hold them all in, pushing the words back behind that rusty door in my head with as much force as I can. The anger tries to batter its way out again, but I imagine myself leaning against the door hard, forcing it to stay shut. I take a deep breath.
Then I pick up the TV remote and flip through channels until I find a baseball game, one that looks like it’s just starting and will be on for hours. I have no idea who’s playing. I leave it on mute.
“You might want something to look at later tonight,” I tell my mother, nodding toward the TV and hoping I sound calmer than I feel. “But maybe we can play cards next time.”
I lean back in the bedside chair. Instead of shuffling the deck of cards, I reach for my sketchbook and flip it open to the next empty page, right after my sketches of the abandoned house.
I don’t usually like to draw people. But when I start sketching, what comes out is my mother’s outline, the hill of legs under the blanket, the long hair, the upturned hand. I break her body down into abstract shapes as I draw them with fierce strokes. They’re just circles and ovals and lines, but together they look something like the person lying in front of me.
When I pull my hand back and look at what I’ve drawn, something about my lines makes it look like the figure on the paper is living, breathing, moving. Like my mother could step off the page, laughing, and start telling me a story about her day. The pencil strokes are more animated than the woman lying in bed in front of me.
But when I blink and open my eyes again, the lines are just streaks on the page, still and gray.
Thirteen
Monday morning, and Leila has the radio tuned, blasting, to a song I hate. At the dinner table we manage to speak to each other politely when Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John start conversations, everyone making small talk about school, work, band, homework. But in the car I feel like a tiny country at the mercy of a superpower armed with ear-piercing music. I’m the losing side in a cold war. There are no more polite questions about my mother, just noise that screams I’m ignoring you as loudly as anything can. Today the screaming actually matches the noise in my head, an echo of everything I wanted to yell at my mother yesterday.
I want to put my hands over my ears and curl up into the small space between the seat and the door. But I refuse to let Leila know her music is bothering me. So I sit there, stiff and silent, while she sings along and bobs her head.
Then the sound suddenly gets much softer and Leila is speaking next to me.
“Hey there,” she says cheerfully.
I look over. Is she actually talking to me now?
But no. Her silver cell phone is next to her ear, pinched between her cheek and her shoulder while she steers. I would have expected her to let go of the wheel to hold the phone, but she still has both hands planted in place at ten and two.
“Oh no, sweetie,” she says into the phone, her voice losing its chipper edge. “I’m so sorry.”
I wonder who Leila’s talking to. She doesn’t look over at me, and I assume she’s forgotten I’m even in the car. For a moment I wonder if something’s really wrong.
“Did something happen?” Leila asks into the phone. “How long are they grounding you for?”
Oh.
It must be one of Leila’s friends, in trouble for something. I roll my eyes out the window so Leila won’t be able to see, watching my own pupils move up and over in my reflection. Then I pretend to be staring intently at my phone while I turn the ringer off for school.
Leila makes soft mhmm and oh and I’m sorry noises into the phone as she drives. I spend the time wondering who’s on the other end and why Leila is the one she calls when she needs to talk first thing in the morning.
“I’ll give you a ride home after school,” Leila says, like she’s answering a question, and then silence. She must’ve ended the call. When I look over, Leila’s hand is already hovering over the radio dial, ready to turn it up again, the phone back in its usual spot in the cup holder. I’m convinced I could have opened my door and gotten out at the last light without her even noticing.
Until Leila glances at me and starts to talk.
“That was Liz,” she says, as if I know and care who Liz is. “She got in trouble with her parents and her punishment is not being allowed to practice with us for three weeks.”
Liz must be someone in James and Leila’s band. I want to roll my eyes out the window again. Why do I care?
I think suddenly of one evening the summer before sixth grade, when Leila called me just before bed the way she always did. This time she had something different to tell me: that she had a crush on one of our classmates, a boy named
Steven who had been at the park all summer when we were there with my mother.
“Will you talk to him for me?” she asked.
I said okay, but I wasn’t really sure what she meant. “What do I say?”
“Just ask him if he likes me too. I’ll talk to someone for you! Who do you like?”
