Little Panic

by Amanda Stern

  As the next person speaks instead, and sweat leaks off me, Taylor stands, walks around the circle, and crouches behind me. A moment later, I feel his hot breath squatting on my neck. “Hey, can I borrow you a sec?”

  Another wave of heat and sweat careens through me as I stand, unsteady amid the wild bucking frenzy inside me. On shaky legs I follow Taylor out of the room and into the main hall, knowing he’s about to ask me to leave, worrying because I left my backpack behind, and I’ll have to go get it, and everyone will see I’ve been rejected. My breath is caught in a very narrow gap inside my esophagus. My life feels like it’s about to be ruined, and I am just waiting to find out how. Taylor sits on a wooden bench and taps the emptiness beside him. His black hair is shiny and thick, slicked back by a waxy pomade. He cups my shoulder with his inked-up hand and leans in close, like he’s going to tell me a secret.

  “I just want to let you know that you can tell us anything,” Taylor says to me. “All right, kiddo?” A surge of energy, like adrenaline, goes through me. He’s looking at me as though he wants to listen. This is like Mr. Indresano’s attention, but more intense. “That’s what we’re here for, to, like, help you.”

  “Okay,” I say, cringing at how inarticulate I sound.

  “Whatever it is you feel you can’t say, you can say here. We’ve heard it all.” I nod, not wanting to say okay for a second time. “You don’t need to hide. You’re like me; I’d recognize that anger anywhere.”

  I’m confused. Is the audition that I’m supposed to say something, and I said nothing, or is the audition that there is something I should have known to say, and I didn’t? I’m nervous, waiting for the part where he tells me to leave. Is suffering, and being harmed, really the prerequisite for being talented? Am I supposed to get myself into bad situations so I have something to share every time?

  “So, you want to tell me out here, in private, what’s going on at home?” he asks. I could run now, and then hope Tatum takes my backpack home for me. I’ll have to figure out a way to never cross paths with these people again. I certainly can’t come to the Upper West Side for the rest of my life. I shake my head slightly, not too hard, but enough so he can read it. “Okay, I get it. You need time. I respect that. Just don’t forget, when you’re ready, I’m here, okay?”

  I nod again and he says, “Let’s go back inside.”

  As I follow him inside it dawns on me that he thinks I’m hiding something. He read my panicked no as a secret, an enemy war code he wants to break. Another person might reach out, tap him, and tell him the truth, that I’m not hiding family secrets, that I’m scared, and also stupid, that the world and all its rules and directions do something strange to my body and brain, but I can’t do that because that’s what I’m hiding. Not to mention, no one’s ever worried about me the way he just did, and I sort of liked it. It felt good to get the attention of an older, good-looking tattooed man, one who isn’t trying to have sex with me but just wants to help.

  This is a new feeling, expansive and open, unlike any of my other emotions. It actually feels good, like I’m the test and he wants to solve me. All I’ve ever wanted, since I was small, was for someone to worry about me, to crack me open and look at the inside of me, to get to the root of my truth and recognize me for my emotions. No one ever has, before now. Maybe with him I won’t always have to perform to distract him from seeing the real me, because it’s the real me he wants. Even if he was searching for the wrong thing, he probed, and it broke open a new feeling in me.

  * * *

  Over beige cafeteria trays the next day, Tatum reenacts the whole thing for Amelia and Madison.

  “That’s not acting,” she says. “That was like…creepy and weird.”

  “I didn’t mind it,” I say.

  “And, like, what did he say to you, that guy?”

  “Just that I could tell him anything. That I didn’t have to hide,” I tell her.

  “What a moron. Uh, hello! I’m not telling you freaks anything private!”

  I make my face laugh along with the others, but I loved acting, or whatever that was called, and I especially like Taylor. I’ve already decided to join if I get accepted to the group, but Tatum hates those people and refuses to go back.

