It’s the drugs, I tell myself. Can drugs do that?
There are other, smaller details that just seem wrong. In contrast to her parents—for surely the woman in the pink twinset is her mother?—Whitney isn’t dressed up. She’s got on jeans and a jarringly orange T-shirt. The T-shirt is sliding off one slim shoulder, revealing a maroon bra strap, and the normal thing for anybody to do would be to hitch her shoulder up and shift the T-shirt slightly to the right, hiding the bra strap. It’d be the normal thing in a high school classroom, I mean—maybe Whitney is so wasted right now that she thinks she’s at some sort of club, someplace where everyone else is too spaced out to notice.
There is also a line of drool starting in the corner of Whitney’s mouth, slipping slowly down her chin.
Oscar’s jokes about superhero Underoos seem pathetically innocent and sad right now. So what if Whitney wore Wonder Woman or Supergirl underwear when she was little? So what if everyone expected her to be wonderful and super and incredible her whole life? She threw all that away.
She ruined her life after high school, I think. Even with what Daddy did, even with everything Mom’s afraid of—I am not going to let anyone ruin mine.
I realize Mr. Court is introducing me to Mrs. Court and Whitney. Belatedly, I shake hands with both of them and say, “Nice to meet you.” I make my handshake firm, even though Whitney’s isn’t. Her hand feels like a fish out of water, trying to flop away. It’s also clammy, which annoys me, because now my hand is moist, and what if Mrs. Court thinks I have sweaty palms?
While I’m shaking hands with Mrs. Court, I notice out of the corner of my eye that Mr. Court is straightening Whitney’s shirt and wiping the drool from her chin. Now she looks normal again. Relatively.
Sad, I think, pitying her and feeling superior, all at once. So, so sad.
Everyone sits down, the Courts on one side of the table and me facing them with my back to the door. They’re all watching me, and it’s a struggle not to squirm in my seat, a struggle not to let panic overwhelm me.
Why isn’t anyone saying anything? I wonder. Aren’t they supposed to ask questions?
The silence grows, and I can’t stand it anymore.
“Um,” I begin, just as Mr. Court says, “Would you mind telling us—”
We both hesitate, and then I say, “I’m sorry. Go ahead—what did you want to know?”
Mr. Court looks over toward his wife and daughter. It’s Whitney who speaks up now.
“What have you liked best about your high school years?” she asks in an unnaturally high voice.
Oh, no! Don’t ask questions about me! I think.
But would it be any better to talk about the glories of Whitney’s high school years when ruined-Whitney is sitting right in front of me?
“Well,” I say, even though my mind is blank. I have a quick flash of remembering laughing in the hallway with Oscar, and in contrast to this horrible moment, that seems like the happiest ten minutes of my entire high school career. Maybe my entire life. “I would say the best thing about high school has been the friends I’ve made. I moved to Deskins right before freshman year, and I wasn’t sure what it would be like meeting new people.”
When I couldn’t be myself, I think. When I couldn’t let anybody get too close.
I don’t say that.
“I got involved in extracurricular activities, just like everybody tells you to—I ran cross-country freshman year, I’ve done service club and math club and other activities like that,” I say. Then I shrug. “Well, you already know that, because it was on my application. But I think the most fun moments have been just ordinary things like going out for ice cream with my friends, or joking around at lunch, or making up silly rhymes with them so we could all remember chemistry or biology formulas . . .”
“That’s how I felt too,” Whitney says softly.
She’s looking right at me, and I feel a jolt of connection. She was the queen of Deskins High School, and I am nobody here; she was drooling a moment ago, and I will never, ever, ever let myself fall that far. But we have something in common.
I remember that I have gone out with my high school friends for ice cream exactly once, and I haven’t eaten lunch with my friends in more than a week.
That still doesn’t mean my answer was a lie.
Whitney tilts her head, still watching me intently.
“Sometimes your eyes bleed,” she says. “You probably think it’s just tears, but it’s really blood.”
