“Yeah,” he said when Cat Poop introduced him. “I’m Rankin. Hey.” He lifted one hand and sort of waved at us, then quickly put it back in his lap and gave a stupid half grin, as if he knew how dumb he looked.
Cat Poop waited a moment for him to say something else, but he didn’t. Watching Rankin, I wondered if I’d looked as clueless on my first day there as he did. Now I was a veteran. An old-timer. I also wondered if he was looking at me and thinking that I was crazy, the way I’d looked at Sadie, Bone, and the others that day.
“Is there anything you’d like us to know about you, Rankin?” the doc finally asked.
“Oh, right,” Rankin said, as if his brain had just been on pause and Cat Poop had hit the play button. “I play football.”
I laughed, just a little bit, but everybody heard it and looked at me. Rankin’s eyebrows went all scowly and he said, “What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just that I was thinking you look like a jock.”
He smiled. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, I am.” I guess he thought I was complimenting him. Anyway, he was quiet for a few seconds, like he was trying to decide what to say. Then he said, “I just get kind of down sometimes.”
I almost laughed again. He sounded like such a little kid. “I get down sometimes.” Yeah, probably because it’s so hard being a popular jock and having everyone fall all over themselves whenever you win a stupid game. What an idiot.
Still, it’s kind of nice not being the only guy. Even though it was only for a day, I definitely felt outnumbered after Bone left. I was sort of afraid Juliet, Sadie, and Martha were going to make me play house with them, or have a tea party, or paint our toenails. Not that I think Rankin and I will be best buds or anything.
I wonder what he’s in for. I know—he gets sad sometimes. Who doesn’t? But there’s got to be something more going on in that big head of his. I’d try to figure it out, but, honestly, I really don’t care. Crazy is crazy. You either are or you aren’t. Like they are and I’m not. It’s pretty simple.
I’ve kind of given up trying to convince Cat Poop that I’m not. After all, I’ve been here three weeks tomorrow. That’s almost half of my sentence. Clearly, they aren’t letting me out early for good behavior. So now I just go to my sessions and talk about whatever. Let Cat Poop think what he wants.
Like today. He wanted to talk about friends.
“Do you have any friends?” he asked me.
“Define friends,” I said.
“People you enjoy spending time with,” he suggested. “People you share things with.”
“Do invisible ones count?” I asked. “Because then there’s Mr. Binky Funstuff and Giggles the Madcap Elf.”
“Let’s stick with real ones,” said Cat Poop. I think he’s getting used to me, because he didn’t even push his glasses up or tap his pencil.
“Mr. Binky Funstuff doesn’t appreciate being called not real,” I said. “He’s crying. You should apologize.”
Cat Poop scratched his nose but didn’t say anything.
“Have it your way,” I said after a minute. “Sure, I have friends.”
“Tell me about them,” said Cat Poop.
“Why?” I asked him. “What do they have to do with anything?”
“I’m just curious,” he answered. “I’d like to know what you find important in a friend.”
“Cash is always nice,” I said. “And an entourage.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of personality traits,” he said. “The qualities you value in other people.”
“Well, cleanliness and godliness are always good,” I told him.
“How about honesty?” asked Cat Poop. He totally ignores me now when I’m being sarcastic. I don’t know if I should be offended or not.
“Honesty is overrated,” I said.
“How so?”
“Well, if you’re always honest, then you have to tell your friends everything,” I said. “And sometimes it’s better not to.”
“Give me an example,” said Cat Poop.
“Say she asks you if her jeans make her look fat,” I said. “And they do. If you tell her that, she’s going to hate you.”
“Even if it’s true?” said Cat Poop.
“Especially if it’s true,” I told him. “A real friend would lie and say the jeans look great.”
He wrote on his pad. “Are you making notes for a self-help book?” I asked him. “Because I have lots of tips.”
“So you don’t think your friend would want to know that the jeans don’t look good?” he asked.
“She already knows they don’t,” I said. “She just wants me to make her feel better. It’s just one of those things you don’t tell someone, just like you would never tell your friend you hate her boyfriend. Or girlfriend,” I added quickly. “Boyfriend or girlfriend.”
“Isn’t that being dishonest?” suggested Cat Poop. “What if that person isn’t right for your friend? Shouldn’t you say so?”
“People always say they want to hear the truth, but they really don’t,” I said. “Like how many parents really want to know that their kids are having sex or smoking? Even if they ask, they just want you to say that everything’s fine. Then they can believe that it is.”
“And you think that’s healthy?” he asked me.
“You’re the shrink,” I said. “You tell me.”
“I’m interested in hearing what you think,” said Cat Poop.
I waited a minute before I answered. “What I think is that the goatee you’re trying to grow looks ridiculous,” I said.
He looked surprised. Then he glanced at the mirror that hangs on one of the walls.
“See?” I said. “Honesty isn’t so great, is it?”
Day 21
A couple of years ago my dad took us all to Hawaii over spring break. One of the things we did there was learn how to scuba dive. It was sort of fun, even though when we first got in the pool to learn how to use all the gear, I was afraid the air would just run out and I’d drown. But I got used to it.
