“I’ve been working with young people for ten years,” Cat Poop said. “I assure you that I’m quite qualified to help you.”
“Ten years?” I said. I was kind of surprised. I didn’t think he was that old. “What’d you do, start college when you were nine? Or by ‘working with young people,’ do you mean you were a camp counselor or something?”
I thought maybe he’d tell me how old he is, but he went back to staring. I looked around the office, ignoring him. Besides his desk, there’s a couch and another chair besides the one I was sitting in. And they’re not the plastic kind we have in the lounge; they’re real leather ones that don’t make your butt hurt. There’s a bookcase with a bunch of boring-looking books in it, and a plant with pink flowers on top of it. On one of the walls there’s a painting of a black-and-white dog holding a dead bird in its mouth.
He also has a window, and it doesn’t have wire in it. I guess they’re not afraid the shrinks will jump out. I thought about trying it, but we’re on the fourth floor, and I’m pretty sure I’d break my leg if I did. Then I’d be crazy and in a cast, which is kind of overdoing it a little.
“I’m not like them,” I said when I got tired of looking at his office.
“Not like who?” he asked, as if he’d already forgotten what we were talking about.
“Them,” I said, waving my hands around. “The rest of the group. I mean, seriously, look at them. They’re crazy.”
“Why do you say that?”
I held up one finger. “One tried to barbeque a guy,” I said. I kept going, holding up another finger for each person I ticked off. “One is in love with another one who doesn’t seem to know who she is or where he is, and one,” I concluded, pointing a final finger in the air, “threw herself into a lake for no reason.”
“And you feel that you’re different from them?” he said.
“Um, yeah,” I told him. “Don’t you?”
“Tell me about your family,” he said.
Like I said, my family is totally normal. Well, as normal as most families are, which means that sometimes we fight about stuff but the rest of the time we get along. We’re so boring that I almost wanted to make up a bunch of drama to tell Cat Poop, like that my mother locks my sister and me in the cellar when we complain about what she made for dinner, or that my father pressures me to be the best at everything. But my dad always says he was never good at math either, and that my As in English more than make up for my Cs in trigonometry. And my mom usually picks up dinner at China Dragon or South of the Border because when she tries to cook the stove catches on fire, so dinner at our house is never a problem.
“They’re great,” is what I said to Cat Poop. “Everything is totally great.”
“Then why did you try to kill yourself?”
The guy has a one-track mind, and it’s getting on my nerves. I waited a long time, to make him think I was seriously considering the question. Then I sighed. “Okay,” I said. “I guess I can tell you.”
Cat Poop straightened up a little in his chair. He took the pencil out again and held it over the pad, like he had to be ready to write down every single word of a historic speech or something.
“I did it because . . .” I hesitated, blinking and sniffing a little, like I might start to cry at any second. “I did it because . . . because I couldn’t stand to live in the same world as Paris Hilton.”
I waited for him to yell at me, but he just sat in his chair, scribbling on the pad. After a minute he looked up at me. “Somehow, I doubt Ms. Hilton is responsible for your troubles. As annoying as she may be, she has not, as far as I know, been responsible for any deaths. So why don’t you just tell me the real reason?”
“There is no reason,” I said. I was getting angry because he wasn’t listening to me. “I just did it. I’m a teenager. We get bored and do stupid stuff. Now I’m over it and I want to go home.”
He looked at his watch and said we were done for the day. I just wanted to get out of there, so when he told me they were taking me off one of my drugs and that I might feel a little out of it tonight I just nodded and walked out without looking at him.
Sure enough, when Goody gave me my afternoon paper cup of happy tablets, one of the blue ones was gone. For a couple of hours I was okay. Then I started feeling a little tired, and now I feel like someone kicked me in the head a few thousand times.
It’s a really crappy feeling to realize that your entire outlook on your life can be controlled by some little pill that looks like a Pez, and that some weird combination of drugs can make your brain think it’s on a holiday somewhere really sweet when actually you’re standing naked in the middle of the school cafeteria while everyone takes pictures of you. Metaphorically. Or whatever.
Day 05
I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like crap. I’d been having one of those bad dreams that seem to go on and on but where nothing really happens. In mine I was running through this big house being chased by something. I kept going up staircases and down hallways, looking for a way out. The whole time, whatever was chasing me was close enough that I could hear it breathing, but far enough away that I couldn’t see what it was.
The house seemed to be nothing but hallways and stairs. No rooms. There was nowhere to hide. All I could do was keep running. Finally, I ran up a narrow staircase and came to a door. The Chasing Thing was right behind me, scratching at the stairs as it climbed. Its breathing got louder and louder, and all I wanted to do was get away from it before I saw its face. But the doorknob kept turning in my hand, going around and around and around.
Then something clicked in the lock, and I pulled the door open. I ran inside, but there was no room there. There was just blackness. And then I fell. It was like the floor just melted, and I was falling so fast that I couldn’t even scream. Everything was black and cold, and the wind was shrieking in my head.
Then I woke up and I was staring at the Devil’s face grinning down at me from the ceiling.
