Agorafabulous! (4 page)

“Yeah?” he hollered back over the noise of the bus. We were bumping over a mountain road that offered gorgeous views of the sea, which smashed against the rocks three hundred feet below.

“Could you come here for a second?” It was hard to push the words out. I had to close my eyes after the “Could you . . .” in order to finish. Thankfully, the other students seemed immersed in their own headphones and/or portable game players.

Mr. D’Angelo lumbered down the aisle and peered at me. He looked surprised, then concerned.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t look so good, kiddo,” he said. “You gonna throw up?”

I tried to speak, but I felt as if I were breathing lukewarm water. I was choking on my own words.

“What was that?” he asked, putting a hand behind his ear.

“Agita,”
I got out finally, in a scratchy whisper.

A remarkable shift took place on his face. What had been confused concern was now replaced by a sort of confident, calm determination. I imagine it’s the look a veteran firefighter gets on his face when he and his truck pull up to a blazing house in the woods. “First thing we do is we keep it from spreading,” he says to his younger teammates. “We can lose the house, but it ain’t gonna take the forest down with it. I want the three of you to spray down the trees to the rear. You two head to the left side and you two head to the right. I’ll turn the hose on the house. With a little luck, we can avoid a real mess here.”

“Change of plans!” he announced in a kindly roar. “Mr. Brixton?”

“Yes?” the tour guide asked, looked vaguely frightened.

“Tell the driver we gotta stop at a gas station. A filling—petrol—you know what I mean, yeah?”

“Certainly,” Mr. Brixton said, looking relieved. This was a request he could handle. I wonder if he’d been scared that Mr. D’Angelo would announce a game of Shirts vs. Skins tackle football, with Mr. Brixton captaining Skins. I could sense that Mr. Brixton hadn’t been the most accomplished student in gym class (we can smell our own).

“Who wants to use the bathroom?” Mr. D’Angelo asked brightly. Some of the kids were drowning in sonic oblivion, so he kicked his already considerable voice up a notch.

“HEY! WHO! WANTS! TO! GO! TO! THE! BATHROOM?!” he roared.

“I thought we were going to the beach!” Amber shot back.

“We are. We’re just making a quick pit stop, because somebody doesn’t feel good.” I suppose this was his counseling training kicking in—confidentiality, and all that. Of course, it wasn’t hard to figure out to whom he was referring, since he was standing beside my seat and I had long since taken on a pale-green hue.

He turned and walked to the front of the bus, leaving me alone to face the rest of the kids.

Amber groaned. “What the hell is
wrong
with her?” she demanded, throwing her head back and rolling her eyes. I sank lower in my seat and focused on holding my bowels tight. The nausea had cleared a little bit, replaced by stabbing pains in my gut. My heart still pounded fiercely, but the shenanigans in my lower alimentary canal distracted me from the growly inner voice that had so frightened me earlier.
If I can just get to a toilet,
I thought,
I’ll be okay.

“Seriously!” Amber nearly shouted. “What is wrong with you? This isn’t just your trip. Everything doesn’t stop because you ate too much!” Through the thick fog that clogged my ears, I heard a few other kids grumble. Amber’s hot stare bored into me, and a couple of shameful tears spilled down my face. I could control my bowels or my eyes, but not both. One way or another, I was about to explode.

In my experience, angels arrive in the most curious form at the oddest of moments. They keep their wings folded neatly at their back, and save your ass using brains, brawn, or quiet calculation.

Leann, the nice girl with whom I’d shared a room the past few nights, said, “I could go. I want to wash my hands.” She held them up. They were covered in a fine dust from the field trip.

Amber looked at her. Leann was one of those girls who were so humble and quiet that even the mean kids like Amber didn’t pick on them. She posed no threat to the popular kids’ dominance, and she could be depended upon to do all the work for any group project. She would also spot you money if you needed some for lunch, and she wouldn’t ever expect you to pay her back.

