I See Me (2 page)

“Hey!”

“Sorry,” I called as I jogged to the back of the bus. “I just remembered I’ve got somewhere to be.”

The 99 B-Line pulled up, and I cut to the front of the line that was forming for it so quickly no one really noticed.

“Cool,” Hoyt called after me. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

I didn’t answer. I flashed my pass and made my way to the back of the bus, pushing through the annoying people blocking the aisle.
 

I noticed that Hoyt hadn’t gotten on the 44. He was standing to the far side of the bus stop, texting. He looked up to scan the windows of the 99 as it pulled past him, and I turned my back. I really wasn’t interested in exchanging waves — again, if that was what was going on. What someone like Hoyt wanted with me, I had no idea. Nor was I interested in finding out.
 

My day was unfolding perfectly, as planned. And that never happened.

Even though it was one of those double-length accordion buses, I had to stand because the bus was crazy-full of school kids. Standing was cool. I preferred not to sit by anyone anyway, but the kids were annoying. Sure, they were only a couple of years younger than me, but still. School didn’t make them any less oblivious. Predictably, most of them got off two stops later at Granville Street, either to shop or transfer to downtown.

I still didn’t sit down. Honestly, I liked the way I had to counter the pull and push of the bus’s momentum. With my feet solidly planted, I hung, swaying from one arm. My right hand gripped the chrome bar overhead. I was actually left-hand dominant, but I never used my left hand for such menial tasks. I reserved it for art.

Vancouver — or at least this part of it — sped by outside the wide bus windows but I didn’t bother to look. I knew this street and these people more than I wanted to know it or them already. I knew every part of Vancouver that I could get to by bus or SkyTrain. I’d never been anywhere else. Not even on school trips, because I never bothered to track down whoever was currently my official guardian to get permission slips signed. I would just camp out in the school library and read and draw on the days my classes went anywhere.

I should have put on my earphones, but I didn’t. So when the hallucination struck, I had nothing to disguise my reaction. Listening to music was a good cover for involuntary spasms. I hadn’t had an incident in months, though, so I’d relaxed.
 

Six years of ‘incidents’ and you’d think I’d be smarter. I wasn’t.

I could still feel the sway of my body as the bus driver tapped on the brakes, as well as my hand gripping the overhead bar far too tightly now. The bones of my hand pressed painfully into the metal. But as the familiar headache rolled up over the back of my head from the top of my spine, I couldn’t see anything but white … endless rolling mists of white. The pain settled across my forehead. I tensed every single muscle in my body even while willing myself to relax … even as I silently begged my mind to let it go. Just let it be. Please.

A dark-haired man appeared out of the mist, obscuring my sight.

He was tall. Maybe slightly over six feet. Pale-skinned and wearing a dark suit but no tie. His short black hair was neatly parted and combed. I had no idea who he was, but that didn’t stop me from seeing him in my broken mind. I’d been seeing him like this for years now.

I squeezed my eyes shut, though I knew it would do nothing to stop the hallucination as it threatened to overwhelm me. The delusions were always threatening to break me, just as they’d broken me last fall.

The dark aura that radiated from the man was what had first inspired me to favor simple charcoal on paper for my artwork. Each time I offered a new sketch of him for sale in my online Etsy shop, it was purchased within the hour.
 

Other people wanted to be haunted by my imaginary friends so much that they willingly paid hundreds of dollars per sketch. My shrink would point that out as a silver-lining, but I’d prefer working at McDonald’s over delusions, any day.

Today, the man’s hair gleamed with the moonlit inky blackness that surrounded him. He was standing by a pile of stones, or maybe by a stone wall? He wasn’t ugly, nor did I think he was evil, but he was blackness. Could I call a figment of my imagination evil? He turned his head to look at someone I couldn’t yet see.
 

Oh, God. I didn’t want to see.
 

As he raised his hand to touch the crimson stone amulet he always wore concealed underneath his crisp dress shirts, I dug blindly through my bag, frantically searching for a pencil or a piece of loose charcoal.