I tried to go back to sleep, but my mind was racing racing racing. Only I wasn’t really thinking about anything specific. It was just this stream of words and half thoughts, like there were a thousand different channels in my brain and someone was flipping through them one after the next. I kept thinking about nothing until I was sure that if I stayed in my room for another minute I really would go crazy. So I got up and went into the common room. One of the night nurses, whose name I think is Nurse Moon (okay, maybe it’s not, but I don’t know her real name) was sitting at the desk that’s against the wall that faces the hallway. She was doing a crossword puzzle.
“Do you need something?” she asked me. She sounded irritated, like I’d interrupted her attempt to figure out 32 Down.
I shook my head. “I just want to sit,” I told her.
She nodded at the couch. I hadn’t noticed when I came in, but Sadie was already curled up on it, watching something on television. The light flickered on her face, but no sound was coming out of the TV. She’s such a freak.
When Sadie saw me, she patted the couch beside her. “Sit,” she said.
I sat down next to her, not because she told me to, but because I didn’t want to go back to my room. She was watching some black-and-white movie where a woman and a man were standing in an old-fashioned living room. The woman seemed upset, and the man was trying not to look at her.
“What do you mean you’re leaving, Reginald?” Sadie said in a sad little voice.
I looked at her, wondering what she was talking about. She stared straight ahead.
“I told you, Daphne, I’m going to Peru to search for the lost city of Quezelacutan,” she said, her voice suddenly low and angry.
I turned back to the screen, and realized that she was making up dialogue for the movie. As the woman threw herself at the man and grabbed his arm Sadie said, “Take me with you!” She made sobbing sounds. I couldn’t help but laugh a little.
“Shh,” said Sadie. “This is a drama. You can’t laugh.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“You be Reginald,” said Sadie.
“That’s okay,” I said. “This is your show.”
“Don’t be a jerk,” said Sadie. “Just do it.”
I didn’t feel like arguing, so I played along. In the film, the man was trying to pry the woman off him. “I can’t take you to Peru, Daphne,” I said quickly, trying to think. “There’s no room on the boat.”
“But I’m small,” Sadie said. “And I don’t eat much. Look how skinny I am.”
“No, Daphne,” I answered. “Peru is no place for a woman, even a skinny one. You’ll get malaria and die.”
“But I speak Peruvian!” Sadie exclaimed. “I learned it at Miss Piffingham’s School for Girls.”
Reginald conveniently looked excited. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” I said.
“There’s a lot about me you don’t know, Reginald,” said Sadie as the woman in the movie let go of the man and put her hands on her hips.
The movie went to a commercial. Sadie looked at me and grinned. I shook my head. “You’re really nuts,” I said.
“It’s fun, isn’t it?” Sadie said. “I do it all the time. Usually my stories are better than the real ones. At least I think so. I never actually listen to the real ones. But I’m pretty sure mine are better.” She looked back at the TV. “Couldn’t sleep, huh?”
I nodded. “It feels like there are twenty-three people living in my head,” I told her.
“Only twenty-three?” Sadie said. “Lucky you.” She looked over at Nurse Moon, then leaned toward me. “They took you off the Wonder Drug,” she whispered.
“The what?”
“The Wonder Drug. It’s what they put you on when you come in, so that you don’t freak out or try to hurt yourself. Once they’re pretty sure you won’t, they take you off it. You must have been a good boy. I was on it for a whole week.”
“I wish I was still on it,” I said. “This sucks.”
“This is the part where they try to make you remember,” said Sadie. She looked at my wrists. “Is it working?”
Without realizing it, I’d pushed one sleeve of my pajamas up and was rubbing the gauze that circled my wrist. I stopped, and let the sleeve fall back where it was.
“It will go away,” Sadie told me, turning back to the television. “The stuff in your head. Little by little.”
I didn’t respond. I just sat and watched the television. “Do you remember?” I asked after a while.
Sadie nodded. “I wanted to float away,” she said, her voice sounding all dreamy. “I was sure I could breathe underwater if I tried hard enough. Like a mermaid.”
“But did you really want to die?” I asked.
She laughed. “Maybe. Maybe not. It didn’t matter. And then he jumped in and saved me, anyway.” She looked at me with her blue eyes. “Who saved you?”
I shrugged. “The paramedics, I guess.”
Sadie shook her head. “No, they just did the work. Someone else had to save you first. Who called them?”
“My parents,” I said.
“Then that’s who saved you,” said Sadie.
I hadn’t thought about it like that. But she was right. Only was it really saving? Wasn’t it more like butting in? I was thinking about this when Sadie said, “So, why did you do it?”
I shrugged. Even though we’d shared a little moment playing the movie game, I didn’t want to talk too much. Besides, there wasn’t really anything to say.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me. Let’s just watch TV.”
And that’s what we did, with the sound off and not talking. After a while I realized that I was really tired. I said good night to Sadie and went back to my own room.
