Hancock Park (6 page)

T
here are certain perks for juniors at Whitbread that sophomores just don't have. Like, juniors can go off campus for lunch or leave early if they have free periods at the end of the day. But best of all, juniors have their own designated living room. (Seniors do, too, but ours is just as good as theirs.) Couches and armchairs line the walls, and pastel-colored beanbag chairs—for that special teenage feel, I guess—are planted throughout, with some grouped around an oak coffee table. The Living Room, which most people just refer to as the Room, is where all of us juniors hang out during our free periods. Most girls bring their laptops to school and spend hours analyzing photos from recent premieres and cocktail parties (the entire campus
has WiFi, of course). A whiteboard, which hangs on one of the walls, sometimes gets used to tally up who in the grade had garnered the most mentions on gossip websites over the weekend—whether for wearing a one-of-a-kind designer dress to an exclusive party or flipping off one of the paparazzi. The winner was usually Alissa Hargrove.

I was beginning to warm up to Taylor. She was nice, albeit eccentric with an occasional unwanted attention-drawing laugh. And despite the fact that I knew she wasn't going to help me win popular friends, I preferred sitting with Taylor in the Room to sitting alone. I didn't want to seem
absolutely
friendless. She had a group of drama friends, and they were all…nice. But I had even less in common with her friends than I did with her. Taylor wasn't in the Room all the time, though—she did have to go to class, after all. And sitting alone on a couch with a schoolbook in my lap, anxiously watching everyone else socialize and wondering how I might convince the Trinity to nod my way, was not good for my mental state. So sometimes, I hid in Mr. Elwright's classroom, doing research for Model UN.

“Just couldn't tear yourself away from world events for one whole day, could you?” Mr. E. asked me once when I plopped my backpack down on a desk and sat behind it. I was back in his classroom for the second time that day.

“No, I couldn't,” I volleyed back. “I was sitting in English class, wondering what Uganda's gross domestic product is. I just had to come and look it up!”

“Oh—speaking of, I received our country assignment for this year.” Mr. E. stood up and began to dig through piles of papers on his desk. In terms of organization, Mr. E. was the anti-me. After a few minutes, he held up a piece of paper, triumphant. “So it's a good thing that you're finding out Uganda's gross domestic product.”

“We have Uganda?” I asked, excited.

“Yep.”

“That's great!” I half squealed. “There are plenty of schools that need building in Uganda.”

“That's for sure,” Mr. E. said, sitting back down. “One more thing: The Parents Association wants you to speak about MUN at their next meeting. You worked so hard last year, and they thought you'd be perfect at getting kids excited about the program.”

I smiled, secretly flushing up with pride. Somebody had noticed. Somebody had realized how hard I worked.

The bell rang.

“Shit, I have bio,” I said and then looked sheepishly at Mr. Elwright.

He was chuckling. “Language,” he said. Then, “Hey, what is Uganda's gross domestic product, anyway?”

Even though I knew he was joking, I rattled off the answer, then headed on to biology.

S
ara Elder had finally called back. I wasn't home when she called—which kind of sucked because I had been practicing what I was going to say to her—so my mom talked to her. Mom told me about it over a dinner of cereal and fruit salad. It was just Mom, Jack, and me. I didn't know where Dad was, and I didn't especially want to ask.

“So I made you an appointment for Monday afternoon. Is that okay? I just wanted to take advantage of the fact that I had her on the phone.”

“Whatever.”

“Mom, can I have the milk?” Jack asked.

“Sure.” Mom reached for the milk, and as she passed it
to Jack, she said, “We're moving on Monday.”

“Fabulous. Sounds like Monday's going to be a
great
day.” I spoke with as much sarcasm as I could muster. I jabbed my fork into a grape.

“Honey, please. I know you're upset, but I'm doing the best I can.” She turned to Jack and said, “Remember, you start school next Tuesday.”

“Shit! Are you fucking serious?”

“You don't curse like that at school, do you?” my mom asked.

Jack shrugged.

“What would dinner be without some attractive swear words, courtesy of Jack?” I said, loving the protection that sarcasm provided me.

“Exactly!” Jack agreed, uncapping the milk and pouring it over his bowl of Frosted Flakes. “And what would dinner be without the creative Miller cuisine?”

 

So it was our last week of living as a four-person family. It wasn't that I thought things were so great for the four of us, but I was scared of what changes the move would bring. Especially since we all walked on a tightrope of mental health. One gust of wind and we might trip, might find ourselves dangling, our hands slipping, struggling to hold on.

Dad wasn't shaving and maybe wasn't sleeping either. I came downstairs one morning and stumbled into the kitchen to get an apple and a Diet Coke. Dad was standing
at the kitchen counter in the dark, an empty coffee cup in front of him.