  Each meeting starts with the same group therapy session. Every time I suddenly remember I forgot to get myself into a bad situation and have no suffering to contribute, which sparks my terror and mutes me up, which incites his worry and sends him tapping my shoulder and leading me outside or off into the corner where he tries to get a confession. I look forward to this concern, hoping that this will be the time he breaks the enemy code inside me, the one I don’t have a name for. After a few sessions I realize he’s still on the wrong track, but I’m not sure how to redirect him, to let him know my suffering is different from what he thinks.

  I like the acting kids a lot. More than I like my own friends at school. These guys are creative—they’re misfits, weirdos, and, most important, they’ve created a little nook in the world where I start to feel at home. The other kids meet on the stoop of the town house I learn belongs to Gwen’s parents to hang out and smoke before we have to go in, and soon I’m racing out of school to go meet them, not really caring what Tatum, Madison, or Amelia is doing, feeling superior somehow, hanging out with older kids, and boys. I start smoking, too, practicing until I can inhale, and I’m amazed at how much it comforts me. It’s like a replacement for my two sucking-fingers, which I miss. After the late-afternoon teen confessional, the clichéd acting games and writing exercises, Taylor and Gwen take a cab downtown. Since I’m the only kid member who lives downtown, they start offering me rides. I turn them down until finally I don’t. I try not to listen to their conversation, but they make it hard to ignore. “I know it’s only 6 p.m., but I’m already hungry for dessert,” Taylor says.

  “Yeah, what are you hungry for?” Gwen asks him.

  He leans over and puts a hand near her crotch. “Boston cream pie.”

  Gwen giggles and smacks him, and he winks at me like he’s entirely positive I understand. They treat me like someone who’s had life experience. On the other hand, they also seem eager to be my life experience, especially Taylor, who never fails to remind me that I can call him any time, day or night. If I need them, if anything bad is happening to me, if I’m in trouble, if my parents are hurting me, he and Gwen are the people to call. He treats life like an after-school special.

  Maybe it is. What do I know about life?

  When I don’t call, their concern for me grows, and eventually their attention on me is so concentrated the other kids in the acting school start complaining that I’m getting special treatment. Some days, Madison, Amelia, and Tatum will walk with me to the town house to catch a glimpse of Taylor, whom they call “weird but hot,” and to watch the cool kids smoke and skateboard down the stoop. There’s a comfort and a strange sense of control in watching my snobbish friends feel out of their element, since that’s how I feel in the world all the time. Occasionally I’ll catch Taylor taking one of the kids aside, to a corner, where he seems to be confiding in them, and maybe it’s paranoia, but I feel like it’s about me, because sometimes they look over, and, afterward, whichever kid Taylor was talking to starts being extra nice to me.

  “Taylor said you’re filled with rage and anger,” Cole says to me one day after a chat with Taylor. He looks both impressed and frightened.

  “He did?” I ask, surprised and curious about this enraged and angry person he sees. Do I really look that tough?

  I’m starting to feel obligated to give him what he wants, but I don’t know how. It’s becoming clear to me that adults are most attentive when something is wrong. For instance, my stepsister, Holly, is constantly stealing things from school and from our bedrooms; and now, instead of Eddie, she’s the center of attention. Kara, Daniel, and David are all in college and never around. I am tired and embarrassed of having so many tutors and fed up that I’m still getting tested without having a
name for what’s wrong with me. I desperately want it all to end, and I beg and plead with my mom to make it stop, but she tells me I’m being difficult and we’re not having this discussion anymore “because I said so, that’s why.” It’s infuriating. I need something from her she can’t give me, but I don’t know what that is.

  A few months into the semester, Taylor calls me at home. He wants to see how I’m doing. He’s never called me before and I’m surprised. It feels weirdly invasive, like I found him hiding in my bedroom. Does he call all the acting kids at home?

  “How’s it going over there?” he asks.

  “Good,” I say. “Just about to eat dinner.”

  “Aww, all by yourself? Do you want me to come over?”

  Now I’m really confused. “I’m not all by myself,” I tell him.

  “The TV doesn’t count.”

  “I know,” I say. Suddenly, I feel mute. No matter what I say, he answers like I’ve said something else.

