Текст книги "Backlash"
Автор книги: Sarah Darer Littman
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 15 страниц)
“I don’t have to tell you how having to be here to watch Lara constantly is going to impact my campaign,” she says.
And that’s when our little “moment” ends with a thud.
“Maybe you can get Lara to apologize for the poor timing of her suicide attempt,” I say before taking my backpack and stomping upstairs, ignoring the stricken look on my mother’s face.
“DID YOU hear? Sydney Kelley’s sister got let out of the hospital.”
“You mean the girl who tried to kill herself?”
“Yeah. My sister said some dude dumped her on Facebook and that’s what made her do it.”
That’s the kind of buzz going around the cafeteria at lunch.
I see Sydney walk in with her friend Cara. She stands in line to get her food. At first she’s chatting with Cara. But then I watch as her back tenses up and her hands clutch the tray tighter. As she starts hearing what people around her are saying. Then she says something to Cara and rushes out of the cafeteria, leaving her tray.
“Yo, Liam – you zoning out or what?”
Oliver waves his hand in front of my face to get my attention.
“What?” I ask.
“Did you hear anything I just said?”
“You asked me if I was zoning out.”
He gives me an “Are you kidding me?” look.
“Duh. Before that.”
“Uh, no.”
“Are you going to debate club after school?”
“Yeah,” I tell him, but my mind isn’t on debate. Or on the fantasy football league, which is what the other guys at the table are talking about. I’m wondering where Syd is and if she’s okay. I want to find her and ask, but I’m afraid she’ll think I’m weird if I do. So instead I pretend I just got a text, and under the pretext of replying, I send one to Sydney.
Hey, saw you rush out of the caf. You okay?
She doesn’t answer right away. I start to think she isn’t going to, so I force myself to join in the fantasy football league discussion and act like I care.
And then my phone vibrates.
Not really.
Anything I can do?
Tell everyone to shut up about Lara? Make the world go away?
I wish I could do that. But I can just see me standing up in the middle of the cafeteria and shouting, “Could you all just shut up about Lara Kelley? And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming …” That would only make people talk about it more – and then they’d be talking about me, too, and how crazy I am.
Wish there was something that I could ACTUALLY do, I text back, before saying, “Are you serious? I can’t believe you played the Bills running back over the Bears last week. You left twenty-five points on your bench.”
As Roger Cohen launches into his reply, Syd texts back.
There’s nothing anyone can do. That’s the worst part of it.
My fingers tighten around my phone. I feel like throwing it at the wall. Someone should be able to do something. I want to do something. But I don’t know what to do or how to do it.
So I just type, Hang in there, Syd, and go back to talking about fantasy football.
THE ONLY time I’ve been out of the house since they released me from the hospital is to go to see Linda, my therapist, which I have to do every few days until she decides I’m sane enough to reenter society and, more importantly, go back to school. Part of me hopes that’s never. Every time my parents bring up the subject of if I want to go back to Lake Hills or transfer somewhere else it makes me want to take more pills. Like that’s even a possibility. Anything that might resemble a pill is under lock and key in our house. The next time I get my period, I’m going to have to ask Mom’s permission to even take Midol. She’s probably going to ration my use of tampons in case I try to make a noose out of the strings.
The problem is the alternative is staying home, bored out of my head, under Mom’s watchful eye. On the therapist’s advice, I’m not allowed to use the computer or my cell phone “until my emotional state is more stabilized,” so even if someone did care – like, say, if Christian changed his mind after he heard I tried to kill myself – no one can contact me. Mom turns off the router when I have assignments so I can’t get online. The only thing I can use is Microsoft Word. If I need to look anything up online to get my schoolwork done, Mom stands over me, breathing down my neck till I’m done. I’m not sure which of us hates the new arrangement more.
I’ve tried reading, but the words bounce around the page like Dad when he’s had too many cups of coffee. The doctor warned me there might be some neurological effects from the overdose. He said that hopefully they’ll just be temporary, but only time will tell. Great. Imagine if they’re not. That’ll make going back to school even worse. Now everyone will call me Stupid Lardo.
