Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

If she showers, that means shampooing and conditioning her hair, shaving her legs. She’ll have to blow-dry and straighten her hair, put on makeup. It’s too much.

Everything is too much.

It’s eight forty-five, and she’s still in bed. She rubs the ragged edge of her left index fingernail with her thumb. She’s been meaning to file or clip it for days. She examines her hand. Her back-to-school manicure is worn and chipped away. Her nails are a mess.

Just like the rest of her.

Her dorm room is illuminated through the sunlit cracks in the uptilted slats of the window blinds. Manoush’s bed is neatly made—a floppy stuffed bunny seated between two white faux-fur pillows atop a blue-and-white tie-dyed duvet-covered comforter. Maddy heard her tiptoe out almost three hours ago.

Maddy has one class today. Central Problems in Philosophy. She’s taking that, Italian I, Political Theory, and Elements of Music. Now there’s the curriculum of someone who’s winning at life. Manoush is premed. She wants to be an orthopedic surgeon. Her classes are all in the sciences. Adam is majoring in finance at Columbia, his classes focused on economics and accounting. He’s planning on a career in banking or private equity, whatever that is. Both Manoush and Adam are taking courses that are readying them for the real world.

What is Maddy’s education preparing her to become? Based on her schedule, she’d have to say an Italian-speaking existentialist politician who appreciates the flute. Yeah, corporate America can’t wait for her to graduate. She’ll have her pick of six-figure-starting-salary job offers, for sure.

Three weeks into first semester, she’s already impossibly behind. She has a test in Italian on Monday that she hasn’t begun to study for, she can’t keep up with the mountains of reading assigned for Political Theory, and she has an essay due next week that she hasn’t yet started in philosophy, an answer to the question “Can there be happiness without sadness?” Fuck if she knows. To her mind, the better question would be “Can there be happiness after sadness?” Actual, lasting happiness. Again, fuck if she knows.

She stares at the poster of Taylor Swift on the wall over her desk, at Taylor’s fierce yet elegant left arm raised, her face tilted up to a sky pouring rain, fearless. Taylor was only eighteen when she released that album, two years younger than Maddy is now. She asks Taylor-on-the-wall what she would do. No question, Taylor would get up, shower, and go to class. Maddy sighs.

She checks her phone. It’s now nine. Her class is about a twenty-minute walk, on the other side of Washington Square, and starts at nine thirty. She’s debated about what to do for too long, and now it’s too late to shower, but if she gets her ass out of bed and dresses quickly, she can still make it. She lies there. She’s agreed to the part about getting out of bed, but the word quickly has her hung up, defeated at the starting line. Her bones feel as if they’re made of stone, her head full of boulders, impossibly heavy to lift.

Her phone pings, a text from Adam.

AW

ADAM WHITE

See you tonight

Her heart panics, scrambling for a dark place to hide. She squeezes her eyes shut. She can’t let Adam see her like this.

Shake it off, Maddy.

She opens her eyes. Her body remains heavy, her heart still scurrying, nothing changed.

Maybe she literally needs to shake her body, to physically fling and cast off whatever this is that’s possessed her. She glances at Manoush’s bed and the door, reassuring herself that no one else is here, then gathers all the energy she can find and begins. She kicks her legs, flaps her arms, and whips her head back and forth on her pillow. She must look as if she’s having a seizure. That or she’s gone completely crazy.

She stops and waits, breathing hard, assessing.

She feels worse.

A wimpy groan leaks out of her open mouth. She picks up her phone and reluctantly replies to Adam’s text with a thumbs-up. She assumed she wouldn’t be feeling any of the angst and sadness she suffered last year, because all of that belonged to the breakup. Everything is good with Adam. She lives an enviable, privileged life. Nothing bad or sad has happened. Everything is okay. So then why does she feel the opposite of okay?

What do I have to be depressed about?

Adam is similarly slammed with schoolwork, so they only see each other on the weekends. Today is Friday, which means they have the next two nights and two days to be together. She should be thrilled, but she doesn’t feel thrilled, about him or anything, and she doesn’t know why. She’s been faking it around him, slapping on a smile and acting out the part of “Maddy” as best she can. So far, she has him fooled, but she’s always relieved when Sunday rolls around, when they go back to their respective dorms, and she can return and tend to her misery.