  “Whatever’s happening to you, I can help you,” he says. “I’ve been there before. My parents, they neglected me, too. You’re not alone, runt,” he says.

  I’m hurt by the term “runt” but try to ignore it.

  “I’m really okay,” I admit, unclear what I’m supposed to be saying.

  He sighs. “I know your pain. You don’t have to protect them. I see your anger.”

  His calls become frequent and so do his questions. When no one is home, I even let him come over. I don’t tell my friends at school, and by instinct I know to keep him away from my family. I like his attention, and even if his questions are too personal and off the mark, he’s still asking. If only I could get him to see that the badness isn’t around me, it’s in me. I’ve tried telling him that there’s nothing wrong with the people around me, it’s that there’s something wrong with the person I am, but instead he says I wouldn’t think that about myself if the people around me were good. If I do get him to believe there’s something wrong inside me, he might run away and leave me alone, and I can’t risk being left. Someone else needs to say what’s wrong with me first. And I’m hopeful Taylor will.

  Whenever I mention a guy I have a crush on, he asks me if I’ve slept with him. “Howard Jones?” I ask, incredulous. “I wish.”

  No matter how many times I say that no, I haven’t slept with this him or that him or any him for that matter, he keeps asking me. It’s like he wouldn’t be able to hear me even if I screamed in his ear, “I’m a VIRGIN!” Taylor wants something from me that feels different from what I want from him. Out of all the acting kids, it’s me he’s always watching.

  “Maybe I’ve been reading this all wrong, and you don’t need my help,” he says. “You know how many girls would kill for this attention?”

  He is threatening to take himself away and disappear. The sand timer is running out, and I have to pick an answer. What if this is my only chance to ever get someone to see me? I feel pressure to be the version of me he sees—that’s going to be the only right answer. And suddenly I realize it’s happening again: All the tests, all this time, have been meant to change me and make me better, and now Taylor is telling me in no uncertain terms that who and how I am isn’t good enough for him either. He wants me to be the person he knows how to fix. Right now, I am a question whose answer he knows and all I have to do is match it, and I’ll be right. Will I never get help if I don’t start acting like the person he wants to help? Is this what real life is then? An endless effort to match the story of yourself someone else tells?

  I have no choice. I start moving toward that angry, brooding version of me, and each time a dizzy hot spray sweeps over me. All these assumptions he makes about me push me into playing the part, and it all feels like a big game, one immersive acting exercise. I don’t stop him when he starts answering for me, with answers that aren’t even remotely true.

  If I’m invited to join another actor’s family for dinner, he’ll say, “Amanda doesn’t need to ask her parents. No one will notice she’s missing.” When Paul is telling me the proper way to roll a joint for a scene we’re doing: “I don’t think you need to explain drugs to Amanda. She knows plenty.” I feel buried a bit deeper with every answer, but I don’t know how to contradict him any more than I already have, or how to extract myself. I know the person he’s inventing on my behalf isn’t me, but I’m not sure I can identify the person who is me. I just know there’s something I aspire to about the girl he’s invented, a girl who isn’t afraid of the world, just mad at it. The girl he’s invented not only understands her emotions, she knows how to manage them. The girl he’s invented has problems, but they’re not my problems. Taylor has created a new me, a me who is cool and tough and doesn’t need saving, and I love that version of me so much. It’s way better than the me my mother has invented, the me that never understands, is incapable of doing anything for herself, and gets everything wrong.

  I eagerly become the fucked-up mess Taylor desperately wants to save. The truth is, I am fucked up, and troubled, but I don’t really have a reason. My parents don’t abuse me, and yet I feel abused. I’m not adopted, and yet I feel adopted. I know I exist, and yet I don’t feel seen; and now someone not only sees me but wants to be my hero, and I’ve always wanted a hero.

