Dismantling Evan (5 page)

I had three weeks to come up with my interview questions, perform the interviews, and write my piece. The first three nights after finding out, I didn’t sleep at all; falling right into the insomnia trap. I kept thinking how I would approach the players and dance team members. What would I ask them? Would they think my questions were stupid? What would they think of me? I could picture the dance team girls reacting to me like I was alien, not of their station in the high school hierarchy. Would they just stare at me because I was so awkward? I never stood straight and I always did this thing with my head; tilting it to the side and never making eye contact when I was nervous. Mom would say I was alway slouching and I needed to stand straight. As for the boys’ soccer team, would I stumble over my own words because of how good looking some of them were? Would they laugh at me?

On the third night of no sleep, I ran the scenarios through my head and each ended badly. That was when I experienced my first anxiety attack. I think it was one anyway. I lay in bed staring up at my ceiling fan, when I felt my throat tighten. I coughed and tried to clear it, but the feeling just lingered and I panicked. I tried to ignore it, but trying to think away the worry just made it worse. I walked over to my bathroom faucet, filled a cup with water and drank slowly, hoping it would calm me. I actually had to remember how to swallow. After a few minutes, the tightening in my throat released and my pounding heart began to slow down. I Googled the symptoms and it said it was a panic attack, but I never talked to Mom or Dad about it. The next week of school was a blur. I was always a fairly good student; As, Bs, some Cs, but, by the week before my interview deadline, I had completely gone on autopilot when it came to completing assignments. Final papers and projects for my classes were being assigned with stiff deadlines since school was ending in a few short weeks and the workload was building up. That was when things really started to snowball. I felt helpless, worthless even. I was crippled by the thought of interviewing these jocks and beauty queens, by the massive amount of class assignments I needed to catch up on, and the fact I wasn’t sleeping AT ALL now.

Ms. Stewart pulled me aside and told me how concerned she was with my performance in English, which triggered another massive wave of mind-crippling fear. I needed her off my back so I told her I was just really distracted and I would catch up before and after school if she would let me. She said she would. After the confrontation, all I wanted to do was go home, lock myself in my room, and just sleep. I couldn’t fucking sleep though, so I worked. I did assignments all night with the most intense focus I have ever had, which I thought was weird initially, but I went with it. I performed a miracle. I caught up on all my assignments in my classes in a span of two full nights of no sleep. The next few days, I flubbed my way through a few quizzes and even managed to get my interview questions together. I tried to make myself fall asleep over the next few days, but I would wake up every hour on the hour.

I was two days out from the deadline and it was the morning of the interviews. As I walked to school that morning, I looked over my interview questions, scratched through a few and reworked them. When I got to school, a cold sweat came over me and a nausea rolled through my stomach. I figured it was hunger so I pulled out the banana I snagged from home and ate it quickly as I walked to Ms. Stewart’s classroom. The interviews would start in less than thirty minutes; during first period. Ms. Stewart was sitting at her desk grading papers when I walked in for the interview pass. She handed it to me, and before I left she said, “You are going to do great Evan.”

I remember wondering how she could think I would do anything great. I wondered what she actually saw when she looked at me. She didn’t see the insomniac, the nervous as hell teen, the paranoid girl getting ready to interview a handful of jocks and beauty queens. I wondered what she saw in me that made her think I would do great at interviewing these students who were completely out of my league. I remember thinking, whatever she saw was a lie, a fake-out, a terrible misconception of what I could possibly be able to achieve. Definitely not what went down that morning.

The dance team was the first to be interviewed. Two were new to the team so they weren’t as... confident in their arrogance. They were sophomores on a varsity squad, basically at the bottom of the social totem pole. Oh, don’t get me wrong. There was some arrogance. It was subtle though since they had just broken the unseen barrier separating the popular from the obscure. They had become part of a team, and when you travel in numbers, especially in a pack as influential in a school as the cheer squad or dance team, you were automatically handed a free-pass of entitlement. The first two didn’t use the free-pass like the third one did, too new to it. Samantha Johnson was the third girl. Samantha was accepted on the varsity dance team when she was a junior. The difference between her and the other two was that she had an extra year on them to get used to her ability to manipulate and get what she wanted. One of the byproducts of being a loner is you automatically become a watcher. One that observes all the goings on around her from a position of social abstinence.

Samantha Johnson was easy to watch since she was the quintessential social butterfly and always had something to smile about or something to say. I swear I think she made a point to be everywhere she could, all the time, in fear of missing something.

I tapped my pencil on my notebook, while I waited for her to come into the empty classroom. She came into the room like I had expected she would, light and fluttery like a butterfly. As she sat, she sighed dramatically, like she was put out by being interviewed. I mumbled that I would try not to keep her long. She swept her long brown hair off her shoulder with the flick of her hand and crossed one leg over the other. “It’s all right. Whatever. What questions do you have for me?” she asked, curtly.

Of course she would react this way, I was a nobody and her coach had probably told her she had to do this stupid interview. JUST LIKE MY TEACHER TOLD ME I HAD TO DO THIS STUPID INTERVIEW!

I asked her the questions and she kept her answers short and without detail. I would be lying if I said I got anything enlightening out of her answers. Her last comment solidified she was toying with me and this was a game, something for her to talk about with her squad after.

“Is that everything you need? I’m sorry, what was your name again?” she said.

“Evan. It is short for. . .”

She snapped her gum between her teeth and rolled her eyes as she cut me off. “Whatever. Are we done?”

Fearful I might spew every ounce of anger I had building at her, I tilted my head as I looked down and nodded. She got up swiftly and headed to the door. By the time I looked up, she was leaving the room mumbling under her breath. “What a weirdo.”

