Fragile: Handle With Care
trigger warning for depression and mentions of drug abuse
for Anna, who is stronger than she thinks.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there on that dark wooden bench in the park she sometimes ran through. She’d been doing that a lot lately, finding herself outside in the cold for long periods of time. The air inside was dense, so dense with the thoughts she couldn’t hold in her head. She couldn’t breathe inside. At least outdoors those thoughts could roam without suffocating her quite so much. Even the exhaustion etching itself on every inch of her body seemed lighter when she was wrapped in crisp air. So she sat, knees together, arms close to her body, with her head in a fog of chaos.
Her days had been bleeding together as of late. She couldn’t say exactly when it started, but that didn’t seem to matter. One day became another, in a seamless join she couldn’t keep up with. She admitted to no one that she’d stopped trying.
Her appetite went first, but that seemed unimportant, because her stomach was in a constant state of intricate knots and tangles that she was too tired to sort out. Sleep was next. She spent the nights battling for rest, and dreaded the idea of rising from bed the next morning. She was losing count of the times she’d woken up feeling more exhausted than if she hadn’t gone to sleep in the first place. Her legs felt weighed down with invisible restraints as they wearily carried her around.
Everything felt heavier. She wasn’t sure why.
She was always cold these days. Cold from the inside, like no amount of warm layers could help, like she was forever destined to shiver involuntarily down to her bones. Her clothes weren’t warm and comfortable like she remembered them being. Instead, they felt like they were closing in on her, threatening her lungs with rations of air that would only keep her alive, nothing more. Still, she’d reach for another layer to cover up, just to not feel so bare and exposed to the world.
She felt so bare all the time.
So she would go outside, because at least then it made sense that she felt cold, because so did everyone around her as they milled through the early winter air. She went outside where the cold air filled her lungs, and tried in vain to clear her head. She went outside so she wouldn’t have to lie awake in bed for hours as she failed to sleep. She went outside, and when she was too tired to walk, she sat.
She knew it had been a while since she’d taken a rest on the cold bench, because the light was fading from the world around her. The evening traffic was at its best, and the large intersection a couple of streets away was a constant source of impatient honks and tires. She looked down to her lap when she felt her phone vibrate in her pocket. All it would have taken was to pull it out and answer it, but her limbs were hesitant of the movement. She wasn’t sure why. When the vibration stopped, she lifted her gaze back up to the source of her focus for the last while, to the reason her legs had carried her to this park in the first place, to the two people standing far enough away from her that she could keep her eye on them from a safe distance, as though that gave her control. She felt her phone vibrate again, but this time she didn’t look down. She didn’t take her eyes away for even a moment. She couldn’t. The vibration caused her bones to rattle inside her useless layers of skin and muscle. It made her feel so cold.
Another while passed. She couldn’t say how long. There were still shreds of orange and pink from the sunset lingering behind the buildings surrounding the park when her phone vibrated again. The movement jerked her out of her foggy head, and only then did she realize that the cool wind had turned cold, and one side of the sky was quickly growing darker, and she was shivering constantly. She took her eyes off of the two people, and that brick building, and pulled her phone out of her pocket. It took another gust of energy to bring it up to her ear and speak.
Ben was there in ten minutes. She knew because a man had taken a seat on the bench across from her and looked down at his watch, announcing the time to the person he was on the phone with. He carried on with an animated conversation which she for the most part tuned out, because she was tired, and cold, and her mind was littered with foggy thoughts. And then the man got up from the bench, looked down at his watch, announced the time again, and hung up before continuing on his walk. Before he was out of her line of sight, Ben was at her side, and she felt how stiff the muscles in her neck and shoulders were as she looked up to see him.
He looked equally worried for her as he did unhappy that he was standing in the cold. She looked away from his disquiet eyes and settled her gaze on those two people again. Ben took a seat and blew hot air into his hands in an attempt to warm them. Her insides seemed to disintegrate as he sat beside her, so full of brotherly concern for her wellbeing. She felt panicky and sick underneath a paralyzing coat of numbness, which was probably the only thing still holding her together. Her tongue lay heavy in her mouth, keeping her from talking. So she didn’t, she just folded her hands in her lap and apologized silently to him for her behavior.