“Hello?” I took a step forward and flipped on the light switch. “Are you okay?”

“Becky! Oh, um, yeah.” Dad turned to face me. He wore a wrinkled white button-down, with his tie loosened around his neck, and an old pair of sweatpants. “You heading to school soon?” he asked, rubbing the stubble on his cheek.

“Yeah.” I nodded, waiting for more, wanting more. Dad and I hadn't discussed the divorce. It was just lurking in the room, sucking up all the air and conversation. We didn't talk about the divorce; we didn't really talk at all. Dad had never been one for confronting emotional situations. I took an apple from the refrigerator, and my dad reached for the jar of instant coffee crystals. “Have a good day,” I told him.

“You, too, sweetheart.”

Maybe we were dangling already.

I
'd been seeing Sara Elder since I was in the fifth grade. One day, I came home from school and told my parents that I felt bad for the numbers in long division problems. “What numbers?” they asked me.

“The remainders,” I told them. “The ones that get left over. The ones nobody wants. So I'm remembering them, making sure they know someone cares about them.”

Mom had leaned forward, her head on her fist, and asked me to explain. Dad had just sort of sat there, shifting his leg nervously. I listed out the remainders of the fifty long division problems that I had done that day. I had started storing those numbers in my head, and once I started, I couldn't seem to stop. Apparently, this wasn't
normal, so my mom asked her psychiatrist for a recommendation, and a phone call was made to Sara Elder.

I spent a year, from fifth grade to sixth grade, sitting in Sara Elder's office for an hour each week, oftentimes refusing to talk to her at all, upset that my parents had forced me into therapy in the first place. It wasn't until the end of sixth grade, when I was obsessively organizing my bookshelves every weekend—alternating between arranging the books by genre, author, and title—that I thought maybe talking to Sara Elder could help. It occurred to me that she wouldn't have any idea how to help me unless I talked to her and told her what I wanted help with. She may have been a doctor who worked with the mind, but that didn't mean that she could read it.

Jack one-upped me for his Get Into Therapy card. (He sees a different psychiatrist than I do, of course, in order to provide us with our necessary “personal space.”) He started in the fifth grade, too, so by the time of the divorce he'd been going for only about two years. His act of insanity was pretty brilliant. In response to the school bully and Jack's personal tormentor, August Cartwright, calling him a Jew and making it clear that it was the worst thing a ten-year-old boy could be, Jack hacked into his elementary school computer system and set up a web site that portrayed August as a Nazi in full Heil Hitler mode.

Jack's private elementary school was concerned and definitely not pleased. Neither were my parents, although they were certainly impressed with Jack's Web design skills.

I
woke up on Monday morning, said good-bye to my mom and to my dad, and went to school. I could almost pretend that everything was normal, but I couldn't avoid the inevitable. Because just a few hours later, my mom and dad would no longer be living in one house.

And neither would I.

I was surprised at myself. I had anticipated being upset, but instead I felt numb. I spent all of last-period English staring at my watch, willing the seconds to pass more quickly—not because I couldn't wait to get out of school, see Sara Elder, and go to my mom's new apartment—but because I just wanted to get it all over with.

After school, I drove to Westwood to Sara Elder's office.
A bag in my trunk held pajamas, an extra uniform, jeans, a sweatshirt, and my medications. It was almost as though I were going to a friend's house to sleep over—except not. I had directions to the new apartment, and after I finished with Sara Elder, I was supposed to head over there.

My appointment was for four o'clock, and after years of making this drive, I knew exactly how much time I had to allot, how long it would take to park, and which elevator was the slowest.

Sara Elder worked on the seventh floor of a bland office building in Westwood, and her waiting room was devastatingly boring. It resembled a cramped and entirely beige living room. Over the course of six years, her taste in magazines hadn't changed or developed, and she never threw a single issue away. Copies of
Better Homes & Gardens
and
Good Housekeeping
from 2003 were stacked in piles on the coffee table. For a psychiatrist who specialized in children, she seemed to have very little knowledge about what kids my age might want to read while they waited.

I flicked the switch that would announce my arrival and sat down on the couch, fuming and ready to confront my MIA psychiatrist. A few minutes later, she opened the heavy oak door that led to her office, and I felt the anger rise within me.

“Hello,” she said, welcoming me as if nothing were wrong, as if she hadn't completely ignored my
emergency
call. Despite the heat outside, she was wearing a bright
red sweater set. “How are you?” she asked once we were both sitting down.

