Positive

by Paige Rawl

  I just wanted to shout at everyone: This is what happened at Clarkstown! It happened like I’m telling you!

  It made me feel like no one believed me, like I was just making the whole thing up.

  So there was the meningitis, and there was the lawsuit. But I swear, it wasn’t just the meningitis, and wasn’t just the settlement hearing, and it certainly wasn’t Herron.

  Something else was wrong.

  There had been signs, I realize now. Like the first day of Herron soccer practice, for example. I’d gotten so nervous that I started shaking. Then I vomited and had to be helped to my mom’s car.

  I told people I must have a stomach bug.

  There were other things, too. I was crying a lot these days, breaking down for no reason. Sometimes I found it hard to breathe. Everything felt like it was coming just a little too close, somehow, the world closing in around me, the air so stuffy I might suffocate.

  And there were other moments, different moments, but no less strange. Moments when I felt that strange disconnection from myself. Moments when I felt like I was moving without thought, moving automatically. Moving toward something specific. Like right now.

  It was evening. My mother was in the kitchen, watching television. We had just finished dinner.

  I walked into the bathroom. My feet stepped in front of me, simple as anything: one, two, three, four. There, in the bathroom, were my mom’s floral towels. They were brown and turquoise, folded neatly in squares. There was the matching shower curtain and bath mat. There was the hair dryer hanging on a hook next to the sink. There, on the counter, was an empty glass. Jars of hand soap and cocoa butter lotion, each positioned just so on the sink, angled like two armchairs in a living room. Or maybe a psychiatrist’s office.

  I closed the door behind me. Behind the door, I saw it: the cabinet, the white bathroom cabinet, just a little taller than myself.

  I opened it.

  Sometimes everything you see around you is like a still life, like a snapshot you’ve tacked to the inside of your locker, or a painting pinned on a bulletin board. You have come to know it so well, that still life, that it almost seems this moment in time has always existed, side by side with all those other experiences you’ve had.

  There was the Ajax cleaner on the bottom shelf, next to the Band-Aids and gauze, the antiperspirant and Caress soap. Above it, peroxide, hair mousse, Halls cough drops, and Listerine. And on the shelf above that, the spare tubes of toothpaste, the pink basket full of nail polish, the Q-tips.

  I wondered briefly if anyone ever really finishes a box of Q-tips, if they ever pull a single, final Q-tip from the box.

  I stopped to wonder that. So it’s not like I was not thinking at all.

  It was the very top shelf that drew my eye. That was where the medicine was stored. The medicine, all that stupid medicine: the horse pills that I swallowed every day, that my mother took, too, in our attempts to save our own lives. And there were other medicines: the pills I took to make me hungry, so I could actually keep a few pounds on, finish the pudding cups my mom was always handing to me. There were the pills I had taken for what I now called my “Clarkstown-induced seizures.” There were the ones my mom took for the occasional panic attack, when the stress of caring for me, for trying to keep us alive, became too much.

  None of those pills were the ones I wanted.

  My hand reached up. It moved without me, like it belonged to someone else. It reached for the other pills, the ones with my mother’s name on them, the ones she took to help her get to sleep at night.

  Sleeping pills.

  I had seen these pills. Had seen the warnings.

  I shook out a handful. How many were there? I didn’t care. I knew only that it was as many as I was able to hold. I put the plastic container down with my right hand, turned on the water. I picked up the glass next to the faucet, filled it with water.

  Then one by one, I swallowed the pills, counting as I went.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four.

  And on until I hit fifteen. One for every year I had been alive.

  I was good at taking pills—better than any kid I knew.

  It took under a minute to swallow them. It wasn’t anything at all.

  I looked into the mirror and stared back at myself. The light above the sink flickered ever so slightly. I put the cap back on the medicine bottle, placed it back on the shelf, and closed the cabinet.

  I sat down on the edge of the bathtub and waited. I had the strangest sensation that all of this was happening to someone else. It was as if none of it was real.

  At first, nothing.