“Here,” he said suddenly, and she looked down to see her jacket in his hand. “I wasn’t sure if you had something warm, and it’s freezing out here, and if you don’t take it then I’m putting it on.”
Somewhere underneath her numbness, she wanted to smile at his grumpy, pouty tone of voice. She didn’t feel how cold it was anymore, but took it from him that she was shivering for a reason. She reached for the jacket and sluggishly pulled it on without protest. She wasn’t doing much of that these days, protesting. After that, they sat in silence again, and her mind drifted in and out of so many thoughts that they felt like one blur of nothingness as she watched the scene ahead of her. She felt herself slipping away, coaxed into a world of haunting memories.
She didn’t fight it as it took over.
She was powerless to its hold on her.
‘You were wonderful,’ her mother greeted her proudly as she came back to the small room she’d been shown to before the concert.
‘No, I wasn’t,’ she corrected her sullenly as she sat down in an empty chair and threw her head back to take a long drink from the water bottle with the label in foreign letters.
‘How can you say that? Couldn’t you hear how they cheered for you?’ Christine insisted, reaching over to place a comforting hand on her daughter’s knee.
‘They don’t know what they’re cheering for,’ she grumbled under her breath as she moved her legs out of her mother’s reach, denying her the satisfaction of making things okay.
‘What was that, Jenny?’
‘Nothing,’ she replied coldly as she picked at the label of her water bottle. ‘Is Papa here?’ she asked then, hoping to have hidden the naïve hopefulness that laced her words. She’d meant to say ‘my father.’ She hadn’t called him Papa out loud in years. She watched her mother in the few short moments before a diplomatic reply would surely sound. ‘Never mind,’ she said instead, uninterested in whatever excuse she’d be given as to why he hadn’t bothered making the five minute journey from the hotel, when he was only visiting for two days anyway.
‘Jenny, grown-ups have many responsibilities,’ was the reply she received after listening to her mother’s tired sigh. ‘And sometimes those responsibilities mean that you have to miss out on things you really want to do.’
She ripped a diagonal line in the water bottle’s label as her lips tightened in frustration.
‘You have to understand,’ her mother tried again, reaching forward once more to comfort her child.
‘No, thank you,’ she replied quickly, standing up from her chair although her legs were sore as it was. ‘I’m done trying to understand that man,’ she stated definitively, noting the visible hurt passing through her mother’s eyes. She pursed her lips and turned on her heels. If her father couldn’t trouble himself with at least apologizing to her himself, then she was done feeling empathetic for how hard he worked. She didn’t care about it anymore. He was her father, he should have been there. Maybe it was her own stupid fault for actually believing his promises, and letting herself imagine him in the crowd as she sang. As though maybe for once in her life, he’d put his work away and only see his child for ten whole minutes. As though she was important enough to hold his attention. As though he cared at all that she wanted him there. She didn’t tell anyone how she still pictured his proud face behind her closed eyes as she stretched the notes out and took the audience’s breath away.
Clearly he had more important things to do.
Fine then, so did she.
She left the room, water bottle still in hand, and ignored her mother’s request for her to come back in. She took determined steps to the heavy back door at the end of the hall, and stepped outside without glancing back.
She’d come to make friends fast at shows. Boys a few years older than her usually hung around the loading zone once they finished packing or unpacking gear. They did fine as five-minute friends. They told her she was pretty, invited her to sit with them, and included her in the conversation as time wasted on in the real world.
At the beginning, she’d watched them curiously as they lifted cigarettes to their lips and drew in long breaths. She watched their cheeks cave in before they’d knock their heads back and release the smoke in the form of crude laughter at some terribly rude joke or comment someone in the group had made. Sometimes they liked to touch her, wrap an arm around her waist and claim her as their own for those few minutes they’d know each other. The lonely girl inside of her liked it. It felt nice to be touched, and included in a conversation, and called pretty.
If only her mother knew of the things she’d seen and heard and done as she tried to make sense of the world around her at too young of age.
