“Just call us every day this time,” said my mom.
“Okay,” I lied.
The school turned out to be just as fun as I’d hoped. On the downside, I got assigned to the maintenance crew. I quickly established myself as the worst dormitory bathroom cleaner on campus, if not the entire world. I could devote an entire book to the colonies of shower-curtain bacteria I nurtured through neglect, but I’m not sure there’s a market for that sort of thing. The live experiment didn’t test particularly well among my dorm-mates.
On the upside, the campus was gorgeous. I had the run of thirteen hundred acres of organic garden, farm, woods, and landscaped grounds. A river bordered campus, and the students kayaked down it in nearly all weather. There were miles of hiking trails. We ate fresh food from the garden, and even beef and pork from cattle and hogs raised on the farm. The classes were interesting, and the 750 students were a mix of international students of color and domestic white kids. Some of the latter bore unfortunate dreadlocks and had been kicked out of boarding school. Others had been raised on small family farms all over the South. Others were post-rehab sober kids. Some were angry anarchist punks. Some were quietly devoted to a life of service as teachers or social workers. Nearly all the students were weird in one way or another, and many were broken little birds on the mend, just like me. Even though I didn’t drink or smoke pot, I fit right in.
The first year passed largely without incident, aside from one of the dormitories burning down (only one person was hurt—she busted her knee when she jumped out of her first-floor window). I formed friendships, some of which solidified into strong bonds. I slept with a few guys. I read cool books. I hiked on the trails. I drank a lot of tea. I went to my new therapist and my new psychiatrist regularly. It was all so relaxing that I only had two or three panic attacks the whole year. And I didn’t feel depressed at all, not even when the recovering crack addict I liked started banging my friend instead of me. There were plenty of moments when I felt genuinely happy. Inexplicably, I didn’t go through a lesbian phase.
I spent much of the summer in Kentucky, completing my service requirement by volunteering at a migrant outreach center run by nuns. One of the nuns had definitely gone through a lesbian phase, and was inarguably still going through it. The fact seemed to make her angry, and she was even more short-tempered than Edgar the angry peacenik. Thankfully, she was not my only boss. The other two nuns in charge were marvelous, smart, capable women who took the edge off Sister Bitchface. That trio of alleged virgins did a bang-up job of running a free health clinic, free food pantry, and free clothing closet. My time with them remains one of my most pleasant memories. I even left with some respect for Sister Rage-a-lot. She wasn’t nice, but she worked her ass off. I saw in those women the best of what the Roman Catholic Church provides today. I spend a lot of time thinking about the bad the Church does in this world, but those women showed me some of the good.
I returned to Warren Wilson in August and began my second year at the school. I had moved my way over to the Writing Center crew, so I tutored students instead of occasionally pushing a mop around their bathrooms. I was also an R.A. for freshmen, and distinguished myself by only hooking up with two of them. (Not at the same time. I’m a class act.) I was twenty-three and they were eighteen, which sounds really gross in retrospect but was highly entertaining at the time.
Once, I was away for my childhood best-friend Gretchen’s wedding and couldn’t do my R.A. shift. Another one of the R.A.s helpfully took over. When I was on my way back to Asheville, I had a brief stop at the Charlotte Airport. A funny feeling tickled the back of my brain, and I sensed that I ought to check in with my supervisors and dear friends, Karen and Chauncey. Karen was a badass blond social worker and recent Warren Wilson graduate. Chauncey was a gay, bearded Atlanta-born bear who was still figuring out what he wanted to do with his life. All he was sure about was that he really liked books. As it turned out, his bibliophilic inclinations were correct, and he’d eventually become the head librarian at a hyper-conservative Christian college in a neighboring state. But that was a few years away. Today, he was dealing with another issue entirely.
“Hey, Chauncey,” I said when he picked up the phone. “Is everything okay back at school?”
“Oh God,” he said, sounding exhausted. “Oh God. Shit went nuts as soon as you left.”
