The Symptoms of My Insanity

by Mindy Raf

  I hold my coat closed with my hands. It’s starting to snow now. Doesn’t she understand that my body is noticeable no matter what I wear? And no matter how I walk? Once my mom told me that she thought I walked suggestively, that I stuck out my chest too much, which was just asking men to look at me. But I swear I just walk like any other person.

  “Mom, it’s not my fault my sweater’s suggestive.”

  “Izzy, people don’t see things that aren’t on display.”

  She punctuates that sentence with the same facial expression my sister, Allissa, uses when she thinks she’s tapping into the depths of my psyche and telling me I need therapy. (Allissa’s in college and she’s really into her Abnormal Psych class, so she thinks she’s really cool when she says things like, “You need therapy” or “Your behavior is way too self-reflective.” I’m not a big, important college student or anything, but I always thought that self-reflection was the whole point of therapy.)

  My mom’s still giving me her Allissa-Psych-101 face, even after I tell her that I’m not trying to be on display. “Why would I want to be on display?!”

  “I’m not saying you want to draw negative attention to yourself,” she explains. “I’m just saying that unfortunately you can’t get away with wearing just anything like other girls your age. Your body delivers a very specific message, whether you want it to or not.”

  Oh God, not the “message” talk.

  “Fine Mom, I’ll just lock myself up at home and never leave the house.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I just want you to be aware. That’s why we did this today.” She smiles at me proudly. “Once they’re supported properly, you won’t draw so much attention to yourself. You’ll see.”

  There are so many things I want to say back to her, but I can’t. I’ve lost the ability to argue with my mom. What if I end up saying something really overdramatic and awful, like scream out “I hate you!” and then she dies and that’s the last thing I ever say to her? Not that she’s dying or anything. I just hate that she thinks I want all that attention from guys. Because I don’t. I just want to be left alone.

  “What are you doing?” I ask when I see Mom still hasn’t unlocked the car door and instead is leaning against it rummaging around in her purse. It’s snowing harder now, making her black purse fabric look white and fuzzy.

  “Forgot we have to stop at Arbor’s and get my medicine,” she mumbles, nodding across the parking lot to the drugstore. “Aha,” she says, pulling papers out of her purse. “Two new prescriptions, one refill.” She hands them to me. “So while you take care of that, I’m going to run next door to Farmer Jack’s and get milk. Oh, and toilet paper. Oh, and shampoo. Oh, and we need chicken, ice cream, fruit and …” She continues rambling off a giant shopping list as she walks back across the freezing parking lot to Farmer Jack’s Grocery, turtling her head down and pulling up the collar of her coat to protect her hair from the snow.

  I head over to Arbor’s Drugs. This is what I do: prescription pickup/drop-off. Broomington isn’t exactly a huge town, and although my mom is anything but antisocial, she doesn’t like people knowing her personal business. I always tell her that I don’t think it matters which one of us goes, since I doubt Mr. Neil thinks I’m the one taking the estrogen and calcium and the heartburn stuff, and the tons of other pills that have names I can’t pronounce and that Jenna says go for more than two hundred dollars apiece “on the streets.” I don’t really know what “streets” she’s referring to since she’s never left the suburbs, but she does watch a lot of Law & Order. Mr. Neil’s been filling Mom’s prescriptions for years, from when she first had all her hardware taken out—ovaries, uterus, all her tubes, the whole factory—and had to go on hormone pills when I was too small to remember. All the way up through this past summer, when she had her big stomach surgery for the slow-growing cancer they found. Mom tells me that of course Mr. Neil knows all the medicine’s for her. That’s why she doesn’t go in, so she doesn’t have to answer any questions.

  I drop off the prescriptions and wander over to the magazines. I grab one and remember that I need to get a new math notebook since I spilled orange juice all over mine this morning. So I’m thumbing through some celebrity tabloid and walking down the aisle, which is probably why I totally collide with someone. The magazine flies out of my hands, does a sideways dive into the shelf, and there’s a huge clatter as products rain down around me.