And let me tell you, there is some far-out stuff under the water. Our instructor said that something like 70 percent of the world is covered by water, and less than 1 percent of the population ever gets to go under there and look around. So when you do, you’re seeing stuff that not many people get to see. My favorite was this fish that kept swimming up to my mask and butting his head against it. I had no idea what he was doing, but when we got back to the surface the instructor said the fish was trying to fight his reflection in my mask.
That’s how I feel being in this place, like I’m a diver looking at a bunch of really strange fish. Take today. For our group session, Cat Poop (who by the way shaved off the goatee, so that’s another point for me) had us do this completely retarded exercise. First he split us into two teams. Again, I ended up with Juliet, which left Sadie with Rankin. Martha got to be the audience, since she still isn’t exactly talking a blue streak. Then we had to pick these slips of paper out of three different boxes. The first one was a setting, the second was a situation, and the third was a line of dialogue.
The idea was that we had to come up with a skit using the three different things. We had ten minutes to come up with something, and then we had to perform it. I let Juliet pick the slips. Our setting was a theater, our situation was that someone had forgotten something, and our line of dialogue was, “Would you like another cookie?” When we looked at what we had, we both groaned. I mean, come on, what are you supposed to do with that? But that’s the whole point of the exercise, right? So we went off in a corner and threw some ideas around.
Juliet is the one who came up with the idea for the husband forgetting his wife’s name. Brilliant. It totally worked. I was the husband, and Juliet was my wife. The idea was that we run into someone I work with during intermission at a play and I’m trying to introduce my wife, but for some reason I can’t remember her name.
I decided to use Martha for the third person, since she wouldn’t
have to say anything. She stood there and Juliet and I pretended to run into her. I kept saying things about how great the show was, trying to avoid introducing my wife to Martha, and the whole time Juliet was pretending to eat these cookies she had in her purse. That was how we got the line of dialogue in: Juliet kept offering me cookies.
Okay, so you kind of had to be there. Trust me, it was good. At least we thought it was.
Sadie and Rankin’s skit was better than ours, but in our defense I have to say it’s because they got way better things to work with. Their setting was a spaceship, their situation was that they were lost, and their line was, “How did that get in here?”
The two of them sat in side-by-side chairs, like they were piloting a spaceship. Sadie was the captain and Rankin was a brand new navigator on his first trip into space. He had managed to get them lost, and was arguing about it with the captain. While they were fighting, a fly was buzzing around, making everything worse. That’s when Rankin’s character said, “How did that get in here?” and opened a window in the ship to shoo the fly out. Because they were in space, they both got sucked out the window along with the fly, which the two of them acted out by rolling around on the floor together and screaming.
See what I mean about watching a lot of weird fish? Sometimes they look normal, but then one day they go and do something that totally surprises you—and it gets them landed in a place like this. I don’t think anyone who knows me would ever have thought I’d do what I did.
But I did.
Day 22
It was the “Fun with Marjorie and Eric Show” again today. Otherwise known as my parents’ weekly visit. Seeing them wasn’t high on my list of preferred activities for today, but I didn’t have much choice. It was that or, well, nothing.
The theme of today’s get together was Why? As in, Why did Jeff do what he did? Again, not really something I felt like discussing, but it wasn’t up to me.
Apparently Cat Poop had talked to my parents before I came in, because the three of them seemed to have some kind of plan for getting me to talk about what happened. First, Cat Poop told my parents how well things had been going with me. Then he asked my parents to tell me how they’d felt when they found me that night.
My mother immediately turned on the waterworks. She said she’d come upstairs and seen blood all over the floor. She said at first she’d thought I was playing a practical joke on her, and she’d laughed even though she thought it was a mean thing to do. When I didn’t respond, she apparently totally freaked out, because my father heard her screaming and ran up to see what was wrong.
I’m not saying she was lying or anything, but I do want to point out that she’s always said that if she hadn’t become a lawyer, she would have been an actress. Seriously. A couple of years ago she even performed in this completely tragic community theater production of Fiddler on the Roof. She was actually pretty good, which is why I wouldn’t put it past her to make things sound more awful than they really were. I mean, finding your kid almost dead is bound to ruin your night, I get that. But it’s like she was trying to make me feel even worse about it.
My father didn’t cry, but he said that seeing me on the floor like that was the most horrible thing that’s ever happened to him. Then he described how he’d made these tourniquets using some torn-up sheets from my bed and held me until the paramedics got there. He said he kept telling me how much he loved me, over and over, in case hearing it helped me stay alive.
That got to me way more than my mother crying. My dad never says sappy stuff to us. He’s the kind of guy who can sit through a movie that has everyone else bawling like babies and all he’ll say is, “Can you believe how big Julia Roberts’s mouth is?” I’m serious. Nothing gets to him. He’s like one of those cowboys in an old western.
