I hate being sick. It leaves so much time open for my family to try and talk to me. Moaning and coughing only keeps them quiet for so long. I often resort to locking myself in my room and using what I like to call, “musical therapy”.
During my “therapy” time, I can be found with my head down on the edge of my computer desk with my eyes closed as the too tiny speakers do their best to blare the songs from my favorite genre: angry. I sit with my nose pointing proudly toward the floor and imagine the music running over the crown of my head, then flowing down my neck and my back until it reaches interference from my chair. Like a musical shiver traveling down my spine.
The therapy is always cut short when loud screams from downstairs find just the right note to clash with the loud screams in my music.
“Leah! Are you in there?!”
Maybe if I ignore it, it will go away, I think hopefully.
“Turn off that crap and come down to dinner!”
“Ugh,” I grunt as I lift my head and open my eyes, which don’t adjust to the light, leaving bright floating stars in my field of vision. I stand and march toward the door before I am able to see through the “Lost in Space” foreground.
“Ouch!” I shout as my shoulder attempts to become one with the bedroom door frame.
“Yeah, that music would hurt me, too.” I look up to see my dad’s face above me. I catch a glimpse at his eyes, glaring impatiently at me, behind a new glaze of pain-caused stars.
“Your mother has been yelling for you for at least ten minutes,” he lectures.
My older brother joins us in the hall, “Leah’s been blowing her nose, Dad. You know how loud that can be. It doesn’t surprise me that she couldn’t hear anything.”
“Shut up,” I say pointedly to his eclipsed form. With the hall light behind him, trying to look at his face is like squinting into an interrogator’s blinding lamp.
“Leah, you know better than to talk like that,” my father chides in a tone that feels like the slap of a ruler on the back of my hands.
“He should know better than to make fun of someone who’s dying!” I retort angrily while pointing at the tall boxy silhouette of my brother.
“Don’t be so melodramatic, kid. You’re not dying,” the black shadowy monster at my right responds. The muscles in my arms reflexively tighten at being called, kid.
“Well, I feel like it,” I mutter, feeling stupid for being caught acting like a drama queen.
Before anyone can respond to my cranky mumblings, my mother arrives at the top of the stairs. An almost visual cloud of fury surrounds her as she spreads out her arms to better express her extreme exasperation.
“What are you all doing standing here?! Dinner is getting cold!” the short woman with a mountain of hair scolds.
“We’re all coming,” says my father, casually adding the “all” as a reminder to both my brother and me.
My mother turns and stomps down the stairs, muttering something about mashed potatoes on Antarctica. Her hair bouncing with the little mobility allowed by gallons of hairspray.
Back to Purgatory
“Glad to see you’re back on deck, First Mate Leah.”
I smile. Returning to school isn’t exactly something I enjoy...ever, but reuniting with my best friend, Ruth, always is.
I watch my feet as they plod over the smudged tile floors that run like a sludge path through the school. I try not to think of the thousands of feet that had beaten into the once pure and white linoleum squares a perverse and unnatural yellow color. I feel sad that they won’t ever be the same.
I look over into the mock severe face of my friend. Her blue eyes are staring intensely down a row of lockers. Watching for icebergs, I assume. While I know she isn’t actually examining anything, her expression is not understood by a group of passing freshmen. I watch as they duck and dodge to avoid her scrutinizing gaze, like they see it as a visible line of daggers shooting from her eyes. I always admire her ability to confuse people without really trying.
“Anything exciting happen while I was gone?” I ask ignoring the role-playing part she had set up for me.
“Captain’s Log: Tuesday, October 8th. A junior officer passes out in the eating quarters, presumably from food poisoning. The meat loaf is lovely and I have second helpings. I give the crew a motivational speech and we prepare for battle,” she says in a deep and professional voice.
I roll my eyes and attempt not to encourage her with my laughter.
“I guess it doesn’t matter since the goings-on of this school don’t ever have any relevance to me. Just let me know if anything drastic happened in my absence. Like the death of a teacher or a petition to put an end to gym classes.” I give up all hope of getting information from my ship captain friend.
