My Beating Teenage Heart

by C. K. Kelly Martin

  There are still so many gaps in my memory that I can’t say for certain that those three weeks at Farlain Lake were the best of my life, but I don’t need perfect recall to realize they were something special.

  Shortly after we got back to Strathedine I remember talking to my mother, who I knew wouldn’t tease me the way Celeste had, about all the good times I’d had with Callum. “It’s nice that you’re friends,” she said, and I didn’t tell her that I thought Callum hadn’t spoken to me much the previous year because I was a girl and younger than him. I beamed at her and said, “I hope next year at Farlain Lake is exactly like this one.”

  Nothing’s ever exactly the same way twice. I can’t remember the changes yet—my eighth year is still shrouded in mystery, but there’s a strange murkiness surrounding it that makes me wonder if I’m better off leaving the future forgotten and hanging on the near perfection that was that second trip to Farlain Lake. Hanging on for as long as I can, just like that night Callum and I played war on the beach in the moonlight.

  ten

  breckon

  My folks say they want me to see a therapist. They tell me they don’t think I’m sleeping well and that they know I’m having trouble settling back in to school. Settling back in. Like there’s any chance of that happening. Like a couple weeks after Skylar died I’m supposed to be able to go on with my life as though nothing happened.

  “Are you telling me you’re not having any trouble settling back in?” I ask defensively. Going through the motions isn’t the same thing as settling back in. I hear muffled crying from behind closed doors every day. My parents both went back to work on Monday but their eyes are permanently tired, and when we talk, our words are just noise.

  My mom nestles vcar>

  “It’s a grief group,” my father adds. “And we think you might benefit from talking to someone too.”

  “I’m not going to any group.” It was bad enough everyone staring at me at the funeral and then school, my first couple of days back. If I have to sit in a room with fifteen other people who feel like they’re being pulled under, I won’t make it out of there.

  “It doesn’t have to be a group like ours,” my mother says. “Barbara and Sean know someone, a therapist who saw their daughter for a while when she was having trouble.”

  Barbara and Sean’s daughter was anorexic. I remember Mom going to see her in the hospital two years ago. She got so skinny that she almost died. Imagine starving yourself until you’re just skin and bone and your body essentially begins to feed on itself in order to survive. I didn’t get it at the time. I don’t entirely understand it now but I think I have an idea of how Barbara and Sean’s daughter must’ve felt when she was starving herself. I bet it didn’t feel voluntary at all. I bet that it made more sense to her than doing anything else.

  “I worry about you,” my mom says, her eyes beginning to mist. “I don’t want you to think this was your fault, Breckon.”

  I can’t lie about that. “It was my fault.” She knows it too. We all know it. I’m the one who wasn’t there when it counted.

  “It was one of those things,” my dad says in a brittle voice. “Just one of those things. Nobody can keep their eyes on anyone twenty-four hours a day.”

  Logically I understand that to be true but I also know that emotionally he’s lying. There’s no way in hell that my father doesn’t blame me. Even if mostly he doesn’t let himself, there have to be times when he wishes I did things differently that day. One tiny choice, in a hundred other tiny choices you make a day, and everything would’ve been different.

  We’ve had this conversation before, the morning before the funeral, and my dad told me then that if he blamed anyone he blamed himself for not being there when it happened. “You can’t always be everywhere we go,” I told him.

  “No, I can’t,” my father replied, looking me in the eye. “And neither can you, Breckon. Don’t take that burden on yourself—if you do you’ll never get out from under it.”

  He acted as if I had a choice on how to look at this, but I knew better. Nobody can keep their eyes on anyone twenty-four hours a day but if you’re the one who wasn’t looking when it mattered, it’s still your fault. The facts are what they are.

  I didn’t reply to my father then, and I don’t reply now. I can see in my parents’ faces that they won’t let up. I’ve let the therapist idea gain traction by skipping classes and haunting Skylar’s room earlier { rooices you. My parents are in orange alert mode.

