Notes to Self

by Avery Sawyer

  “Promise me you’ll go to the nurse’s office and sleep if you feel like you need to,” Mom said, folding my laundry. She’d found out about me sleeping in the closet, so the stacks of clothes went into the dresser and she’d fashioned a little nest for me out of couch cushions and extra blankets. I liked it; I felt safe in there. Dr. Kline said it was fine. Small spaces can be soothing for some people.

  “I promise,” I said. Mom needed to go back to her classes and I didn’t want her worrying about me being alone all day in the apartment.

  I’d managed to go two whole days without crying or laughing hysterically. I can handle school. Right?

  It was easier to convince my mother than it was to convince myself.

  CHAPTER 13

  FML

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. What is this my eyes are seeing?” Adam Jordan got in my face as I was trying to figure out how to open my locker. What is my combination again? I thought it was 9-22-47. Or was it 22-74-9? Wait, no. It was definitely 92-24-7. Maybe I’d just get someone to reset it.

  “Go away, Adam,” I twirled the lock for the hundredth time. I didn’t even know if I was at the right locker. The minute I was sure I was in the correct spot, the world shifted and I felt lost. I kept seeing things out of the corner of my eye that weren’t really there.

  How messed up is my brain? Hella.

  “Don’t hate, Ro Ro. I’m just surprised is all.” He opened his mouth wide and tipped a bag of Cheetos into it. Everyone walking by us stared and whispered.

  Why are they staring and whispering?

  “What’s up with everyone?” I asked Adam in a low voice. He glanced around and nodded to a few people, who nodded back. Everyone was moving in slow motion, swirling around us like extras on a movie set being shot from a camera on a crane. I shut my eyes for a moment and turned back to the combination lock, vowing to focus on just that one thing.

  “We kind of thought you expired, Ro. MisKis canceled a pep rally and we had, like, this totally intense moment of silence every morning for a week. It kind of gave me the creeps. When’s Em coming back?” Adam shifted his weight and leaned on the locker next to mine. MisKis was our principal, Mr. Kisterson.

  “She’s still in the hospital.” My eyes teared again and I used every bit of concentration I had to not let them spill over. At that point I’d been at school for a grand total of nine minutes. Everyone around me was so casual, so unconcerned, and I felt terrified to even open my mouth. I had no idea what would come out. The only thing I knew for sure was that it would be the wrong thing.

  “Oh. You look different.” He wasn’t looking me in the eye; he was checking out my head. I’d honestly have prefered he stare at my chest.

  “No shit.” I wanted Adam to leave me alone so I could wipe my eyes without him noticing, but I needed help and he was basically a decent guy. We’d done a Social Studies project together in ninth grade. His handwriting was neat. He wrote his A’s like typeface instead of like an ‘o’ with a line on the side. “Can you help me with something?”

  “I’m your slave, baby.” He grinned and wiggled his eyebrows, then crumpled up the Cheetos bag and shot it at the garbage can near the drinking fountain. He missed.

  I rolled my eyes. “I can’t open my locker.” I hated playing the damsel in distress, but else could I do? I readjusted my bag and tried to stay calm. Everything is fine. It’s going to be fine.

  He spun the lock and sucked on his teeth, concentrating. “So is it true you tried to break into Waffle House with EmsiePants and some cop shot you in the head? Badass. Uh, what’s your combination?”

  “No, we did not break in to anything. Why would you break into Awful Waffle? I fell. It’s…um…I can’t remember.” I leaned against the lockers next to Adam and closed my eyes. Did I forget to take my pain meds? My head was starting to pound. When I opened my eyes, the wall of lockers across the hall from us shifted on its side. I shook my head and things returned to normal, whatever that means.

  “Then I can’t help you, Ro.” He spun away. Before he took off running to tackle Jaden and Dino, he looked at me for a second and said, “Take it easy.” It was his way of wishing me luck I guess.

  “Thanks,” I called after him.

  I could feel people looking at me when I wandered in what I thought was the direction of the office to get my combination, but when I tried to meet their eyes they glanced away.

