“I’m sorry you’re a lousy murderer,” he says condescendingly. I wish I hadn’t told him. I walk away, angry at myself and at him. My self-directed anger is nothing new, but the anger I feel for Jem is of a different breed. I accepted him and his demons before I knew what they were, and as soon as I share mine, he insults me and passes judgment.
“If it makes you feel any better, the whole experience wrecked me,” I tell him bitterly.
“Why would that make me feel better?”
I shrug. “Justice. I didn’t get off scot-free, even though I did keep my thumb.” I don’t know why I bother, but I flex my hand in demonstration. My thumb joint doesn’t move like it should. “I can’t grip stuff properly anymore.”
“What a fucking tragedy.”
“I got in trouble a lot after Tessa died; racked up a few citations in a couple of months and ended up with some community service and probation.”
“Some justice,” Jem scoffs. “You fuck up that hard and you get a few weeks of picking up garbage along the highway? That’s bullshit.”
“She died in August and I got a psych detainment just before Christmas.”
Jem gives me a look that I’ve seen a hundred times before—like I have a second head or a bomb under my shirt. “A psych detainment?”
“I tried to kill myself.”
Jem doesn’t say a word.
“I missed Tessa’s funeral because I needed surgery to repair the ligaments in my hand, and I missed Christmas because I was in a mental hospital.”
“You think she would have wanted you there?” he says sourly. How good of him to consider that this isn’t easy for me to talk about.
“I don’t know.” I resolve not to let him make me cry. “I know you don’t care, but those three weeks in the psych ward were where a lot of my issues began.”
“Uh, I think they began before that,” he says dryly. “That’s how you landed in a psych ward in the first place.”
“What the fuck do you know?”
“Did your parents kick you out when you turned eighteen? Is that why you’re living with Frank?”
“I left voluntarily.”
Jem snorts derisively and looks the other way. “Do you have any more water?” he asks moodily.
“Piss off.”
“Seriously, I need to take my meds.”
I laugh humorlessly. “You want my help to take pills? That’s rich.”
Jem grabs my arm and makes me stop. He glares at me and reaches into his messenger bag, pulling out bottles of pills. He shoves these into my hands and pulls out more. There are nine bottles in all. I don’t recognize the names on half the labels. I’m guessing those are transplant-related.
“I’m just gonna dump my baggage on you all at once whether you like it or not,” he snaps. “There. You want to help me sort through dosages? Listen to every fucking thing about what each drug does to me? Let’s see if you can get it right this time or if you kill someone else, you reckless bitch.”
I take a deep breath through my nose and try to respond civilly. “I get it. I’ll shut up. Forget I ever trusted you.” I dump the pills against his chest. He catches some and others drop to the ground.
“Willa!” he calls after me as I march away. I don’t stop. Jem frantically packs up his bottles and jogs after me. The short distance is enough to wind him.
“Just let me take a bottle.” He grabs my backpack and I throw him off.
“No. You don’t treat me like that and then ask me for favors.”
“Please.”
“Why should I?”
“Because,” he yells, out of patience, “it fucking hurts!”
That brings me up short. I stop and study him. Underneath his frustration and anger there is a definite look of pain. I should have noticed it, but I was too distracted and angry at him to see properly.
“All the walking, the stress, it adds up. I need to take—”
I swing my backpack off my shoulders before he can finish and take out the only bottle of fluid left. It’s just a few swallows of orange mint tea; not enough to take nine bottles’ worth of pills with, but enough to take his Oxy.
“We’ll stop for more water at the gas station along the way, and you can take the rest,” I tell him.
“Don’t do me any favors,” he says bitterly, and throws back three pills in one swallow to save fluid. He makes a face as they get stuck at the back of his throat and wastes more tea trying to get them down.
“Plug your nose,” I say tiredly. “It makes the pills go down with less water.”