Karen got on the other extension, and demanded, “Sara, you didn’t sleep with Brett Ferris, did you?” Brett was one of our eighteen-year-old charges. He was the tall, handsome, athletic scion of a well-connected Southern family. He would’ve gone to USC, UNC, or Duke, but he was the family fuck-up. A lot of the kids at Wilson were the family fuck-ups (ahem).
“Enough with the freshmen-fucking jokes!” I said. Karen, Chauncey, and our friend Dylan loved to make fun of me for hooking up with two frosh. And to be perfectly fair, I didn’t actually have actual, you know, sex with either of them. It was just oral sex, which as a lapsed Catholic I simply considered a very entertaining abomination against Christ.
“He just got kicked out,” Chauncey said.
I had trouble keeping up with the story as both of them jabbered excitedly over one another. The gist was that Brett had gotten incredibly intoxicated, hardly an unusual experience for him. What was unusual, however, was his reaction. High on a combination of mushrooms, acid, and booze, Brett stripped off all his clothes and ran naked and screaming through the dorm at three A.M. He ripped open an unlocked door on my floor. Thankfully, the girls who lived there were out at a drum circle summoning Gaia or whomever one summons during drum circles. He emptied all their drawers into the hallway, threw their mattresses across the room, and peed on just about everything. He ran back out into the hallway and slammed the fire alarm before returning to their room to hide. When Karen found him, he was incoherent. The fire department arrived along with an ambulance. Brett managed to punch a firefighter before being strapped down to a gurney and hauled off to the hospital. When he sobered up hours later, he denied taking any drugs. Unsurprisingly, blood tests said otherwise.
“I miss all the good stuff,” I said, genuinely disappointed. “Why did Gretchen’s wedding have to be this weekend?”
“It was actually kind of awful,” Karen said.
“God, I wish I’d been there,” I said wistfully.
And no, by the way—I never had hooked up with Brett Ferris. In fact, once I’d gotten the young gents out of my system, I fell in love with a more age-appropriate fellow. His name was Carl, and we soon became attached at the hip.
I’d never loved someone so much. Back at Emerson, most of the straight guys were consumed with writing the perfect haiku or making the next great underappreciated black-and-white shaky-cam opus. This guy was into literature, but he was also into manly stuff. He was strong and smart and funny, and he knew how to do lots of cool things. He could change a tire, and the oil in his car. He could build things. I met his parents and his older sister. We even talked about having children, or anal sex. It was a real deep kind of love.
Eventually, it soured in the way that these things do. We just weren’t right for each other. We didn’t fit. He drank a lot, and I didn’t drink at all. He exercised a lot, and I didn’t exercise at all. He worked hard at school, and I didn’t work hard at all. He was a saver, and I was a spender. He was a partier, and I was a napper. These things and more were cause for frequent disagreements. I called him to break up with him, but I got his voice mail. So I broke up with his voice mail. It wasn’t the most sophisticated use of communications skills, but I wasn’t the most sophisticated gal. He appeared at my door after he got the message, drunk and sad. I didn’t change my mind. He went to get drunker.
That night, I tried to go to sleep. I had the ne plus ultra of college dwelling-places, a dorm with its own private bathroom. I’d decorated the place with swaths of brightly printed fabric, art prints I’d salvaged from the recycling bin, and loads of books. It was a peaceful little sanctuary, and I loved it. Yet I couldn’t fall aslee
p.
I miss Carl, I thought. I really, really miss Carl. I meant it. But why did it hurt so much? After all, he and I had gotten on each other’s nerves a lot. Karen, Chauncey, and Dylan thought we were awful for one another. And quite frankly, they had a point.
Still, I couldn’t stop thinking it. I miss Carl. I miss Carl. I miss Carl. I miss Carl and I want to die.
Whoa! I sat bolt-upright in bed. Where had that old thought come from? I didn’t want to die! I had a nice life. I had good friends. I loved my school. My family was healthy and reasonably happy.
I want to die. I want to die. I want to die. There it was, over and over again. I turned on music to block it out. I’d gotten into bluegrass since moving to Asheville, and if anything could cure this little funk, it was banjo.