  Dee Winters, the tenth grade class president, school newspaper editor, and pep club planner, was the one exception. MisKis must’ve told her to keep an eye on me because she chased me down as soon as I found my homeroom. “Are you okay, Robin? Should I carry your bag? Do you want me to, like, find out what all you missed? Can I interview you for the paper later about what happened? Should I ask Mr. Reynolds to let you sit up front in Biology?” She was sweet but annoying, and apparently believed I was nearsighted now. I told her I was fine and said I could manage on my own. Her rapid-fire way of talking was not something I wanted to handle, even on a good day.

  One freshman wanted to know if I had any Vicodin I could sell him. Mostly, everyone stared. And stared. And stared some more—but only when they thought I wouldn't see them do it. Everything was different with all eyes on me and no Emily around to tell people to shut the hell up and mind their own business.

  I needed her. I didn’t realize how much.

  Unfortunately, my ponytail didn’t totally cover up the spot where my hair had been shaved. Also, I learned the hard way that I needed earplugs. School was a loud place. Just before the bells were supposed to ring, I had to remember to cover my ears in a way that didn’t make me look crazy. It was hard to do because I couldn’t keep track of time and the ground kept shifting beneath me.

  I put a printed class schedule in my pocket like some sort of freaked out freshman because I couldn’t remember where I was supposed to be. I turned down the wrong corridor and arrived to class late every single period except the one after lunch. I thought about hiding in the janitor’s closet all morning.

  Not having Emily around to talk to made the day drag on forever. Reno was a junior at a private high school in Windermere. I felt totally alone. Even Adam seemed to disappear: I expected to see him in Current Events but he wasn’t there. Ditching, probably. Maybe Mom was right. It was too soon.

  In art class, Miss Gibbons gave me a “Get Well” card that everyone had been made to sign and decorate. It seemed so weird. Like, I was well, wasn’t I? I was walking around, talking (occasionally), and collecting all my missed homework assignments. I even finished one of them when I lost track of what Mr. Logan was saying in trig. No one could even see how hard it was. Could they?

  They gave me a card to give to Emily, too, but its puniness upset me. She was in a coma. She wasn’t going to get well soon.

  CHAPTER 14

  THANKS FOR NOTHING, BRAIN

  On my second day back, I hid in the bathroom for all of fourth period. I needed a break and didn’t feel like dealing with the school nurse.

  It was nice and dark in there, no windows at all. I traced the graffiti written on and carved into the stall door with my fingers. There were song lyrics and instructions regarding which guys were hot and which guys would give you herpes. A whole argument was written out in Sharpie and there was a line drawing of a ship in a harbor that was actually kind of beautiful.

  “I heard she tried to hurt Emily. On purpose,” a girl said. I almost gave myself away by gasping. Instead, I kept as still as possible, barely breathing so they wouldn’t discover me and stop talking. This was the reason I’d come back: to get information.

  “I know. Josie says she’s completely crazy. You can tell because she doesn’t really talk, she just stares at people. Yesterday I saw her almost tip over in English Lit. She had to grab the back of a chair. And that hair, oh my God, just shave it off.”

  “Seriously. Did you know her dad is a carnie?” They laughed.

  A third girl’s voice was much quieter than the other two. I couldn’
t tell who it was. “I kind of feel bad for her,” she said.

  “What? Why?” the first one asked.

  “I don’t know. Why would she hurt Em? Weren’t they tight? My mom’s cousin had a brain injury once and he had to quit work for like a year. She’s just, you know, trying to get better. She can’t help it if Emily won’t wake up.”

  “Whatever,” the other two replied. The quiet girl gave up on defending me. I wished the gap between the stall doors was bigger so I could see who it was. The group cleared out and I sighed. I couldn’t hide forever.

  I went to the cafeteria. The bell rang and people started clamoring for their favorite tables. I spotted Josie, surrounded by people. I’d shared tater tots with Maria Regan and Tyler Frank—everyone called him Beans—a few times, even though Em and I didn’t usually sit at that table. None of them even made eye contact with me as I approached.