  After a minute or two: still nothing. The bathroom light hummed.

  And then I noticed my eyelids. They were heavy.

  And before long (how much time? Ten minutes? Twenty?), I was tired.

  A little longer (how much longer? I really couldn’t tell anymore): I was really, really tired.

  I stood up. I wanted sleep. The light was humming so loudly, and there were other sounds, too. There was the sound of the door opening, the knob snapping back in place. There was the sound of my own footsteps walking toward my bedroom, of my mother opening a drawer in the next room. There was all that light and color. It was too much light, too much color.

  It was too much, all of it. I wanted to shut my eyes.

  The world had a problem, I realized: it was so noisy, and there were so many things to think about. Sleep was the answer. Sleep sounded so good, so calming.

  In sleep, I wouldn’t have to think about settlement hearings. In sleep, I wouldn’t have to be afraid of running into a group of kids in my own hometown. In sleep, I never had to explain myself.

  I could just quiet all that noise. Lie down. Make it disappear.

  I closed the door to my room and lay down on the bed. I heard the television in the kitchen. My mother was watching a news show, or maybe it was a celebrity news show, which was not really the same thing. Someone famous had checked into rehab. I didn’t care who it was. It didn’t matter, anyway; all of it was just so much noise.

  I should tell my mother, I thought. I should tell her how sleep would just quiet all of that down. She could use some quiet, too, I thought.

  I looked up at the ceiling and wondered if it was starting to spin, or if I was imagining that.

  I closed my eyes, and the world began to fade away.

  Then I sat up. I sat up straight and suddenly. I stood, which turned out to be surprisingly difficult: it was like I was trying to control someone else’s arms and legs.

  I walked to the door, reached for the knob. Yes, I thought. This was the knob. I felt it in my hand, round and hard and slightly cold. Just turn. I walked out of my room and into the kitchen.

  Forming a word was hard. It took thought. Lips are so strange when they don’t work right.

  “Mom?”

  She leaned against the counter, her eyes on the television. “Mmm?”

  “Mom, I think I did something stupid.”

  She must have heard it in my voice, because she looked at me immediately. Her face changed. Her eyes flickered all over me. I didn’t know eyes could dart around so quickly.

  “What?” Her voice was almost a whisper. There was something in it I had never heard. Panic, the disconnected part of my brain thought. That is the sound of panic.

  And then. Oh, no, I’ve done it again. I’ve gone and worried her. I was always worrying her.

  “What did you do, Paige?”

  “Mom?” I didn’t want to scare her. But that thing I’d heard in her voice had started welling up in me. “Mom?” I sounded like a little child, my own voice very far away.

  She rushed over to me. “Oh, God, Paige, what did you do? What did you do?”

  “I took the pills.” My words were so slow.

  A whisper. “Oh, God.”

  “I think I need to go to the hospital, Mom.”

  She grabbed me, picked up her keys. She pulled
me toward the garage. She left the TV on, the lights on. We were leaving a lit and loud house, heading out into the night.

  “Oh, God, Paige. Oh, God. Oh, God.”

  And just like that, she was pushing me into her car, clicking my belt for me, her hands fumbling. And then we were making the drive that I already knew so well—downtown, to Riley.

  She was asking questions, so many questions.

  “What kind, honey? What kind of pills?”

  “Trazodone.”

  “How many?”

  Silence. It was so tiring, forming words.

  “How many, Paige? Tell me how many!” Her voice was loud now.

  I noticed how white her fingers were; she was gripping the wheel hard. I noticed that.

  “Fifteen,” I said. My voice could barely be heard over the car engine. Still, I heard her suck in her breath.

  She drove fast, faster than she ever drives. But time was all different now, the way it could feel fast and slow, all at once. It was like the car was in one time zone and I was in a different one.

  We swayed from side to side, and everything rushed past us way too fast. It was hard to keep my eyes focused on anything, and I really just wanted to rest my head and close my eyes. I didn’t think it would be too bad if I closed my eyes, as long as I did it only for a minute. But every time I rested my head against the car window, we hit a bump and my head banged against the glass.