I want to die. I want to die. I want to die. It wouldn’t let up. I spent a solid four hours trying to get that bad old thought out of my head. I took a shower. I did jumping jacks. I cracked open a textbook for once. Nothing helped. If I’d been a drinker, I might have drunk the pain away. Maybe I would have passed out and woken up the next day with an awful headache and the strong conviction that liquor and Carl were both bad news. That might have been a tidier conclusion to this story. But that’s not what happened.
As time wore on, I felt as though my heart had been ripped out and pounded. I felt lonely and frightened. What if I’d made the wrong choice? What if nobody else would ever love me? What if Carl got together with another girl? I want to die. I want to die. I want to die.
I guess I’d never felt real heartbreak before, or at least not since high school—and that had been over five years ago, more than enough time for a heart to un-learn how to deal with the end of a romantic relationship. Sure, I had done the dumping, but that somehow made it more confusing. Why did I feel so bad if I was the one who had ended things? I must be going crazy. Was I going crazy again? Oh, no. I couldn’t go crazy again. I just couldn’t. Things were working out so well. I want to die. I want to die. I want to die.
Finally, at four A.M., I dug up the R.A. manual we’d all been given at training a couple of weeks before the school year started. I flipped to the part about mental health emergencies.
“If a student expresses a persistent desire to hurt him- or herself, or a desire to commit suicide, notify the Dean of Students and take the student to Mission Hospital’s St. Joseph Campus. Doctors there will be able to determine whether to admit the student to the Copestone mental health care unit. The Dean of Students will immediately notify the student’s parents or guardians.”
If I were my own R.A., what would I do? In this case, the student (me) didn’t express a desire to commit suicide, exactly. But some crazy voice in her brain sure was expressing a strong desire to die. Was it worth splitting hairs over terminology, considering the student’s history of mental health crises? I decided it wasn’t, and called Karen.
“Hello?” Her voice sounded sleepy and muffled.
“Hey, Karen, it’s Sara. I think I need to go to the emergency room. I think I’m going crazy again. I can’t stop thinking about dying.”
“Okay,” Karen said simply. “I’ll be up in a sec.” She knew about my history and why I’d dropped out of my old college, but I think she would have reacted the same way if anyone had called her with that announcement. Karen just had that kind of cool head under pressure. You could tell her that a giant carnivorous dinosaur was eating all the cattle down on the farm, and she would’ve casually picked up the phone to call Animal Control. And she would’ve already had the phone number memorized, too, just in case something like this ever came up. She was always prepared. Today she has two master’s degrees and a sweet job as some kind of grand social work queen. Back then, she already displayed the right attitude for that kind of high-stress job.
She got to my room and said, “So you want to go to the ER now?”
“Sure,” I said.
“You should probably pack some stuff.”
“Like what? Clothes?”
“I mean, bring a change of underwear in case they put you in a gown. Your toothbrush, a wallet, any prescriptions you have. Bring the phone numbers of the people you’ll need to contact, like your shrink.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. I threw a few things in a bag, and then she drove me to the ER in her lipstick-red, biodiesel-fueled pickup truck.
We put my name on the list and sat down. Even the hospital waiting rooms in this town had comfy rocking chairs, apparently. Karen read a Southern Living magazine. After I filled out and handed in my medical history chart, I found the inevitable Highlights issue hiding beneath the grown-up periodicals. It turned out Goofus and Gallant had been up to pretty much the same shtick since I’d last made their acquaintance. I was partway through a pretty awesome maze when the intake nurse called my name.
She was a thin middle-aged woman with big, curly, dyed-blond hair, a thick mountain accent, and those permanent lines chain-smokers get around their lips from all the years of pursing, sucking, and blowing. Her nametag read MAYBELLE S., I assume to distinguish her from the other Maybelles wandering round the place.
“Okay, Sara,” Nurse Maybelle S. said. “You been taking your Prozac on schedule?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. Two years of living in the South had taught me that “ma’am” wasn’t just for female police officers and complaint-line staffers.
