The blood drained from Se?ora Gutiérrez’s face as her eyes darted to the shut door. She was panicked. I’d said words you weren’t allowed to say in a school unless you were serious.
She picked up the phone on her desk and called whoever she was supposed to call in an emergency. People came—an ambulance and medics and police officers and firefighters. And it looked like October fifteenth. It looked like that day. And I’m sure it was very upsetting for a lot of people, because students in my class wrung their hands and peered over their shoulders like they were waiting for the next bad thing to happen.
I was taken away in an ambulance. We went to the hospital where my mom works. She was sweaty when she got to the ER, like she’d run from far away even though it was only from the cancer ward three floors up. She’d run the whole way because that’s what moms do when they hear their kids are in the emergency room. When she found me sitting on a bed with the privacy curtain wide open, she hugged me, and I sank into her chest and cried.
My mom went down the hall and around the corner with me, where a radiologist took a CAT scan of my head and an X-ray of my heart. They wanted to make sure I didn’t have something majorly wrong with me. I didn’t. Not exactly.
My heart was fine.
My brain was fine (sort of).
It turned out I wasn’t dying on the outside. I was only dying on the inside, where nobody could see.
After that, we sat in a freezing cold waiting room. I drew in deep breaths of hospital air that I was convinced smelled like blood and bleach. Then the doctor took us into a private room with a door and a window. He gave me some medicine to make me calm. Then he told me I’d had a panic attack.
“But it felt like I was dying,” I said.
“It can feel that way,” he agreed.
“What can we do?” my mom asked.
“It would be good to find someone for Morgan to talk to.”
*
My mom had to be there the first time I met Brenda because Brenda had to do something called an intake. I think that meant she wanted to talk to both of us to figure out how messed up I was and how often she’d need to meet with me. My mom couldn’t afford therapy. I felt guilty for needing it. But my mom was close with some of the doctors at work because she’d had her job for a while. And the doctors at work knew people. And one of them had heard about Brenda. She said Brenda did a certain number of volunteer hours every year and she was willing to use those hours on me because she was particularly interested in helping out military families. The doctor asked Brenda to call my mom. Brenda did. They set up an appointment for the next day in the middle of a bright and sunny afternoon.
I liked Brenda instantly because she was young. And she had tattoos and dreadlocks and all those earrings. It made me trust her. Like she was honest about what she was. Like she didn’t have anything to hide.
We sat in cushy chairs in her office. They were deep and green and plush like the carpet underneath them. I think they were supposed to be comfortable, but I felt like I was going to sink into mine and disappear. I asked if I could stand up. My mom and Brenda looked at me funny.
“I can’t go to school anymore,” I said out loud, my hands fluttering against my thighs. “And I don’t want to leave my apartment again.”
“Are you sure? Won’t you miss your friends?” Brenda asked.
“My friends are all at different schools.”
“But you can still see them,” my mom said, and then admitted to Brenda that she was worried about the way I seemed to be pushing all my friends away.
“I can’t be social right now,” I said. “I’m sorry. And I can’t go to school. But I did some research. I found an online high school. There’s one just for California students, and I can start classes right away.”
“I don’t know,” my mom hedged. “How much is it?”
“It’s free. All my classes will transfer, and it’s fully accredited.”
“It just sounds so extreme,” my mom said.
I literally stomped my foot on the ground the way Ben would when he didn’t want to jump to me from the edge of the swimming pool when he was three. “I can’t go to school. I won’t.”
Brenda reassured my mom it might be the best thing for me since I’d made the decision myself and had done the research. “Morgan deserves to have some control.”
It felt like Brenda understood what I was going through even if I didn’t quite understand it. She asked me if maybe I could try to come to her office only twice a week and stay home the rest of the time.
I told her no. I said I couldn’t drive. “I can’t be in my car. I feel trapped inside of it. I just want to be home where I feel safe.”
“Morgan,” my mom said, “Dr. Gwynn doesn’t make house calls. If you want to work with her, you’re going to have to get yourself to her office.”
“I can’t.” My voice caught then. I curled into myself. Broken and barely breathing. “What are you not hearing? I can’t leave our apartment. I won’t.”