  “Stay awake, Paige!” She was screaming now. She reached over with one hand, grabbed my arm, and shook me. “Honey, you can’t do this. You can’t do this. You can’t let them win. It’s not worth it.”

  I couldn’t quite focus on her words. There were so many of them, and they were coming at me so fast.

  “Why would you do this?” she asked, though I know she wasn’t really looking for an answer.

  “Oh, Paige.” Then she glanced over at me again. “Stay awake, Paige! Jesus, just stay awake!”

  And then we were in the parking lot, and she threw on the brake. She was moving so quickly. Somehow she was already outside the car, opening my door, and yanking me up. “Come on.”

  She started pulling me. I stood, but nothing in my body was working right. It was like moving underwater somehow.

  And then she was screaming to no one, to everyone, “Help us! It’s an emergency. Oh, God, somebody help us!”

  It was like a scene from a TV movie, the kind of movie that my mom and I might watch together, staying up later than we should, both of us sniffling and wiping tears from our eyes at the end. Except that in this case I was inside the movie, and my mother was, too. It was so odd, because the movie was happening all around me.

  And then in an instant, there was a team of people around me, and my mother was there, and then she wasn’t. And it didn’t matter that I was so tired, and it didn’t matter that my lips wouldn’t move right. I was in the parking lot, and then there were the sliding doors, and then there was a nurse, and then I was in a bright room.

  One person after another came in the room, and they asked questions, they just kept asking so many questions, and it was so hard to keep track of who was who.

  And I spent that first night at Riley so they could monitor my heart. I was under suicide watch, which meant I was not allowed to be alone, not even to go to the bathroom.

  But I was too worn out to care.

  God, I was just so tired.

  Bright lights. White coats. People in scrubs. Why do all the people in a hospital dress alike? You can barely tell who is the janitor and who is the doctor.

  They came in, they went out.

  They gave me a terrible-tasting black drink, which made my stomach cramp painfully.

  I heard murmurs.

  Activated charcoal. Irregular heartbeat. Possible organ damage.

  I vomited in a bucket, again and again.

  Really quite serious.

  I slept, I woke up. Someone’s hands were on me. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them that person was gone, and another person was there.

  My mother was there. Then she wasn’t. Then she was again. Here. Gone. Here. Gone. Talking-which-was-murmuring. Flickering lights. The hum of these lights reminded me of the hum in the bathroom.

  How long ago was that? An hour? A day? A lifetime, maybe.

  Somewhere during that night, one of the staff members asked me, “Were you actually trying to kill yourself?” And I must have been starting to feel like myself again, because I knew, right then, what the answer to his question was.

  Maybe.

  Maybe, if that’s what it took for it all to stop. One way or another, I wanted it all—the comments, the loneliness, the terrible way I felt about myself, the fear that it would never get better—to just stop.

  I turned away from him and faced the wall.

  In the morning, Dr. Cox came in to see me. I was back in my right mind by then, more in control.

  I was in control enough to imagine her getting the phone call—Paige Rawl is in the hospital after a suicide attempt, someone must have said. I thought about all she had done for me, all the work she put into keeping me alive and healthy, all those years.

  I felt ashamed. I once thought it would be impossible to feel shame with Dr. Cox.

  “. . . no permanent damage,” Dr. Cox was saying. “. . . going to be okay.”

  No permanent damage.

  I closed my eyes.

  “I thought it was better, Paige,” Dr. Cox said quietly. “I thought things were getting better.”

  “They are,” I said. “That’s the funny thing.”

  And I wanted to explain it to her—that sense of wanting it all to stop.

  There were a million different things I wanted to stop. There was the fear that things wouldn’t stay better, that things at Herron would turn bad, just the way everything turned so terrible at Clarkstown. There was the sheer exhaustion that followed my bout with meningitis. The shock about having been hospitalized like that, and so suddenly. There was the stress of the lawsuit, the attorney’s questions, that sense of having to defend myself when the people who hurt me were just going about their lives.

