by E. R. Frank
“If it’s so normal, why isn’t Ellen having the same reaction as I am?”
“First of all, she wasn’t driving. But also, Ellen was drunk and then passed out,” Frances says. “Her brain was having an entirely different experience from yours.”
“We were in the same car,” I say. “We were in the same accident.”
“Were you?” Frances asks.
Now I’m thinking she’s the insane one. If I were a little younger, I’d probably look at her and go, “Duh.” But I just stay quiet.
“Anna. There’s nothing crazy about you. Listen.” She leans forward, and her freckles slightly change color somehow. They get darker. “When a trauma occurs, it seems to get locked in the nervous system with the original pictures, sounds, and feelings. A part of the brain that’s involved in handling thought and language shuts down. Another part of the brain that knows only body sensations and emotions gets lit up. Way up. If those two parts of the brain don’t find a way to reconnect, we can end up with symptoms like the ones you have.”
She stops talking and leans back in her black leather chair. I’m sitting at the corner of her couch. It’s red and has these small, cream-colored suede throw pillows, which are really, really smooth. I can’t stop stroking them, as if they’re little pets or something.
“Well, how do I get the two parts of my brain to reconnect, so I’m not such a head case?” I ask.
“There are different ways to treat PTSD,” Frances tells me, “including taking medication for the anxiety and panic-attack part. There’s also something called exposure therapy, which would involve getting you behind the wheel of a car before you really want to, and then making you drive. Then there’re ways of making use of body sensations. We’ll use elements of that today. And there’s something called EMDR, which is my vote on what’s most likely to get your brain reconnected.”
“I don’t want to drive.” It’s the only part of what she’s just said that I hear. Getting you behind the wheel of a car again. I feel my heart chipping away at the inside of my chest, just at the thought.
“All right,” Frances says. “We won’t do that, then.”
My heart’s still pounding, though.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Your face is red, and you’re sweating.”
I wipe the tops of my thumbs down my temples, which are hot and damp.
“That’s your body’s response to the memory of the accident,” Frances says. “You were thinking about having to drive, right?”
I nod.
“See how you’re physically reacting to that thought?”
“I guess,” I say.
“What kind of feelings are you having, thinking about it?” she asks.
“Shaking. Sweating. Hot,” I say. “Kind of like I could throw up.”
“Okay. Those are body sensations. What kind of emotional feelings are you having?” she asks.
“Scared. Embarrassed. Nervous,” I say. I am crazy. I must be.
“Put your feet flat on the floor.” Frances sits up straight, uncrosses her legs, and does it herself. “Like this. Really feel the bottoms of your feet supported by the rug and the wood beneath.”
I untangle myself and copy her. I slide my butt to the edge of the couch and flatten both my feet inside my black leather boots with the zippers up the sides.
“Press down a little bit and see if you can feel the ground pressing back, solid under the soles of your feet.”
“Okay,” I say after a second. I’m a little calmed down, I think.
“Now take a couple of deep breaths,” Frances tells me. “Like this.” She breathes in really, really slow through her nose. She holds it a second and then blows the air out through her mouth, long and deep. It’s a little weird. It looks like Ellen’s mom, sort of, on her yoga mat.
But I do it anyway. I take a breath.
“Slower,” Frances tells me. “Go slower.” So I do. “How does your body feel now?” she asks after I blow the air out.
“I thought therapy was about talking,” I say. “Not breathing. Or … you know … feet.”
“This is uncomfortable for you,” she tells me.
“Kind of.” But as weird as it is, having my feet solidly on the floor and breathing deep like that does make me feel better. “I guess I’m not feeling as embarrassed,” I admit to Frances.
“Good,” she goes. “So you get a sense of how your body can cue emotions, and how emotions can cue your body. Right?”
I nod.