“I will send my informant directly to you, deckhand,” She said still squinting into the distance, watchful for any ocean perils.
“Hey, what happened to First Mate Leah? Why’d I get demoted?” I decide to play along.
“Deckhand, if you don’t act like a first mate, you can’t be a first mate. It’s as simple as that,” she dictates.
Misguided Guidance
I wonder what created that black blob in the corner above her desk, I find myself thinking as the school counselor attempts to tell me what I want to do with my future.
An unwanted snippet of her sermon slips through my well-made hearing blockade, “If you don’t plan something soon…lead to failure.”
I am extremely intrigued. No really, I wonder, what is that black oozy substance? It ought to be tested or something. I could be the first person to discover this thing. I wonder what lab I could call to have it tested, my thoughts flow unhindered by the buzz of the counselor’s advice.
Perhaps it is an intelligent life form. Here’s the headline, I continue to myself, “Girl Discovers Talking Mold.” Unfortunately, no one can hear it above the school counselor’s blather. I smile to myself.
Uh-oh, I realize, she’s waiting for me to respond. What did she just say? I think back to what the counselor just asked me.
I play back her question in my mind, “What do you want to do after high school…career wise?”
“Well,” I begin, “I was thinking of becoming a chef…but then I realized I hate to cook. So, my next ambition was to be a veterinarian…”
I am cut short, “Well, that sounds like a good choice. What college…”
I break in as though she hadn’t just interrupted me, “But then I remembered that I’m allergic to most animals. So, that plan fell through.” The counselor is not amused.
After catching her intense look of disapproval, I wasn’t about to tell her that my only current aspiration was to discover the secrets of the black blob in the corner of the cramped office. Even though I was certain the substance was watching her every move and preparing for an unholy black fungus war, just above her computer.
“Leah, what are you going to do?!” She reveals to me her short temper, “Your life is heading nowhere! Now, I understand that with what happened to your friend Ruth…”
“No!” I nearly jump out of my chair, surprising myself with my sudden rage, “You don’t understand!” I am done with this conversation. I stand to leave.
“Leah, what is wrong…” I can sense her desire to finish the question with, “with you”. I’m also aware that she feels hurt from my outburst.
I close my eyes and stop my hand just above the doorknob at the entrance to her tiny workplace. My head is pounding with pulsing waves of pain.
“I’m sorry,” I say through clenched teeth; my eyes still closed. “I just haven’t been feeling well.” I offer no other explanation, though I know it won’t please her.
I grab the knob and turn it slowly, feeling that if I went any faster I would break it from the door with my intense desire to leave the trap of a room. I throw open the door and am gone before she can say anything else.
The Untouchable
I hate lunch. I sit by myself at the end of a table. The mandatory “two seats from the crazy girl” are being kept religiously.
I concentrate on the mental wall I create to block as many sounds as possible from being processed by my brain. It casts a shadow behind my eyes that anyone could notice, should they bother to look.
Even with this wall, some of the Stupid manages to seep through the tiniest of cracks, “…friend was killed. I know…manic depressive.”
I try desperately to thicken the wall and block out what bits of conversation I am overhearing.
“…can’t imagine what she…just awful.”
“They say…saw the other car hit her when she walked to…”
I jump up and stride quickly through the clumps and clusters of people in the overcrowded lunch room. I’m attempting frantically to escape from the stories spreading in great dark swirls throughout the room; table to table, clique to clique, person to person. I feel my shoulders crunch into the overstuffed backpack of a freshman. The look of fear on his face makes me flee faster. I won’t look back to see what dark cloud of rumors is chasing me.
Outside the lunchroom, I can’t hear the jabbering students anymore, but I haven’t escaped. The gossip still spins dizzyingly through my mind, ripping through my thoughts like a predator would its wounded prey.
“I hear she was drunk when it happened.”
“No, her friend called her to tell her she was dying. She didn’t see it happen.”
“I heard they were more than just friends.”
Before I realize how I got there, I find myself on the bathroom floor kneeling in front of a toilet. I’m making dire attempts to hold back the bile rising in my throat.