So I’ve been watching a lot of daytime TV, mostly kid programs, because in those, everything has a happy ending. Even though I know that’s a lie, that in reality everything goes downhill once you get to middle school, and things never really get tied up in a neat bow after half an hour in real life, it’s better than watching Maury or Jerry Springer, where the whole point of the show is to see people whose lives are so messed up that they’re willing to find out who is really the father of their baby on national TV. Why would anyone want to find out something that personal in front of an audience? Don’t they ever think about how someday that poor little baby will be a teenager and see his or her screwed-up parents fighting on YouTube?
I’ll take Sesame Street over that in a heartbeat.
While I’m counting with the Count, I list the reasons why I wish the pills had worked.
1. I wouldn’t have to face going back to school.
2. I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life being known as the girl who tried to kill herself and failed at that, too.
3. I wouldn’t have to remember, and so, because of that, and here’s the biggie:
4. I wouldn’t have to feel. Anything. Ever again.
But what I’m doing is putting me on Dr. Hospital Shrink’s Naughty List, because I’m not supposed to be engaging in “destructive negative thought patterns” like this. Instead, I’m supposed to be making a Gratitude List of three things I’m grateful for every day.
I was like, “How am I supposed to do that? My life sucks. That’s why I’m here in the first place.”
Dr. Hospital Shrink just smiled and nodded, like yeah, yeah, he’d heard it all before.
“It doesn’t have to be a big thing, Lara. It can be something as small as being grateful that you got the right flavor Jell-O on your dinner tray.”
“If I liked Jell-O, which I don’t.”
“But you get the idea,” he persisted. Dr. Hospital Shrink was annoyingly persistent.
As much as I pretended not to, I did. This was my list for the first day:
1. I’m grateful for water. I’m thirsty.
2. I’m grateful that Mom and Dad went home to shower and change so I had a break from them sitting by my bedside, sighing and making me feel like I’m their Problem Child.
3. I’m seriously grateful for toilet paper. That activated charcoal they gave me to help get the drugs out of my system is making me poop a lot, and it’s making my poop beyond gross. Like, I mean, even more beyond gross than poop usually is. It’s totally black, like coal.
This episode of Sesame Street is brought to you by the letter W for Waste of time.
Making the list hasn’t been getting easier, even after being out of the hospital for a week. I’m still stuck on number one for today’s list.
Oh wait:
1. I’m grateful for Sesame Street so I don’t have to watch “Mothers who sleep with their son’s girlfriend’s brothers” on The Jerry Springer Show.
One down. Only two more to think about in the endless hours that stretch between now and when I go to sleep and this all starts over again.
2. I’m grateful for naps, because they help pass the time and let me forget.
Except when they don’t. Except when I dream about Christian.
Last night I dreamed that he did ask me to his dance and I bought that ivory dress I loved on Wanelo. He looked hot in his tux, and he told me I was beautiful when he slipped a pretty corsage of tiny pink roses with a small spray of baby’s breath onto my wrist – the touch of his hands on my wrist sending shivers up my spine.
In my dream limo, he put his arm around me and rested his hand on my bare shoulder, gently touching my skin with his fingertips. He whispered in my ear that he loved me and this was going to be the best night ever. In my dream, I believed him, my heart beating faster in excitement and anticipation, because just by being there with him and having his arm around me, it already was.
But when the limo pulled up at the dance, it wasn’t at his high school; it was at my middle school. And all these people outside dressed in tuxes and beautiful dresses were holding big signs that said Lardo and Lardosaurus. I was scared Christian would see them and change his mind, so I tried to kiss him to distract him from the signs. But instead of leaning in to kiss me with his perfect, warm lips, he pulled away from me in horror.
“Why would I want to kiss you?” he asked, his handsome face distorted almost beyond recognition by disgust and loathing. “Lardo. You repulse me. I would never want to be seen with you in public anywhere, let alone a dance.”
“But … why?” I pleaded, reaching for him, still feeling the warmth of his fingers on my skin. “A few minutes ago, you said …”
“The world would be a better place without you in it, Lardo,” he said, and he was no longer handsome. His eyes made me shiver, but with fear, not anticipation; his mouth was a thin line of cruelty. But worse still were the words that came out of it. “You should just do us all a favor and kill yourself.”
I woke up, my heart racing, with tears streaming down my cheeks. In the stillness, in that lonely quiet of three in the morning when no one else was awake, I cried into my pillow so my sister wouldn’t hear through the wall, and I wished once again that the pills had done their job.