Did I hear that right?
I look to Mr. and Mrs. Court as if I expect them to translate.
They’re both looking at Whitney, and then past her, toward each other.
“Whitney,” Mr. Court says, easing an arm around his daughter’s shoulders. “Did you take your medicine this morning?”
Code, I think. Because he doesn’t want me to know it’s not really medicine she took.
Whitney grins and then puts her hand over her mouth, hiding it. Her eyes still glow. She looks like a little kid who’s been caught doing something bad but doesn’t regret it in the least.
“I wanted to be alert,” she says emphatically. “I wanted to talk to this one. To tell her—”
“That her eyes are bleeding?” Mrs. Court asks, with heavy skepticism. She and Mr. Court seem to have a good cop/bad cop routine going. She’s the bad cop.
Whitney giggles.
“Of course not,” she says. “How would I know her eyes were bleeding until I saw her?”
What is she on? I wonder. I think back to freshman-year health class, when we filled in grids about drug side effects. The only drug I can remember causing hallucinations is LSD.
Didn’t people pretty much stop taking LSD after the 1960s? I think.
I want to run out of the room and down the hall and find some kid who’s hanging around after school to get high and ask, “This isn’t how people on drugs usually act, is it? Isn’t this really bizarre?”
How could this be happening during my interview?
Oh, wait, what if she’s just acting? I wonder. What if this is some kind of test, to see how I’ll react to people who are . . .
I can’t even classify Whitney’s behavior. But I sit up straight and try to hold a patient, understanding expression on my face.
Even though I completely do not understand.
“Whitney,” Mr. Court says as he maneuvers his hand around her arm and begins pulling her up. “I think it would be best if you and your mother take a little walk while I talk to Becca.”
“But I want to tell her—”
“I know everything you want to say,” Mr. Court assures her. “I’ll pass it along.”
Whitney crosses her arms and shakes her head no. She’s got to be—what? Thirty-two? Thirty-three?—but she’s acting like a petulant little kid.
“No, me,” she says.
“Whitney,” Mrs. Court says. “Think. If this girl’s eyes are bleeding, shouldn’t we go find bandages for her? Wouldn’t that be the kind thing to do?”
I can almost see this idea burrowing into Whitney’s fogged mind. She stops shaking her head and her eyes go wide with concern. And then she jumps up and heads for the door.
“Right!” she calls. “We’ll be back as soon as we can! Try not to let the blood drip everywhere!”
Mrs. Court trails after her.
I turn and watch them leave. And then they’re gone, and the door’s shut and I know I need to face Mr. Court again. But what am I supposed to say?
As I’m trying to pull myself together to act normal—though, what is normal in a situation like this?—I hear Mr. Court clearing his throat behind me.
“It’s not what you think,” he says in such a heavy voice that each word seems weighted down. “She’s not a drug addict.”
I whirl around.
“I didn’t say anything about drugs,” I tell him, trying to sound both innocent and sympathetic and still as though I’m reacting “normally,” whatever that means. I remind myself I??
?ve had plenty of experience trying to hold myself together in bizarre circumstances.
Mr. Court frowns as if he doesn’t believe me.
“What you wrote . . . ,” he begins. He stops and waves this away, as if he wants to start over. “I know you saw newspaper articles about Whitney. From when she was at Kenyon.”
How does he know that? I wonder.
I squint, thinking about my scholarship essay. Of course I didn’t write anything about Whitney being arrested. But did I slip up and accidentally hint that I’d seen those articles?
No, I couldn’t have. . . .
I want to deny everything, to pretend I don’t know anything Whitney did between her high school graduation and today. But Mr. Court is already wading deeper into his story.
“Whitney began acting strange toward the end of her junior year in college,” Mr. Court says. He lets out a heavy sigh. “At first the police and the college thought she was on drugs. Marlene and I—her own parents!—we thought she was on drugs too. But she wasn’t.”
