Coming of Age on Zoloft (3 page)

“We need to get you some fun,” she said. “You should have a summer fling.”

“What’s the point of a summer fling? We’re all just leaving.”

“That’s
exactly
the point,” she said, taking a sock-ball from the dresser and throwing it at me. “You’re hopeless!”

“I’m not hopeless!”

“Yes you are,” she said, rolling forward in her desk chair, then hauling her body upright. “Come on. Let’s go get some home fries.”

YET FEELING BAD
wasn’t the whole story of that time. Looking back, it almost seems as if there were two summers, simultaneous and nonintersecting. There was the summer I felt bad in, and there was the beautiful, intense summer. The summer in which Sarah and I rocketed down the George Washington Parkway in her car after midnight, blasting the Smashing Pumpkins, deep in the crazy love that only high school best friends can have for each other. The summer in which I devoted my afternoons to writing a novella that was meant to weave my observations about the people and places I’d known in high school into a kaleidoscopic whole. There are bubbly, excitable entries in my journals that parallel the angry, mournful ones. In August, I went to see Scott in a production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and we talked afterward and it felt good, like closure. It
was
excellent to be through with high school. At certain moments, that feeling that Sarah talked about would settle, drift down on us like valedictory snow. We’d made it. Hail to us.

Was I depressed? It seems strange to say, but that is not a question I asked myself then. If I had graduated high school in 2007 instead of 1997, it seems inevitable that I would have asked myself the question, or that someone else would have asked it for me. How would I answer? No—I wasn’t depressed, exactly, because depression is supposed to go on for weeks, unbroken, and no feeling I had that summer lasted for any length of time. Were my moods abnormal? It’s hard to say. I did seem to be taking the transition harder than my friends were. But then, I’d always been serious, romantic, tightly wound. Maybe I was just living these things in my own way.

Anyway, in the end, what can you do? The summer got late, and then later. One day while I was stopped at an intersection in my mom’s car a song came on the radio, with a gravelly voiced man singing about how
“I hope I was everything I was supposed to be.”
As the light turned green, a guy in the oncoming lane leaned his head out of his window and shouted, “Don’t cry!” But it didn’t matter. Days passed, I finished up at work, Sarah went off to college in Iowa, and a few days later my time came too.

REED COLLEGE SITS
in a neighborhood of one- and two-story houses in the southeast quadrant of Portland, Oregon. Architecturally, the campus presents a jumbled mix of stately collegiate Gothic buildings and angular 1970s affordabilia. At the top of a hill rising East there’s a Safeway and a discount store, a bar and a restaurant, a post office and a Plaid Pantry. There is nothing distinguished about the area, but I loved Portland from the moment I set eyes on it. Douglas firs rose from the hilltops, giving the whole city the look of an Alpine theme park, and the air felt fresh and energized, scrubbed clean by its trip across the Pacific. On a clear day I could catch sight of the distant, snowy mass of Mount Hood, poking from the horizon like a giant’s chipped tooth.

At the beginning of freshman orientation week, my father helped me move into my new room. He made a few runs to the store with me for things like coat hangers and laundry detergent, gave me a big hug, and then he was gone.

What was it I had been so afraid would happen? After a few nights, I could hardly remember. From the moment I set foot in Portland, my mood had turned around with a speed and decisiveness that shocked me. The transformation was so swift that it was almost embarrassing, the edifice of gloom I’d built with such painstaking care all summer tumbling down flimsily under the first volley of new people and new things.

For the first week at school I ricocheted around the campus like an atomic particle: meeting, bonding, splitting, repeating, releasing energy in all directions. I found a girl to go thrift-shopping with on Eighty-Second Avenue. I met Darlene and Rob, who had been friends together in high school in Arizona. A boy from a nearby hall got a crush on me, but I wasn’t interested. I got a crush on a senior who played the cello, but it didn’t last. Some people from my dorm and I went to a party up the street, at a punk house with a keg in the backyard and a kitchen decorated with six-foot-tall signs salvaged or stolen from the meat department of a supermarket. A reddish stop-motion filmstrip of a seed sprouting into a plant projected in a loop on the bathroom wall while a four-piece rock band played loud in the living room.

