‘Okay.’ Dr Reeves puts her hand on top of mine. ‘Just relax. We’re not up any stairs right now.’
‘I know it’s irrational,’ I tell her, because I do know that. I know that you can’t live your life waiting for disaster to strike. I know this. Hell, if we all lived like that, we’d stay stock-still our entire lives or be forced to roll around the streets in those giant plastic bubbles. But it’s like my mind and my brain are two separate things, working against each other. I can’t get them to cooperate.
The doc reminds me that fear and rational thought are enemies. Then we talk about neural pathways and breaking thought cycles, medical jargon that amounts to Next session, we’re going to climb a flight of stairs. Fun times.
With that, she makes a follow-up appointment.
I suggest Monday, same time next week.
She insists on Tuesday, in the afternoon.
She likes to mix up our psych dates a little, says she wants to keep a pinch of spontaneity in our meetings; this way, my brain doesn’t start relying on a routine. The doc climbs out of the car.
I’m already trying to invent a sickness that will prevent me from leaving the house next week.
Home safe and sound, at last. It takes less effort to walk the fifty yards to my front door. It’s the going out that rocks my world, not the coming home.
Mom heads off into the kitchen. I consider disappearing into my room and slipping into a vegetative state, but I have a science paper due in sixteen days, and I’m not one to leave things until the last second/minute/week. Well, anything could happen between now and then. What if the computer and laptop break simultaneously and it takes an eternity to get them fixed? What if I lose fingers in a horrific sandwich-slicing incident? Or a tornado tears through our house and sucks up everything we own? You just never know.
I slink off into the study, push the power button on the computer, and the old gal starts up with a cough and a splutter. Sadly, long-term sickness does not mean a free pass from education, and for the last four years, Mom and the Learn Long Distance website have been home-schooling me.
Like I don’t love learning. I do. I absolutely love it. I almost wish I didn’t. I never used to. It’s all part of agoraphobia’s dastardly plan to make me look like the most abnormal teen on the planet.
I work as fast as I can, mostly because this computer is practically steam-powered and the clunky buttons click every time I tap them. This does not bode well for a brain that obsesses over patterns and numbers. Superhuman hearing detects the slight variation of sound with every keystroke, and I become frustratingly fixated on the fact that no two clicks sound the same. Then suddenly it’s as if I’m Mozart, losing hours trying to type out Shakespeare sonnets to a tune. Thankfully, this is one of those quirky behaviours that’s not always present. It comes and goes like most of my compulsions, depending on how stressed/emotional/sleepy/hormonal I am.
The printer spits out my pages. I grab them, stack them, and bang them against the desktop so they’re all nice and neatly aligned. I want to clip them together so they stay that way, but Mom’s usually well-stocked stationery caddie is missing paper clips. There was this moment during a math quiz last week when my mind started to wander and I inadvertently twisted them all into a model of the Eiffel Tower. Art isn’t a required subject, but Mom gave me an A anyway.
I glance around the study, uncertain where she’s storing stationery supplies this week. Could be here, could be the trunk of her car, could be in her bra or at the bottom of her Louis Vuitton briefcase. I reach for the top drawer of the desk. Hesitate.
Mom is a mess monster. Her bedroom looks like a battle broke out between a hurricane and a thrift store. There are cold cups of tea in there, playing host to entire micro-nations. My Spider-Man mug went in two months and ten days ago . . . I haven’t seen it since. A shudder rips through me. When my mug finally does emerge, it will need to be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom.
But that’s her space.
Our compromise.
She fights her natural urge to leave things lying around the rest of the house and we keep her bedroom door closed at all times.
‘Mom?’ I wait a second, and when she doesn’t answer, I head towards the kitchen, admiring the crisp white sheets and perfect type on my paper. Perfection is a feeling; you’ll know it if you’ve ever questioned the competency of your penmanship before writing on the first page of a new notebook.
I can hear Mom talking before I get to the kitchen.
‘Can’t you send Maggie or the intern, what’s-his-face?’ She’s on the phone, sitting at the table with her back to me. Her words are heavy, weighted down with worry.
I’m instantly concerned. So much so that I spend only a second thinking about how vulnerable she’s made herself to potential intruders; I’m halfway in the room and she still hasn’t noticed me.