Okay, so yes, I think she’s about to break up with me all the time. Especially at night. In bed. When I can’t sleep. Like now. Maybe in the morning I’ll feel fine.
Or maybe this time is different. Maybe this time it’s not just my imagination, maybe this time she really didn’t respond to my good-night text as quickly as she used to. And when she did respond, her answer was so short: Good night. No baby, no love you, no sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.
And it’s not just the latest text, I think as I roll over and adjust the covers (again), trying and failing to keep my eyes closed, to slow my breath, to drift closer to sleep. It’s after midnight. I have to get up in six and a half hours. If I sleep through my alarm (again), I’ll be late (again). Anyhow, I swear, Tess doesn’t initiate the conversation as much as I do. Or our plans. It’s always me:
Tess, how about dinner on Saturday?
Tess, I missed you at lunch today. (We never eat lunch together at school.)
(But maybe if I’d been the kind of girl who sat with her girlfriend at lunch Tess wouldn’t be about to end it now.)
Tess, you looked so beautiful after your run this afternoon. (Tess is on the track team at school.)
Tess—
Tess—
Tess—
The minutes tick by, and now it’s only six hours till my alarm goes off. I mean, who invented the notion that we drift off to sleep anyway? Falling asleep is hard work. It takes effort. It takes concentration.
And I can’t concentrate on sleeping now because all I can think about is Tess.
I’d had a crush on her for ages before we finally kissed, at a party one night. She has this perfect skin (I don’t think she’s ever had a single zit), and an Afro that makes her look about three inches taller than she actually is, which, at five ten, is already much, much taller than I am. (I’m barely five feet tall. And my stick-straight brown hair, cut bluntly just below my chin, definitely doesn’t add to my height.)
I can’t stop imagining how she might end it. Where she’ll do it. When. The words she’ll use. No one’s ever broken up with me before—no one’s ever been with me before—so my imagination is limited to the phrases I’ve heard on TV shows and read in magazine articles.
Before track practice on a Monday afternoon. (This afternoon.) It’s not you, it’s me.
After school on Wednesday. I need space.
Before school on Friday. I’ve fallen for someone else.
Thinking about it makes my hands shake, so I try to think about anything else: our first kiss, our first real date (which came after the first kiss), the first time we held hands (which came after our first date), the first time she called me baby (which came after the hand-holding), the first time we said I love you (which came after calling me baby).
Maybe we did everything backward. I wish we could do it all over again, in order this time: first the date, and then the hand-holding, and then the kiss, and then the love, then the sweet nicknames.
But thinking about doing it over again makes me think about what went wrong, which makes me think about the inevitable breakup, which makes my hands shake all over again. There’s only one thing that could make them keep still, and I’m not allowed to do that anymore.
That hadn’t always been a problem—it only started a few months ago—but I’ve never been, let’s say, easygoing. Never been the kind of girl who doesn’t care what everyone else thinks.
Actually, I obsess (that’s the right word, I have a diagnosis and everything) over what everyone else thinks. Every night—not just tonight—I lie awake, going over every single word I said that day (and lucky for me, I have a really good memory so I can usually remember exactly what was said), wondering whom I might have offended, what I might have done wrong, what terrible thing will come back to haunt me, ruin my reputation, or somehow get to the admissions officers at Stanford even though there are still nine months before I’m going to apply.
I’m the type of girl who sits at our table during lunch glancing carefully at every adjacent table to see if anyone is staring, wondering what they know that I don’t, certain that they’re talking about me, thinking about me, laughing at me, and sharing inside jokes and secret handshakes (the metaphorical kind, not the literal kind) that I’ll never understand.
Dr. Kreiter told me that the way my hands tremble is a warning sign. Like how my mom sees spots when she has a migraine coming on. It’s called the aura.
After our first session, Dr. Kreiter wanted to prescribe me antianxiety medication (diagnosis: generalized anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders, self-harm), but I begged my parents to let me try to handle my problems without pills. They agreed to a three-month trial: three months, no incidents, no need for meds.
Dr. Kreiter said I’d been hurting myself to help calm my anxiety, like a coping mechanism. To Dad, coping mechanisms are finding ways to take action when injustice makes you feel powerless, or practicing yoga each morning, and meditating each night. Dad’s coping mechanisms are much more socially and medically acceptable than mine. But Dad doesn’t have an anxiety disorder, so maybe that’s why he doesn’t have a disordered way of dealing with his stress.
Dr. Kreiter said we were lucky to have caught the self-harm—that’s what she calls it, I call it cutting—early, to which Mom reasonably (that’s Mom, always reasonable) pointed out that I’d hurt myself badly enough to need hospitalization, which didn’t strike her as early. But Dr. Kreiter said that the behavior had gone on only for months before I began therapy. She said that some of her patients had been hurting themselves for years before they sought help. I was tempted to point out that I hadn’t exactly sought help—I mean, I’d gone to the ER to get stitched up, which I guess is a kind of seeking help. But I hadn’t asked to be put in therapy.
Dr. Kreiter didn’t like the three-month deal I made with my parents. She pointed out that the incidents weren’t the result of a lack of willpower. (My other symptoms included insomnia, increased heart rate, an inability to get places on time, biting my nails, and of course trembling like a Chihuahua.)
The doctor suggested that setting high standards and goals was part of what had gotten us into this situation in the first place.
I said that I found goals motivating, had all my life.
She said this wasn’t a homework assignment, wasn’t the sort of thing I should be rewarded or punished for. That an arrangement like this would keep us from delving deep into the reasons I’d started cutting in the first place.
I said, wasn’t the point of therapy to get me to stop cutting?
She countered that the incidents had been going on for months before my parents found out about them. What was to keep me from hiding them again?
I said: “If it happens again, I’ll come clean right away.”