Burnout (12 page)

“I’m not,” I tell him, walking to elevators.

I hear his chair squeak as he gets up, and a moment later
he’s next to me. “When’s your mother coming home? Do you want me to call her?”

I jab at the elevator call button again. “No. I’m fine. Just a touch of the flu or something.”

“You’re shaking,” he says, taking my hand as I reach for the button again. I pull my hand away.

“I’m just cold,” I snap.

“It’s sixty degrees out,” he shoots back.

I blink at him. The elevator doors open, and I get in and press the door button. “I’m fine,” I tell him as the doors close.

The familiar sound of the locks on our apartment door clicking into place behind me is so reassuring, my eyes go blurry with tears. I move quickly through the apartment, turning on all the lights and cranking up the heat. Everything looks the way it should look, but nothing feels the way it should feel. I want the sight of my cereal bowl in the sink and the Tick’s Legos on the coffee table to comfort me with their sameness, but they look like scenes from someone else’s life. I want, more than anything, to feel okay again, to have this terrible feeling inside me go away.

I’m going to call Mom and I’m going to tell her everything. Even the familiar sound of her disappointment would be a comfort. She can be as disappointed as she
wants to be, I don’t care—I just want her to help me find Seemy.

I go into the bathroom first, and that’s where I find my backpack.

It’s just lying in the middle of the fuzzy purple bathmat, where I always drop it when I rush in after school to pee. It feels like so long ago that finding it was the most important thing in the world to me.

I rip open the main part of the backpack and then drop it to the floor. My hair, a rainbow rat’s nest, spills out onto the floor. I reach down, touch it lightly with my fingertips. It feels like me, only less alive.

I find my ID in the front pocket. The picture on it was taken the first day at my new school. I sit on the edge of the tub and stare at it, flipping it over and over in my hands.

T
he summer after the Nanapocalypse passed in a stream of too-hot days with too much sun and not enough air-conditioning. I had a summer cold that kept coming back, and I alternated a million times a day between sweating from the weather when I was outside, sweating from a fever when I was inside, and shivering when the fever broke, whether I was outside or in. Mom said it was my body adjusting, cleaning itself out. It made me think that every time I sneezed or coughed up a chunk of something gross, a piece of the old me was flying out of my body. I was glad to see it go. Mom would look into my eyes, and it felt like she was looking way down into my guts
to see how much of the dark stuff was left.

The sickness made the whole summer surreal. Like I was watching myself through mottled glass that would catch the sun and burn my eyes without warning. Nothing I ate could get rid of the taste of antibiotics. Back when I was hanging out with Seemy, I never really cared if we drank or if we didn’t. What I wanted was to hang out with her. I didn’t have that thing she had, the thing that made her make smacking noises with her tongue against the roof of her mouth, the thing that made her grumble, “I’m thirsty.” Seemy knew I didn’t want it like she wanted it, and I think she started to hate me because she thought I was judging her, and she was right. “It seems to me,” one of my counselors said to me, “you don’t have a drinking problem, you have a bad-choices problem.”

Now I wanted to drink something that would burn the taste out of my mouth, set fire to my throat, singe my insides clean.

“New school, new you!” Mom chirped at me whenever the subject of my new school came up. She should know that she’s not a woman who can chirp convincingly. She’s like me. Wide shouldered and barrel chested and made to growl. Chirping makes her sound frantic, like she’s losing her grip on her sanity.
New school, new you.
She would say it like it was a good thing, a fantastic opportunity, like I
had made a really great choice, instead of having no choice at all.

I didn’t want a new school. I wanted to go back to my old school, but they wouldn’t have me. Too many unexcused absences last year. Dr. Friedman even wrote a letter on my behalf, but it didn’t make a difference. They wanted me out.
New school, new you.
I had no choice in the “new school” part, but the “new you” part, that’s where I could make my stand.

Over the summer Mom and I had constant mini-squalls about my appearance that left us both flushed and quiet, neither of us wanting to push the subject for fear of our fragile peace cracking in half. The fissures were there, though, and the night before school started, Mom stuck a fingernail into the biggest one and gave it a wiggle.