I reminded myself of what the world actually looked like right now. Of the chrome bar I was still gripping … of the aisle in which I was standing … of the bag I was digging into with my left hand, which was a gift from another Etsy seller — an online friend — who repurposed it out of an old army duffle and painted it with black ivy reminiscent of my arm tattoo. While I was still attempting to not appear frantic, my edging-on-desperate digging through the bag caused the new tattoo on my shoulder to sting.

If I could just hang on to my surroundings … if I could just ground myself here on the bus, I wouldn’t end up screaming on the floor and being dragged to the psych ward … again.

It had taken me three days to get released into the care of my social worker and my shrink last time. The hallucinations had come and gone for that entire time. They’d continued for a couple of weeks after, actually. I had just gotten very good at hiding them. When I wasn’t blindsided as I had been just now.

A woman laughed. The sound of it came from the hallucination, not from the occupants of the bus. Thankfully, I knew the difference now after so many years. That helped me hide my illness from everyone else.

A chill spiraled up my spine to follow the path the headache had taken. Not because the laugh was terrible — it was actually quite musical — but because I knew who was laughing even before the hallucination expanded to reveal her golden curls and jade-green knife. The knife looked like something out of fantasy movie, but the blond woman almost always wore T-shirt’s and jeans when she appeared in my delusions … except for last fall. Now that he’d seen her, the dark-suited man’s gaze was glued to the blond, but whether he was enraptured or enraged, I didn’t know.

I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to see.

I closed my hand around a piece of charcoal. I felt the grit of it against the skin of my frantic fingers. And that was just enough to help me focus.

The hallucination faded, leaving only a residue of blurry, blank spots in its wake.

I’d headed it off before it could expand in my mind, before it could completely overwhelm me.

I was shaking, clinging to the bar like the lifeline it was so that I wouldn’t collapse to the floor. So I didn’t show my weakness to the press of people around me. So they wouldn’t know how broken I was. How utterly broken.

I’d taken my pill that morning, but just the regular dose. I should have accounted for stress. I never actually felt stressed, as far as I understood the sensation. Not until a second before a hallucination seized me. But my shrink, who was actually a psychologist, kept telling me I had to learn to anticipate the life moments that were stressful to everyone else.
 

To regular people, she meant.

And anyone else would find aging out of the foster care system that had raised them their entire life stressful.
 

Well, anyone else without an unknown psychotic disorder. Anyone else who wasn’t on meds to keep them focused and calm.

The bus rolled to a stop. I swayed forward and then back, but my feet were grounded. I wasn’t going to fall. I wasn’t going to falter further.
 

I looked up to see I was at the Commercial Drive bus stop, which was the best transfer point for the 20 bus. I could barely see through the hazy pain of the migraine that would still try to pull me under if I let it.

Just one more bus.
 

I was halfway to beginning my life.

I was going to make it the rest of the way today.

I shoved through the press of the crowd trying to enter the bus and stumbled onto the sidewalk.

I wasn’t sure how many years I’d been seeing the dark-suited man — at least six — but the blond girl, who was only a few years older than me, was new. Well, newish. I’d been hallucinating her for a little over a year now.

Her hair glowed golden, just as the wicked knife in her hand sparkled green, but I’d never drawn her or him in color.

Real life didn’t look like that. Real life was rendered in tints and blurs of gray all around me. The streets, the buildings, and car after car were gray, gray, and gray.

I pulled my charcoal-covered hand out of my bag. I was still gripping the piece that had rescued me from the clutches of the hallucination. I also grabbed the medium-sized sketchbook that I carried with me everywhere. Still trying to get my bearings, I stumbled over to the low cement wall that backed the bus stop. I sat down. I needed to catch a bus up Victoria Drive to get to my social worker’s office, but I couldn’t manage that right now.
 

I flipped open the sketchbook to a blank page, ignoring the pages and pages of other drawings it contained. Ignoring buses as they came and went. Ignoring the people staring at me.
 