It had actually taken her a long time to fall into drugs. She’d seen them around, seen people use them. She’d registered the glossy-yet-vacant look in their eyes while it worked inside of them. They’d been offered to her plenty of times, she hadn’t kept track, and the strangeness of it all had worn off quickly. What finally tempted her was a conversation she’d overheard at one of her parents’ parties. Two wives of important men sitting near her had been discussing an article from that morning’s paper; youth drug use was on the rise again. ‘It’s awful,’ one of them had said. ‘Thank goodness Julian is nowhere near that terrible stuff,’ the other one added with a nod of agreement.
She did her best not to cough up her drink. Julian, as the woman had so affectionately regarded her son, was a boy she knew well. He was so high most of the time that his parents didn’t notice anymore, and simply wrote it off as ‘adolescent behavior’, as some passing phase of rebellion. She hated that term, as if by saying it, it would excuse the stupidity of the act or something. That boy was a creep, slurring his vocabulary of sexual harassment inside a cloud of smoke at any girl with a short skirt. They were acquainted, and he made her feel ill inside.
Still, that short, meaningless snippet of conversation she’d overheard stayed with her for days. About a week later, a friend of hers came over after school with the latest magazines so they’d be all caught up on the gossip. They’d left their bags on the kitchen counter when they went up to her bedroom, and her friend’s wallet had fallen out onto the clean marble surface.
When her father got home an hour later, he stormed into her room, red-faced and fuming. ‘You will not smoke under my roof!’ he’d shouted, holding a cigarette package between his thumb and pointer finger, as though it was poisonous. She’d never seen him so worked up before, and froze in her spot as his icy glare attacked her.
‘Mr. Hartmann, relax, okay? It isn’t a cigarette pack. It’s my wallet,’ her friend breezily explained with a dismissive wave of her hand. She walked over to him and showed him where the snap was, opening it to reveal her ID and money. ‘See?’ she added lightly, and chuckled as she made her way back to her spot and sat down. ‘Everyone has them now,’ she told Jenny with a roll of her eyes. ‘It blows, I totally discovered them.’
Jenny absently nodded along once her father had left her room.
And that was about cigarettes.
Two months later, she took her first hit. She waited to feel the strange effects it played on her, before taking a cab home. She’d wanted them to see it, to see her. She’d wanted it to hurt them.
Things moved quickly from there. She let different people pull her along for roller coaster rides, and enjoyed it for the most part. The feeling of being so far away from yourself, like you could float away from your problems until they’d be forgotten, was strange and enticing. It made things feel easier, less daunting, and important, and complicated. She understood the appeal.
A month later, she was in rehab. She answered questions when asked, but otherwise kept to herself. The staff was sure she’d recover nicely.
She did.
On the day she was released, her parents stood at the main hall of the clinic, and spoke to the doctor she’d had to see daily during her time there. As she made her way down the hall toward them, she heard them laugh politely at something the doctor had said, but she could tell by the way they stood and shifted their weight that they were both silently counting down the seconds until they could leave the facility and erase that entire segment from their memories. She acknowledged them with a silent nod, and her mother placed a warm hand on her shoulder. The doctor smiled at her, and she wondered if that would be a good time to suggest he try mints after his coffee, and spare the rest of his patients that smell, but rolled her bottom lip between her teeth and kept quiet.
The grown-ups decided to classify her little slip-up as ‘adolescent behavior’. She went home, and life returned to normal. Her parents chose not to acknowledge what happened, in hopes that it would simply go away. In the counseling sessions she’d had at the clinic, they’d talked endlessly about how important it was to stay open with the important people in her life. She tried it a few times, tried mentioning something here and there to her parents about ‘what had happened,’ as they had come to refer to it, but they wouldn’t even hold her gaze. They’d murmur something about a meeting, or a luncheon they were late for, shuffle uneasily toward the nearest exit and disappear for a few hours.
They behaved so normally that it maddened her.
She gave it a week before giving up, and falling back in was easier than she thought. She paraded around the house trying to get her parents’ attention in the ways she knew would have to work. Sometimes she brought home less-than-presentable friends after a long night out. Once or twice she barged in on a party or dinner with important people in fancy suits. A few weeks later, the wife of a business associate of her father’s told her mother that, ‘Children just feel the need to let go sometimes.’ She went on to promise that, ‘She’ll come out of this phase right quick, you’ll see,’ while keeping a comforting hand on her mother’s arm.