  “Just give her a try,” Mom urges.

  I don’t say yes or no. It doesn’t matter what I think. I hunch over, lock my hands around the back of my neck and stare down at the living room carpet. How can I feel so empty and still want to fight them? After all the pain I’ve caused my parents I should be willing to do this without making them worry and beg.

  I can’t ditch any more classes either. From now on I need to convince my mother and father that I’m doing as well as can be expected, given the circumstances. I need to say, the next time we have this conversation, that I miss Skylar but that what happened to her wasn’t my fault.

  I need to lie.

  “I’ll go meet her,” I tell my mom and dad. “But I’m not promising I’ll go into therapy.”

  My mother nods so readily that it makes my throat swell. “We only want you to have the opportunity to talk to someone about your feelings. We’re not saying it has to be permanent.”

  With that settled, Mom confesses that she’s already spoken with the therapist, who has a cancellation tomorrow after school and can fit me in. Her name’s Eva Kannan and I’m supposed to speak to her for fifty minutes.

  I’m sure what Eva Kannan and I have in mind for those fifty minutes are two vastly different things. She’ll want to unravel me—break me down into bruised pieces and shove them under a magnifying glass, but I can’t let that happen. The most important thing, during those fifty minutes, is that I don’t crumble. I’ll have to hold it together, no matter what, because every time I break makes it that much harder to keep going.

  And this shouldn’t even be about me.

  None of this should be happening.

  I’m so sick of feeling my parents’ sad eyes on me, their cheeks carved into expressions of concern, that I stand up and mumble, “I think I’ll head over to Jules’s place, if that’s okay. We have an econ thing we need to work on.”

  I haven’t been to econ in two days and Jules has no clue that I’m on my way over. She’s been trying to check in with me at every opportunity but I’ve been shitty at returning phone calls and text messages over the past few days.

  After a moment’s pause Dad tells me not to be too late. I say I won’t and then jump in the car, thinking about how I’ve screwed myself over this week and about all the things I won’t tell Eva Kannan. When I get to Jules’s house I notice her friend Renee’s car in the driveway next to her mom’s Acura and almost change my mind about stopping by. Maybe I’d have better luck at Ty’s or Rory’s. There are aspects of me that they don’t know as well as Jules does but they expect less. They don’t need to feel like they’re tapped into my soul to consider us friends.

  I used to like that Jul {liked into es and I could talk about anything. But now I don’t know if I want to talk. My brain’s so knotted and foggy that I don’t know what I want. But this is the first place I thought of when I wanted to get away. That has to mean something.

  So I park next to the curb in front of Jules’s house and ring the doorbell before I can change my mind. Jules opens the door in the same punk kilt dress she was wearing at school earlier. She had thick black tights on under it then but now her legs are bare, which makes the dress look shorter and sexier and I know if she opened the door looking like that a few weeks ago—and no one was around—that I’d start running my hands over her the second the door was closed behind us.

  Jules gets as horny as I used to, maybe more, and the sight of all that skin flashes me back to the first time she asked me to work m
y fingers inside her. Being naked with Jules, two of my fingers moving slowly inside her, seemed as intimate as sex, but now the memory feels like it must belong to someone else. I can’t imagine wanting to touch her like that.

  “Hey,” Jules says, jumping forward to hug me. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  “I saw Renee’s car,” I tell her, giving her a squeeze before I stand back.

  “She and Cameron are hanging out.” She swivels to look at the staircase, which I guess signals that they’re up in her room. Renee’s a senior but she and Jules know each other from doing school plays together. A month ago both Jules and Renee were in The Importance of Being Earnest. Because I helped Jules practice her lines for the audition I still have phrases like, “I hope, Cecily, you are not inattentive,” swimming around in my head.

  “But they won’t be here long,” Jules adds. “They have to pick their mom up at the hospital.” It’s not that she’s sick—that’s just where Renee and Cameron’s mother works. Usually brothers and sisters don’t hang out together as friends much but Renee and Cameron are step-siblings and so close that some people at school used to make incest jokes about them when they first moved here.