  “Sorry,” I mumble, squatting to collect everything. When I look up, I’m staring at an epic and very familiar jaw—square, slightly stubbled, with a tiny chin scar-dimple on the lower left side. It belongs to Blake Hangry.

  I stand up slowly, and place three overturned boxes of anti-diarrhea pills back on the shelf.

  “Hey! Izzy! Aw man, did I get you? Sorry!” Blake smiles at me, takes a swig of what’s left in his open bottle of Gatorade, and gestures to my neck and coat, now covered with sticky electrolytes. Then a Celine Dion ballad starts playing from inside his coat pocket. “What the—I’m gonna kill those guys,” he says, rolling his eyes and pulling out his cell. “Hey,” he says into his phone and then turns to me with another smile and one finger up, as if to tell me to hold on for a minute, like the two of us have more to say to each other.

  Blake Hangry and his dimpled jaw are smiling at me. Again. For the past few weeks, I’d been thinking of reasons why. He’s thinking of a funny joke in his head, or He’s looking at someone right behind me, or He’s spotted half my lunch stuck inside my teeth.

  “So Izzy, you okay? No injuries or anything?” Blake asks now, putting his phone back in his coat pocket and flashing me another smile as he bends down and picks up a subscription postcard from my magazine.

  Holy cow, that smile just now was definitely for me. And I realize—I think Blake Hangry and his manly jaw have been smiling at me all along. Last Tuesday, when he was picking up some old art supplies from the school’s studio—that was him smiling at me too. (I smiled back that time because it was kind of funny watching him try to carry four canvases and all those paints and brushes out of the studio by himself. Then Miss S. told me he was giving them to his little sister, Jillian, for her birthday after one of her drawings won Pine Fall Elementary School’s “Top Pic” Award, and I just about swoon-melted into my stool.)

  “Izzy, you okay?” he asks again, leaning in slightly, eyes searching my face.

  He has sweat stains on his T-shirt, which means he should smell kind of wonky, but I get a whiff of his deodorant, which must be that Blade stick he’s holding, mixed in with his gym smell, and the combination … Well, I’ve lost the ability to move my mouth. Oh God, he’s looking right at me, still smiling, and I know I need to respond, but I can’t because my mouth is not connected to my face right now. Come on Izzy, get it together. Just say something, anything!

  “You’re really sweaty.”

  No, no, no. Crap. Rewind.

  “Oh yeah, sorry. I’m nasty. Been working on my free throws after school,” he says, taking an imaginary one-handed shot. “No less than a hundred a day. Gotta get my percentage up for basketball season.”

  “Your percentage … ?” I do a quick wipe of some of the lemon lime off my neck with my scarf.

  “Oh, that’s not gonna do the trick,” he says, laughing. Then he grabs a package of baby wipes from the shelf behind him, takes one out, and starts … baby-wiping my neck.

  “Sorry,” he says mid-wipe in a teasing tone, handing me the package. “Didn’t mean to be so forward.”

  “No, it’s okay, I get … baby-wiped by guys all the time.”

  He laughs.

  Holy Mother of Gatorade, I just made him laugh.

  “So … your percentage? Is that the number of baskets you make?” I ask, trying not to sound like a total idiot.

  “Oh,” he laughs, “I get it. You’re doing that whole, ‘I’m a girl, I don’t know anything about sports’ act.”

  No. It’s not an act. Both those things are true.

 
“Yeah,” I laugh. “I know all about basketball. It’s that sport where you wear helmets and tackle each other, right? Duh,” I say, twirling my hair.

  Blake laughs. Again! Then he pushes some of his thick wavy hair out of his face so I can see his blue eyes, which have little gray flecks in them, and which are really nice and set super-symmetrically above his cheekbones. Come to think of it, he has a great face for sculpting. Not that I’d sculpt him or anything. That would be stalkerish, but … wait, what is he looking at? Why is he staring at me and grinning like that?

  “Your hair,” he says, “it’s really crazy curly today.”

  I want to die. I want to sink into the linoleum floor and die. Why did I let my hair air dry into a big, puffy mess today?