“So if you notice you’re feeling anxious or afraid, you can use this to help soothe yourself. Just put your feet flat on the ground and breathe.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. “But …” I stroke the cream-colored pillow, worrying that the nightmares are too big and the shaking is too strong to be fixed so fast by some new way of sitting and breathing.
“What is it?” Frances asks.
I stop stroking and look at all the certificates on her wall. There’re a bunch of them, and the one on the left middle row is crooked. “Am I going to be okay?” I think about how mad my dad is at how messed up I am now, and I feel that thick ink in my chest. “I mean, really okay?”
“Yes, Anna.” I can feel her staring at me, and I pull my eyes from her certificates on the wall to look back at her. Her freckled face is so confident. “You’re going to be fine.” The ink thins out a lot. Not all the way. But a lot. It’s a relief. To hear that from someone who maybe actually knows.
Rob’s SUV is the easiest car for Ellen, with her wheelchair, compared with Ellen’s mom’s Volvo or our new Honda. So instead of going to school separately, Jack and I and Ellen and Rob start showing up together.
“How new is your car?” Ellen asks Rob as Jack helps her into the wheelchair. I’m holding her book bag, and Rob’s kicking at the back left tire, worrying it’s got a leak. He doesn’t say anything. “Because it smells new,” Ellen goes. “And it’s spotless.”
“Rob’s a clean freak,” Jack says. The air has that December edge to it that turns our breath into mini steam clouds.
“So when did you get the car?” Ellen asks again.
Rob holds out two fingers. We’re heading out of the parking lot and toward the school building.
“Two months ago?” she guesses. Rob smiles.
“Two years,” Jack corrects.
“No way,” I say. I spot Lisa exiting the front door of school and walking down the steps onto the lawn toward us.
“Yep,” Jack goes.
Lisa meets us near the flagpole. “They’ve got prom planning committee posted.”
I don’t know why she’s telling us. We’re not planning-committee people. To tell you the truth, we’re not prom people either.
“I thought we didn’t find out until tomorrow,” Ellen says. Before I can even register that one, Lisa’s talking again.
“Jack’s on music, and so is Ellen.”
What? We’re walking up the outside double stairs now, and I’m shoving past kids harder than I usually do. Rob and Jack carry Ellen, in her chair, as if she doesn’t weigh a thing. They’re supposed to wheel her in to the side door, where there’s a ramp, but we never bother.
“Rob, you’re on theme and decoration.”
“Excellent,” he says.
“Wow,” Lisa goes. “You have a really deep voice.”
“You guys signed up to be on prom?” I ask.
We’re inside. The bell is going to ring any second, and I just want the day to be over already.
“Not me,” Lisa says. “I just passed the posting by accident.”
“Hi,” Jason goes, joining us.
“I wanted decent music this year,” Ellen says. “I told you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Take your sin-glasses off.” She’s supposed to remind me when I forget indoors, which is a lot of the time. Jason’s looking back and forth at her and me, trying to figure out what’s going on.
She went last year with this senior, Alan Frendleman. They broke up five days later because he decided he was too old to have a tenth-grade girlfriend. Ellen didn’t really like him anyway. I mean, she liked him as a friend, but she said he was a bad kisser and worse at other things. Whatever.
“I didn’t know you signed up,” Ellen’s saying to Jack. Then she turns to Jason. “Did you?”
“For prom?” Jason asks.
“Who do you think you’re even going with?” I say to Ellen, but Rob’s bass voice drowns out mine.
“He did it for Cameron,” he rumbles.
We look at him. He looks at Jack.
“She was into it,” Jack explains. “She convinced me.”
“Duh,” Lisa goes. “She would have been voted prom queen.”
“Actually,” Jack says, “she was going to …”
We all stop, as if there’s a red light or some sort of signal. We just stop right where we are, in the center of the T intersection of the science rooms and math hall. We stand still and stare at Jack. He stares back, and his face fights itself.
“Anyway,” he mutters. He shakes his head at Rob. “Come on.” They take off.