That night, she overdosed.
She was tired. She’d been throwing tantrums since she was a kid; screaming, kicking, crying, begging. Anything to get their attention, to remind them that she was there too, that she needed them more than the bank, or the charity board, or the gala. That she missed them. Since she was growing up, she’d had to replace such behavior with a shadier scene, one they couldn’t so easily ignore. When they wouldn’t listen, she played the game of drugs-then-rehab again just to see what they’d do.
When she landed in rehab for the second time, the punishments were much stricter, but that didn’t bother her. When she’d decided to stop, she did. The drugs had served a purpose for her, one that made everything blurrier, but she was as strong-willed as they came, and nothing dared to stand in her way. She didn’t crave drugs; she only wanted the two grown-ups that had created her to open their eyes.
“What are we doing here?” Ben asked after a while. Perhaps it was only a couple of minutes later. She didn’t trust her perception of time. She could tell that he’d wanted to say something for a while, but there was hesitation in his movements, like he thought it better not to disturb her if she was working something out. He was kind about it, his voice was soft. She appreciated that.
She swallowed, noting that tightness in her throat was still there. She felt like she’d throw up if she tried to answer. In a hopeless attempt to settle her knotted stomach, she took a slow inhale of cold air and filled lungs. She held it in as she watched one of the two people in her sight put his hand in his left pocket almost methodically. She released it again as she watched him duck in around the building, out of sight, followed by a passerby. She watched them both leave a moment later. The man took up his spot next to his friend, and the passerby was gone, hurrying down the street like he was never there to begin with. She’d lost count of how many times she’d seen that happen today.
She swallowed again before she answered. “This was the last place they cared.” Her voice was flat and grainy and unsteady; hollow, like she was only half inside of herself.
She knew that Ben had been watching the same scene she had been since he’d arrived. She knew he saw the careful dance of drug exchange from a safe distance. She knew he understood by the way he quietly cleared his throat, like his heart was sinking.
“I spend my days missing people who only actually cared when it came to this,” she said after another minute. She’d tried so hard, for so long, to find some peace when connecting heartache and reason, and she was still struggling.
From the corner of her eye, she saw how Ben dragged his hands down the length of his lap. She knew he wanted to tell her that she was wrong. He was dying to tell her that it wasn’t true, but he just swallowed thickly and watched. She appreciated that too.
“It was never about the drugs,” she told him in a raw kind of whisper, before turning to look at him honestly for the first time since he’d arrived. Her eyes were wet. She wanted him to understand. Maybe she even needed it.
“That part I figured out a long time ago,” he replied quietly.
She placed a hand on either side of her legs, and curled them around the wooden bench to steady herself. She looked down as tears continued to rise in her eyes. A smile ghosted on her lips, like she’d earned another breath if someone else got her twisted logic. She felt Ben place a comforting hand over hers, and shut her eyes before tears could run down her cold cheeks. His hand was so warm resting over hers. A part of her wanted to ask him how he accomplished that, but she’d said so many words already.
“Can I take you home?” Ben asked after another while had passed, as darkening shades of blue pulled across the sky above them.
Her gaze was locked on the two people leaning against the brick building. She watched them like her life depended on it. Maybe, in a way, it did. “Yeah,” she said quietly, with more breath than voice. She was weak on her feet as they walked. Her shoulders rolled in to retain warmth as her cold hands turned to fists inside her pockets. Her mind was a sluggish fog again.
She was silent in the car, with her gaze on the passing landscape. Ben moved to turn on the radio, only to stop midway and place his hand back on the steering wheel. She wanted to tell him that it was okay, that she didn’t mind some music to distract them, but she kept quiet. She looked at his profile for a long moment as he drove, and apologized silently again. She wished she could get the words out of her mouth. He turned and met her gaze for only a moment, and his eyes were kind, like he understood that the silence was important somehow. She could tell that those kind eyes saw the painful thoughts passing over her face. She’d stopped trying to hide them.
