Day Five

Day Five

When the banging on the door happens, it's still gray outside our dorm window. I blearily look around. Gideon is already up, lacing her sneakers. Charlotte rubs her eyes.

"God, I hate that guy," Charlotte says. "He's like a combination of every awful jock and PE teacher at my old school. All testosterone and slogans." She swings her legs over the side of her bed and reaches under it for her running clothes and water bottle. "Just give us a freaking minute, you monster!" she yells at the door. The banging stops, then starts up again somewhere down the hall.

I get up and shake Brandy awake.

"Oh, good lord, no, not again. I was hoping it was all a bad dream," she moans.

Gideon stands up, stretching, cracking her neck.

"Welcome," she says, "to your first real day of hell."

—

There are ten of us, running through the cold desert as the sun rises, panting and swearing. Holly stayed behind. We tried to get her up, but Gideon waved us off, saying she needs the rest, even if she gets a demerit. "Some things you can't push through," she said. "You just have to let them happen. I don't think she should have left Detox yet."

I'm at the end of the group with Brandy and Charlotte.

"This sucks so bad," Brandy pants.

"Indeed," Charlotte answers. "But this is how it is, every day. Run, eat, feed the animals, rest, eat, do all your therapy, go to gym, shower, eat, then fuck off the rest of the time. It's better when you get your phone back, at least. Something todo."

"How long have you been here?" I ask.

"Too many days to count," Charlotte answers lightly, twisting her head around to look at me. "I had a little snag and got some days added, but I'm pushing through."

"?‘A little snag'?" Brandy says. "Like what?"

"Oh, you know. Some of this, some of that. But listen, if I can keep it together and not go psycho, I'm out, and I'm gonna wreck shit up, I tell you what."

"?‘Go psycho'?" I say, coughing a little. My lungs are starting to hurt and there's sweat in my eyes. I stop, bend over, and clutch my knees.

Charlotte runs in place while Brandy lumbers ahead.

"It happens. I haven't seen it too bad yet, but someone told me Gideon did once. Flip out, I mean. Like, just snapped in half like a branch. Then you have to go to Seg until you can calm your shit down. She didn't really want to talk about it, but if it's bad enough, it adds to your days."

"Seg?" I ask.

Charlotte jumps up and down for minute. "Segregation. Like a time-out, only it can last a really long time and you're stuck in a room with nothing and no one."

She stops jumping and runs ahead of me.

I am dead last. I am so far behind that Chuck and the kids who were in the front are starting to pass me on their way back.

"Turn around at the red boulder," Chuck calls out, thundering by me.

I swear at him inside my head. All the kids behind him are splotchy-faced and intent, concentrating on not falling on stones or rocks, which is me right now, because the direction we're going in today has us going up a slight hill.

I'm chugging along, just fast enough that I can still see Brandy, Gideon, and Charlotte up ahead. I'm not completely alone yet.

I look up from watching the ground at the sound of my name.

"Hey, Bella, hey, Bella, hey."

Smooth and silky. Smiling. That guy, Josh.

He turns from the kids he was with and starts running by my side.

"You want company? I can do another round," he says. "Ah, nature. Don't you just love it?"

"No," I say. "No, I do not, and no, I don't need your company. You can go back. I'm fine."

My heart is beating a little too fast, and it's not just from this run.

"You still mad about the Edward comment?"

"I don't even remember it," I lie, picking up my speed a little, even though it hurts. "I don't even remember your name, frankly."

"Josh," he says. "It's Josh."

"Good for you, Josh. "

"I'll stay with you. It's cool. Isn't that what they want here? For us to stick together?"

"Whatever," I say. We're almost at the red boulder Chuck mentioned. Gideon zips past us, Charlotte and Brandy behind her. Brandy looks at me and Josh and rolls her eyes.

I sit down on the boulder. "I have to rest for a second," I tell Josh.

"Cool." He sits on the ground a little away from me and brushes his damp hair out of his eyes.

We're quiet for a bit. Then he asks me what school I go to, and when I tell him, he says, "Damn, that's a big one."

"Three thousand kids," I say.

"I wish I had that," he says. "My school's pretty small. Hard to hide, you know?"

I'm staring at the ground, at a cluster of darkling beetles. I can feel his eyes on me. I drink a few sips from my water bottle.

"Can you not do that?" I ask finally. "Like, look at me for so long? I know it's funny, my face and all, but it hurts, and I'm kind of embarrassed about it, okay?"

"I wasn't…" He falters. "I wasn't looking at that. I mean, that part of your face. I wasn't…making fun of you."

I keep my eyes on the ground. If he wasn't looking at the bad part of my face, then he was looking at the okay part. The flutter that happens in my chest is swift and hot.