Jem gives me that snarky look again. “Did you pinch her nose? Or did you learn that taking sedatives from a Dixie cup in the nuthouse?”
“Yeah, actually, I did.” I snatch the empty bottle back from him. I walk away and it takes Jem a second to follow.
“How long were you in the psych ward?”
“Three weeks. I had to detox and do some therapy before they’d let me be an outpatient.”
“Detox. You were drugging yourself up too?” This time I refrain from hitting him.
“It’s a convenient way to avoid living with yourself. It was mostly pot, anyway. The stuff I had to wean off of was antidepressants. I’d been referred to this grief counselor and the dosage was never quite right.”
“Are you still on antidepressants?”
“I got off them last year.”
“What about therapy?”
“After I was released I was put into this group therapy program at the rec center. It was the only one my parents’ insurance would cover.”
“Did it work?”
“No. It made things worse. I started hanging out with the bad influences from Group, and it all went downhill from there. My school’s guidance counselor liked the idea of sending me to a reform school but my parents didn’t—they think reform schools have nothing but fuck ups and criminals. I’d just learn new tricks and more bad habits. Dad wanted to ship me off to military school.”
“So you could learn to be even colder?”
I’m cold for a reason, damn it. It’s not easy to live with this shit.
“Given the choice, I’d take the reform school. I’ve spent enough time around junkies and thieves to know how to screw with their heads. It’s always the same game with them.”
“You’re talking about the kids from group therapy?”
“Nah, they’re just garden-variety fuck ups. Kids with daddy issues and anger management problems. I meant the people I met in the psych ward while I was on suicide watch.” I can’t help but smile grimly at the memory, even though I never tried to talk to any of these people again. “Cliques form on the ward,” I tell him. “It’s the prison mentality. You’ve got to group together in there or you go really fucking nuts. It was four of us—a schizo, two addicts, and me.”
“Quite the prison gang,” Jem remarks drolly.
“I beat the shit out of one,” I tell him. “That’s sort of how we met. She called me Kevorkian and I hit her with my lunch tray.”
“Jesus, Willa.”
“Yeah, that didn’t exactly bode well for me. I’d just gotten out of detox and they put me in solitary for two days to cool off. But when I was allowed back into the common area, her and me became friends. Sort of. There’s only so much they can do as friends. Junkies will do and say anything if they think they can score from it.”
“You sold her your meds, didn’t you?”
“Lana was only pleasant when she was docile, yes.” I look over at Jem to find him shaking his head. It’s bad enough that I have to deal with Mom and Dad’s disappointment without Jem heaping his onto the pile.
“She was there to detox, but she’d take anything. I’d slip her my Zoloft when I could. That stuff is hard on the gut.”
“So even when you were on antidepressants you weren’t really taking them.”
“Not all the time. But not all of them worked out so hot when I did take them, either.” I don’t elaborate and Jem prompts me to continue
. “Well it was Zoloft for the first few months, up until I landed in the psych ward, but that made me a little…intense.”
“Did you hit multiple people with lunch trays?”
“No, but I had these paranoid spells where I’d get all worked up and angry. So I detoxed and then they put me on Lithium, but that made me hallucinate. I left the hospital with a prescription for Prozac. It killed my appetite and I dropped twenty pounds, so they switched me to Cymbalta. That drug worked for shit, so Elavil came next.” I look over at Jem. He’s frowning thoughtfully at my list of drugs.
“Remember how I said I threw a brick through the kitchen window?”
“Yeah…”
“I wasn’t entirely honest. It wasn’t my parents’ kitchen window. It was the kitchen window in the fifth-floor apartment of an abandoned walkup. I broke it because the frame was stuck and the window wouldn’t open. I was going to jump.”
He murmurs, “Jesus, Willa.”
“I didn’t do it. Clearly.”
“The meds made you suicidal?”
“That’s what I told the doctors. That’s why they took me right off the meds when I got the psych detainment. I had to start new treatment from scratch.”