She couldn’t anymore.
to be continued…
for Anna, who is stronger than she thinks.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there on that dark wooden bench in the park she sometimes ran through. She’d been doing that a lot lately, finding herself outside in the cold for long periods of time. The air inside was dense, so dense with the thoughts she couldn’t hold in her head. She couldn’t breathe inside. At least outdoors those thoughts could roam without suffocating her quite so much. Even the exhaustion etching itself on every inch of her body seemed lighter when she was wrapped in crisp air. So she sat, knees together, arms close to her body, with her head in a fog of chaos.
Her days had been bleeding together as of late. She couldn’t say exactly when it started, but that didn’t seem to matter. One day became another, in a seamless join she couldn’t keep up with. She admitted to no one that she’d stopped trying.
Her appetite went first, but that seemed unimportant, because her stomach was in a constant state of intricate knots and tangles that she was too tired to sort out. Sleep was next. She spent the nights battling for rest, and dreaded the idea of rising from bed the next morning. She was losing count of the times she’d woken up feeling more exhausted than if she hadn’t gone to sleep in the first place. Her legs felt weighed down with invisible restraints as they wearily carried her around.
Everything felt heavier. She wasn’t sure why.
She was always cold these days. Cold from the inside, like no amount of warm layers could help, like she was forever destined to shiver involuntarily down to her bones. Her clothes weren’t warm and comfortable like she remembered them being. Instead, they felt like they were closing in on her, threatening her lungs with rations of air that would only keep her alive, nothing more. Still, she’d reach for another layer to cover up, just to not feel so bare and exposed to the world.
She felt so bare all the time.
So she would go outside, because at least then it made sense that she felt cold, because so did everyone around her as they milled through the early winter air. She went outside where the cold air filled her lungs, and tried in vain to clear her head. She went outside so she wouldn’t have to lie awake in bed for hours as she failed to sleep. She went outside, and when she was too tired to walk, she sat.
She knew it had been a while since she’d taken a rest on the cold bench, because the light was fading from the world around her. The evening traffic was at its best, and the large intersection a couple of streets away was a constant source of impatient honks and tires. She looked down to her lap when she felt her phone vibrate in her pocket. All it would have taken was to pull it out and answer it, but her limbs were hesitant of the movement. She wasn’t sure why. When the vibration stopped, she lifted her gaze back up to the source of her focus for the last while, to the reason her legs had carried her to this park in the first place, to the two people standing far enough away from her that she could keep her eye on them from a safe distance, as though that gave her control. She felt her phone vibrate again, but this time she didn’t look down. She didn’t take her eyes away for even a moment. She couldn’t. The vibration caused her bones to rattle inside her useless layers of skin and muscle. It made her feel so cold.
Another while passed. She couldn’t say how long. There were still shreds of orange and pink from the sunset lingering behind the buildings surrounding the park when her phone vibrated again. The movement jerked her out of her foggy head, and only then did she realize that the cool wind had turned cold, and one side of the sky was quickly growing darker, and she was shivering constantly. She took her eyes off of the two people, and that brick building, and pulled her phone out of her pocket. It took another gust of energy to bring it up to her ear and speak.
Ben was there in ten minutes. She knew because a man had taken a seat on the bench across from her and looked down at his watch, announcing the time to the person he was on the phone with. He carried on with an animated conversation which she for the most part tuned out, because she was tired, and cold, and her mind was littered with foggy thoughts. And then the man got up from the bench, looked down at his watch, announced the time again, and hung up before continuing on his walk. Before he was out of her line of sight, Ben was at her side, and she felt how stiff the muscles in her neck and shoulders were as she looked up to see him.
He looked equally worried for her as he did unhappy that he was standing in the cold. She looked away from his disquiet eyes and settled her gaze on those two people again. Ben took a seat and blew hot air into his hands in an attempt to warm them. Her insides seemed to disintegrate as he sat beside her, so full of brotherly concern for her wellbeing. She felt panicky and sick underneath a paralyzing coat of numbness, which was probably the only thing still holding her together. Her tongue lay heavy in her mouth, keeping her from talking. So she didn’t, she just folded her hands in her lap and apologized silently to him for her behavior.