  “Yeah, it curls when I don’t blow-dry it,” I explain. “Well, actually, it waves when I don’t blow-dry it, and just a couple pieces in the front really curl. And actually it doesn’t really wave, it kind of just frizzes out, like this.”

  Shut up, Izzy, please just shut up.

  “No, I like it,” he says. “It’s kinda wild.” And then he reaches out his hand and TOUCHES MY HAIR! And then he says something else to me, but I don’t remember what because I’m fantasizing about Blake throwing his Gatorade bottle across the floor and passionately pressing me up against the beverage fridge to make out.

  “So …” I say, hoping my face doesn’t look as hot as it feels, “you need to get your percentage up?”

  “Oh. Yeah, working my butt off. I don’t have the height, so I gotta make sure I’m sinking rocks every time, you know?”

  “Right,” I say, nodding at him like I know all about sinking rocks.

  “Sorry, I probably sound all jock-like and douchey. Oh, and sorry for saying douchey.”

  “No problem.” I nod, realizing he’s probably reacting to the face I make whenever I hear a vaginal cleaning method used as an adjective.

  “Anyway, Tim’s helping me out with my game when he’s home too, which is awesome.”

  “Tim?”

  “My brother. He plays at Michigan State. Saw a lot of time his freshman year. He’ll probably start this season.”

  “Wow. So … you wanna play in college too?”

  “Yeah, I mean I hope so. I gotta get a full ride like Tim. My cousin Will’s still paying off student loans, and he’s like in his thirties!”

  “Well, if you don’t play basketball, do you—”

  “I gotta play, I pretty much suck at everything else,” he says, finishing off the bottle.

  “I doubt that.” And then he doesn’t say anything back and I feel stupid because maybe he meant that jokingly, and so I try and think of something else to say to imply that I don’t think he really does suck at everything else, but I can’t think while he’s smiling at me. I know he’s only sixteen, but I swear Blake Hangry has the kind of jaw that grown men would envy. I bet right now he could just effortlessly open that bag of Doritos he’s holding with his teeth.

  “So I like that thing you did, by the way,” he says, knocking me out of my Blake-rips-open-a-bag-of-Doritos-with-his-teeth fantasy.

  “What thing?”

  “The thing—the one in the hall by the art studio.”

  “Oh, thanks,” I say, surprised.

  “It’s like a self-photo right?”

  “Yeah, it’s a drawing. It’s from last year. In the fall, actually. So it’s not very—”

  “It’s cool. It looks so real. Like a photograph. How do you do that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s charcoal. Just shading and stuff.”

  “Yeah, right. Like it’s so simple. Well anyway, it’s impressive.”

  “Thanks.”

  And now Blake’s looking at me in this way that affects every single one of my arrector pili muscles. I think that’s what they’re called from biology, those tiny skin muscles that make your body hair stand up straight when you’re around powerfully potent pheromones. The way Blake’s looking at me right now makes every single one of them spasm, like goose bumps times a trillion.

  “So my mom,” he says, “she works for the DIA.”

  “Oh, wow, that’s really cool.”

  “Yeah. I saw your name and your picture on their website for that Italy thing.”

  “Oh, right.” The Detroit Institute of Arts is giving six students a scholarship to study abroad at U of M’s campus in Italy this summer. Miss S. thinks I have a pretty good chance of being one of them, if I ever finish my stupid application portfolio. “So your mom’s involved in that?” I ask. “In the scholarship?”

  “Yeah. I mean she’s not a judge or anything. She’s an events coordinator there.”

  “Oh. That’s cool.”

  “So yeah the DIA, they’re having this grand opening thing for this new wing? Food, music, art and all that. Told my sister, Jillian, I’d take her. She’s a really good drawer. I mean, for a seven-year-old. Anyway, I think you’d like it too. Right?”

  “Yeah!” I say with a tad too much enthusiasm, especially since there’s no way Mom will let me go to Detroit, unchaperoned, with a guy.

  “Cool,” he says, “so you wanna come check it out? It’s on Saturday. That’s if you’re not busy working on your watercolors. Or your charcoal? You said charcoal, right?”