“Just look at my nails,” Leann added. Amber’s eyes widened in dismay. In the handful of classes I’d been condemned to share with Amber, I had never seen her devote much energy to anything other than her fingernails, which she maintained through an elaborate ritual of filing, painting, and gluing. Teachers frequently sent her into the hall for disobeying their command to keep her bottle of nail polish sealed during class. If her parents had allowed her, I’m pretty sure she would have taken the cosmetology classes offered in our school’s vo-tech department. But they wanted her to go to college, so she slogged through French III while sketching nail designs in pen on the top of her desk. She was quite adept at intimidation and manipulation, but Amber’s one true passion was the female fingernail.

Amber moved toward Leann, grabbed her hand, and held it up to the light. “Ew, you’re right,” she said with a genuine look of concern. “They do look bad. You can’t go to the beach like that.” She examined her own nails. “Shit, I lost a rhinestone back there.”

“I have extras in my kit,” her friend chimed in. “With glue.”

“You think they sell those trucker pills at the gas station, NO-DOZ?” a third member of her contingent asked. “I fucking love those.”

“I have cramps,” said the fourth bottle blonde. “You think they got Midol?”

And because the four most popular girls in the junior class were now also falling apart, it was okay to delay the beach in order to go to the bathroom.

The driver brought us to a filling station and parked in the sun-baked lot. Mr. D’Angelo helped me disembark, and Leann put her arm around me and walked me to the bathroom. The other girls rushed ahead of us and were done with their hand-washing by the time we reached the door. They commenced nail triage in the shade of a nearby tree.

“You go first,” I told Leann. We were bonding, a little, but we were nowhere near the zone that allows one person to comfortably withstand the sound and smell of another’s assplosion within the confines of a tiny restroom. Come to think of it, I don’t know if I’ve ever reached that zone with any human other than my mother, and I was a baby then so I don’t retain the heinous memory.

“No, you,” Leann said. She smiled conspiratorially at me. “I don’t really need to wash my hands,” she whispered, and patted me on the shoulder. Gratefully, I lunged into the bathroom, locked the door, and let it all out.

There was an enormous initial feeling of relief. I felt weak and light-headed, but my intestinal system was mercifully at peace. Anxiety is wonderfully chameleonic. It can disguise itself as any number of maladies: insomnia, indigestion, fatigue, physical pain, or even addictions of every imaginable sort. And once you treat the insomnia or the addiction or whatever physical manifestation the anxiety has thrown up as a smokescreen, you are left with the beastie who started it all. Most of us do not want to face down the ugly, pathetic little demon that we’ve unwittingly allowed to run our lives. Most of us would rather talk to our doctors about irritable bowel syndrome, or complain to our chiropractors about knots in our back, or stay home from work because we’re just “too tired” to go in that day. These symptoms are very real, but they all spring from one nasty little source that must be addressed. Otherwise, getting rid of one bothersome ailment just leaves room for something equally or more awful to pop up in its stead.

On that day in Sicily, with the specter of a beautiful, burning boy floating in the back of my mind and a high school arch-nemesis repairing her nails a few yards away, I hadn’t the slightest idea of how to confront the real culprit behind my embarrassing tummy trouble. I didn’t know how to talk back to the voice that had babbled terrible, inscrutable words within my head before the pain in my lower half drowned it out. And so, after I did all the things you’re supposed to do in the restroom and rose from the toilet, the voice came back. It was louder and more distinct.

“You piece of shit,” it hissed. “You fucking loser.”

I turned on the sink and washed my hands, hoping the sound of the water would drown it out. The trouble with screeching internal voices is that they’ve bypassed the whole auditory system and actually emanate from within your brain. Throwing up aural roadblocks doesn’t help. The harsh noise is already inside you.

I raised my hand to open the latch to the bathroom door.

“You can’t go out there,” the voice snapped. “Everything will hurt again. You can’t go out there. It’ll be worse than before. You have to stay here. You have to stay right here. You’ll never make it anywhere. Why did you think you could come here? You’re broken, and everybody knows it. You’ll never see home again. You’re going to die in here.”

People with mental illness are privy to very special knowledge that the rest of the population—poor, average souls that they are—never gets to enjoy. We have the most stunning revelations in the most mundane circumstances. We’re sort of magical, really. Thus was it revealed to me that I could not leave this particular restroom in this particular filling station on this particular giant island in this particular ocean on this particular day in this particular year.

So I sat down on the toilet.