Listening to my parents talk about that night, I thought about the time Sadie asked me who had saved me. She was right that it was my mom and dad and not the paramedics. If my mother hadn’t come up to see me, and if my dad hadn’t known what to do, I really would have died. Three weeks ago, that’s what I thought I wanted. Now things seem different. Not totally different, but different enough that I guess I’m glad they did what they did. But I wasn’t about to tell them that.
Then Cat Poop asked me how I felt about what my parents had said. What are you supposed to say to something like that? Gee, I’m really sorry I freaked you out, and thanks for making sure it didn’t work out? It just sounds so stupid, like the big moment in one of those cheesy made-for-TV movies where the kid who ran away from home and became a hooker does a giant boo-hoo after her mother fights off her pimp with an umbrella to get her off the street. I couldn’t say those things, even if I was thankful for what they did. And I was. I mean I am. Thankful. Sort of. On good days.
What I did say was that I was sorry for making them worry. That seemed like a good compromise, right in between the stony, uncommunicative teen-ager and the cry-till-your-nose-runs breakdown I could have gone with. I said I was sorry that they were afraid for me and reassured them that everything was okay now.
I should have left out that last part about everything being okay now, because that’s one of those statements the doc jumps on like a cat on a mouse.
Sure enough, he said, “What’s different about how you are today from how you were that night?”
Oh, man. He pushed me right into that one. Here we were back at the big Why? I was supposed to show how much I’d learned about myself, and they were supposed to get some answer to explain it all. But like I keep saying, there is no big reason.
I had to say something, though, so I said, “I guess I’ve learned that no matter how bad things get, there are always people who love you.”
I won’t blame you if you stop to go throw up right about now. I know I would. But it sounds pretty good, right? If you were my parents, you’d buy it. And they did. I felt a little bad when I saw the look on my mother’s face. She seemed really relieved, like she’d been worried all along that the reason I tried to off myself was because I thought she didn’t love me. But that was never it. I know she and my father love me. This was never about them.
I think Cat Poop knew I was handing them a big pile of crap and calling it a present, because he pushed me even further and said, “How would you handle things differently now, Jeff?”
What I wanted to say was, “I’d lock my door.” I was getting tired of having to make everyone feel better. I’m sorry I freaked everyone out. I’m sorry my parents are sad about it. But it’s over. Can we all move on?
I thought for a minute or two until I wasn’t quite so steamed, then I said, “I’d talk to somebody.” I didn’t say who. I just said I would talk to somebody. That way they could each think I meant them.
It was the right answer, I guess, because Cat Poop finished with the third degree and moved on to some other stuff. It wasn’t anything exciting, so I won’t go into it. Basically, he talked to us about better ways to communicate. Blah. Blah. Blah.
I was really thrilled when it was all over and my parents went home. I was even more thrilled to go back to my room. Let me tell you, writing a report on Lord of the Flies, which is what I was doing for my English class assignment, is way better than spending an hour with the doc and my parents. Given a choice between discussing the symbolism of a pig head on a stick and discussing my feelings, I’ll take the pig head every time.
Day 23
Something totally weird just happened. I’m not even sure I want to write about it, but if I don’t I’m afraid it will just stay in my head, and I don’t want it in there.
It’s about three in the morning. I woke up a while ago and had to pee, so I walked down to the bathroom at the end of the hall. The guys’ bathroom here is like the ones at school: sinks and toilets and showers all in one big room. When I walked in, I heard one of the showers running. That was kind of strange, because people mostly shower in the morning, and we’re really not supposed to be running around at night except if we have to, yo
u know, go.
Still, it wasn’t really a big deal. I mean, we’re all in here because we’re a little bit off in the first place, so someone deciding to shower in the middle of the night is pretty tame on the scale of things. So I started to pee, and that’s when I heard it. And by it I mean this groaning sound.
I made myself stop peeing—which is really, really hard to do when you have to go, by the way—and listened, thinking that maybe I’d just heard noises in the pipes or something. But there it was again, definitely human, and definitely coming from the shower. Now, besides me the only guy here is Rankin, so I knew it had to be him, unless one of the night attendants had suddenly decided to practice some personal hygiene. And judging from the noise, Rankin wasn’t feeling too well.
I wasn’t sure if I should ask if he was okay or just leave him alone. Then the groaning got a little louder. My bladder was about to pop, so I finished peeing and walked toward the shower. I didn’t want to scare Rankin, so I didn’t say anything. If you’re taking a shower in the middle of the night and not feeling too well, the last thing you need is someone pulling a Psycho and yanking the curtain open.
The thing about those curtains is, they don’t really cover the opening to the shower totally. There are gaps on either side, almost like the steam from the showers has made the curtains shrink. It’s not like you’re flashing the whole world when you take a shower, but you can definitely see around them.
What I saw through the crack was definitely Rankin. Too much of him, actually. I didn’t mean to, but what I saw was his hand moving back and forth somewhere around his waist, if you know what I mean. Even with all that steam, it was pretty obvious what was going on. Suddenly the groaning made sense.