Using the charcoal-covered fingers of my left hand, I began to shape the hallucination.

If I could just steal a bit of it … if I could tie this stolen bit to the page, it wouldn’t haunt me. The sketch would free me from the grip of the delusion.

I didn’t know why that was — why sketching worked to calm me. It just always had. I’d drawn for weeks after the terrible bout last fall … weeks and weeks recording and discharging the hallucinations. Weeks of acknowledging them, tying them to paper, and walking away. This is why I sold my work. I released the hallucinations from the confines of my mind into the world through charcoal and paper.

I concentrated on the knife — a jade-colored knife that looked to be hewn out of actual stone — and the way the blond woman held it.
 

If I could just get the knife right, I could capture the hallucination in the sketchbook, then walk the rest of the way to my appointment.
 

The walk would give the headache time to abate. My social workers had always made me remove my tinted glasses inside, whether or not I complained about the fluorescent lights in their offices. My eyes were always weird after a hallucination — even paler than usual — which typically made my social workers launch into questions about drugs and other garbage. I didn’t need that any day, but especially not today. Today was my birthday. Today I would be free … well, as free as my mind would let me be.

If I could just render the shading of the blade’s edge perfectly.

“It was your mother’s,” Carol said as she handed me a ratty royal-blue-velvet jewelry box. It was about the length of a sunglass case, but thinner.

“What?” I asked, because I wasn’t really listening. I’d signed some papers, retrieved my passport, and was now ready to walk out of this part of my life.

“Held in trust by the ministry.”

“Sorry?” I asked. “You kept something of my mother’s for nineteen years?”

“It would have been … if you had been adopted …” Carol took off her wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed her eyes. She was a series of shades of brown. Brown eyes, hair, and freckles. Even her sweater, belt, and shoes were brown today, but none of the shades matched. Too much yellow in one, too much orange in the other. Her hair was dull, devoid of shine. Her eyes needed a day off, even though — since it was Monday afternoon now — she’d just had two.

Carol had only been assigned to my file for about a year and a half. Sharon, the social worker who’d given me the mittens, hadn’t returned from maternity leave. I’d already forgotten the name of the temp worker who’d been assigned to me in between. Carol didn’t really know how to talk to me, about anything. She saw my thick file and it made her sad.
 

Early on, she’d talked about the possibility of teen adoption. I’d had my name taken off the list the day I turned twelve and was legally able to express my opinion on the matter. I’d had to miss a couple of meetings with Carol, and suffer from a hallucination in front of her, before she let the subject drop.
 

It was nice that she cared, though. I’d just had more than enough of nice in my life. I wanted more than nice, but I didn’t believe that more existed. So I’d take nothing — and no one — on my own terms every day, starting today. Nice just didn’t work for me anymore.

“You kept this because you thought I’d lose it?” I asked.

“The ministry —”

I waved off Carol’s explanation and snapped open the box to see a gold necklace attached to an antique white rock. The quartz, or whatever it was, was about the size of a nickel and roughly hewn. The chain’s links were wide — almost industrial looking — and tarnished. The necklace was attached by gold eyelets that appeared to be drilled right into the stone, but one of them was broken. The metal of it was oddly stretched out, as if some force had pulled the chain apart.

“Did they rip it off her?” I was whispering as I stared at the broken necklace, but I wasn’t sure why.

“Excuse me?”

“The paramedics,” I said. “Did they rip the necklace off her when they pulled her from the car? Or later at the hospital when she was dying and I was born?”

“I … I …” Carol replaced her glasses and turned back to the thick file on her desk. She always kept my file closed but in sight when we visited. Occasionally, she placed her hand on it when she was discussing something she deemed very important. When she’d taken over the office, she turned the desk so it was against the far wall. That way she could sit facing the guest chairs without the desk as a physical barrier. The framed inspirational quotes and the fleece throw on the third chair were also meant to add a cozy feeling to the room. Unfortunately for Carol, the item that probably got the most use in her office was the Kleenex box.