And the question that I asked myself, over and over, as I tried to get back to sleep, staring at the shadows on the ceiling was: What did I do wrong?
Until I understand that, making these stupid gratitude lists is just a homework assignment in fakery, because I’m mad that I still have to wake up every day to a world where nothing makes any sense.
No way am I going to be able to come up with number three today. Linda, the therapist I see now that I’m out of the hospital, is just going to have to deal. Just like she expects me to. Just like everyone else thinks I should.
Mom knocks on the door: her attempt at pretending I have privacy. I’m not allowed to shut it anymore in case I harm myself. They’re protecting me from me.
Even when I shower I have to leave the bathroom door ajar, which is totally awkward when Dad’s home. My parents promised that when I take a shower he’s not allowed to come upstairs.
But still … the faint draft coming in from the open door reminds me that I’m not to be trusted.
Now I know how zoo animals feel, always watched, always observed, never able to escape except in their heads. Except now everyone’s trying to watch me in there, too.
“Lara, honey?”
“Yeah?”
She inches into my room and takes a seat on the edge of my bed. I shove the stupid gratitude journal under the covers. No way I want Mom prying into that.
Elmo is telling kids about how great it is to share. Oh, Elmo, you poor, deluded little red fur ball. You don’t have a clue, do ya, li’l buddy? Kids are way meaner than Muppets.
“Can you turn down the TV a little?” Mom asks.
I push Mute. Elmo’s relentless optimism is starting to grate on my nerves anyway. He doesn’t get it. Wait till you hit puberty, Elmo. Just you wait.
“The police called,” Mom says. “They’re coming over in half an hour to talk to us – well, specifically to talk to you. I thought you might want to take a shower and get dressed.”
Not particularly. I’m happy to stay in my pj’s, with unwashed hair and no makeup and unbrushed teeth. Because I really don’t care. I know I’m supposed to, but I don’t. But here’s the thing with Mom: When she says, “I thought you might want to …,” what she really means is I want you to … If I say what I really feel, namely that I want to remain slobby and unwashed, she’ll ask me twenty questions about why (answer: because I don’t care about how I look) and don’t I worry about the impression I’m giving the world (answer: no) and doesn’t it make me feel better to be clean (answer: nothing makes me feel better).
I wish she would come straight out and say, Go take a shower and get dressed, instead of pretending I have any say in the matter.
“What do they want to talk about?” I ask, instead of telling her that.
“They want to ask you some questions about Facebook.”
Ugh. Just what I’m trying to forget about. Just what I’d rather not think about ever again.
My father is obsessed with the subject. The other night he printed out his stupid spreadsheet for what feels like the millionth time and wanted me to look at it so I could tell him something about every single person on the list. I tore it up again without even glancing at it. He yelled at me, saying that I owed him my cooperation “after everything you’ve put this family through.” Then Mom yelled at him for yelling at me when I’m “still so fragile and unstable.” Syd yelled at both of them because she’s “sick of living in such a messed-up family where everyone yells at each other all the time while I’m trying to do my freaking homework.”
I curled up, wishing that I were a turtle with a hard shell that I could retreat into and hide when things got difficult or scary. And I stuck my fingers in my ears, asking myself again why I had to be such a failure, why I couldn’t even get a simple thing like taking too many pills right.
What Dad doesn’t understand is that I just want to forget. Every time he tries to ask me questions, I pretend to have a relapse, except the reality is I’m half pretending. My parents think that trying to commit suicide was the hardest part. They still don’t get that failing is what’s hard. How from the moment my brain starts to work again in the morning, I have to start trying to make sense of why I’m still here and to figure out how to survive another day.
Mom is alert, as always, trying to read every tiny change of expression on my face.
“Are you up for this? I spoke to Linda and she said she thought it would be okay. You have an appointment with her this afternoon anyway to process whatever might come up.”
Process. Murray Monster, can we ixnay the word process for the rest of my life? There are word processors and food processors and processed meat, but apparently all my thoughts and feelings also have to be processed, like spray cheese or SPAM.
“Whatever. I’ll go take a shower.”
I might have to keep the door cracked, but at least Mom won’t follow me in there.