  When we get to Mercer Street, they invite me upstairs to their apartment. It smells like Irish Spring and vacuum fumes, but suddenly something doesn’t feel right. I’m instantly nervous when Taylor closes the apartment door. I watch his hand as he locks it. The final click starts the ignition on my heart. We’re on the sixth floor. I can’t jump out the window. They offer me a beer, tell me to relax on the couch, and then Taylor pulls out a bag of pot and hands it to Gwen, who begins rolling a joint. My coat feels too heavy on my chest. I’m probably the only fourteen-year-old in this city who’s never smoked pot. I look at the clock.

  “Aw, man. I really have to go. I’m gonna be late,” I say.

  “Like anyone will even notice you’re not there,” Taylor says.

  Right. Right. That. I’m trapped. I have to unzip my coat because it’s weighing too hard on my chest. Too much pressure and my heart might stop altogether, but the unzipping makes them think I’m staying. I feel like Irene Cara in Fame when she’s pressured to take off her shirt during a screen test. Gwen lights the joint and passes it to Taylor, then he passes it to me. Are they going to make me take off my shirt? I take the joint and the requisite drag, but I cough hard on the inhale. They ripple with laughter and my mind is screaming, These people are not safe! and I fucked everything up! at the same time. I hand the joint back to Gwen and then motion to the clock and the door again.

  “Really,” I say. “I have to go.”

  “Oh please, you can smoke a little more,” Taylor says, handing the joint back to me, although I’ve just had it. After the second hit, a sweat-inducing nausea begins to rise and then I feel it, a tickle in my throat. Nothing is more embarrassing than allowing my actual truth to escape in front of these people. Any bodily function that reveals I’m human, and not the character they’ve invented, must be blocked at the pass. My own human self is fragile and sensitive; I can control my performance but not my bodily functions, which threaten to topple the entire empire. The only way to get beyond the moment is to move past the cough and the only way to move past the cough is to cough.

  Instead of scratching the tickle and sending it away, however, the cough seems to thicken it, morph the tickle into an object, something lodged there, not sliding down. My fear escalates that I will never catch my breath, or I’ll vomit or choke on my vomit and die. Am I allergic to pot? Can you die from pot allergies? Are they on to me now because I am unwittingly giving myself away? I cannot stop coughing. I am dying, which is the most embarrassing thing a human can do. Once you’re dead, you have no control. People can do anything to you; they can move your limbs and contort your body into mortifying positions, mocking you in death, changing the world’s impression of you. Gwen hands me a glass of water, which does not he
lp, and I know I have to leave, to get out before the unseemly and weak process of dying begins right here on their freshly waxed and polished hardwood floor.

  I feel the familiar loop begin: sweaty palms, tightening chest, the walls closing in, and the dizzy start of floating away. I manage to squeak out, “Bathroom.” I turn on the faucet and throw up in the toilet. I stumble out and murmur something about my watch, something about a reason, something about getting in trouble. At the word “trouble,” they let me go.

  On the street I can breathe again, and I feel I’ve escaped death, but a block or so later I find myself leaning over pissed-on piles of paper and Styrofoam cups, throwing up my entire day. When I’m finished, I turn and look up to their building, worried they are watching me, laughing and pointing. I worry that they’ll pass this garbage can and recognize my vomit.

  I walk home, but I must be really stoned because the blocks look less and less familiar and I worry that I’ve entered a part of the world that doesn’t exist. I stop, and I feel the out-of-body experience begin. These streets seem to tangle whenever I walk down them. My gut wraps its familiar fist around itself, squeezing out the same sensations I had when I was lost on these streets that first day of sixth grade, only this time I’m stoned and can’t call my mom and have her save me. I don’t know how to rescue myself; I’m never getting home. It occurs to me finally to look up at a street sign, and that’s when I see I’m on Lafayette Street and walking the wrong way. I can’t manage to get anything right, not getting stoned, not walking home stoned.

  I don’t know where anyone is when I get home, but I run straight to my bathroom and throw up several more times. The intercom goes off in my room. It’s my mom: “Are you home?” she asks.

  “Yes, sick,” I manage.

  “Did you take anything?”

  “No, I’m fine. Need to sleep.”

  “Okay, I’ll leave some Tylenol outside your door.”