On the third day, I was fiddling with the combination dial on my student mailbox when I bumped elbows with a girl who was doing the same thing. She smiled and shook her head. “How do you work these damn things?” she asked. I said I didn’t know either. “I’m Kate,” said the girl, stretching out her hand. “I guess your box is right above mine.” Kate had long, deep red hair, straight bangs, and a trace of Texas in her voice. The moment I looked into her kind hazel eyes, I felt sure that of all the people I’d talked to, this one was going to be a friend.

“I’m Katherine,” I said. “Hey—do you want to go to the Paradox and get some coffee?”

“Okay.” It was that easy. How could I have fretted so much about ever finding human connection? One could no more avoid it than step in between raindrops.

THROUGH KATE, I
met everyone else who mattered. She lived in the oldest building on campus, a beautiful Gothic dorm shot through by a crazy system of hallways that reminded me of the tunnels in an ant farm. I began to spend most of my free time there, with Kate, her hall mates, or the boys who lived in a triple nearby. Classes started, and freshmen began to troop together in large packs to weekday-morning lectures. We talked about them afterwards, and about our professors, picking apart their foibles the way people pick apart celebrities. The shared excitement felt good. I had never been in a place where knowing things wasn’t at least potentially a liability. In high school there had been little pockets where being engaged in what you were studying was an asset, something that could bring you closer to other people rather than marking you off as strange. But this was a whole new league of play, and I began to want nothing more than to rise and distinguish myself in it. I felt so relieved to realize that I hadn’t been wrong about Reed. I liked it as much now that I was there as I had thought I would on college night in the high school gymnasium the year before.

A couple of weeks in, I made friends with one of the boys from the triple. Brendan had curly brown hair that grazed his shoulders, and he wore perfectly rumpled white button-down shirts. He had gone to boarding school, which meant that he’d skipped right over the homesickness part of college and already had considerable experience having fun in an institutional setting. Most evenings he held court in Kate’s social room, talking and spinning stories for anyone who passed by, his loud, bleating laugh bouncing off the walls and reverberating in the next hall over. He dressed up like F. Scott Fitzgerald for Halloween, claimed to know what brand of cigarettes Kurt Vonnegut smoked, and promptly worked out five ways to get onto the roof of the building. He thought I was funny, and I found him completely enthralling.

Brendan quickly became the person on campus I most hoped to run into, the one for whom my eyes scanned the quad and the student union with the greatest diligence. He had a college radio show on Saturday mornings, and I used to get up early and sit with him while he was on the air. The studio was just a room in the basement of one of the dorms, furnished with a couch whose arms had been rendered hard and shiny from years of rubbed-in food and hand oils. But when I sank into its cushions and listened to Brendan play the oddities he’d harvested from the station’s groaning shelves of records, I couldn’t imagine a place in the world I’d rather be.

The fonder I grew of Brendan, the more I realized that not all of my friends saw him the same way. Ted said that Brendan had teased him ruthlessly while he, Ted, was high and Brendan wasn’t. Jessica said that Brendan seemed smarmy, but I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. Brendan was amazing. Being around him felt amazing. I wanted to be with him all the time. I had a desperate crush on him, of course, but there was more to it than that. I wanted to be
like
him. The things about myself that I wasn’t so sure about—the seriousness, the deliberation, the tendency to worry—were nowhere evident in him. Where some people saw arrogance, I saw a boy who was carefree, at home in the world and in his skin in a way that I would have given almost anything to be.

Midterms came, a week of intensely concentrated stress but also a bleary-eyed camaraderie that affected the whole campus and made the time pleasant in its own delirious way. I’d stay in the computer labs until two or three in the morning, with Kate or whomever, working on papers under fluorescent light until our minds went swimming in the undersea murals of seaweed and turtles and fish to which some campus wag had added stumpy cigarettes and thick-rimmed glasses in precise black Sharpie marker. On one of the nights of the reading period, I took a study break with Brendan. We walked to the far end of campus and sat on a log in the undergrowth behind the theater building. We were on the log, and then we were off it, rolling around in the ivy, kissing frantically. I took my glasses off and, after a few minutes, realized that I couldn’t find them. I began patting down the brush all around us, casually at first, then wildly. Brendan sat on his heels and watched impassively until I pulled them out of the vines—a rudeness that registered, but not as decisively as I wish it had.