Lisa starts walking after a second. Then she stops. Then she starts and keeps going. Ellen and Jason and I stay where we are, watching Lisa’s back.
“I even e-mailed Anna about it,” Ellen tells Jason. He arches his eyebrow. I see Seth moving toward us from the end of the hall.
“No, she didn’t,” I say to Jason. “She never said a word.”
They start meeting for their stupid committees in, like, February or something. It’s stupid. We’ve always said how stupid it is.
“I did,” Ellen argues. “I’m sure of it.”
The bell rings. Seth walks up and pulls a curl and kisses my cheek.
I push him off and spin away and don’t even wait to see how they’re going to get Ellen up the stairs for French IV.
18
SETH FINDS ME DURING LUNCH. I’M HIDING IN THE GIRLS’ ROOM at the back of the back gym lockers. It’s a bathroom Ellen and I never use because it’s always filled with smoke and there’re only two stalls and Marcy Cunningham gives blow jobs in here all the time. Seth marches straight through the door.
“Guy!” some girl waiting yells.
“Come on,” he says to me.
“You’re going to get into trouble,” I say back.
“Life without parole,” he goes. “Now, come on.”
“Get out!” this girl yells.
Marcy Cunningham walks in. “Get out,” she tells everybody.
“Come on,” Seth says. I walk out with him.
“So, what’s the matter?” He steers me away from the lunchroom and toward the side exit. There’s a brick wall out there, and in the spring all these purple and white flowers sprout up along the face of it. But it’s not spring, and when we get to the wall, it’s not pretty. It’s just brick. “What’s the matter?” he asks again.
“Everything,” I say. I lean my butt on the low edge. It’s cold and sharp.
“Oh,” Seth goes. He stands in front of me and starts pulling my curls and letting them bounce back. There’s nobody else out here. I let him pull.
“Where are your shades?” he asks. I must have dropped them in the bathroom. It makes me realize my right eye isn’t freaking out in the daylight.
“I guess I don’t need them anymore,” I say.
He keeps pulling. He goes, “Boing, boing,” under his breath.
“What’s your next big thing?” I ask him. “You never told me. From that day at Ellen’s. You know. Charisma. Heart attack.”
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “Send a dollar.”
“What?”
“Send a dollar. I started it already I put an ad in the City Trib classified section. It just says, ‘Send a dollar.’ With a post office box address. That day at Ellen’s I was working on the wording.”
“I don’t get it,” I say.
“I want to see how many people actually send money.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope.”
“You have a post office box address?”
“I do now.”
“Isn’t that expensive?”
“I have a feeling dollars will be arriving shortly to cover the cost.”
“Isn’t that illegal? Can you just take people’s money like that? Doesn’t there have to be a cause or something? I mean, you could get into trouble.”
“Life without par …,” he starts, but he doesn’t finish.
“Stop making me feel stupid.”
“I’m not making you feel anything.” But he is.
“I don’t want to like you,” I tell him.
‘Yeah, you’re kind of strange about that.”
“I don’t know why.” It’s embarrassing for some reason.
“Me neither,” he says. “I’m a good catch.”
I take his hands and put one on each of my cheeks. It feels nice. Safe.
“Don’t kiss me,” I tell him.
“Okay,” he says. “Can I kiss you this afternoon, though?” His face is almost touching mine. I can smell his breath. Chocolate and peanut butter.
“No,” I say. “I have therapy.”
“You can’t kiss on the same days as therapy?” he asks. “Is that a law?”
“Yes.”
“Oh,” he says.
Ellen passes me a note in biology. If Ms. Riffing catches cell phones in use, she confiscates them and then uses them to call parents to tell them how great their kids are. She calls them every day from the kid’s cell, and at about day four she’ll mention that she’ll be keeping the kid’s phone until the end of the marking period.
Why are you so mad? Ellen’s handwriting slants to the right, and her letters are tall and angled. Not curvy and round like Lisa’s.
