I purse my lips resolutely and fold my arms tight against my boobs. Your ball, Susan. She just nods and squints like she has no clue what to do with me.
I’ve asked God and Jesus and all their other relatives to “wash away my sins,” but it doesn’t feel like Jesus is living inside me—I can’t even imagine what that would feel like. I’m so full up with me, me, stupid me.
“Mmm…,” she finally grunts. “I see.”
Fighting the near-constant urge to roll my eyes all the way to the back of my skull, I snatch up and devour a Werther’s.
A little buzzer goes off on Susan’s desk, and she clears her throat. Time for her little closing statement, usually some sentimental crap that clears up nothing for me.
“I know you’re worried about school”—I lean forward to disagree, but Susan puts up a stubby hand and continues—“but maybe you’ll be surprised. In the next few weeks, I’d like you to write everything down, exactly as you see and experience it.”
Only Susan could make writing in a journal sound so boring and corny. I roll my eyes on the inside, but I nod dutifully.
“Well, we have to stop,” Susan sighs, and I feel every atom in my body exhale.
Before I leave, she gives me a book by someone named SARK on how to “free the creative spirit” and instructs me to practice my breathing and meditation every day. I am heavy with dread just hearing the words. I thank her (for what?) and shuffle to the parking lot of the office park, where my mom is waiting in her black Mercedes.
She grins theatrically when she sees me. Much too peppy for my mood, she tosses her James Patterson novel into the backseat and turns on the engine. “How was it?”
The afternoon sun is offensive. As usual. Too damn bright. I lean my forehead against the car window and survey the place where I live: tan stucco as far as the eye can see; dirty cars parked in front of a Denny’s; a Stater Bros. parking lot bustling with Susans; a billboard asking Where Will You Spend Eternity? I don’t know why, but it feels significant.
“It was okay,” I say wearily.
And nothing else the entire ride home.
The Diaries of Morgan Parker
August 10, 2008
I am in THERAPY. And in honor of such an occasion, I am starting a new journal. And, yes, I am writing in crayon because I still like crayons, so there.
Summer is gone. I’ve spent it fighting with everyone around me and crying in bed all day. I’m so pathetic. I keep thinking, I wish I didn’t do this. But it’s like I can’t help it. Because of my depression.
I have this same dream over and over, that I’m driving on the 10. I recognize landmarks: the theme park where I flipped out and ruined Marissa’s birthday, the strip club billboard with that senior cheerleader who supposedly overdosed on pills in the girls’ bathroom and then got kicked out right before graduation. I’m driving up on the side of a mountain, but I can’t turn the wheel, I can’t slow down, and I’m just about to crash, but instead, in the next dream, I’m in the orange groves. They’re on fire. Suddenly a storm cloud covers everything. I hear thunder, but no rain ever comes.
As soon as I wake up I have a bad attitude. It’s how I know I’m alive, again.
THE BLUE ALBUM
At an hour that is completely unholy, my mom bursts into my room—my precious hideaway—carrying the force of a hundred black moms, all armed with inexplicable Saturday-morning energy, gospel music, and cleaning supplies.
I’m barely awake and already steeping in despair. (There isn’t anything worse than the moment, the Ughhh, shortly after waking up, when you realize everything is where you left it.) I roll over and groan.
“I know you don’t want to go, Morgan,” my mom speaks down to the me-shaped floral sheets. She clears yesterday’s untouched coffee from my nightstand and replaces it with a hot one, then sets off scooting around in her UGGs, humming to Kirk Franklin and coating everything in Pledge or Windex.
“You need to get out of the house. I’m not doing this with you today, Morgan.” She pauses at the foot of my bed and huffs loudly until I peel the sheet from my top half.
“Mom, I won’t be any good out there. I just can’t handle it.”
My whole summer vacation has basically been a bad performance-art loop of me “causing a scene” or “having a fit” at barbecues all over town. Even my birthday dinner in June, at our family’s favorite Newport Beach pizza place, ended in tears and screaming and folded arms: me in the backseat on the drive home, invisible to my parents and my brother, stewing in shame and OK Computer. Everywhere I go, I am an embarrassment.
Balancing the coffee cup and an empty ice cream pint in one arm, my mom raises the blinds, letting in the brightness. I squint and grimace; I hate how the sun exposes my darkness.
“I’m trying, Morgan.” It always seems to be about someone else—what I’m doing to other people, instead of what’s happening to me. “I’m trying!”
“Trying to do what?” I shriek.
“To deal with this.” Because of an overactive thyroid, my mom’s eyes bulge when she talks. It pisses me off.
“Then stop yelling at me! Mom, I can’t control this.”
I know that I can make it, Kirk Franklin and his gospel choir sing. I know that I can stand.
“I know,” she relents, scripted. There’s more frustration than sympathy in her voice. I hate that I’m the kind of person people have to “try” to be around.
It’s a whole thing; we both start tearing up for no good reason.
She offers to flat-iron my hair for the party, a veiled bonding attempt and a backhanded remark about my “presentableness,” so I begin the grueling mental process of preparing to drag myself out of bed and into the world.
“I’m just scared,” I say too loudly as she’s leaving the room. “It’s scary for me.”
She nods gravely with her lips closed. We’re both very dramatic people.
* * *
—
Sitting at my mom’s vanity, I stare brutally at my face in the mirror. I guess I’ll always have this face, which is super annoying. The prospect of carrying this body around day after day makes me want to crawl right back into my little womb of woe and just shut everything out.
However, today I’m going to Meg’s tea party because my therapist and my mom are making me. When Meg Sloane called to invite me, I was actually shocked—I haven’t been to one of her birthdays since back when we had to include everyone from class.