  “Josie, what have you been saying about me?” My face was only two feet from hers. She stopped chewing. I must have said the right words.

  “Robin, Jesus.” Josie smirked and swallowed her food. She was sitting under a poster that said KOME ON KOWBOYS! Someone had crossed out KOME and written CUM in its place. “You startled me.”

  “I heard the plate in your head made the metal detector go off this morning,” Maria snickered, and the whole table laughed. Beans was decent enough to not join in, but he didn’t say anything to stick up for me either. He drank from a can of Red Bull and wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “Really, Maria?” I looked at her, surprised she could be so awful. Literally two weeks ago she’d admitted to me she had no money for lunch and I’d given her five bucks. I turned back to Josie. “I overheard some girls. They said…you said…Emily. They said…” I wanted to kick something. None of the tables or chairs or people in the cafeteria stayed in one place. I felt like I was on a Tilt-a-Whirl, one of those awful carnival rides you only enjoy when you’re six. I grabbed the back of Beans’ chair to steady myself and tried to focus.

  “Spit it out, Saunders.” Josie looked amused, but also angry. What had I done to her? I couldn’t remember.

  “They said you’re telling people I tried to hurt Emily.” Finally. Thanks for nothing, brain.

  “I didn’t say anything,” she wiped her mouth with a napkin in a precise way, like she was trying to show how clean and perfect she was compared to me, with my messy ponytail and scattered homework pages and carnival ride brain. “But Emily was my girl. Unlike you. You better hope she recovers. Why isn’t she waking up? What did you do to her?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember,” I whispered. “I can’t…”

  “I can’t remember,” she repeated, her voice an octave higher and ten times louder than mine.

  I walked out of the cafeteria, tears streaming down my face.

  CHAPTER 15

  ALL ATTEMPTS AT NORMALCY ARE FUTILE

  “School is a nightmare,” I said.

  “So don’t go,” Reno replied.

  Mom was thrilled I had company because she always worked the dinner shift. We didn’t exactly have an emergency fund saved up, so she couldn’t skip any more work. I didn’t ask about my hospital bills. That could join the long list of other things we didn’t discuss, like sex and my father’s whereabouts and the occasional eviction notices on our front door.

  Reno had announced that he’d come over as much as I wanted him to. I was a little baffled about why he wanted to hang out in a depressing apartment with a girl who’d ignored him for the last several months, but I didn’t ask about that. I was just glad he was there even if it was a charity thing. His parents were probably making him check on me because they remembered how nice I’d been when I was, like, eleven.

  We were sitting on the floor in my room, our backs against my bed. “I can’t remember where any of the classrooms are and people are talking about me. Sometimes when I try to say something, I can’t figure out the right words, which makes me want to stab my own eye with a fork. I keep getting dizzy.”

  “Wait another week before you go back again.” He pushed up his glasses and stared at his laptop screen. The plan was to play video games, but I didn’t feel like it.

  “I just—I keep feeling like no matter what I do, it’s the wrong thing. If I stay home, I’ll drive myself crazy. What if she never wakes up? Everyone loathes me.” I made faces at Zelda’s bowl to distract myself from wanting to cry. I noticed that my Chagall print was gone and a Magritte print was in its place. Is Mom messing with my room? What the hell?

  “Not everyone, Rob.” Reno gently tapped the side of his foot against mine.

  I hugged him and immediately realized it was the wrong thing to do. The laptop was in the way and his face turned red. He didn’t try to hug me back until I’d already started pulling away. “Sorry,” I said. “I, um, don’t know how to be normal. I wish it were me in the coma.”

  “Robin… look, I don’t know how to be normal either, and I’ve never had any brain damage. That we know of.” He set his computer down and shut it.

  I sighed and smiled a little. Why was he so nice? “I want to go back Fun Towne…will you take me? I’ll buy you a churro.” I offered.