“So, are you all ready for school?” She was sitting cross-legged on my bed, watching me comb out my hair after my shower.

I gave her reflection in the mirror a halfhearted shrug. “I guess.” I studied the thick stripe of purple that ran from the crown of my head down to where my hair ended below my shoulders. It was a supervised dye job. Mom said my hair could be a maximum of two colors. She took out the student handbook for my new school and showed me the section about “Distracting Clothing or Appearance.” She
said it meant I couldn’t go to school with my hair eight different colors. And that I had to take out my lip ring and my eyebrow ring and my tongue ring. Even though she tried not to gloat, I could tell she was happy. Over the summer I kept catching her glowering at my hair, her eyes flicking from color to color, her lips pressed together.

For my two colors, I chose to keep it all black, except for the one stripe of purple.

“What do you think you’re going to wear?” she asked, her voice thick with forced casualness.

We looked at each other for a long moment in the mirror. I finally nodded to the futon in the corner, the one Seemy and I had covered completely in duct tape on a freezing cold day last winter. On the chair was a pile of clothing. My usual. A pair of new black leggings, a black A-line lace skirt. A couple of black T-shirts. It was still hot out. On the floor next to the chair were my boots, freshly polished for the occasion, with new purple laces I had to special-order online, still in the package, waiting to be threaded through.

Mom didn’t get up, but she stared across the room at the clothes like she was fighting the urge to jump up and stomp on them. She pursed her lips. “I don’t really think—”

“It doesn’t matter what you think.” I swung around, my anger so hot and so sudden that I made myself lean back against my bureau to keep from throwing my hairbrush
against the wall. I clutched it to the towel around my chest, my wrists crossed, feeling the double echo of my racing pulse against my heartbeat.

All I could think was,
Stop-stop-stop. We have to stop. We’re going to break everything.

But Mom was up off the bed. She kept her distance, crossing her arms in front of her, glaring at me, rocking slightly from side to side. “Actually, it does matter what I think.”

Anger prickled up the back of my neck. “Mom . . . don’t.”

“Don’t what?” she asked, but from the look on her face she knew exactly what I was talking about.

“I’ve been doing really well all summer. You know that.”

She nodded but wouldn’t look at me. “I know. But you’re actually still on probation with me.”

“Oh really?” I was raising my voice now. “I’m on probation? That’s what you call it? Because it feels to me like I’m still behind bars.”

“Actually—”

“Stop saying ‘actually’!” I yelled, and I could see we were both scared because finally one of us was yelling and it felt like something was being ripped down the middle between us. “You don’t own me, Mom.”

“ACTUALLY, I do!” she yelled.

I couldn’t believe how much it hurt to hate someone you love.

“No, you don’t,” I said quietly, trying to keep from crying. “Just because I messed up doesn’t mean I turned my soul over to you. It doesn’t mean you get to take away every freedom I’ve ever had.”

“Nan,” she said quietly. “You didn’t start dressing this way until you started to get in trouble. How am I to think there’s not a connection?”

“
Mom
, I’m not going to fall off the wagon because I have purple hair and combat boots. I’m going to jump off the goddamn wagon because you won’t let me be myself!”

She walked over to the duct-tape chair and started picking up the clothes, then held them out and made a face like she was trying to stifle a burp. “Can we at least agree on a shirt without holes in it?” She put the stuff down, walked over to my closet, and opened the door.

“Mom, no!” I was in front of her, holding the door closed with one hand, trying to keep my towel on with the other. The thought of her rifling through my closet made my blood boil. “Get out of my room! You have to trust me to be able to at least pick out my own goddamn clothes!”

“Well, I don’t!” she yelled in my face, so close I could see the gray of the back tooth she needed to get pulled.

“Well, then that’s your problem,” I said quietly.
“Because I don’t know what else I can do to show you that I’ve changed.”

Mom raised her eyebrows and looked pointedly at the closed closet door and then back at me.

“Wow,” I whispered, disappointment choking my voice. “I guess . . . I guess if that’s what it takes.” I opened the closet door and stepped back. “Have at it. Pick whatever you want. I’ll wear it.”

