Maddy was trying to solve the problem on her own. She had always been an incongruous blend of independence and dependence, which most of her friends and family actually found quite charming. She never leaned on anyone else for her homework, and she self-motivated with nearly everything she did. And yet she never got her driver’s license. Almost every other kid in Allendale was at the DMV on their sixteenth birthday, but Maddy let that day come and go—then every day after it. She didn’t think she would be very good at driving, and the way she saw it, failing the driving test would be worse than never taking it. But also, she just didn’t see the need. All her friends could drive. She never found herself stranded anywhere, wishing she could drive, and she liked how it connected their group—everyone always planning who would pick up whom and when.
In mid-November, Maddy decided to make a counseling appointment with Penn’s Counseling and Psychological Services. She did not tell her high school friends, or her parents, that she was reaching out to get help. She sat with her MacBook Pro and researched the protocol for setting up an appointment, and quickly discovered that the first step was booking an initial screening, a session in which she would talk with someone about what was bothering her so the counselor could assess what kind of help she needed. Maddy had assumed she could see someone the next day, or at least that same week, but in fact the first opening in the system was approximately two weeks away. If her symptoms were time sensitive, if she were desperate, she could have skipped places in the line, but she was not sure she qualified. Maddy accepted the standard initial appointment, waited her turn, and continued trying to fight through whatever this was.
When the date finally came, she was actually hopeful, filled with a belief that the therapist might know exactly how to help, some special trick in the way a physical therapist can soothe a sore muscle or a coach can find just the right game plan. Maybe, Maddy thought, an outsider could see an angle she had missed. No, obviously the therapist couldn’t fix everything, but perhaps she could set her on a course toward full health.
The meeting was nothing like what she’d hoped. She felt the therapist had standard questions she asked of every student who walked into the office, and none of them seemed to get at the gravity, the depth, of Madison’s situation. Have you ever been homesick before? How many times a day do you call your parents? Are you making sure you’re eating three meals a day? The meeting, she would tell her family over Thanksgiving, seemed pointless. She understood that homesickness and stress were common issues among college freshmen, but she could not reconcile that those were her issues, because how she felt did not feel common at all. The way Madison felt was extraordinary—and not in a good way.
She tried to convey this to her family over Thanksgiving. She was much better at expressing her feelings in writing, always had been. But that week, she tried to make them understand that something significant was going on.
They started to get it.
Madison was focused and diligent, but in high school she had also been silly and goofy. She was usually smiling, loved dancing and singing in the car when she was with her friends, and also making silly faces for Snapchat. She would often retreat into herself when parents were around. But when it was just her friends, she was usually open and connected. That version of Maddy was not the one who showed up for Thanksgiving. At some point during that week, while the family was in the living room watching one of their shows and the rest of the kids were joking and laughing, Madison was simply sitting there, staring at the screen but not really watching.
“You never smile anymore,” Brendan finally said, more as observation than criticism. “You never laugh anymore.”
Madison just nodded.
Theirs wasn’t the kind of house in which you could hide how you were feeling or what you were doing. It was a cozy little two-story home at the end of a dead-end road, and if you were singing in the shower upstairs, everyone would hear. The place was bursting at the seams—especially during the holidays, when all the kids were home.
Madison sat at the table with Carli and Scott after Thanksgiving dinner. The long wooden table occupied almost the entire space of the eat-in kitchen, with the wall-length window looking out onto the backyard, the soccer goal, and the horse pasture beyond. Maddy had spent hundreds of mornings at that table, eating cereal or peanut butter and bananas. And she had spent countless evenings there studying, eventually closing her books to join Mackenzie just a few yards away, where they would watch The Voice or American Idol.
That afternoon, the three of them began talking. Carli, like the rest of the family, was not overly concerned, and felt this challenge, a little bit of turmoil, could be good for her sister. “This is normal,” Carli told her younger sister. “People leave home, they’re unhappy, they transfer—they figure it out.” Madison shook her head: “It’s not normal. It’s not normal to feel like this.”
To some degree, Maddy had an easier time showing her vulnerability to her family than to her friends. Still, opening up was not, in general, a comfortable state for her—or, really, for any teenager. Those years are often spent pretending you’ve developed a tough exterior, because you think you’re expected to have one and because you haven’t yet realized that a tough exterior isn’t actually an asset. Maddy thought being a college student was synonymous with being an adult, which somehow was supposed to be synonymous with individual problem solving—a mistake we all make and most of us recover from.
All of Maddy’s high school friends were home for the holiday. Emma was back from Boston College for a few days, Jackie from Princeton, Justine Moran from Marquette, MJ White from Villanova, Brooke Holle from Holy Cross. Except for Brooke, who had fallen in love with her school and team right away, the common theme among them was disappointment and melancholy. College was not as expected. Jackie even told Maddy that she had seen a therapist at Princeton, which empowered Maddy to tell Jackie that she had done the same at Penn but that she hadn’t connected with the counselor.