She forces herself to stand and takes one slow monster step at a time in the direction of her dresser. She chooses a pair of jeans, but, like all her pants, they’re noticeably too loose around the waist, practically falling off her. She knows she should eat something for breakfast, but there’s no time because she wasted the past hour trying to decide whether to get out of bed. And to be honest, even if she’d been up and dressed an hour ago, she wouldn’t have eaten anything. The thought of food sickens her. Even the waffles she loves from the food truck parked outside the front door of her dorm don’t appeal to her anymore.

She needs a belt but doesn’t have one. Sweatpants with a drawstring would solve the issue, but all the girls at NYU dress up for class—trendy skirts, brand-name jeans, cute crop tops and sweaters. Everyone will surely judge and shun her if she shows up to Central Problems in Philosophy wearing sweats. She can’t decide whether to care or not care and wishes there were a third option somewhere in between the two extremes.

Too apathetic to change out of her ill-fitting jeans, she pulls an oversize sweater over her head and threads an arm into each sleeve. The idea of putting on socks and sneakers feels too complicated to fully imagine, so she shoves her bare feet into Birkenstocks, hoists her backpack onto her shoulders, and trudges out of her room.

Out on the sidewalk, her slowness is out of step with the brisk pace of morning pedestrian traffic. People brush and bump into her as they hurry past. She’s in the way. A man passing too close to her bangs his gym bag against her hip.

“Ow!”

He doesn’t say sorry. He doesn’t look back or even break stride.

She wants to walk faster, to keep up with the rest of the world and get to class on time, but everything in her feels slowed down, as if someone has reached into her brain and turned the master dial three clicks to the left. People pass her as if they can’t see her, as if she’s not really there. Maybe she’s as invisible as she feels.

She’s only gone three blocks when she stops. Walking hurts, not in her muscles or joints, but somewhere deeper. There’s no way she can make it to class.

Before turning around, she cries a little, tears rolling down her impassive face. No one notices. Or if they do, they don’t appear to care.

Back in her dorm room, she has to pee. She slides her jeans down without unbuttoning or unzipping the fly, pulls down her underwear, and sits on the toilet. She had one thing to do today, one class for one hour, and she couldn’t do it. As she pees, she hates herself for being such a pathetic loser. She doesn’t deserve to be here.

She’s done peeing but doesn’t get up. She rubs the ripped nail of her index finger with her thumb. That’s it. If she does one thing today, she’s going to take care of that nail.

Still sitting on the toilet, jeans around her ankles, she grabs her black-and-white polka-dot toiletry bag from the cart between the toilet and sink, places it in her lap, and rummages through it. She finds nail scissors and trims the nail smooth.

The rest of her nails could use some love, too, but she doesn’t have the energy to give herself a home manicure right now. Before returning the scissors to the toiletry bag, she touches the sharp tip to the pad of her index finger, and an unbidden impulse swells inside her. Directed by a force big and unseen, without words or rationale, she pulls up the sleeve of her sweater and slides the three bracelets she never takes off up a few inches, as far up her arm as they’ll go.

With a detached curiosity, she examines the pale skin of her inner forearm for the briefest moment, and then, as if in a trance, she presses the pointed tip of the nail scissors into her skin and drags it clear across her arm. A flash of pain. Then, to her great satisfaction, bright-red blood appears across the perfectly straight line as if painted by the stroke of an artist’s fine-tipped brush. A thrill rushes through her every cell like a massive wave, washing away the physical pain and all remnants of the mental torture she’d been suffering. The relief is so palpable she swears she can hear it, like the sudden gush of air released from a bottle of carbonated soda opened for the first time. She listens. The constant noise in her head, that ruthlessly critical narrator who cuts her to pieces, has quieted.

She sits on the toilet, fascinated by her blood, by the thought of her heart pumping it throughout her body, and here it is on her arm, physical proof that she’s real. She takes a deep breath, fills her lungs, and exhales. She tears a modest length of toilet paper from the roll, folds it twice, and holds it against her skin. As she waits for the bleeding to stop, she senses the fuzzy hint of a new reality, that something fundamental in her has shifted. She’s crossed a line, and there’s no turning back.