Home > Girl on the Line(15)

Girl on the Line(15)
Author: Faith Gardner

“I’d honestly rather light myself on fire.”

She blinks extra long, visibly battling the urge to flinch. I feel bad. I’ve always expressed myself strongly, but she’s sensitive to it now in a way she didn’t used to be.

“You seem much better, and I’m worried about you passing—”

“I thought you talked to my teachers and the makeup work is fine.”

“It is, I just . . . I want to give you the best shot I can.”

“We said November first,” I say, a little sharply.

“We did,” she says. “November first is fine.”

I exhale. It grips me with panic to imagine returning to school. I imagine myself a mess, bursting into tears for no reason, seeing Jonah and running in the opposite direction.

“How’s that new therapist?” Mom asks.

“His name is Wolf and he’s teaching me how to practice mindfulness and breathing exercises.”

“Oh Lord. I knew if your dad referred us to him it had to be some hippie-dippie bullshit.”

“It wasn’t bad, really,” I tell her, watching as she fans the cards down the bed in a long line. “I liked him.”

“Hmmm,” she says doubtfully, giving me a look.

My mother can raise one eyebrow in a way that says more than an entire lecture could.

“Sometimes I don’t know about the whole bipolar thing,” I tell her.

Her face now says I am judging you. “You’re not messing with your medication.”

“I’m taking my meds,” I say. “But . . . think about it. I went off the deep end after I started taking medication, not before.”

“You have to follow doctor’s orders, baby doll.”

“I am. But answer me something. Honestly. Do you really think I’m bipolar?”

“I trust the professionals. You know, I’ve learned a lot about bipolar disorder since joining The Forum.”

The Forum is an online support group for moms with bipolar teens. Mom’s super into it. Like I’m a little over hearing about The Forum and what the ladies on The Forum say.

“There are so many varying degrees and it looks so different on different people,” she goes on.

“You tell me stories about those girls and they sound worlds beyond me, though. Like yeah, I like to stay up late and I can talk fast when I get excited and I’ve always been moody. But you told me about a girl who thought she was communicating telepathically with a prince.”

“They’re not all like that.”

“When I was at the nutjob ward the other day—”

“Stop calling it that. It’s stigmatizing.”

“It’s a joke,” I say. “It’s how I deal. I thought, I’m not like all these other people. There’s been some mistake. My roommate tried to stab someone.”

“You tried to kill yourself,” Mom says.

She sits up straight and her gold eyes quiver, threatening to spill tears, and she does this twitchy thing with her mouth that happens when she’s either trying not to yell at me or not to cry.

“You tried,” she says again, slower. “To kill yourself.”

My cheeks heat up. “Right.”

“So . . . you have everything in common with those kids in the psychiatric unit.”

She’s right. Doesn’t everyone think the same? We’re all so different, all so special. It’s bullshit.

“Someday, sure, you can maybe try coming off medication. But now? Not now. You cannot handle any more instability right now.” Mom’s voice lowers but also intensifies—it becomes a whisper-shout. “And neither can I.”

I could argue with her. Past me would have argued with her. But frankly, I don’t have it in me. And I’m not sure I know what’s best for anyone anymore.

This is our ritual: pull one tarot card from the deck, look it up online together. I pull a card with a man hanging upside down from a tree. The Hanged Man, the card reads. Mom pulls in a sharp breath, like the sight of the card was a punch to the gut. My heart races and I get a queasy flutter. Because one of my suicidal fantasies and terrible brain loops has involved me hanging from a tree.

I would never tell my mother this. I would never tell anyone.

Mom consults her BFF, Google. Turns out the card has nothing to do with suicide. Look closely: there’s a golden halo around his head, a slight smile on his lips. The Hanged Man is a card that represents the need to turn your world upside down for a whole new perspective. The man first has to hang himself to achieve enlightenment.

“Profound,” Wolf says when I tell him about the card the following Friday. There’s a skeleton behind him, sitting on a table. I assume it’s for Halloween, which is Sunday, but then quickly realize it’s an anatomical skeleton that is a regular part of Wolf’s mess.

He’s leaning in, positively enraptured with this description of the Hanged Man. So much so that I scoff at him. “You don’t actually believe in tarot cards, do you?”

“Like a good novel, or a vivid dream, it’s not truth but points to truth.”

I can’t stop staring at Wolf’s socks, by the way. Argyle. They don’t match.

“And you brought it up here for a reason,” Wolf says. “Clearly it meant something to you.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

Which is what I say when I’ve been cornered and someone else is right. Wolf lets the silence go on long, so long I notice the sound of traffic, which I’ve never noticed before now. I fight the urge to look at my phone, crack a joke, anything to fill up the gap in conversation. Instead, I focus on my breathing.

“What were you looking for when you tried to kill yourself?” Wolf asks softly.

I study the dust floating in the air. I used to think dust in sunlight was so beautiful, magical snow that you only saw sparkle sometimes. Then I learned it was mostly just dead human skin that filled the air and it grossed me out. I close my eyes.

“I think I was just looking for . . . escape,” I say. “‘I’m going to kill myself’ was this invisible black hole I could mentally hop into when real life and my feelings became too much.”

“When you said the mantra, how did it make you feel?”

“Numb. Gorgeously numb. Like all the scared, confused, weird, uncomfortable feelings could just be shut off like a faucet. I wouldn’t exist. I wouldn’t feel anything. Problem solved.”

“Did you think about the reality of this? Of what your death would look like, how it would affect everything?”

“No,” I tell him. “I know that’s selfish. But at first it was just a . . . a kind of inner conversation-ender. A problem-solver. I’d annoy Jonah by being melodramatic, or get a shitty grade at school, or freak out at my parents. Then I’d think, ‘I’ll just kill myself.’ And it made me feel better.”

Wolf nods.

“But then, just in the week or two before I tried, I started researching it online. People’s experiences trying. Pictures of crime scenes with bodies, people hanging from trees.” I go red admitting this, feeling gross, like I’m revealing some disgusting fetish or something. “I don’t know why I kept doing it. I felt bad about it but I kept doing it. I told myself it’s what I wanted, that life would go on without me. And then I tried, and I took all the pills, and as I blacked out I felt this desperate energy in me. Like a bird trapped in my chest, trying to fly. I wanted to live so badly.”

Hot Books
» House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1)
» A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire
» From Blood and Ash (Blood And Ash #1)
» A Million Kisses in Your Lifetime
» Deviant King (Royal Elite #1)
» Den of Vipers
» House of Sky and Breath (Crescent City #2)
» Sweet Temptation
» The Sweetest Oblivion (Made #1)
» Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels #6)
» Wreck & Ruin
» Steel Princess (Royal Elite #2)
» Twisted Hate (Twisted #3)
» The Play (Briar U Book 3)
» The War of Two Queens (Blood and Ash #4)