I sat and I sat, and then I sat some more. I sat so long that the nail brigade tired of its labors and boarded the bus. I sat so long that I grew accustomed to the fetid smell of the hot bathroom. I sat so long that Leann gently knocked on the door and called my name not once, not twice, but three times.

“Just a minute,” I said. “Just a sec.”

In reality, I sat no more than twenty minutes. But stuck in that bathroom with only my hateful inner monologue for company, as my heart pounded in my ears and I perspired rivers, as my clothes took on the lingering scent of the shit and piss around me, I felt certain in the knowledge that to leave was to die. So I had to stay.

Then I heard the bus horn honk loudly and violently, four times in a row. Even in my stupor, I was a little surprised. Our driver was a mild-mannered guy. I couldn’t picture him laying on the horn like that.

I heard footsteps approaching the door.

“Hey, Sara?” came a nervous voice that I recognized as Mr. D’Angelo’s. “Um, I know you’re not feeling well, but uh, I was wondering if you were maybe gonna wrap it up in there?”

Then came another voice, equally nervous.

“Sara,” Mr. Brixton said. “I’m terribly sorry to rush you, but your classmates are rather eager to get to the beach and, well, I wouldn’t say one of them has
overpowered
the driver, but she certainly seems unafraid to express her displeasure with the horn, and these small villages really do not appreciate the buses to begin with, and I’m afraid that the noise will rather antagonize . . .”

“If it’s a woman’s thing,” Mr. D’Angelo offered, talking over Mr. Brixton, “it turns out the station does sell Midol or whatever, so I can go buy you some with a soda, and you can just take a nap on the bus if you don’t wanna come out to the beach with us. It’s just, the gang is getting restless and . . .” His words were interrupted by another blast of the horn.

God bless adolescent rage and peer pressure. If there was one thing in my life that frightened me more than anything my untamed brain could conjure, it was the very real disapproval of my peer group. Amber and her friends had never been on my side, but now it sounded as if the whole group was turning. And I couldn’t abide that, no matter what my inner voice howled in protest.

I rose from my perch on the toilet seat, shakily opened the latch, and stepped out into the blazing sunshine. Then the earth tilted in front of me, and I hit the ground.

It was probably the most dramatic exit I’ve ever made from a lavatory. The response was appropriate: Mr. Brixton let out a very small, very controlled English shriek and Mr. D’Angelo gasped, “Oh, shit!”

“Can she hear us?” Mr. Brixton asked.

“SARA!” Mr. D’Angelo yelled. “CAN YOU HEAR US?”

To my disappointment, I found that I had not lost consciousness and could, in fact, hear him loud and clear. I had landed with one cheek on the ground, and I could feel a couple of knee scrapes begin to gently ooze blood. It was my knees that had given out in the first place, so I figured they deserved whatever they got. It seemed a rather inauspicious time for them to take a lunch break, and I dimly thought I might have a talk with them once we reached Heaven or The Great Calzone in the Sky or wherever people go when they die in Sicily.

Mr. Brixton knelt down and rummaged through his briefcase. For a moment, I caught a glimpse of thirty-nine befuddled, fascinated teenage faces pressed against the glass windows of a luxury air-conditioned motor coach. Then he stood up again, blocking my view with a large map.

“There’s a hospital about seven kilometers away,” he said. “I took a traveler there two summers ago when he had a heart attack.”

“Shit,” said Mr. D’Angelo, scratching his head. He held my wrist for a few moments. “Well, she’s not having a heart attack.”

“Probably not,” Mr. Brixton said. “But it’ll be free to visit, and they’re very good.”

“Free? You mean, like, they bill you later?”

“No, it’s totally free. The man ended up needing surgery and he didn’t pay a penny.”

“No shit! Is it like that in England, too? Here, sweetheart, see if you can stand.” While Mr. Brixton educated Mr. D’Angelo on the finer points of socialized medicine, the two men helped me to my feet.

“How you feelin’?” Mr. D’Angelo asked as the three of us, now a unit, slowly moved as one across the parking lot.

“Better,” I said woozily. “How come the ground keeps moving?”

“Oh dear,” said Mr. Brixton.

“She’s talking and breathing and her pulse is okay,” Mr. D’Angelo said. “She probably just ate the wrong thing, or not enough. You know how these girls are.” We were nearly to the bus.