“What do you mean ‘that’s what you told them?’” Jem demands. “What really happened?”
“I felt like shit. My sister was dead and I’d killed her; everyone at school thought I was a fucking psychopath; and my only human contact was with parents who could hardly stand to look at me. Eternal silence seemed like a good decision at the time.”
“So why’d you stop?” Jem asks quietly. “Why didn’t you jump?”
I kick a rock off the path. “Same reason you didn’t take your mom’s sleeping pills. There’s something, deep down, that can’t support that kind of self-destruction.” I nudge Jem with my elbow. “That’s how I knew you’d never come to an attempt; I’ve been there. I know what the edge looks like and it leaves a stain on a person.”
“Kirk?” Jem says softly.
“What?”
When he speaks again his voice is quiet and bitter, not kind like I expected. “That’s a really stupid reason to want to kill yourself. You have no idea what real suffering feels like.”
It hurts me more than anything has in a very long time to learn that Jem Harper isn’t the person I thought he was. But I really shouldn’t have trusted him to begin with.
*
I take Jem back to his house, but when I stop the car he doesn’t get out immediately. He just sits there for a few seconds with this deeply thoughtful look on his face, and then it suddenly occurs to him that the car is no longer moving.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yeah.” He says it in a distant way, like he didn’t really listen to what I said. Jem gets out of the car without looking at me and slams the door behind him. I’d almost forgotten what a permanent goodbye sounds like.
Frank notices that something is amiss when I get home. He keeps asking questions and I tell him to piss off.
“Are you in some kind of trouble?” The question grates on my nerves because I used to get that one from Dad all the time. When I made up my mind to clean up my act at Thanksgiving, no one believed I would do it, even after I did. There were too many old wounds and hatchets buried in shallow graves to let bygones be bygones.
There were always things we couldn’t fix, no matter how much we tried as a family. It was Dad who took me to a grief counselor the week after Tessa died. The counselor was an okay guy. Had a gentle voice and his office smelled nice, but talk therapy didn’t work its magic on me. There were things I couldn’t say—that I’d killed her, for one, and that I hoped my hand would never heal as a form of bizarre penance, for another. On came the antidepressants, which didn’t work any better than talk, but that was my own fault. Those drugs aren’t meant to be taken with other substances, and by that time I was already involved with the wrong crowd. It occurred to me the day after Tessa died, when I woke up and realized that I didn’t have anyone to call: I had no friends. My leisure hours had been spent hanging out with my sister or holed up in hospital waiting rooms. I’d lived in Newfoundland for over a year and hadn’t made a single friend. No one knows what to say to the girl whose only hobby is caring for a dying sister, anyway.
So I made some friends. I made the friends who knew about pain and could teach me how to get blitzed out of my fucking mind. I can’t say it felt good. It felt like nothing, and the nothingness was pleasant compared to the agony of conscious awareness. Dad caught me. It wasn’t hard. I wasn’t trying to hide my stash of drugs by that time.
It was then that I decided not to let other peoples’ emotions weigh on me. Dad’s disappointment was too much to bear, otherwise. He’d been driving me to counseling and paying for prescriptions I wasn’t interested in taking seriously. I got clean. For two weeks.
Turns out the antidepressants were better when I was drugged up on other shit too. I’d been clean exactly a week when things started to get strange. They say depression is like all the color being sucked out of life. That’s not quite it. It’s a lack of process. Every action ends halfway. Every train of thought fails to come to fruition. Nothing comes full circle; has its place; carries much meaning.
It was the longest day of the year when I went up to the fifth floor the empty apartment building near my house. It was slated for demolition anyway; no one would care about a broken window or blood on the pavement.
I honestly don’t remember getting caught. I don’t even remember being on the window ledge, except for the sensation of wind on my face. I remember nothing except being in the back of a police car and the familiar ride back to the hospital. I had a date with a psychiatric detainment.