I lowered my voice in case my mom could hear from the kitchen, but I didn’t hesitate before telling Leila the name. “James,” I whispered, my face turning red even though Leila couldn’t see me. I twisted the phone cord in my fingers, nervous about what she would say. He was her friend too, so was it okay for me to like him not just as our friend?
“Really?” Leila had started to whisper too. Then she giggled a little, and I knew she didn’t mind. “Okay, I’ll talk to him for you.”
It was so easy to tell her anything then. But now, here in the car, I have no idea what to say to her. I don’t even know who Liz is. Between my mother and Leila and James and Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John and school and work, I can’t find space in my head for anyone else. So I just lean my head against the cold window and stay silent until the car pulls in at school.
—
In English, Mr. Jackson, Room 210, Mr. Jackson has forgotten that I wasn’t there for the first few days of class, and he’s stopped interrupting himself to tell me about assignments he already explained to everyone else. I sit in my corner seat with my notebook open, scribbling something every few minutes so it looks like I’m paying attention. But really I’m just filling the margins with doodles, my hand weaving randomly down the page.
I did the reading for class yesterday while sitting by my mother’s bed. But I kept losing my place, hearing the nurses’ shoes squeak down the hall or a patient making noise in another room, and I barely remember anything I read. So while Mr. Jackson asks questions about character and symbolism, I just sit there, not raising my hand, not looking up, only half listening. I tune out completely once someone in front of me starts reading aloud from the book. I don’t know the boy’s name, he sounds bored, and I can’t concentrate on his voice. When I let my eyes wander around the classroom, I catch James’s gaze once. His mouth moves like maybe he’s trying to talk to me, but I can’t understand what he’s saying, so I just look back at my notebook. The memory from the car this morning pops back into my head, and I wonder whether Leila ever talked to him, back in sixth grade, like she said she would. Is that why he didn’t call me back?
I snap back to the present only when I hear chairs scraping the floor all around me. The bell hasn’t rung yet, but when I look up everyone is moving, switching seats, shifting desks around. When the noise stops, most people are in clumps of three or four. Mr. Jackson picks up the thick books that are stacked on the back table and starts to hand them out. I look at the cover. It’s a giant anthology of poetry.
“Sophie,” Mr. Jackson calls. I snap my head up, wondering if he can somehow tell how uninterested I am in this book.
But that’s not it: one of my classmates is standing to my right, and I realize he’s waiting to take my desk, which sits slightly apart from all the others.
“Don’t you have a group?” Mr. Jackson asks. “Everyone needs to work in groups of three or four on this next project.”
I try not to roll my eyes, but it doesn’t matter, because Mr. Jackson is already looking away from me, scanning the room for a cluster with an empty spot. I’m sure everyone’s looking at me, the one person without any friends in the class to form a group with. I want to slide down in my seat until I’m hidden behind my desk, or until Mr. Jackson forgets I’m there at all, whichever happens first. I’m afraid everyone can see how confused I am, how disconnected I feel from everything: the readings, the questions, Mr. Jackson’s group work. All those thoughts feel fuzzy around the edges. The only ones that penetrate the fog are the worries about my mother; the questions from the voice in my head, wondering how she’s doing.
“Oh, here we are,” Mr. Jackson says. “There’s one group of two, so grab your stuff and come on over.” He says the last part loudly, like an enthusiastic game show host. Come…on…over! Everyone looks our way, and a few people laugh.
I stand up, poetry book heavy in my hand, and look across the room to the empty desk. On either side of it sit—out of everyone in the class—Leila and James.
Of course.
They have their heads bent over Leila’s notebook, where they’re taking turns writing something, but they look up at the sudden silence in the room. When she sees me, Leila looks the way I feel—dismayed. James just watches me, and I have no idea, still, how to read the expression on his face. A small part of me wants to laugh because this, of all things, is happening to me right now. The rest of me wants to turn around and sit down again at my own desk, take a zero on the assignment, hand in the giant book of poems I already know I don’t care about reading. I’d rather be in math class, where at least each answer makes me feel like I’m getting closer to understanding, solving, something. Or chemistry, where I can measure and balance. Here, with poetry and novels and vocabulary, I just feel impatient.
