I was floating around so confused and angry when I was a freshman and sophomore. Hooking up with older guys. Bashing freshman girls. Being with Dev did something to me. It stunted some of my shame. Not all of it, but a lot.
Any of the feelings I’ve been having for Sean lately—I’ve got to erase them. I’m embarrassed for even thinking about him. I’ve got to crush them, even if it’s just for Dev.
* * *
* * *
Sean and I are in my bedroom. There’s a white glow between us. A warm light. Like spring. Like the way the sun shines on you in a hot meadow. But then it starts to feel dangerous, and I can’t breathe. Sean is sitting on top of me, and I’m saying, Sean, Sean, I can’t breathe. I can’t get up. Someone grabs my hair from behind and people are laughing. Sean is laughing. Why are you laughing? I scream. I look over and see Donnie on her knees crying.
I open my eyes.
I’m in my room.
The clock says three A.M. I hear my mother sniffling in the hallway. I jump out of bed and run to her.
Her face is a mess. White and puffy. Like she’s been sitting there for a long time.
“Where’s Daddy?” I say.
“He took a sleeping pill. I shook him and shook him, and he can’t get up. He was drinking earlier. He shouldn’t have done both.”
“Well, Jesus, Mom, is he breathing?”
“Of course he’s breathing, Blythe. I would have called 911.”
“What about you, Mom? Did you take your medication?”
“I took it, but it’s not working.” She’s rubbing her hands through her hair, but then they just land on the crown of her head like they’re stuck and she can’t move them. “My body chemistry is changing again, Blythe. None of the meds are working anymore. Everything is just falling apart all over again.”
I sit down next to her, even though I don’t want to. I don’t want to touch her. I don’t want to kiss her. But she’s crying and she can’t stop. I can’t do anything but help her. I can’t do anything but tell her it’s okay. I feel like this is my new saying lately. This is what I’ve been telling everyone. My mom. Ali Greenleaf. Sean. Everyone.
Who is going to tell me?
Before the medication, my mother was so unpredictable. When I was younger, she was exciting in a way even though it was a roller coaster being around her. I thought it was cool when she woke me up at one A.M. to go on a night walk when we had a place in Upstate New York because that’s the only time you can see the stars, in the middle of the night when all the lights are really, truly off. It didn’t matter that I was in my pajamas, or not in any shoes at all. Or that the ground was cold, or that I was stepping on rocks. Keep going, Blythe. Keep going. Keep pressing on.
Then there was the time she brought me to this big adventure park down in South Jersey when I was eleven years old and left me there.
“It’s time to teach you about materialism. See all these people here with their short shorts and their cotton candy and their SpongeBob rides? They’re all falling into something called consumerism. The only way for you to not be anywhere near that is to immerse yourself in it without me. I want you to be scared of it, Blythe. I want you to be fearful of it because no one should live like this.”
I walked around for a while buying myself popcorn and juice and then, after going on something called the Dare Devil Dive four times in a row, I finally puked right next to a young mom and her daughter.
“Who are you here with?” she said, wiping my mouth. That’s when I said, “My mother left me here.” So she called the police and then my father came.
It was breathtaking how concerned people were. You can’t just leave your daughter at a park, apparently. My father and my grandmother excused it up to the hilt, but the police don’t deal with incidents that way. They pressed charges against her. That was the first time my mother was hospitalized. Bipolar.
My father started taking me to my shrink then. The same person I’m seeing now.
“It’s okay that you feel bad that your mother is in the hospital, Blythe. But no matter what you think, it’s not your fault,” my therapist told me at the time.
I never thought it was my fault, by the way. They say this to kids a lot. It’s not your fault.
“I don’t think it’s my fault at all,” I told her.
“Oh? Okay. Good.”
“I was glad not to be around her,” I said. I think I was hoping for a reaction, but she only gave me a twitch. “I had those few hours there by myself at the park, alone without her acting nuts or starting a fight with someone because she thought they ripped her off. Do you know how many fights she starts with everyone? Do you know how embarrassing it is to be around her?”
That’s when I started screaming and crying. That’s when I raked all my dolls across the sand tray. That’s when I kicked over the pottery lamp in her office. It broke into triangular pieces all over her black-and-white chevron rug.
My father came running in from the waiting room. “I heard a commotion,” he said. “I heard things breaking.” His face looked freaked. He had a lot of looks like that during those days.
My therapist was on the floor cleaning up the pieces of her lamp, saying, “It’s all right. Honestly, it’s all right.”
“Oh, now you’re coming in,” I yelled. “Now you decide it’s time to step in? Father of the year, aren’t you?”
“Blythe, it’s not like that, honey. None of this has been easy on any of us.”
“I wish I could just leave. I wish I could just leave all of you,” I said. I threw myself onto the couch and cried and cried.
I heard my therapist coaching my father.
“Tell her that you’re going to do your best to protect her.”
So he walked over to me. I could hear his feet creak across the room, his footsteps so quiet and calculated. He was so concerned. Not sure if it was about me, or about how to handle this situation. This tween girl falling apart at the seams.
I sat up. Wiped the tears from my face. My cheeks burning.
“Don’t worry, Daddy. I’ll be fine,” I said.
I let him off the hook again. And that was probably the end of my childhood right there.
“Blythe, you don’t have to say it’s fine.”
And they talked and talked. But I faded out into nothing. I felt all my memories of my mother slipping past me in a fuzz, like the kind you pick off your pillow. You have to deal with bad things in life like that sometimes. Like lint. And so that’s how I learned to deal with a lot of painful things. Like lint.