“Here,” he said suddenly, and she looked down to see her jacket in his hand. “I wasn’t sure if you had something warm, and it’s freezing out here, and if you don’t take it then I’m putting it on.”
Somewhere underneath her numbness, she wanted to smile at his grumpy, pouty tone of voice. She didn’t feel how cold it was anymore, but took it from him that she was shivering for a reason. She reached for the jacket and sluggishly pulled it on without protest. She wasn’t doing much of that these days, protesting. After that, they sat in silence again, and her mind drifted in and out of so many thoughts that they felt like one blur of nothingness as she watched the scene ahead of her. She felt herself slipping away, coaxed into a world of haunting memories.
She didn’t fight it as it took over.
She was powerless to its hold on her.
‘You were wonderful,’ her mother greeted her proudly as she came back to the small room she’d been shown to before the concert.
‘No, I wasn’t,’ she corrected her sullenly as she sat down in an empty chair and threw her head back to take a long drink from the water bottle with the label in foreign letters.
‘How can you say that? Couldn’t you hear how they cheered for you?’ Christine insisted, reaching over to place a comforting hand on her daughter’s knee.
‘They don’t know what they’re cheering for,’ she grumbled under her breath as she moved her legs out of her mother’s reach, denying her the satisfaction of making things okay.
‘What was that, Jenny?’
‘Nothing,’ she replied coldly as she picked at the label of her water bottle. ‘Is Papa here?’ she asked then, hoping to have hidden the naïve hopefulness that laced her words. She’d meant to say ‘my father.’ She hadn’t called him Papa out loud in years. She watched her mother in the few short moments before a diplomatic reply would surely sound. ‘Never mind,’ she said instead, uninterested in whatever excuse she’d be given as to why he hadn’t bothered making the five minute journey from the hotel, when he was only visiting for two days anyway.
‘Jenny, grown-ups have many responsibilities,’ was the reply she received after listening to her mother’s tired sigh. ‘And sometimes those responsibilities mean that you have to miss out on things you really want to do.’
She ripped a diagonal line in the water bottle’s label as her lips tightened in frustration.
‘You have to understand,’ her mother tried again, reaching forward once more to comfort her child.
‘No, thank you,’ she replied quickly, standing up from her chair although her legs were sore as it was. ‘I’m done trying to understand that man,’ she stated definitively, noting the visible hurt passing through her mother’s eyes. She pursed her lips and turned on her heels. If her father couldn’t trouble himself with at least apologizing to her himself, then she was done feeling empathetic for how hard he worked. She didn’t care about it anymore. He was her father, he should have been there. Maybe it was her own stupid fault for actually believing his promises, and letting herself imagine him in the crowd as she sang. As though maybe for once in her life, he’d put his work away and only see his child for ten whole minutes. As though she was important enough to hold his attention. As though he cared at all that she wanted him there. She didn’t tell anyone how she still pictured his proud face behind her closed eyes as she stretched the notes out and took the audience’s breath away.
Clearly he had more important things to do.
Fine then, so did she.
She left the room, water bottle still in hand, and ignored her mother’s request for her to come back in. She took determined steps to the heavy back door at the end of the hall, and stepped outside without glancing back.
She’d come to make friends fast at shows. Boys a few years older than her usually hung around the loading zone once they finished packing or unpacking gear. They did fine as five-minute friends. They told her she was pretty, invited her to sit with them, and included her in the conversation as time wasted on in the real world.
At the beginning, she’d watched them curiously as they lifted cigarettes to their lips and drew in long breaths. She watched their cheeks cave in before they’d knock their heads back and release the smoke in the form of crude laughter at some terribly rude joke or comment someone in the group had made. Sometimes they liked to touch her, wrap an arm around her waist and claim her as their own for those few minutes they’d know each other. The lonely girl inside of her liked it. It felt nice to be touched, and included in a conversation, and called pretty.
If only her mother knew of the things she’d seen and heard and done as she tried to make sense of the world around her at too young of age.