“Nan . . .” For some reason Mom sounded even more disappointed than me, like she was hoping I’d fight her on this.

“What?” I sat down on the bed. “If this is what it takes for you to trust me, then fine.” She started to respond, but I cut her off. “Because I can’t take you looking at me like that anymore, Mom. You make me feel like I’m walking on ice and you’re just waiting for me to fall through. Like you
know
I’m going to fall through and you’re just deciding if you’re going to throw me a rope. So what will it be? Pigtails and overalls? What sort of outfit says ‘not a drunk screwup’ to you? What sort of outfit will make you love me again?”

I burst into tears. And Mom did too, and then she was hugging me and I was hugging her and trying to hold my towel up at the same time.

The next day she let me walk out of the house in the morning in my favorite blacks; she even helped me put
the new laces in my boots. She took a first-day-of-school picture of the Tick and me out on the fire escape, him standing in front of me, grinning his gap-toothed smile, me pretending to have him in a headlock, my long hair hanging over him.

My new school was fine. “It’s just a school, I don’t know,” I said to Mom that night when she pressed me for details. “No, I didn’t really talk to anyone.” I could see her bite back a response, thinking I was clomping around school in my boots with my scary clothes and a
Don’t mess with me
look on my face, that it was my fault that nobody talked to me, that I was scaring them off on purpose. Like I was a skunk with my own back-off stench, the kind that went straight to the back of your throat and made you gag.

She was right.

D
r. Friedman said that life is full of crossroads; full of moments when you decide to go one way or another. She said I
knew
how to make good decisions. I made them every day. Don’t cross the street when there’s a bus coming. Don’t pick up a hot pan with your bare hands. She said I just had to use those same decision-making smarts when it came to the other parts of my life.

Is this what she meant?

Did she mean that when I am here, sitting on the edge of the tub, wondering what to do next, there is a right answer and a wrong answer? Did she think that I would know which is which?

I am ashamed at what I am thinking.

Because as I flip my ID over and over in my fingers, I am thinking how I could just neatly trim up my hair and make it look like I cut it short on purpose. I could go to Sephora and get someone there to help me figure out what would get this makeup off. I could stuff this dress down the garbage chute.

I could pretend like this morning never happened.

I could stop looking for answers. I could stop looking for Seemy.

But I won’t. I’m going to call Mom and she’ll come back home and we’ll call the police together. And I’m going to tell them most everything. And they’re going to help me find out that Seemy’s okay.

I’m just going to take a shower first.

That’s not the wrong thing to do, right?

And it’s not like I’ll be lying about last night, because I don’t remember anything anyway. I just don’t want her to come home and take one look at me and think that I look like a freak. I want to be clean. Put together. I’ll dig out a pair of normal-looking jeans and a sweater from my closet. I’ll wear a hat. And the set of pearl earrings that Dad gave me, when we all thought I’d be wearing them to their wedding.

I turn the shower on and take the MTA coat off. I
start to pull the pink plastic dress off over my head, but it starts to rip and I just tear the whole thing off my body and throw it against the bathroom door. I peel off my yoga pants, my underwear, and stand naked in front of the mirror.

Painted face. Chopped-up hair. Words scrawled on my chest. Cuts on my arm. They all add up to an answer that I don’t want to hear.

I brush my teeth while the shower heats up. Then I get in.

For a long time I just stand with my eyes closed, my head tipped forward so the water hits the top of my head, the soft spot I was terrified of touching on the Tick until he was well past two, wondering at the evil and cunning of a God that would put a baby’s kill switch on top of their heavenly-smelling head.

I start to get dizzy, my body sways so far forward I have to touch the slick tiles to steady myself. I flash back to the morning after the Nanapocalypse, of the feeling of the bathtub slipping out from under me, of the tile wall rushing forward and smacking me in the head. I lower myself so I’m sitting; the water is hitting me in the face. I hold my hands out in front of me, palms up, fingers spread. I run my soapy hands over my breasts, my stomach, my back, my butt, down my legs. I lift my feet to scrub them and
discover a few shallow slashes on their soles, a bruise in the middle of one heel. From running up the subway stairs, I guess.