I hear someone’s cautious steps behind me. I turn just enough to see Dita, my old Biology lab partner. I see in her face a look that is no longer uncommon to me. She’s afraid.
“Leah, are you alright?” She asks taking a few steps backward.
“No,” I say as I lean back against the stall’s wall and press my hands against my eyes.
“I’m sorry if I’m inconveniencing you,” I say pointedly without bringing the heels of my hands away from my eye sockets. I don’t have to look to recognize that Dita knows why I responded so curtly.
The day after the accident, and still long after it occurred, everyone avoided me. This included my lab partner and supposed friend, Dita. When Ruth was alive, Dita used to sit with me in Biology class. We would always talk during class until the teacher would yell at us. After the accident, she left me alone in the middle of the classroom. I was a solitary bull’s-eye for crazy conjectures and ridicule.
That day, I could hear Dita laughing at a desk two rows behind me. At the time, I didn’t know why she would want to hurt me the way she was. Eventually, though, I realized she didn’t care enough about me to want to hurt me. She just didn’t want to deal with me. Just like everyone else.
The truth is, even people like the school counselor, who were trying to “help” me, really only wanted to make me and my problems go away. They didn’t want to handle the burden my problems brought to them and they didn’t want to handle me.
Weight of the Wounds
Five of us sat on the steps outside the tiny ice cream shop. Nobody was out on a day this hot, so we didn’t have to worry about getting in people’s way.
Dita, Fan (short for Fanchon which probably means, “my parents were high when they named me”), and David had just finished their turns at sharing their worst dating experience and Ruth was in the middle of her hilariously tragic and true dating tale.
“He and his box-of-wine-drunk buddies then proceeded to hurl baked potatoes over the balcony and onto the unsuspecting couples on the dance floor.” I had heard this story before, but Ruth still has me laughing hysterically. I know there are more hi-jinks to come.
“I had to end it quickly before he asked me to dance and I ended up tripping over one of the boy’s potato missiles, so I simply stood to leave. Seeing his prized cow about to mosey away, my date hastily offered to walk me home with a drunkenly obvious wink to his charming companions,” Ruth continues like a master storyteller, “He spat twice on the walk back to my house, and once it was upwind of me.” The entire group erupts with laughter.
“He kept apologizing all the way back to my house, though, I’m certain he didn’t know what he had to feel sorry about. Then, when we reached my door I was utterly astonished to discover that he felt he deserved a good-night kiss. Sure enough, as I looked in his direction I noticed his face coming at me, full speed ahead. I quickly tilted my head upward and he ended up sucking on my chin,” she allows the laughter to die down.
“And that, dear children,” she pauses for dramatic effect, “is why you should never date a football player.” Her story is through and no one’s aching ribs complain.
My turn, “Well, I’ve never really had good luck with any of my dates,” I say, aware that I am not satisfying anyone’s curiosity.
“And why do you think that is?” Ruth asks, her tone indicating she knows all about my anti-social attitude toward every one of my past dates.
“You know,” I begin my explanation, “I once opened one of those chain emails, and it told me that if I wouldn’t resend it in 97 seconds to 273 other people, I would have a terrible love life until my death. I didn’t resend it. I have the sneaking suspicion that might be my problem. It’s not my fault. Apparently, I won’t have a successful date until after I’m dead.”
Everyone is laughing again and it feels good to entertain my friends.
My good feeling is interrupted by my cell phone’s annoying ringtone, one Ruth picked out to drive me nuts.
I answer it and hear Ruth’s desperate voice crying through the ear piece, “Leah, it hit me! I was just walking.” I can hear her gasping for breath. She obviously is in a great deal of pain.
“Oh, God! Leah, my legs are being crushed! I can’t breathe! Help me!” she is sobbing.
I am horror struck. I look over at my friend next to me. Ruth is talking to everyone again, but instead of an ice cream cone in her hand, I see her cell phone, drenched in blood.
I look down at her white shirt and see that it is soaked in a blinding red liquid, spreading slowly over her stomach.