It had actually taken her a long time to fall into drugs. She’d seen them around, seen people use them. She’d registered the glossy-yet-vacant look in their eyes while it worked inside of them. They’d been offered to her plenty of times, she hadn’t kept track, and the strangeness of it all had worn off quickly. What finally tempted her was a conversation she’d overheard at one of her parents’ parties. Two wives of important men sitting near her had been discussing an article from that morning’s paper; youth drug use was on the rise again. ‘It’s awful,’ one of them had said. ‘Thank goodness Julian is nowhere near that terrible stuff,’ the other one added with a nod of agreement.
She did her best not to cough up her drink. Julian, as the woman had so affectionately regarded her son, was a boy she knew well. He was so high most of the time that his parents didn’t notice anymore, and simply wrote it off as ‘adolescent behavior’, as some passing phase of rebellion. She hated that term, as if by saying it, it would excuse the stupidity of the act or something. That boy was a creep, slurring his vocabulary of sexual harassment inside a cloud of smoke at any girl with a short skirt. They were acquainted, and he made her feel ill inside.
Still, that short, meaningless snippet of conversation she’d overheard stayed with her for days. About a week later, a friend of hers came over after school with the latest magazines so they’d be all caught up on the gossip. They’d left their bags on the kitchen counter when they went up to her bedroom, and her friend’s wallet had fallen out onto the clean marble surface.
When her father got home an hour later, he stormed into her room, red-faced and fuming. ‘You will not smoke under my roof!’ he’d shouted, holding a cigarette package between his thumb and pointer finger, as though it was poisonous. She’d never seen him so worked up before, and froze in her spot as his icy glare attacked her.
‘Mr. Hartmann, relax, okay? It isn’t a cigarette pack. It’s my wallet,’ her friend breezily explained with a dismissive wave of her hand. She walked over to him and showed him where the snap was, opening it to reveal her ID and money. ‘See?’ she added lightly, and chuckled as she made her way back to her spot and sat down. ‘Everyone has them now,’ she told Jenny with a roll of her eyes. ‘It blows, I totally discovered them.’
Jenny absently nodded along once her father had left her room.
And that was about cigarettes.
Two months later, she took her first hit. She waited to feel the strange effects it played on her, before taking a cab home. She’d wanted them to see it, to see her. She’d wanted it to hurt them.
Things moved quickly from there. She let different people pull her along for roller coaster rides, and enjoyed it for the most part. The feeling of being so far away from yourself, like you could float away from your problems until they’d be forgotten, was strange and enticing. It made things feel easier, less daunting, and important, and complicated. She understood the appeal.
A month later, she was in rehab. She answered questions when asked, but otherwise kept to herself. The staff was sure she’d recover nicely.
She did.
On the day she was released, her parents stood at the main hall of the clinic, and spoke to the doctor she’d had to see daily during her time there. As she made her way down the hall toward them, she heard them laugh politely at something the doctor had said, but she could tell by the way they stood and shifted their weight that they were both silently counting down the seconds until they could leave the facility and erase that entire segment from their memories. She acknowledged them with a silent nod, and her mother placed a warm hand on her shoulder. The doctor smiled at her, and she wondered if that would be a good time to suggest he try mints after his coffee, and spare the rest of his patients that smell, but rolled her bottom lip between her teeth and kept quiet.
The grown-ups decided to classify her little slip-up as ‘adolescent behavior’. She went home, and life returned to normal. Her parents chose not to acknowledge what happened, in hopes that it would simply go away. In the counseling sessions she’d had at the clinic, they’d talked endlessly about how important it was to stay open with the important people in her life. She tried it a few times, tried mentioning something here and there to her parents about ‘what had happened,’ as they had come to refer to it, but they wouldn’t even hold her gaze. They’d murmur something about a meeting, or a luncheon they were late for, shuffle uneasily toward the nearest exit and disappear for a few hours.
They behaved so normally that it maddened her.
She gave it a week before giving up, and falling back in was easier than she thought. She paraded around the house trying to get her parents’ attention in the ways she knew would have to work. Sometimes she brought home less-than-presentable friends after a long night out. Once or twice she barged in on a party or dinner with important people in fancy suits. A few weeks later, the wife of a business associate of her father’s told her mother that, ‘Children just feel the need to let go sometimes.’ She went on to promise that, ‘She’ll come out of this phase right quick, you’ll see,’ while keeping a comforting hand on her mother’s arm.
