The creepy guy with the bowler hat. The birds perched on the edge of my bed. The choir of voices that didn’t belong to anyone I could see. I listened for about ten minutes before I couldn’t take it anymore. Jason sat in my chair with his feet up on my desk and reminded me to keep quiet so I didn’t wake up Paul and my mom. He wasn’t really an appealing image with his bare butt cheeks nestled into my furniture, even if he was politely trying to stay out of everyone else’s way.
Rebecca followed me to the kitchen, her eyes tired, her face drawn. I pulled out all the baking ingredients while she found a comfortable spot on a stool and watched. I closed all the doors leading to the kitchen and pulled out a whisk. I knew I couldn’t use my stand mixer while Mom and Paul were sleeping. Especially if I wanted to avoid awkward questions until morning.
So I baked. I made shortbread cookies to dip in dark chocolate, tiny thumbprint peanut butter cookies, and really complicated little pinwheels with jelly in the center. I was in the zone. I couldn’t hear anything except the sound of my spoon scraping the side of the bowl. Blissful silence.
By the time I pulled the second pie out of the oven to cool, my mom was walking downstairs to have breakfast before work. Judging by her expression, I must have looked like hell.
That took some explaining, but honestly, it’s probably one of the least-crazy crazy things she’s seen me do. She was mad about the mess, which was understandable. There wasn’t an inch of counter space that wasn’t covered in flour. But rather than yell at me about it, she just started assembling platters of cookies for Paul to take to work. When he walked downstairs and saw the piles of baked goods, he raised an eyebrow to my mom, who shrugged her shoulders and handed him two platters to carry out to his car while she followed him with lemon bars. Paul was actually pretty good about ignoring stuff like this. He says the people in his office like when I bake.
“Leave the blueberry” was the last thing I remember saying. I didn’t make it back to my bed. I was more tired than I’d ever been in my life. The kind of tired you feel when you don’t know if you’re already asleep. And my head was aching. I managed to send Maya a text telling her that I was staying home from school and to “come over later for milk and cookies.” I immediately followed this with a text saying, “That’s not a euphemism for anything.” Though I secretly kind of hoped it was. Also canceled tennis with Dwight.
A few hours later, I staggered to bed, set the phone down on my nightstand, and let the choir sing me back to sleep. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew Mom would stay home from work, and for once this didn’t bother me. She was cautious and that was okay.
But for the moment, it was just me and Rebecca. She curled up against my chest and fell asleep.
—
So here I am again in the darkness of my room, with nothing and no one to distract me, and still I can’t sleep. I can’t stay home tomorrow because I was already out today and I have Academic Team practice. I wouldn’t be able to explain it to anyone, even though my mom would understand. So I’m writing to you because I’m so tired I feel drunk. I’m pissed that I can’t just doze off like everyone else, but I don’t want to take sleeping pills. I don’t need more medication.
Maya has been watching me more closely since the library incident, and I seem to be bumping into Ian more frequently at school. He definitely knows there’s something wrong with me, so it makes me wonder if he’s just waiting for the right moment to do something about it. Also makes me wonder how many other people are starting to notice, too.
Maybe I should be taking more pills. Pills for hearing voices. Pills for sleep. Then pills for anxiety about taking too many pills.
Yes, my hand is healing nicely. Thanks for asking.
DOSAGE: 3.5 mg. Increase in dosage approved.
JANUARY 30, 2013
You’re slipping.
I expected you to ask that question a long time ago. I mean, it’s been months now. What if I’d been dwelling on death all this time and you just now asked me about it?
Anyway, yeah, I used to think about death. Like I said before, my life was a scattered pile of crap when I didn’t know if anything was real. I guess for a while I thought about it because death seemed peaceful. More importantly, it seemed quiet. I crave quiet. You have no idea how much time I spend trying to block out the noise in my head.
There’s no privacy. Someone is always with you, always watching, always talking about something. When you have a man in a yellow suit asking you what time it is over and over and over again, eventually you want to answer him because you know that is what will send him away. But he’s not real. And other people can hear you when you answer his question, so it’s hard not to feel frustrated by that. I don’t need the attention.
So I didn’t think of death as a sad thing. I didn’t fear it the way other people do, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It was only ever bad when I craved it because being me was exhausting. Death seemed like a release that I was too cowardly to reach for because of my family. Even if I could settle on a method that didn’t repulse me, I could never have put my mom through the pain of finding my body.
Every day I worried about what I looked like to everyone else and what that would mean for my mom. And I was afraid. Rebecca looked really bad back then.
But I don’t think about death anymore. At least not the way I used to. Now I’m more concerned about noticing the ToZaPrex’s side effects before anyone else does. But sometimes I miss things, like this week, when something new sprang up.
I didn’t know there was a name for it until it started happening more frequently, but it’s called tardive dyskinesia. Involuntary muscle movements. It’s one of the side effects of the drug—so, yeah, you should probably write that down somewhere and make it official. In my case, it appears to be manifesting itself in grimaces and smacking of lips, which isn’t awkward at all. I probably look like a toothless old man eating soup.
I didn’t even know I was doing it until Maya stared at me in our religion class and sent me a text: “Why are you frowning like that? Knock it off, you look scary.”
It must have looked pretty scary for Maya to text me during class. Sister Catherine has a strict no-cell-phone policy. She confiscates them and hangs them like dead bodies in a bag at the front of the class. But I risked getting caught to text her back: “Bit the inside of my cheek. Ow.”
Maya shook her head and turned her attention back to the front of the class. There was sympathy for headaches, a shoulder shrug and a knowing expression that usually meant This too shall pass. But there was no sympathy for stupidity. I could almost hear her. You bit the inside of your cheek? Dumbass.
But Rebecca, at least, looked sympathetic. She always does.
Sometimes it just takes a little effort to squish my face back into the shape it’s supposed to be. I have to focus on the tiny muscles in my cheeks and press my fingers into the skin until the weird flutters of movement stop. It’s not so bad. It’s easy to pretend I’m just tired.
DOSAGE: 3.5 mg. Same dosage.
FEBRUARY 6, 2013