“You feeling good physically? No cold, no nausea, no fever, no nothing?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Your period’s normal. You don’t think you’re pregnant. You have a history of depression, panic attacks, and suicidal thoughts.”
“That’s right, ma’am.” She made a few notes and then looked me square in the eye.
“Now baby, what’s going on this morning?” she asked. “You just tell me how you’re feeling, and we’ll do our best to sort it right out.”
I told her everything, starting with the breakup (“Well, you can’t be with a man who just isn’t right for you. Believe me, I been to that rodeo about as many times as they’d let me go”) and ending with the whole wanting-to-die thing.
When I finished, she took a big bag of gummy bears out from her desk. Then she shook several out into a tissue and gave it to me.
“We’ll have you see the doctor, just in case,” she said. “But honey, brokenhearted and crazy are two different things. I’ve been both, and if we had more time I’d tell you tales to make your toes curl. And I’m glad you came in to be safe, but I’m thinking what we have here is a heart that needs mending.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” I said. Nurse Maybelle S. nodded emphatically and popped a gummy bear into her mouth. Then she told me about her third divorce, which in her opinion bore certain resemblances to my situation with Carl. We had a real nice time sharing her gummy bears and talking about guys until the next sick person showed up and she had to excuse herself to do her job.
I sat back down with Karen until Nurse Maybelle S. came over and told us we could go back to wait for the doctor in an exam room. We were met at the door by a social worker, who walked us into a little private room that I guess they kept for potential psych patients. She said apologetically that she’d be by in a few minutes, but had to complete an evaluation with another patient next door.
Karen and I sat and talked shit about some of our teenage residents for about thirty minutes. Our foxy, tattooed friend Talia showed up to join the party, with food she’d smuggled from the school cafeteria. Karen left to start her shift at her day job, and Talia and I had a fine time reading old magazines and listening to the other potential psych patients freak out.
My next-door neighbor, the one who was taking up the social worker’s time, was a girl around my age. I saw her briefly when she ran out of her little waiting room and past the open door of mine. She was a brunette like me, and short, but her hair was messy and her clothes were rumpled. The social worker went after her and then gently walked her back to her little room.
&nb
sp; “They’re trying to kill me!” the girl shouted.
“You’re safe here,” the social worker said reassuringly.
“That girl is seriously nuts,” Talia whispered. “I think that’s why they’re taking so long to get to you. She’s higher on their list of priorities.”
“I guess the squeaky wheel gets the lithium around here,” I said. We giggled.
“Do you want to die anymore?” Talia asked.
I paused. I actually hadn’t thought about dying for at least an hour.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “But I think I have to stay now and, like, explain that to them.”
Being friendly types, Talia and I commenced getting to know the nurses and orderlies on the floor. Apparently Talia frequented the same bar as two of the male nurses, and they got into a long discussion about whether or not the bartender was actually on the run from the mob. I gave one of the female nurses the Cosmo Sex Quiz of the Month and we cackled at how stupid it was.
The dean of students, my psychiatrist, and my psychologist called to check on me. I spoke to each of them in turn, assuring them that I was going to be okay, and apologizing for waking them up. Then came the call I’d been dreading.
“Hey, Sara,” said one of the nurses. “It’s your mom and dad.”
“Are they freaking out?” I asked.
“They sound fine,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
I got on the phone, more nervous than I’d been in forever.
“Heeeey, guys,” I said uneasily. “I guess school called you.”
“We think you should come home today,” Mom said. “We’ll get you a ticket. Can your friend drive you to the airport?” She didn’t sound fake-happy. She sounded sort of normal, with a tinge of worry. I started to cry.
“Are you mad?” I asked, sniffling.
“Why would we be mad?” my dad asked.
“I don’t know. I just feel like I’m backsliding.”
“Honey,” my mom said. “Breakups suck.”
“But they shouldn’t land you in the hospital. I just feel like a crazy person, or a loser, or something. I shouldn’t even be here. I just got scared when I couldn’t stop thinking those bad thoughts again.”
Agorafabulous! Page 16