That night, she overdosed.
She was tired. She’d been throwing tantrums since she was a kid; screaming, kicking, crying, begging. Anything to get their attention, to remind them that she was there too, that she needed them more than the bank, or the charity board, or the gala. That she missed them. Since she was growing up, she’d had to replace such behavior with a shadier scene, one they couldn’t so easily ignore. When they wouldn’t listen, she played the game of drugs-then-rehab again just to see what they’d do.
When she landed in rehab for the second time, the punishments were much stricter, but that didn’t bother her. When she’d decided to stop, she did. The drugs had served a purpose for her, one that made everything blurrier, but she was as strong-willed as they came, and nothing dared to stand in her way. She didn’t crave drugs; she only wanted the two grown-ups that had created her to open their eyes.
“What are we doing here?” Ben asked after a while. Perhaps it was only a couple of minutes later. She didn’t trust her perception of time. She could tell that he’d wanted to say something for a while, but there was hesitation in his movements, like he thought it better not to disturb her if she was working something out. He was kind about it, his voice was soft. She appreciated that.
She swallowed, noting that tightness in her throat was still there. She felt like she’d throw up if she tried to answer. In a hopeless attempt to settle her knotted stomach, she took a slow inhale of cold air and filled lungs. She held it in as she watched one of the two people in her sight put his hand in his left pocket almost methodically. She released it again as she watched him duck in around the building, out of sight, followed by a passerby. She watched them both leave a moment later. The man took up his spot next to his friend, and the passerby was gone, hurrying down the street like he was never there to begin with. She’d lost count of how many times she’d seen that happen today.
She swallowed again before she answered. “This was the last place they cared.” Her voice was flat and grainy and unsteady; hollow, like she was only half inside of herself.
She knew that Ben had been watching the same scene she had been since he’d arrived. She knew he saw the careful dance of drug exchange from a safe distance. She knew he understood by the way he quietly cleared his throat, like his heart was sinking.
“I spend my days missing people who only actually cared when it came to this,” she said after another minute. She’d tried so hard, for so long, to find some peace when connecting heartache and reason, and she was still struggling.
From the corner of her eye, she saw how Ben dragged his hands down the length of his lap. She knew he wanted to tell her that she was wrong. He was dying to tell her that it wasn’t true, but he just swallowed thickly and watched. She appreciated that too.
“It was never about the drugs,” she told him in a raw kind of whisper, before turning to look at him honestly for the first time since he’d arrived. Her eyes were wet. She wanted him to understand. Maybe she even needed it.
“That part I figured out a long time ago,” he replied quietly.
She placed a hand on either side of her legs, and curled them around the wooden bench to steady herself. She looked down as tears continued to rise in her eyes. A smile ghosted on her lips, like she’d earned another breath if someone else got her twisted logic. She felt Ben place a comforting hand over hers, and shut her eyes before tears could run down her cold cheeks. His hand was so warm resting over hers. A part of her wanted to ask him how he accomplished that, but she’d said so many words already.
“Can I take you home?” Ben asked after another while had passed, as darkening shades of blue pulled across the sky above them.
Her gaze was locked on the two people leaning against the brick building. She watched them like her life depended on it. Maybe, in a way, it did. “Yeah,” she said quietly, with more breath than voice. She was weak on her feet as they walked. Her shoulders rolled in to retain warmth as her cold hands turned to fists inside her pockets. Her mind was a sluggish fog again.
She was silent in the car, with her gaze on the passing landscape. Ben moved to turn on the radio, only to stop midway and place his hand back on the steering wheel. She wanted to tell him that it was okay, that she didn’t mind some music to distract them, but she kept quiet. She looked at his profile for a long moment as he drove, and apologized silently again. She wished she could get the words out of her mouth. He turned and met her gaze for only a moment, and his eyes were kind, like he understood that the silence was important somehow. She could tell that those kind eyes saw the painful thoughts passing over her face. She’d stopped trying to hide them.
She couldn’t anymore.
to be continued…