You never told me, I pass back. After Christmas you and Jack are going to be hanging out together while I’m doing nothing.
I did tell you. And I didn’t even know about Jack.
Fine, I write. Forget it.
You’ll get to have more alone time with Seth, anyway.
Big deal, I write back.
Stop moping, she writes. It’s just a stupid prom committee. It’s just a stupid prom.
Exactly! And I draw a frown face.
Oh, come on. She draws a smiley face.
I think about Cameron and know I’m a complete spoiled bitch brat, because I’m alive at least, and I suck up how bad I’m feeling straight to somewhere in the bottom of my stomach.
I’m not moping, I write back. M. C. was in the science hall bathroom again.
Which guy?
Didn’t see.
I feel sorry for her, Ellen writes.
So do I. So, Jason’s not on any prom committees?
I wish. He is so amazing.
He’s gay, I remind her.
But he hasn’t had a boyfriend since I’ve known him.
He’s not straight, Ellen. He’s picky. He’s got class.
I know. Okay. What are you doing after school?
Therapy, I write. You?
Doctor. I get my short cast soon.
It’s been almost two months. I can’t believe it.
I know, she scribbles.
SATs are almost here.
I know.
Christmas is almost here.
I know. She draws a face with a half smile, half frown. It reminds me of Jack.
I feel like shit.
Yeah, she writes, and I’m reading it, and then Ms. Riffing is standing over me. She whirls around and around, saying something about the path of mitochondria. Actually, I think she’s being a mitochondrion. Everyone is laughing. Ms. Riffing doesn’t stop talking or whirling. Just holds out her hand. I have to pass over the note in time with her spin.
She uses the note to be some part of a cell, or maybe an enzyme—I’m not really sure—and then she crumples it up and stuffs it in her mouth and keeps swirling, and
Ellen and I pay attention after that.
Frances is trying to explain EMDR.
“Bilateral stimulation of the brain used in a certain way,” she’s telling me, “seems to unlock the nervous system and to help people with PTSD.”
“Wait,” I say, holding up a little rectangular box that looks sort of like a gray iPod. “Is this the bilateral stimulation?” It has headphones attached to it and also another set of wires that end in two matching plastic handles, each about the size of a mussel. They vibrate in your hands, one at a time, back and forth, when the little box is turned on. The headphones make this soft snapping sound, one ear at a time.
“Yep,” Frances says. “I also use left-right eye movements with a lot of people, but since you’ve had an eye injury, we won’t do it that way with you.”
I put down the box, with its headphones and hand buzzers and pick up a suede pillow. “Hearing clicks back and forth and getting my hands buzzed back and forth is going to unlock my nervous system?”
She nods.
“I still don’t get how.”
“We think it works a little bit like what happens when we’re in deep sleep,” Frances explains. “We all need a minimum amount of sleep in order not to get too crazy. Right?”
“If you say so,” I go.
“Okay,” she says. “You know how in deep sleep your eyes move back and forth very quickly?”
“I guess,” I say, stroking the pillow.
“It may be that those eye movements are a kind of bilateral stimulation that helps people process daily experiences,” Frances says. “That way our brains don’t get overloaded from all the stimuli we take in each day.”
“So deep sleep is like mini EMDR for everybody?” I ask.
“Theoretically.”
I put down the pillow and pick up the gray box again. I take a buzzer in each hand and turn it on. Buzz. Buzz. And I thought deep breathing was weird. I turn it off.
“Today we’re not even going to work on the accident,” she tells me.
“Why not?”
“First we need a safe place,” she says, “and then we need some inner resources for you to call on if you ever need them.”
“A safe place?” I ask. “Do my parents know we’re doing this?”
Frances smiles. “I explained EMDR to them.” She has perfectly even teeth, except for this one that’s longer than the others and pointy. A fang. “Why do you ask?”