Is he still in denial? I wonder. Maybe it’s like Mom and me, how after Daddy was arrested we were so convinced he was innocent, so certain the prosecutors made a mistake. . . . Nobody wants to believe somebody they love could do such awful things.
Except Whitney’s strange behavior dates back twelve years. If Mr. Court is still in denial, that would be like Mom and me still believing in Daddy’s innocence even after he’d been arrested and convicted and sentenced, and had already served his full term in prison.
Now Mr. Court is looking me straight in the eye.
“Whitney is mentally ill,” he says.
I jerk back. I wasn’t expecting that.
“What?” I say. I’m having trouble processing this. “But Whitney was so normal in high school. No—not normal. Extraordinary. Incredible. How does someone go from that to being . . . being . . .”
I barely stop myself from using the word “crazy.” I also have to struggle not to say, “I don’t believe you.” I change tacks.
“She was already twenty, right?” I ask. “How could she be one type of person for twenty years and then suddenly become someone totally different?”
I don’t have to say “I don’t believe you.” The skepticism is thick in my voice. I want to force Mr. Court to admit “Well, it all started because she experimented with psychedelic drugs. . . .” I want there to be a reason.
I want to be able to blame Whitney for what happened to her, just like I blame Daddy for what happened to him.
Mr. Court keeps gazing at me, as steady as an anchor in a storm.
“That’s how schizophrenia works,” he says. “Average age of onset for females is twenty-five. It’s younger for males—eighteen, I think. And it wasn’t exactly sudden. There were signs. She stopped wearing shoes—at best, even with snow on the ground, she might wear flip-flops.” He laughs halfheartedly. “On a college campus, that didn’t stand out as much as you’d think. And anyhow, she’d always been a little quirky, always had such a great imagination—”
“Like how she invented the Land of the Two Seas,” I say. I’m struck with horror: Did I pull out one of the first signs of her insanity as something that made her great?
Mr. Court looks jolted, as if he’d forgotten I talked to Rachel and Tiffany Congreves.
“Well, yes,” he says. “But then in college she started crossing the line from being quirky and creative and imaginative and fun to . . . just being sick. Having delusions and strange hallucinations and thinking they were real.”
“Telling people their eyes are bleeding,” I say.
Mr. Court nods.
I have yet to do a college visit, but I don’t think college is that different from high school. If someone started saying crazy things like that in the hallways at DHS, everyone would laugh at first, thinking it was a joke.
And then everybody would start avoiding the person.
How did people treat Whitney, the golden girl, when she went crazy in college?
I can’t ask.
“A lot of Whitney’s hallucinations have to do with eyes,” Mr. Court is saying. “She usually only sees blood like that when she’s worried about someone. When she thinks someone’s in pain.”
I shift uncomfortably in my seat. Should I laugh this off, act as though Mr. Court himself is crazy for taking Whitney’s hallucination seriously? It’s not like I’m going to confess that I have problems of my own. Or admit that, even now, even as we’re talking about Whitney’s illness, I’m fighting a tide of rage inside me—ridiculous rage, unreasonable rage, rage no normal person would feel.
Am I supposed to say, “You know, I’m really mad Whitney would say that about me. I’m really mad that she’s crazy. And . . . I’m really mad that it’s not her fault, not anything she did to make this happen. Because I wanted to be mad at her for ruining her life, like Daddy ruined his. And mine. Don’t you know, as long as I could split my anger between her and Daddy, it wasn’t so bad?”
I’m not crazy. Not crazy enough to say that aloud to Whitney’s father.
Or anyone else.
“Isn’t there medicine she can take?” I ask, trying to shift the focus back to Whitney. I suddenly realize I misunderstood Mr. Court’s question about medicine—he was talking about a prescription, something Whitney needed. Something she’d forgotten to take? I try to sound meek and mild and only concerned about her. “Isn’t there something that could . . .”