I didn't answer. What kind of question was that? I stared past Sara Elder, past her hair and her gaze, to the orange tapestry with the heart in the center, hanging on the wall behind her. I tried to see if I could count the stitches from where I was sitting.

“Becky?” she leaned forward.

I leaned back. “I called your emergency line.
Emergency.
You didn't call me back for two days. My life is doing a belly flop into who the hell knows where, and you're supposed to be there for me. Thanks for nothing.” I surprised myself with the fury that rushed out of me. My breathing came in faster bursts, and my eyes stung.

“Becky, is this really about you being angry with me?”

I wanted to scream, “Don't give me that psychobabble bullshit!” But instead I just sat there, seething.

Sara Elder went on, talking about how this wasn't the end of the world, and I had to concentrate on me, and I don't really know what else she was saying because I, admittedly, wasn't giving her my full attention.

Then, toward the end of the session, she asked, “How are your meds? You seem a little on edge.”

Thanks to Sara Elder, I basically had a pharmacy in my bathroom. Everything but the ADD stuff. I'd never had a problem with paying attention. Unfortunately. Just the opposite. I tapped my feet, one then the other and back again, and clenched my hands, one, two, three. I had to
do things in multiples of three. “No, I'm doing wonderfully, thanks for asking,” I responded, coating my words with sarcasm.

“Why don't we up the Topamax by half a milligram? That ought to help even out your moods a little bit. I'll call the prescription into Rite Aid, okay?”

I nodded and stood up to leave. “Okay. Bye.”

I walked out into the hallway, still disappointed in myself that I hadn't fully expressed my rage, and that she hadn't responded to it at all. But at least I was getting more Topamax. Maybe that would calm me down.

I hadn't always been this open, or even open at all, to the idea of medication. The idea that a pill could control my moods, my instincts, and what went on in my mind used to be terrifying. Topamax was my first prescription, and the only one I'd consistently stuck with. The dose, however, had increased steadily throughout the years. I remember the terror, standing in front of the pharmacy counter at Rite Aid, waiting for the pharmacist to fill my first prescription. Mom was next to me, credit card in hand, waiting to pay. I stuffed the little white paper bag into my backpack, nervous that I might run into someone I knew, and that they might wonder why I had a bag from the pharmacy.

That night, after I had brushed my teeth, washed my face, and changed into my pajamas, I went into the bathroom and placed the bright orange medicine bottle on the counter in front of me. “You're going to take half a
pill tonight, okay? Just half a pill each day,” I remembered Sara Elder saying. Carefully uncapping the bottle, I stared down at the round, white pills. I had never swallowed a pill before. When I got sick, my parents still bought the chewable or drinkable versions of medicine. At that time, Jack and I still shared a bottle of gummy vitamins. What if—what if this pill got stuck in my throat, and I couldn't figure out how to swallow it? And if I did manage to swallow it without choking, it was going to change the way my brain functioned?!

Skip
GO
and collect two hundred bucks—I was officially freaked out.

As carefully as I could, I removed one pill from the bottle. It was small and felt chalky between my fingertips. Sara Elder had said to break it in half, and it had sounded easy then, but once I was home I wasn't so sure. There were no dotted lines on the pill, no directions on the bottle; how would I be able to tell if I had successfully broken the little white pill into equal halves? And what if I swallowed two-thirds of the pill by mistake? I could only assume that two-thirds of the pill would affect me more than one half would, and I didn't necessarily want that extra kick right away.

The problems were endless. I gripped the pill and ran down the hall toward my parents' bedroom. “Mom, I don't know how to do this! How am I going to get the pill into two equal parts?” I was becoming hysterical. I walked past her, into their bathroom, calling back to her
as I walked.

She was sitting at her computer. “Just break it in half. Hold both ends and pull it apart. Don't worry, you'll get it close enough.”

I grasped the pill between my thumb and forefinger and, holding my breath, I pulled apart. I had a piece of the pill in each hand, and I was afraid at first because chalky dust was falling from the pill's jagged edges onto the granite countertop. “Did you get it? Just put it in your mouth and swallow now. Take a deep breath and swallow,” Mom called over from her desk. There was a glass of water next to me on the granite countertop. I looked at my reflection in the mirror and shook my head.

“I can't do it, Mom!” I yelled out into the bedroom.

“Becky, I have to finish writing this article! Just swallow it; it's a little pill. Do you know how many pills I have to take every day?”

I looked toward my mom's sink. To the right of it, there was a tray filled with little orange bottles.

Just swallow, just swallow,
I told myself, looking at the half pill in my left hand. One deep breath, one big gulp, one little pill. Just swallow.

And with one deep breath and one big gulp, I swallowed that one little pill. And then waited for the magic to happen.