I’ve been thinking about Sadie, though, and how she maybe tried to drown herself. And here’s what I’m wondering: How come someone always saves the people who try to kill themselves and then makes them tell everyone how sorry they are for ruining their evenings? I keep feeling like everyone wants me to apologize for something. But I’m not going to. I don’t have anything to apologize for. They’re the ones who screwed everything up. Not me.
I didn’t ask to be saved.
Day 06
When I was in seventh grade I had a pen pal as part of our social studies class. I guess the idea was that if we got to know kids in other parts of the world, we’d see that we’re all the same and none of us would want to bomb each other when we grew up to be the presidents of our countries. Anyway, I got this girl who was part of a Masai tribe in Kenya. I didn’t even know they got mail out there. I wrote her this letter about how I liked to skateboard and paint and listen to Thieving Magpies and Fun While It Lasted. She wrote me back saying her family lived in a mud hut, raised cows, and drank their blood mixed with milk, and that on Sundays they walked fifteen miles to a village to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and E.R. on someone’s TV. That’s how she learned English.
She sent me a picture of herself with her body all covered in red mud, and asked me if everyone in America had swimming pools and blonde hair. I remember thinking the stamps on her letters were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen, and I made up a lot of stuff about myself because I thought she was so interesting and I was so boring. I told her my father was a famous explorer and that we went to Broadway plays all the time because my mother was in them. We wrote to each other for almost the whole school year. I forget which of us didn’t answer back first. Probably me. I think I ran out of lies to tell her.
I was thinking about that today during my session with Cat Poop. Because basically he was trying to get me to tell him stuff about myself and I was making up a bunch of lies. I turned it into kind of a game. The Lying Game.
“You’ve been here almost a week,” he said. “How are you feeling about it?”
“Oh,” I said. “I really like it.”
He pushed his glasses up his nose, which I realize now is something he does when he gets either nervous or excited. “You do?” he asked.
I nodded. “Absolutely. It’s totally a four-star place you’ve got here. I’d knock it up to five stars, but the pool is a little cool for my liking and the room service was kind of slow bringing me my club sandwich. Not that I’m complaining. I just thought you should know.”
Cat Poop set his notepad down. “Jeff,” he said. “The only way this is going to work is if you start talking to me.”
“I am talking,” I reminded him. “See my mouth moving and the words coming out? That’s called talking.”
“You’re a smart young man,” he said. “It’s too bad you can’t turn some of that intelligence on yourself.”
I knew what he was getting at. He was using that reverse-psychology thing, trying to get me to do something by saying he didn’t think I could do it. It’s totally Psych 101, and I couldn’t believe he thought I would go for it. So I decided to have some real fun.
“You’re right,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it, which was harder than you might think. “I guess I’m just scared.”
Cat Poop picked up the notebook again. His finger went right for his glasses, and I could tell he thought we were having a breakthrough. “What are you scared of?” he asked me.
I sighed really deeply, like it was totally hard for me to let my feelings out. “Everything,” I told him. “I’m scared of everything.”
That really got him going. His pencil flew across the paper, and he was nodding like crazy. “What are you most afraid of?” he said.
“I guess being alone,” I said. “You know, having no one understand me.”
He looked up. “You think no one understands you?”
“People think they do,” I said, “but they don’t. There’s this whole different me in here, and nobody sees it.” I touched my chest and kind of sighed.
The look on his face was priceless. I wish I’d had a camera. He totally bought the whole thing. He didn’t know I was basically acting out a scene from a made-for-TV movie I’d s
een once. Although in fairness to me, I was putting in some of my own stuff. I mean, I didn’t totally rip off The Problem with Nicole.
“Who’s inside you, Jeff?” Cat Poop asked.
I waited a while before I answered him. I wanted him to think I was revealing some big secret that only he knew. Then I leaned forward. “A ballerina,” I whispered.
“I’m sorry,” Cat Poop said. “A what?”
“A ballerina,” I said, a little bit louder. “There’s a ballerina inside of me.”
He sat back in his chair and looked at me. I started talking really fast. “Yeah, see, when I was five or six, my parents took me to see The Nutcracker. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
I closed my eyes, like I was remembering being at the ballet. I even smiled a little. “The woman playing the Sugar Plum Fairy was wearing this pretty costume,” I said. “I couldn’t stop watching her. I wanted to be her.”
I opened my eyes and looked at Cat Poop. “Later, I told my parents that I wanted to be the Sugar Plum Fairy. They just laughed. But it’s true. I want to be her.”
I leaned forward again. “She’s trapped inside me,” I said, really softly like maybe she might be listening and would be mad that I was talking about her. “She wants to come out.”
Good old Cat Poop tapped his pencil against the pad. “You’re telling me that you hurt yourself because you want to be a ballerina,” he said. “Is that right?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s all her fault. She made me do it. I’m possessed by the Sugar Plum Fairy.” Just to prove it, I started humming this weird song that was a little like the music they play when the Sugar Plum Fairy dances. I mean, I have seen The Nutcracker. Hasn’t everybody?
Cat Poop didn’t say anything for a long time. When he did say something, he sounded like he was trying really hard not to be angry. “Do you think I’m stupid, Jeff?”