I was hospitalized for three weeks with other teens, until they were sure that I was no longer a danger to myself. I still didn’t like the antidepressants, and after a week I started tonguing them and selling the pills to an addict down the hall. She could get me what I really wanted: peace and quiet. Lana would cause trouble—some ruckus in the communal lounge, usually—and we would all get sent to our rooms until things settled down. I relished the undisturbed time, lying on my bed and feeling nothing but my own breath and the texture of institution-quality sheets.
And when I got out, I actually missed the hospital. At least there I had privacy for fifteen minutes at a time. At home, not a second was my own. My parents drove me to and from school. When I insisted on riding Tessa’s bike, they would follow me to make sure I took no detours. I wasn’t allowed to shut my bedroom door or have visitors beyond the living room—not that any came. Caring for my wayward ass became a full time job, one that burnt my mother out within six months. She knew what I had done to her firstborn. Couldn’t prove it, but she had a feeling. It haunted her that I would never admit to assisting Tessa. There was no point talking about it.
While Mom and Dad thought they were monitoring me, I was really getting into a whole new set of problems. The Group I was enrolled in for therapy was just as much about giving them a break as it was about my sanity. Mondays the Group did community service—worked at soup kitchens and such—and on Wednesdays we did therapy. Fridays were activity night, when we would play sports and games at the recreation center. It sounds peachy, but to get into the program you either have to be at-risk or damn closed to it. I was playing tetherball every week with the same kinds of screw-ups and delinquents that had steered me wrong in the first place.
Let’s just say that what my parents don’t know constitutes sufficient reason to kick me out of the house. They didn’t, to their credit; they generously sent me to live with Frank. After three months of behaving, I could feel myself starting to slip again, and I looked around and realized that I’d wasted three years of my life on nothing more than self-destruction. So I made promises, and I gambled that distance from my situation in St. John's would help me keep them.
I always was a fuck up.
The look of disgust and annoyance that Jem gave
me on the drive home keeps coming back to me. “How could you fuck up that badly?” he said. “That many times, too. You couldn’t have left it at one mistake?”
Thursday
I don’t see Jem when I get to school, which is weird because he usually gets here before I do and hangs around my locker. But what else could I expect? I see him at lunch when he comes into the cafeteria, and try to keep a neutral expression. He looks the other way and goes to sit with Elise and her friends. Shit.
Cody pulls my attention back to my surroundings by offering me a coupon for a one-month subscription to World of Warcraft.
“I thought you were into Starcraft?”
“Only sometimes,” he says. “WoW fills in the rest of the week. You should join. We need reliable people for raids and—”
Please shoot me now.
Soc is no better. Jem tosses the joint assignment across the table instead of passing it properly and is incapable of discussing it without sarcasm.
“Stop being such a moody little bitch,” I tell him lowly. “If you have something to say to me, just say it.”
“What is there to say?” He turns back to the textbook with a disgusted sneer.
“I hate you.”
“I don’t care.”
*
I sit in the driveway with my engine shut off, not quite sure of how I got home. That’s a bad sign. I haven’t had walking blackouts since I was cycling off Zoloft. Maybe I should carpool to school tomorrow…
I get out of my car and very deliberately walk to the front door, trying hard to keep track of everything around me. Frank isn’t home yet, and the last thing I want right now is solitude. Even sitting next to him on the couch, watching TV and saying nothing would be better than being alone.
It sucks that the first person I’ve ever trusted with the whole story just crapped out on me. I knew he would probably hate me for it, but it’s Jem. I thought he’d have his tantrum and then demand we work things out, like he always does. But no. I’m too messed up for the friendless kid with cancer. I wonder if he’ll tell anybody, and if they’ll believe him if he does. I never told any of my schoolmates in St. John’s the whole story, or those fucks in Group or even my shrinks. I thought Jem would get it because he is equally fucked up, albeit in a different way.
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