But the screeching noise I hear behind me, the sound of metal chair legs against floor tiles, tells me my own desk has already been co-opted for someone else’s group. I can’t spend the rest of the period standing in the middle of the classroom, so I cross the space and take a seat in the third desk of James and Leila’s cluster. James turns toward me and nods without saying anything, then ducks his head. Leila stares down at her notebook as if whatever she and James were writing there is absolutely the most important thing she’ll ever read anywhere.
Whatever this group project is, I already have a feeling it isn’t going to go well.
At the front of the room, Mr. Jackson clears his throat.
“Well then, now that everyone is in groups, let’s get down to business. Your assignment is this: choose one poem in the book that everyone in your group likes, maybe something that you all find meaningful for your own reasons. Then work together to research the life of the poet and come up with a creative project that represents the poem or the poet’s life in some way.”
I zone out while Mr. Jackson describes some of the projects students did last year. When I tune back in, he’s finishing up the instructions.
“The key word here is creative,” he says. “You can turn in written reports if that’s really what your group wants to do, but please try to do something a little more visually interesting. A poster, a diorama. You can even dress up in costume if you want to.” Everyone laughs, not sure whether he’s serious. I glance at James and see a faint smile on his face. I wonder if he’s imagining, like I am, what it would be like if the three of us showed up to class dressed as something from a poem. I picture Leila in costume as a flower or a cloud, then start to sketch it in a cartoon style in the corner of my notebook.
Mr. Jackson looks up at the clock over the door. “The bell’s about to ring, so before you all peace out”—more laughs—“please set up a time to meet with your groups outside of class to get started. We’ve got a lot to get through with the poetry unit, so we won’t have much class time to work on these. I’ll send around the presentation sign-up sheet tomorrow.”
All around us, as Mr. Jackson settles behind his desk, people whip out calendars and phones and start comparing dates. At our desk cluster, no one says anything. None of us actually wants to have a meeting outside of class.
“How about Wednesday night?” James finally says. His not-a-little-kid voice surprises me again, and I wonder if that will ever stop happening. “I know we don’t have jazz band that night, and we could do it after my shift ends at work. Sophie, are you free?”
I nod. The words I’ll just need to visit my mother in the hospital are right there on the tip of my tongue. But I don’t let them slide off.
“Okay, how about eight o’clock?” James says. “We could have pizza?”
We all
nod, still not meeting each other’s eyes.
The bell rings and Leila stands up so fast her whole desk moves, screeching across the floor.
“Let’s do it at my house, since two of us are there right now, anyway,” she says.
And then she spins and walks out, kicking her chair on the way, without giving us a chance to respond.
“O-kay,” James says softly once she’s gone, and I look at him. Just for a moment, I forget about James and Leila chatting in the parking lot and writing in her notebook, about James showing up at the house to meet Leila for rehearsal, and it feels the same way it did when we were kids, Leila giving the orders and leaving the two of us to carry them out, her loyal foot soldiers. James rolls his eyes and a sort of resigned smile flashes across his face. I smile back, as if we’re on the playground again, refusing to chase the ball when it’s really Leila’s turn to do it.
“What do you think?” James asks me. “Costumes?” He flips his own notebook toward me, showing me a drawing of three stick figures in what look like togas.
I laugh.
The sound rings out, startling me so much I clap my hand over my mouth as if I’m trying to keep it from happening again. I turn the corner of my notebook toward him so he can see my drawings of Leila as a flower and a cloud.
He grins. “That’s much better than mine. Good thing you’re the artist,” he says, like he just knows I still am.
Then we both stand up and gather our books. I follow James into the hallway. But we turn in separate directions, and the feeling of having an ally again disappears as I walk away.
—
When I open the door to the art room, I’m surprised by how happy Ms. Triste is to see me. She rushes toward the door, a broad smile on her face.
“Sophie! Welcome back. I thought you would be joining us on Friday, but it’s wonderful to see you today.”
I mumble something about my schedule getting changed, even though it has nothing to do with why I wasn’t in class, and Ms. Triste waves me off. “Come in, you can just get started now.”