When I heard someone laugh just outside of the door, my stomach dropped. It was a masculine chuckle, probably one of the soccer players I was interviewing.
Perfect!

I breathed in deeply and held down the cry I desperately wanted to release. I wasn’t going to let anyone know I had heard them and it upset me, so I did my best to ignore the knot in my throat. I couldn’t keep my body from trembling though; my nerves.

The door opened suddenly and I looked up only high enough to see the tennis shoes and hairy legs of my next interview approaching the chair set across from me. I didn’t want to make eye contact right away and I was hoping I could buy some time to calm myself, but he spoke gruffly. “I’m here for the interview.”

The smell of soap and too much cologne filled the room. I hesitated responding to him as I pretended to sift through the interview sheets.

“Hello?” he taunted in a baritone sing song voice.

“W, what is your name?” I asked, stuttering a little.

“Crawford. Darren Crawford.”

I tilted my head to the side to look at him only long enough to see him hunched over, his elbows resting on his knees. He was gawking at me, waiting for the interview to continue, but I was stunned, like a deer in headlights. He was very good looking and this only made my lack of verbal skills freeze even more.

I looked back down and took a deep breath. I felt very hot and my hands started to tingle, like they were going numb. I shook them out and tried to count to ten in my head. Oh, and breathe. I had to calm my breathing.

“Is this going to take very long?” he asked, loftily.

“No, it is only a few questions.” My voice was barely a whisper and a quivering one at best.

“What did you say?”

Tense and frustrated, I raised my voice. “It is only a few questions!”

He leaned back in the chair and put his hands up, surrendering. “Whoa, chill out. You don’t need to be such a freak.”

He looked me up and down in disgust and that was how he made me feel, disgusting. I was a disgusting freak. I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply. A sad moan escaped from me and I guess it made him angry. “Look, I’m only doing this damn interview for coach. If you are not going to ask your stupid ass questions then I will leave. You are wasting my time. Shit, Sam was right. You are a weirdo.”

I held my breath and stopped taking in air. I was upset, angry, and hurt by his words. He was speaking to me like I was something stuck to the bottom of his shoe. An annoyance he had to endure because his coach told him he had to. I wanted to tell him to leave me alone so badly, but I couldn’t get past the sound of my pounding heart in my ears.

“What did you say?” he asked with a surprise tone. “Did you just say to leave you alone? I’m doing you this favor you stupid bitch.”

I hadn’t just thought it. I had told him to leave me alone and I didn’t realize it.

His brown eyes narrowed on me with his jaw set, waiting to see what I would do or say next.

All of a sudden, he rose from his chair. “Nah, screw this.”

He closed the gap between us and got right in my face. “Look at you. You can’t even speak!”

He wanted to intimidate me and it didn’t take much to send me over the edge. I pinched my eyes closed and tilted my head down away from him just as he pulled back, snickering. “Are you crying? Seriously? What the hell is wrong with you?”

I don’t remember saying anything else. I just stood, walked around him, heading straight for the door. He was talking and chuckling behind me as I left. Free of him, I saw two other guys, I was supposed to interview, leaning against the wall. They both looked up at me then at Darren, laughing as he came up behind me. I saw their serious looks turn to smiles and I knew I was moments away from their ridicule as well. I tried to run, but my legs felt like Jell-O, so I walked as quickly as my feet would take me down the hall. The other two started laughing just as I exited the building. I couldn’t hold my whimper any longer and I choked on my cries. I remember wiping my eyes with the sleeve of my shirt. I broke as I walked through the empty courtyard, around the cafeteria building, through the student parking lot, and off school property.

By the time I got home, my tears had dried sticky to my face. The entire time I walked, I ran Samantha Johnson’s and Darren Crawford’s words through my head: weirdo, stupid bitch, freak. Sadness turned to anger, but I didn’t know what to do with it, except let it fester inside. I didn’t care that I had left campus without permission and was about to confront my mom who didn’t expect me home for hours.

I slammed the door behind me when I entered. The sound made Mom call, “Who is it?”

When I didn’t respond right away, she came around the corner fast, but not fast enough for me not to dart to my room. She was right behind me and when I shut the door on her, she knocked on my door and wiggled the knob furiously. “Evan, what happened? What is going on? What are you doing home? Evan, answer me!”

I didn’t want to talk.

She banged on the door, still demanding after not getting a response. “What the hell is going on Evan?” She was scared, afraid of me or for me, I wasn’t sure which.

“Go away mom. Just leave me alone! I wish everyone would just leave me alone!” I yelled back at her as she beat on the door. She told me I couldn’t spend the rest of my life alone.

I yelled back, “I don’t need anyone! You don’t know what I’m going through!”

She pleaded for me to tell her what I was going through. Even if I had, she wouldn’t have understood. She was never the loner, the outcast, the freak in high school. She was popular and beautiful and social.

Her pounding on the door was constant and I needed to drown everything out. I put my earbuds in and turned up my music until the pounding on the door joined the sound of the bumping bass. Eventually she stopped. Well, not exactly. Dad came home and made her stop, pulling her from the door. After that I feel asleep. The next thing I remembered was seeing an open doorway with no door on the hinges of my room. My door was gone. They fucking took my door off the frame. I lost my shit and I stomped out of my room into the living room. Dad was sitting in a chair and mom was pacing as she spoke with someone on the phone. “Yes, we have made an appointment with her doctor. I will call your office with an update once we have talked with them.”

Neither of them had seen me yet.

“Who is she talking to?” I asked Dad, sharply.

They both looked at me and Mom quickly ended the call. At that point I didn’t give a shit whether I was being an asshole. I wanted to know why they took my door off the damn frame.