I want to say “fix her” but I’m afraid that would sound bad. And I’m afraid it would loosen my iron control, send the fury spiraling out of my mouth.
And then who knows what could happen?
Mr. Court frowns and lets out another heavy sigh.
“It’s complicated,” he says. “Lots of people, with medicine, can lead fairly normal lives. Whitney . . . not so much. And the side effects . . . She hates how foggy her brain gets with certain medications. Some of the meds make her look and act crazier than without them.”
The drool, I think. The shirt falling off her shoulder.
“She has good days and bad days,” Mr. Court says. “Good and bad months, even good and bad years. Sometimes we can’t take care of her at home—that’s why we moved down to Cincinnati, to be close to the hospital where she stays.”
“So—no one in Deskins even knows she’s sick?” I ask.
Mr. Court winces.
“No, people here know,” he says. “But we’ve found they have a remarkable degree of . . . well, I know it’s meant as loyalty. A lot of the people who remember Whitney growing up, they refuse to talk to outsiders about her problems now. They think they’re protecting her.”
Mrs. Congreves, I think. The teachers I interviewed. Maybe even Corey Wisner and the other classmates who set up the reunion page.
I think about what Ashley Stevens said leaving her scholarship interview, about how her cousin had told her all about Whitney. Of course people like her would have known everything right from the start. They had the advantage. They weren’t outsiders like me.
“So why don’t you just explain everything in the scholarship handouts?” I ask. “So nobody else has to?”
No matter how much I try, I can’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. The sense of being left out and deceived.
Mr. Court shakes his head.
“We were surprised this year to find out that Whitney’s mental illness wasn’t mentioned in the scholarship handouts,” he says apologetically. “We had a whole paragraph about it in the information we gave the school way back at the beginning, when we set everything up. Somehow I guess that’s been left out every year.”
Ms. Stela making yet another mistake? I wonder. Then I remember she hasn’t been at DHS that long. So was it some old Deskins person once again trying to “protect” Whitney?
Mr. Court is still talking.
“This is the first year we found some students didn’t know all about Whitney,” he says. “We kind of forgot how much Deskins has changed, that there a
re so many new people whose parents wouldn’t even remember.”
Or students who haven’t heard gossip about her, I think. Because I’m pretty sure if people like Ashley Stevens know, there was gossip. Would I have known all about Whitney if I hadn’t cut myself off from everyone over the last few weeks?
No, my friends didn’t know either, I think, remembering the lunch where everybody else, like me, assumed Whitney was dead. All my friends are Deskins transplants like me.
This thought comforts me enough that I can tamp down my anger and sense of betrayal and say, almost graciously, “That’s okay. It’s not your fault the school didn’t tell us everything.”
I’m shifting to an almost-normal thought process: Does this mess up anything about my essay? Could we possibly just go on with the interview like normal now?
But Mr. Court won’t let the subject drop.
“No, it’s not okay,” he says. “This makes it seem like we were trying to hide Whitney’s illness—like we’re ashamed or something—and we’re not. And anyway, we don’t want people to be upset about the early deadlines. We want them to understand.”
I squint at him, confused once again. What do deadlines have to do with anything?
“You know how our contest starts and ends earlier than the other local scholarships?” Mr. Court asks. “It’s because Whitney usually does really well in the fall, and this way she can help pick the winner.”
What I saw was Whitney doing well?
Maybe I telegraph that question with my eyes, because Mr. Court says defensively, “She was perfectly fine during the other interviews. It’s just, she was so worried about you . . .”
I’m back to squirming again. I jump in with another question.
“Why do you even do the scholarship program?” I ask. It’s the closest I can come to what I really want to know: Why parade your crazy daughter around when she’s drooling and half-undressed? Why make it likely that people like me will find old articles about her being stopped by the police and judge her for things that weren’t her fault? Why force Whitney’s old friends to relive the past and put them on the spot, deciding every year what they should or shouldn’t say? Why not be like everyone else in Old Deskins and keep the secret from all outsiders?