  “Yeah. I should be able to borrow the Jeep on Saturday. My parents are going to Sanibel for the weekend.”

  “Thanks.”

  We started a game of Scrabble online, but I was terrible. I kept trying to play words that weren’t words.

  CHAPTER 16

  NOTES TO SELF

  The coffee smelled good. I helped myself to some on Saturday morning and immediately spit it into the sink.

  I made a face and turned to Mom. “Coffee is disgusting.”

  She tried not to laugh, but I could see the crinkles around her eyes. She had papers strewn from one end of the kitchen table to the other. In the middle of it all, she typed slowly on her computer. College waited for no one. “Here. Let me put some hazelnut cream in it for you. It’s the only way to drink coffee. Try it.”

  I took another tentative sip. It was good. No, that wasn’t the right word at all. It was amazing. I close my eyes, breathing it in even as I swallowed. The sweetened cream balanced the dark bitter flavor to create something smooth and perfect. When I opened my eyes, my mom was grinning widely. I made a face at her and finished my cup in about four seconds and poured a second. “Hey, not too much caffeine, Robin.” I waved the warning away and took the cup back to my room with me. Coffee, coffee, coffee. I love you, I love you, I love you.

  A few minutes before Reno was supposed to pick me up, I opened my computer and checked Facebook. No one had posted much of anything on my wall in the last month, except for Dee and Adam. I had only fifty-seven friends and nothing interesting on my info page except for one kinda cool quote: “If we’re going to walk into walls, I want us running into them full speed.” It was a line from Mom’s favorite old TV show about a fake president.

  I clicked on the profiles of people who went to my school, hoping to find a status or comment I’d made that might jumpstart my stupid brain. Nothing. Emily’s page had been taken down. On Reno’s page, all I’d ever posted were links to xkcd cartoons and YouTube videos. He didn’t like Facebook and was always threatening to close his account. Reno was the type who took it seriously when parental types warned that future employers would look at your profile and put your resume in the trash when they saw pictures of you doing body shots or whatever. As if Reno would ever do a body shot.

  I thought about Dr. Kline for some reason. I knew he was talking about things like directions to the movie theater and homework assignments and instructions for how to open a locker when he told me to write notes to myself. But I wanted to do more than that. I felt empty. I had no idea who I was. I didn’t remember ever knowing, really.

  I clicked on my screen and brought up a blank document. I stared at it for a few moments. The white screen and the blinking cursor stared back at me, daring me to write something true.

  I like coffee with hazelnut cream
.

  It was satisfying, writing it. There was one thing in the world that made sense, finally. I knew how I liked my coffee.

  It was something.

  I hit enter, ready to add something else. I waited. What did people say when you asked them about themselves? I suppose most told you what sort of stuff they liked. That’s what I had just done. But if I listed every band I’d ever liked and every food I’d ever enjoyed and every book I’d ever read, would I really know who I was?

  I thought about how some of the people at school cultivated a specific oddness, like wearing a newsboy cap every single day or taking their sandwiches apart and rebuilding them in a certain order before taking the first bite. Did they even like their stupid hat or care if every bite tasted the same, or were they just trying to be notable?

  I stood and opened the top drawer of my dresser and dug around for a minute. It was full of receipts and old make-up and batteries and a tiny flashlight. I found a small mirror and sat down again, looking at my reflection. I searched my face for something to write about myself, and saw my boring brown hair and my dad’s eyes staring back at me. People always said how much we looked alike, even when I was very small.

  I closed my eyes, remembering something from a long time ago.

  I wanted to leave. Daddy had been chatting with one of his friends, a bartender inside this cheesy tourist restaurant called Margaritaville, forever. The bartender was getting mad because his boss kept shouting at him that he was getting behind on orders. Daddy was getting mad because I was whining.

  “Daddy! I want to touch the lava,” I said over and over. The margarita volcano enthralled me. We always played “hot lava” at preschool and now there was real live hot lava right in front of me. Sure, it wasn’t orange, but the green color meant it had to be mutant lava. Even better.