“Help me, please,” I hear her beg, her voice tiny and pleading through my cell phone. At the same time, I watch the Ruth next to me tell a joke to our friends and at the punch line she spits blood and continues to laugh.
“Oh, God!” I choke on my prayer.
I bolt upright in bed and notice immediately the complete darkness surrounding me. I am saturated in sweat and have silent tears streaming down my cheeks.
“Oh, God!” I repeat.
Operation: Moronic Question
I find myself back in the counselor’s office for what has become a mandatory weekly routine. I’ve stopped caring about the evil mystery substance and focus mainly on ignoring everything occurring around me. I’m aware that my surly attitude is noted, and that it only makes the counselor more determined to “fix” me.
I have no idea what has been said but I hear the end of a lecture, “What do you think,” she asks, not actually expecting me to go against my previous pattern and respond to the question.
I surprise her. I really don’t know what part of her speech she was referring to in her question, and I don’t care. I tell her what I think anyway, “I think we live in the broken shadows of what this world should have been, and the cracks are just now revealing themselves to me.”
I’m not looking at her; instead, I bore a hole through her bookcase with my eyes. I don’t care if she gets what I’m saying. I’m just tired of having her ask stupid questions. So I decide to respond, for once, with what I really think and feel, whether she understands or not.
As I would expect, she replies with another dumb question, “How do you feel right now, Leah?” I swear, this woman cannot have gone through any good training and still be this dense.
“Do you know what the name, Leah, means?” I ask, turning my burning gaze toward her face for the first time since entering her office.
She is visually surprised by my question, as well as the sudden attention of my livid gaze. Her eyes widen as her eyebrows stretch to their greatest height and her mouth drops open.
“It means weary. Tired,” I throw in the synonym in case she is still confused.
“Leah, I…I…” she stutters.
“I know,” I spit venomously, “You don’t know what to say.”
With that, I stand and leave her in confusion amidst the stacks of papers on her cluttered desk.
Broken Shadows
I’m alone at a desk in the front of my homeroom. Little bits of conversation, disgustingly easy to categorize as “teenage drama”, float and flutter past my head like so many mindless butterflies. Though, swatting won’t stop these bugs.
“And I was like, ‘I’m not Matt’, and I pushed her, and she was like, ‘What’s your deal! Don’t push me!’ and she was all mad and stuff.” I hear the spiky-haired guy behind me inform his friend.
My stomach cramps and I feel like I might throw up. I look to see what the teacher is doing and decide to just run for the bathroom without saying anything.
I return ten minutes later, my stomach feels a bit better but my head pounds with each new beat of my heart. I look around the room. No one even noticed I was gone.
The Truth
Lunchtime again. I can’t even think about eating anything. For some reason, I go to sit by myself at a table anyway.
While I rest, suppressing waves of nausea, my brother approaches me. I don’t react even though I realize how unheard of it is for a senior to come and talk to an underclassman. Especially to the “creepy girl” who he wouldn’t want anyone knowing was his sister.
“Hey, Leah,” he whispers, “I was just wondering…well I mean, Mom and Dad asked me if I knew and…You aren’t thinking of…hurting yourself, are you?” I’m taken aback. He may actually be concerned.
I give no response apart from a glance in his direction.
“Well, you aren’t going to kill yourself or anything, right?” he says, as though I need clarification.
“No, I did that a long time ago,” my voice is flat.
He shifts his weight on the seat next to me. “Sorry, I don’t get it,” he replies.
Big shocker there, I think sarcastically.
“You just seem depressed, is all,” he prods for more information, “Are you?”
“I don’t know, I don’t feel like it,” I state truthfully.
“Well, uh, what do you feel like?” he questions.
Oh, no, I think, it’s like having two poorly trained counselors.
I find myself answering candidly to a stupid question, yet again. “Nothing, just sick. That’s all I ever feel anymore.”
I glance at him to see how he is reacting to me. His brow furrows as he tries to fathom the possibility that I am a problem he can’t fix.
“Don’t worry, though,” I assure him. “I’m sure it’s just a phase.”
I leave the table and walk serenely to the restroom, where I promptly vomit the truth all over the homecoming queen’s shoes.
The End.
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