I glance up at him.

Our eyes meet.

"It's not even that bad," he says quietly. "I mean, I've seen a lot worse."

"Really?" I say. "Like how? How could you have seen worse?"

He looks away from me, into the distance. "I have some experience with it, is all. Busted faces." He abruptly stands. "We should go. I'm starving, aren't you?"

I get up and we start running together. We're quiet except for the sound of our breath. He keeps pace with me, which he doesn't have to do, and which is kind of nice.

I can't stop thinking, though, about what he meant by "busted faces."

—

Tracy's office is a lot nicer and cleaner than the rest of Sonoran Sunrise. She has tons of potted plants and tiny pincushion cacti in painted pots on her shelves, along with a lot of books: The Language of Letting Go; Breaking the Chains of Addiction; Refuge Recovery; The Courage to Heal. There aren't any beanbags in here, though, like the group room. Just some comfortable-looking easy chairs. There's a large window behind her desk, the desert stretching out beyond it.

"So," she says, settling into her chair. "Tell me how it's going. How do you feel?"

"It's okay," I mumble.

"Pretty good, pretty bad, horrible, awful, scary?"

"I guess all of that."

"These sessions," she says. "They're for you. Whatever you want to talk about. I'm a sounding board."

I nod. "Okay. Sure."

She's quiet for a minute; then she says, "I heard you had a moment the other day. You got very anxious. With Billy and Brandy. Janet helped you."

"Yeah."

"It sounds like you had an anxiety attack. Do you know what that is?"

"I think so. I guess so? I don't know." I start picking at my cuticles.

"Some people have a very physical response to certain stressors," she says. "Maybe we're worried about something, or many things, and it can build up before we know it. Shaking, crying, can't breathe, fast heartbeat. Has this happened to you before?"

"Yes," I say, thinking about what happened in art class. But I'm not going to tell her that. She knows about what happened in the class where I yelled at the teacher and hit the desk, but not about the presentation. I don't think, anyway.

I will give some information, but not everything. Just enough, like Charlotte said.

"A lot?"

I avoid her eyes. "Maybe. I guess."

"For how long?"

I shake my head. "I don't know. I really couldn't say."

I pick harder at my nails. Even though I didn't exactly answer her question, something's pushing at my brain, some memory, maybe more than one, of other times. I grit my teeth to make it stop. Bite my lip.

"Have your parents ever noticed your anxiety?" Tracy asks. She gets up and goes to a mini-fridge under the window and takes out a bottle of water. She sits back down and hands it to me. I don't open it, though. I just wrap my hands around it. The coolness feels soothing in my palms. I feel a little calmer.

"Bella?"

"What?"

"You didn't answer my question."

"I'm sorry, what did you ask, again?"

"Have your parents ever noticed your anxiety?"

"I don't know," I answer slowly. "Maybe? They don't exactly get along, if you hadn't noticed."

"I did notice," she says softly. "That's hard on you, I can tell."

I shrug. "It is what it is. They aren't bad people. They just have a lot going on."

"Have you ever told them how anxious you get sometimes? Some parents need to be told when their child needs help."

I start ripping the paper from the plastic water bottle, the pieces falling onto my jeans. "No, not really. Like I said, they have a lot going on. I don't want to bother them."

"Mmm," she says.

"I don't know what that sound means," I say tentatively. "Is that a good sound or a bad sound?"

She laughs lightly. "It's a sound that means I wonder what it's like for you at home that you feel like a bother to your own parents. How that's been for you, growing up like that?"

I drop my eyes to the strips of white paper in my lap.

It feels like shit, that's what it feels like.

It's hard to insert yourself into the lives of two people whose sole reason for being seems to make each other as miserable as possible. Even when I got my first period three years ago, it became a thing. Some kind of contest, with my mom saying I should use pads because I wasn't ready for tampons and my dad saying I should use period panties because he'd done research online and that seemed to be the new thing and wow did my mother lose it at that and it wasn't even because she didn't like the idea of period panties. I know for a fact she'd looked them up, too, and it was totally her jam—environmentally responsible, comfortable, all that stuff. But she wasn't expecting him to have done that work on his own, without her. Like he was encroaching on her motherly duties. So she fought him just on principle. Like you're going to wash them out every night, Dan. You never even help with the laundry! In the end, I just went down the street to Laurel's and she hauled out a box of Tampax and showed me what was what in her crazy bathroom with the framed and autographed album covers she'd shot for Iggy Pop and the Cramps and PJ Harvey.

"Bella?"

I snap my head up. "I don't remember the question?"

"That's all right. I think I have my answer." Her eyes drop to my lap. I've ripped the label into a pile of tiny, tiny white bits.