  I hardly knew Cameron before I got together with Jules but now I count him as a friend. Sometimes, when he’s not with Renee, he hangs out with my other friends, which is one of the reasons the jokes stopped. So many people have his back now that making a shitty joke isn’t worth the trouble it could cause.

  I go upstairs with Jules and say hi to Cameron and Renee, who are sitting on the floor listening to music that I don’t know how to categorize. It’s like classical violin, jazz-rock fusion, folk and pop all rolled into one.

  “This is pretty cool,” I say. “Who is it?”

  Cameron hands over a CD. “Doctor Draw. We saw him at a jazz-blues festival the other night, playing electric violin with a backing band. He tore up the crowd. I thought I was going to get trampled in the line to buy his CD afterwards.”

  Meanwhile Renee’s painting her nails orange and she stops and points one of her orange-tipped fingers at me. “W {me.align=e can’t wait to see you at Boleyn’s. Do you know when you’re playing yet?”

  Boleyn’s is a café in Bourneville, a bigger town bordering Strathedine to the west. They let anyone who puts their name down on the night play music, do spoken word or read regular poetry. I was planning on having a few songs ready by the time school lets out near the end of June. I’m not a natural and wanted to get a lot of practice hours in first—the only people who’ve even see me play are Jules and Skylar.

  I shrug and say I haven’t been thinking about it much lately. The truth is, I have no intention of playing at Boleyn’s but I don’t want to get into that now.

  Jules is standing behind me and she grabs my hand and guides me over to the bed to sit down next to her. “Are your folks on their date night?” I ask. I haven’t seen or heard any sign of them since I got here and I know Mr. and Mrs. Pacquette try to have a date night once a week. That sounds like something a person like Eva Kannan would suggest if your marriage was in trouble but Mr. and Mrs. Pacquette just do it because they like to hang out together.

  “They went to a new Thai restaurant near city hall,” Jules tells me. “My dad’s been there for a couple work lunches and can’t stop talking about their curry duck.”

  “How can anyone eat duck?” Renee asks, grimacing as she seals up the nail polish. “We feed ducks in the park. They’re way too cute to eat.”

  “Once they’re cooked they’re charred birds just like chickens,” Cameron quips, tilting his wrist so he can glance at his watch. “We should go. Mom’s shift’s going to be over in a couple minutes.”

  The three of us exchange goodbyes and Jules follows Cameron and Renee out of the room to walk them down to the front door. The second before they left there wasn’t a bad intention in my head but in a flash I realize there’s an opportunity at hand and I’m up slinking soundlessly towards the Pacquettes’ bedroom and then their en suite bathroom, throwing their medicine cabinet open and scoping out Mr. Pacquette’s sleeping pills. He has a practically full bottle—he won’t notice a few more missing, and now I won’t have to ask Jules or worry about dipping into whatever my parents are taking, which, for all I know, might not do the trick.

  My heart pounds as I open the bottle and stuff a fistful of pills down one of my front pockets. I race back into the hallway and have nearly made it to the safety of Jules’s room when she appears at the top of the stairs. Her eyes whip over to me and freeze me to the spot underneath my feet. Air sticks in my throat. I can’t stop blinking.

  “What’s going on?” Jules demands.

  I shake my head, and during that pause my brain kicks back to life. “I felt dizzy,” I murmur. “I was going to the bathroom for water.” The second upstairs bathroom is only a few feet away and I motion to it behind me. “But then everything started going black.” I slump down on the floor and duck my head like I’m fighting to stay conscious. “So I th {x20en eveought I better lie down and turned around to go back.”

  Jules’s expression morphs from confusion into worry. “Put your head between your knees,” she commands, dropping down next to me.

  I nod a little, my head still between my knees. I didn’t know I could be such a good liar; I’ve nearly sold myself on the idea that I was about to pass out.