In the shower, I twist the hot tap up until the water turns my skin pink. If only hot water could sterilize me; if only it could boil the thoughts out of my brain. At least it fills the bathroom with swirling mists of condensation. I close my eyes and try to visualize my brain as the fog: grayish white, fluffy, with no form, no thoughts, no pain.
It works for about four seconds before Christian’s face emerges from the mist. The world would be a better place without you in it.
I might as well do what Mom says and wash my hair, since I’m an epic failure at my own life.
“You look refreshed, dear,” Mom says when I walk into the kitchen.
Refreshed. Rebooted. Reprogrammed. Reprocessed.
Ignoring her, I open the fridge and scan the contents for something that might make the Gratitude List. But there’s no cookie dough, no gooey chocolate cake, no unhealthy snacks. Mom thinks I still care about not being Lardo, that I still think all those trips to the nutritionist and all that extra exercise and the weighing food and mindful eating and stuff were worth it. Nope. If there were a big chocolate cake in the fridge, I would eat the whole thing and wash it down with a quart of milk. Because what does it matter? What does anything matter when the world would be a better place without me in it?
“Don’t leave the fridge door open. Can I make you something?”
If she could make me understand about Christian, that would be something useful. But she can’t. I mumble, “No thanks,” and grab a yogurt that I don’t really want, just to stop her from nagging me.
“They should be here in a few minutes,” Mom says. She’s watching my every movement, even as I go to get a spoon for the yogurt, hypersensitive to the weapons for self-harm lurking all around me. Kitchen knives. Matches. Glass. You name it. It’s all here in our kitchen.
I don’t respond. I just sit and eat the stupid yogurt. It’s banana, which makes it even less appealing. This is definitely not going to be one for the Gratitude List, unless I can write that I’m glad that eating it is over. Luckily for me, the doorbell rings.
Mom looks from me to the direction of the front door, her brow furrowed. She’s obviously worried about leaving me alone in the presence of So. Much. Danger.
“I’ll just get the door,” she says. “Back in a sec.”
As soon as she leaves the room, I ditch the rest of the yogurt in the garbage can, making sure to hide it under something so Mom doesn’t see. If there’s one thing being in the Shrink Hospital of Horrors taught me, it’s that I have to play the game.
When Mom comes back, she’s followed by a police lady and a guy wearing a worn jacket and khakis instead of a police uniform, but you can still see the gun holstered under his arm and the badge at his waist.
“Lara, honey, this is Detective Souther and Officer Hall. Officer Hall was here the night you were … taken to the hospital. Officer, Detective, can I get you anything? Coffee? Water?”
“No thanks,” Detective Souther says. “Are you most comfortable chatting here, Lara?”
I’d be most comfortable not chatting at all, but nobody is giving me that option.
I shrug. “Whatever.”
We all sit down at the kitchen table. Detective Souther takes out a little black notebook. Something tells me he doesn’t have to make useless Gratitude Lists in it.
“We’ve been looking into the activity on your Facebook profile the night of your …” He hesitates for the briefest second. “Hospitalization. We’re here to ask you about a young man named Christian DeWitt.”
If there is one thing in the world I don’t want to talk about to the police, especially in front of my mom, it’s a young man named Christian DeWitt.
Math equation: Christian + talking = pain.
But if I show that I’m freaked out by the idea, Mom will get even more freaked out, creating a vicious vortex of freaked-outness.
“Oh? Like what?” I ask with pretend nonchalance.
“How long have you been friends with Mr. DeWitt?” Detective Souther asks.
Before he turned on me? Two months, four days, eleven hours …
“About two months.”
“Have you ever met him in person?”
I avoid looking at Mom.
“No. But he was friends with a bunch of kids from my school, so I figured he had to be okay.”
Mom exhales her disapproval.
Yes, Mom, I know. I broke the rules. Don’t you think I’ve learned my lesson?
“Did he friend you or did you friend him?”
This guy clearly must have forgotten what it’s like to be in high school. Like I ever would have had the courage to friend someone as good-looking as Christian.
I couldn’t believe when I got the friend request from him. He’s so gorgeous, like, seriously, he could be an Abercrombie model. I looked at his profile picture for ten minutes, unable to believe that he actually wanted to friend me.