  Meanwhile, who knew what effects all that medicine would have: the HIV drugs that kept me alive, or the antidepressants that countered the effects of the HIV drugs, or the drugs I took to boost the appetite that I never had as a result of the HIV drugs. Who knew how they might interact inside my body?

  But mostly, I knew what my mom had said in the car was true: those kids at Clarkstown had gotten inside me somehow. They’d gotten really deep inside me, turned me against myself, just like a tiny spiked virus had turned the cells that were supposed to protect me into the very things that were trying to kill me.

  I wanted them out. Gone. Whatever it took.

  Soon after, I was getting into an ambulance—so many ambulances already, and I was just fifteen years old. I was looking at the medical equipment that helps keep people alive in the most dire of emergencies. The sky above me disappeared, and the doors closed behind me, and then I was heading across town. We moved slowly, not like the times that I woke up in speeding ambulances after my seizures.

  Riley, the hospital that I knew so well, almost my second home, was behind me. Somewhere ahead of me was something they called a “stress center” just for teens, which a nurse was telling me was a safe environment.

  And to keep it that way, they would lock the door behind me and take away my sneakers and belt.

  Stress Center

  The first thing I remember about the Northside Pavilion is SpongeBob.

  I was standing in a big room, the day room, where a flickery television showed cartoons. On the screen in front of me, Squidward was trying to teach SpongeBob and a bunch of other sea creatures how to play musical instruments. When the characters blew into their instruments, bubbles floated out.

  There were a few kids in the room, scattered at tables. They sat staring at the set. No one was laughing.

  It was evening by now. I’d spent all day a
nswering questions: And how are you feeling now? Are you hearing any voices? Medications? My mom had been there for much of that, by my side as always, until a nurse told her it was time to go.

  Don’t go, I said, clinging to her. Please don’t leave me here. I didn’t know what this place was. I just knew it wasn’t home. I cried fat, bitter tears onto her shoulder.

  The nurse watched me with my arms around my mom like I was a young child. She heard my sobs—choking sobs, the kind that make it hard to catch your breath. Her face didn’t change at all. She showed no surprise, no distaste. And that’s when I knew that a stress center was different from school. A stress center was the kind of place where sadness wasn’t hidden away. People saw sadness so much that at a certain point it didn’t even faze them anymore.

  My mom stroked the back of my head and held me as long as she could. Then when the nurse said, “Mrs. Rawl,” Mom sort of pushed me away and rushed to the door without looking back. I knew how sad and worried she must be.

  I walked through the door, which clicked behind me when it shut. My knees felt so weak I thought I might pass out.

  I wanted to. I wanted to drop to the floor right then and there.

  Just yesterday I had been doing homework. But now my mom was leaving, and I was stuck here, on the wrong side of the door that clicked.

  Pajama bottoms and sweatpants seemed to be the fashion items of choice, I noted as I looked around the day room. I didn’t see a single mirror in the room—not even any pictures in frames—and all these kids in their old T-shirts looked like they’d never smiled in their lives. I looked at one kid, an enormous boy, wide and tall, wearing flip-flops, basketball shorts, and a wide Cookie Monster T-shirt. He probably weighed as much as four of me, and he just sat there, his back rounded, staring into the ground, slack-jawed.

  No way, I thought. There’s no way this is real. I’m not really here with these people. I swear, I had this feeling that I might get swallowed up by their sorrow.

  Cookie Monster glanced up at me and nodded in greeting. I looked away.

  That’s when I heard a voice behind me.

  “Oh, thank God you’re here,” the voice said. It was a boy’s voice, but it had inflections more like a girl’s. I turned around and saw a skinny kid with dark skin walking toward me. He grabbed my arm. It was like he knew me, although I was certain I had never seen him in my life. “You’re one of the normal ones, right? Thank God, because I was just about to die from the stultifying depressing-ness of this whole affair,” he whispered.