  Jules watches over me for a couple more minutes before slipping into the bathroom for water. She hands me the blue ceramic cup from her bathroom and I drink. “You really had me scared for a minute there,” she tells me. “But I think you’re beginning to look a little better.”

  “I don’t know what happened. Everything just started to fade.” I finish off the rest of the water. “But I’m feeling okay now. I think whatever it was is passing.”

  “Sit here a bit longer,” Jules advises, her hand on my leg. “To be on the safe side.” Then she adds, “Are you sleeping lately?”

  “Sleeping, eating, all of it. I guess it was just one of those weird things out of nowhere.”

  Jules stares skeptically into my eyes. “Maybe it’s stress.”

  “You sound like you’ve been talking to my parents.”

  Jules’s fingers fall into her lap. Sitting down on the floor like we are, her kilt dress is riding up, giving me a peek at her green panties that makes me want to tell her to cover herself.

  “They say I should see someone,” I continue. “They think I can’t handle what happened with Skylar.”

  “It’s not about handling it,” Jules says quickly. “I mean, if it was me, I think I’d need to talk to someone. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea.”

  “Just because I missed a couple classes doesn’t mean I need to see a shrink, Jules.” It doesn’t feel good to say that from the floor outside the bathroom with a bunch of Mr. Pacquette’s pills in my pocket, and I shoot up and stomp towards her room.

  Jules follows me in so that we’re both sitting on her bed again. She’s quiet the way I need her to be and I add, “I just need space. And time. And for everyone to understand that.”

  “Breckon.” Her little finger locks around mine. “I only want whatever will be good for you.” Her finger wriggles against mine. The first time we held hands it was actually holding little fingers, just like this, on the ferry from Battery Park to Liberty Island. We’d been hanging out a lot on that trip but I didn’t know for sure anything was happening between us until I felt her finger stroke mine.

  “I know,” I tell her. I wonder if she has any idea how badly I want to let myself fall to pieces when I’m with her. I could crawl under the covers, drag her under with me and stay t {me I want to here forever. But it still wouldn’t be enough. Nothing would. I feel like we’re thousands of miles apart, even though she’s right here next to me, clasping my little finger with hers.

  I’m relieved that Eva Kannan’s a middle-aged woman with deep crow’s-feet and laugh lines. The closer she is to my age, the weirder this would seem. H
er office is above a European bakery and I think about Barbara and Sean’s anorexic daughter having to walk by there and face the smell of freshly baked cakes, tarts and cookies before each therapy session. From upstairs, I can’t smell them anymore but I should’ve bought something to munch on so I’d have something to do with my hands.

  When I first get inside I call the therapist Mrs. Kannan, but she says I can call her Eva instead, if I like. “Okay,” I tell her. Once upon a time I might have wanted to make a stupid joke about feeling free to call me Breckon too but now I don’t bother.

  Eva Kannan’s office looks more like a university professor’s than a therapist’s. All the leather-bound hardcovers I can see are novels instead of psychology books—classic fiction but newer books too. “It’s a hobby of mine,” Eva says in a clipped accent when she notices me studying her shelves. Eva looks South Asian but she sounds like she grew up in England. “I like to collect books—preferably signed.”

  “Why signed?” I bet people are always trying to out-shrink the shrink and I remind myself that’s a bad strategy. She’s the one with the degree—outwitting an amateur would be a cakewalk. I just need to get out of here without revealing too much about myself—give her the impression that I’ll keep my head above water without any kind of intervention from her or my parents.

  “They’re rarer,” Eva says thoughtfully. “But I suppose they also seem more personal.”

  I nod like that makes sense about the signatures and press my thumbs together on my lap. My bandaged left hand seems like a declaration of guilt. A regular person would ask what happened to me and wince when I explained but here I feel like a deep-sea diver being circled by a shark.

  “I spoke to your mother on the phone,” Eva tells me. “She seems very concerned about you.”