“He friended me.”
“And how did you develop a relationship?”
What relationship? There is no relationship, Detective. Somehow – I don’t know how or why – I screwed it up.
“We started chatting. You know, by IM.”
“Did you ever video chat?”
“No. I wanted to, but the camera on his laptop was broken.”
“Did you ever speak to Mr. DeWitt on the telephone?”
“No.”
“And on the night of your hospitalization, he sent you this message?”
Detective Souther nods to Officer Hall and she takes a piece of paper out of a folder. It’s a printout of the Facebook direct message Christian sent me. The one that said the world would be a better place without me in it. The one that said, “GOOD-BYE, LOSER!!!”
I realize, horrified, that they’d been reading my chats and my emails. They know everything. How stupid I’d been. How I believed someone like Christian could actually like someone like me.
But they’re still asking me questions instead of giving me answers. Like everything else that’s supposed to be helping me, this is just another royal waste of time.
I’m beyond sick of it. I’m furious.
“Why are you even bothering to ask me questions when you’ve already pried into my personal life and read everything?! When you already know!” I snap. “Huh? Why don’t you answer my questions for a change?” I stand up and grab the paper, crumple it up into a ball, and throw it on the table in front of the spying detective.
“Lara!” Mom exclaims. “Calm down!”
She grabs my wrist and tries to pull me back into my chair.
“Why should I?!” I shout at her, trying to pull my arm out of her grasp.
Don’t I have a right to be mad? Why does she always shut me down?
“Maybe this was too much, too soon,” she explains to the police, pasting on a warped version of her Politician Smile. Even Mom can’t manage full-watt fakery right now.
“This must be incredibly painful for you, Lara, and I understand that our questions feel intrusive,” Officer Hall says in a calm, gentle voice. “But we want to help you find answers.”
I still.
It’s the hope, however unlikely it might be, of finding an answer that makes me slump back into my seat and answer the question. Trying to understand why Christian turned on me is an obsession.
“Yeah. He sent me that message. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what I did wrong, why he suddenly changed like that. He went from being so sweet to …”
This is why I don’t want to let any kind of feeling start – because I have no control over the size of it, or how to control it or stop it if it gets too much. Emotion pours over me like a tidal wave, drowning me with primitive force. I lay my head down on my arms on the table and sob until the sleeves of my T-shirt are wet.
Mom flutters around me, panicked by the force of my grief, stroking my back, trying to give me tissues, telling me everything is going to be okay, which I know isn’t true. I know full well it’s a lie, because how can things ever be okay after what’s happened?
When my sobs have slowed to sniffles, Mom sits holding my hand, and I face Detective Souther and Officer Hall with red, swollen eyes.
“Lara, you didn’t do anything wrong to make Christian turn,” Officer Hall says. “The thing is …”
She glances at Detective Souther. He takes over.
“What we’ve learned from our investigation, Lara, is that there is no Christian DeWitt. The profile was deleted a week after you were hospitalized. According to the administration at East River High, there is no student of that name registered. No family by the name of DeWitt lives in the town of East River. And we cross-checked the few profile pictures – they are all of a young man named Adam Bernard who models for Abercrombie and Fitch, the clothing store. We contacted Mr. Bernard and he has no knowledge of anyone named Christian DeWitt.”
I stare at his mouth as the words come out, my mind unable to believe what he is telling me can be true. It can’t be.
This is a dream. A really bad dream. The worst dream ever. I’ll wake up and it won’t be true, just like the one I had where I went to the dance with Christian in the limo and we ended up at my middle school with everyone calling me Lardo.
I start pinching my leg, hard, with my left hand, over and over to try to wake myself up. Mom sees me and takes my hand.
“Lara, stop. You’re going to bruise yourself,” she says, thinking that I care.
And that’s when I know beyond all shadow of a doubt, this isn’t a dream. The horror of this is that I’m awake, and it’s all too real. Even worse, it’s not going to go away.
I thought my world had already shattered when Christian sent me that message, but I realize now that was only the appetizer, the prelude to this moment, which is the main course.
Because Christian isn’t even real. He’s fake. I tried to kill myself over a boy who doesn’t even exist. It’s official. I am the stupidest person alive.
And I wish, even more now, that I were dead.