  “Oh, yeah. I mean yes, that one was a charcoal drawing, and no, I’m not busy,” I tell him, while telling myself that it’s not irresponsible to spend a free Saturday not working on my portfolio. It can be research. With Blake!

  “Great. Should be some good stuff there. I mean, I don’t know exactly—”

  “Yeah. Actually, I read an article on the new wing, and there’s this painter, Juliana Roriago—well, she’s more of a performance artist, and I’ve always been curious to see her live. And she’ll be there on Saturday. She’s a resident all month actually. But yes, she’ll be there on Saturday. This Saturday. She’ll be there. At the new wing. On Saturday. That same Saturday that you’re going, ’cause she’s debuting. Performance art. This new … performance art … piece.

  And thus ends my own performance art piece entitled, English? Or Word Vomit?

  “Well cool … okay then, it’s on,” Blake says.

  “Okay. Yeah, it’s on,” I repeat, nodding my head.

  “Well, I gotta get another one of these”—he gestures to his drink, smiles—“and the guys are waiting in the car, so …”

  “Okay”—I nod my head again, and again, and again—“nice to see you.” Nice to see you?! Blech.

  “Yeah. Oh, and I hope your shopping went well,” he says with a slight grin and walks past me to the front of the store.

  I stop mid-nod and look after him, confused, and then realize that, oh my God, I’ve been holding my Lola’s Lingerie bag this whole time.

  CHAPTER 3

  I’m the assistant director.

  I know Mom’s asking me to tell Cathy Mason something for her tonight when I go over to Jenna’s for dinner, but all I can think about while we fill up the trunk with groceries is Blake, his blond-stubbled jaw, and how his lips would taste if we were actually making out.

  “Izzy? Did you hear me?”

  Salty maybe? Or no, sweet from the Gatorade? Ick, no. Should I be surprised he was so nice to me just then, so nice in fact that he asked me out on a museum date? Not that Blake’s ever been mean to me directly, but he’s friends with all those guys who are.

  Oh man, he’d definitely touch my hair a lot if we made out. I’m thinking he’d brush it out of my face before he went in to kiss me. And that first kiss would be soft. But then I’d touch his hair. I’d take hold of it on the back of his head. And then he’d get this look in his eyes, like he couldn’t control himself any longer. He’d pull me into him gently. No, roughly. Yes, he’d grab at the sides of my shirt and yank me in super-close. And then we’d basically go at it like crazy animals until I finally pry myself away and say all out of breath, “Wait, we have to stop, we can’t do this here in the middle of the drugstore.”

>   “Never mind, I’ll call Cathy later.” Mom sighs, picking up another bag from the cart, but before she can get it into the trunk, she starts coughing so hard that she has to lean against the side of the car.

  “Are you okay?” I grab the bag from her.

  “Fine, fine, battling a sinus thing, I think.” She straightens herself up.

  “Wait, didn’t you just go grocery shopping the other day?” I ask, seeing our almost-full trunk.

  “Yes, but Allissa’s coming in for the weekend.”

  Allissa’s school is less than two hours away. Yet whenever she’s coming home, Mom acts like my sister’s flying in from a foodless, far-off country.

  “We’re all going to spend the day together on Saturday,” Mom continues. “Have a girls’ day, go to the mall.” She smiles, as if just saying the word mall is an endorphin boost. “You both need winter clothes. And you desperately need a haircut.”

  A girls’ day? On Saturday? I would rather watch the Weather Channel, no, get caught in an actual blizzard, than go to the mall with Allissa and Mom. They’re always laughing about things I don’t find funny and getting excited about things I would never get excited about, like the fact that you get an ugly bag full of nasty-smelling perfume samples when you spend over seventy-five dollars at the makeup counter. Plus, when Allissa’s around, Mom’s always asking her about boys, saying nauseating things like, “So Allissa, you think this one’s Mr. Right?” and Allissa’s always saying equally nauseating things back like, “I don’t know, Mom, but we did hold hands during the whole movie.” And then they both talk about me. About me being antisocial, and never having a boyfriend. Like I’m not even there!