On the hall where Brendan lived there was a room so tiny that the residence life office didn’t even assign it to anybody. At one point, Brendan’s hall mates had picked the lock. They decorated the space with a bong, some pornographic playing cards, and a few condoms, and dubbed it “the sex room.” A couple of nights after the log incident, I don’t remember quite how, Brendan and I ended up in the sex room. We definitely didn’t have sex there, not even close. We fooled around for a while and then fell asleep with our clothes on. By the time I woke up, just after dawn, I was shivering with cold. Brendan was nowhere to be found, and something felt obscurely but undeniably wrong.

When I try to remember the next few days, I get an image of breaking glass: they have that quality of crash and splintering. I finished work, turned in papers, and slept fitfully. I looked for Brendan everywhere, but when I finally did manage to track him down, he acted as if a stranger had invaded his body. He spoke in monosyllables, as though I were someone he didn’t know, or particularly care to start knowing; he directed his words in the general direction of my face while managing to avoid my eyes completely. He didn’t break up with me or talk about what had happened (what
had
happened? I felt unsure of anything anymore), but it seemed clear that from his point of view, our friendship, and its whiff of romance too, was decisively and unceremoniously over. I walked away, feeling light-headed. Later someone told me they’d seen him hanging around campus with another girl, whom I knew just vaguely, and who was beautiful. My friends told me I was better off without him, that there were dozens of worthier guys all around us, but I couldn’t hear them; I felt as if I’d been cut open, my organs removed, and my body filled with something as hard and heavy as gravel.

My last conversation with Brendan happened a day or two before I was supposed to fly home for fall break. I got up early on that Saturday morning and followed the instructions I’d written myself about how to take the bus to the light rail to the airport. I felt tired, hungover, and strangely deflated. The past nine weeks had been hectic, I thought, and maybe it was a good idea to take a few days in Arlington to slow down.

DESCRIBING WHAT COMES
next feels unsatisfying any way I try it: I can’t make the facts seem to match up with my reaction, and so it seems that I must be exaggerating or leaving something out. But it happened just like this.

My flight home had a layover in Saint Louis. On the carpet near my gate, I sat in a pool of light that streamed in through big plate-glass windows, and scribbled in my journal. My face was puffy from crying so much. A different girl would have been furious with Brendan, but I didn’t feel anger, just the sting of rejection, the creeping, hemmed-in sensation of shame.

“It looks like you’re writing a ‘Dear John’ letter,” said a voice. I looked up. It was a TWA staff member in a blue polyester uniform. She sounded hearty and amused.

“A what?”

“You know: ‘Dear John, by the time you read this, I’ll be gone . . .’ ”

“Oh yeah. Well, I guess I am, kind of.”

I tried to enjoy being at home. Fall was usually my favorite season in Virginia. But my mind couldn’t seem to find a comfortable position. I felt sad and agitated at the same time. The happy letters home, dated just weeks earlier, that my parents had taped to the refrigerator door seemed to have been written by someone else—a silly, naive person I didn’t know.

One morning, maybe my second at home, I decided to take my mother’s bicycle out for a ride. I wasn’t a frequent rider, but going for a spin seemed like something to do that would get me out of the house, a way to discharge the strange, irritable energy I’d noticed in myself. Soon I was following “
BIKE ROUTE”
signs down sleepy streets that led toward a paved trail. A few brown oak leaves waved, like hands in gloves, high up in a sky of perfect East Coast blue. I could see that the day was beautiful, but I was still waiting for it to produce in me the happiness that I expected from crystalline October days in Virginia. What I felt instead was that biking seemed harder than I remembered. I could feel my breath ripping unevenly in and out of my chest. I tried to shift down, but the gears seemed to behave exactly the opposite of the way I expected them to, and it got even more difficult to pedal. I was on familiar streets in a familiar neighborhood less than two miles from my home, but for some reason I began to panic. Or worse than panic: I felt a wave of despair rise, ripple through my body, and escape as heat from the top of my head. My stomach turned over. I didn’t want to be there, and a moment later I knew that I didn’t want to be anywhere. Merely living suddenly just seemed too hard, too undignified. The burn in my thighs, instead of meaning healthy exercise, felt like an emblem for the pain of life in general, a sickly reminder of every struggle to come. I mounted a small hill, and the gears crunched; the chain went slow and then slower until all my effort to push it forward came to nothing. The wheels ground to a stop and I thought,
I can’t
do
this! I’m so pathetic. I don’t know why I’m even trying.