We sit there in our usual comfortable silence, well comfortable as long as he isn’t staring at me.
“Tally,” his voice is soft and I realize he is leaning on his arm that is draped on the back of the bench. “What is it you dream of?”
I’m caught off guard by the question. “Do you mean like a literal dream while sleeping, or do you mean a vision of what I want to happen?”
“Is it ever both?” he asks.
“Well maybe sometimes but it seems like what we dream, or at least what I dream is more fantastical than real life could ever be.”
“Do you want your life to be fantastical?”
Okay he is getting deep today, I wonder if I should be worried. I’ll just go with it for now but at the first sign of entering the danger zone, I will panic, I repeat I- will- panic.
“I want my life to mean something,”
He interrupts before I can finish. “Your life does mean something Tally.”
I look down at my hands, I think about what is under those sleeves, and I want to cry. I want to break down right there, crawl into Trey’s big, safe arms, and ask for my life to mean something to him.
“I want my life to mean something to someone else,” I finish.
His eyes widen just a little at my admission. In that moment, I see the protectiveness that seems to live and breathe inside of him rise up and choose me as one he would shelter. I don’t know how long we stare at one another, silent words being sent between us; it is more intimate a time than I have ever shared with another human being.
He clears his throat and the moment is broken, but the connection is still there. “You never answered my question.”
“I dream of living, of being whole, happy, and bold.” He’s quiet and I wonder what he thinks about my answer. I won’t ask, I’m not wondering that hard. “What about you Swift, what do you dream?”
Something in the way he looks away from me tells me that he isn’t going to tell me the truth, or at least not the whole truth.
“I dream of a life that is real, full of all its joys and all its darkness. I dream of being complete.”
Aaand that concludes our time today boys and girls, please don’t stomp each other when you run for the exit. He sees that I have checked out, that my mind is in find a hole and dig it deeper mode.
“Tally,” his voice is stern and confident. He isn’t worried about hurting my feelings. He is simply gaining control of a situation where I feel out of control.
My eyes come back into focus and I’m looking into big dark brown eyes. Some of his hair has come loose from his braid and is blowing around him making him look wild and untamed. His eyes are focused and alert, but he doesn’t look panicked.
“We good?” He finally asks.
I nod.
And just like that, we move on
“Good because I have a game I want to play.” He smiles and there is rare, boyish quality to it.
“Why do I have a feeling this isn’t going to turn out good for me?”
He simply smiles in response and pulls a black case from his pocket. As he opens the case, my eyes widen at what’s inside. I can’t help it; I’m laughing so hard my side hurts. This stoic, over six feet tall, stern looking guy brought me Pass the Pigs to play.
“What?” He asks innocently.
I finally pull myself together and shake my head, “Nothing, I’m good.”
“You’re ready to listen now?”
I nod.
“You’re sure you’re going to behave?”
Eye roll.
“We are going to play it a little differently than the conventional rules. During your roll, for every pig that lands on its feet you will have to write down something about yourself,”
“Wh,” I start to interrupt not liking the sound of this at all.
“At the end of the game, you will write down your secrets and then give them to your opponent in your own time.” He watches me, quietly waiting for my answer.
I know I shouldn’t agree to it because I will not be able to uphold my end. Once I am released from MPF, I won’t see Trey again. My body seems to ignore what my brain is telling me and I nod.
I feel like the beginning of a relationship has a lot of potential if pig throwing is a common interest.
Chapter 10
“There’s this feeling that happens when a relationship is so new that it’s even questionable that it is a relationship. This feeling of constant ache when you are apart, and then breath–stealing joy when you are together again. It’s exciting and exhausting at the same time.” ~Tally
It’s been two days since I essentially issued a challenge to Trey to make a kiss from him so good that I lose all inhibition and throw the game. Don’t ask me why I’m sticking with baseball analogies. Right now, I can barely keep up with what is happening and why I’m letting it happen. I’m still hurt over the fact that he avoided me for three days. I haven’t told him how much it affected me. The wondering, the speculating, finally telling myself that there was no way I was good enough for him. Then out of nowhere, he was back, and he came every day to just sit and talk while Candy helped us evade the staff. It has been the best two days, well, three days counting today, of my life, and undeniably the worst as well.
I throw myself down into one of the chairs of Dr. Stacey’s office. At this point I’m tied up in knots, fluctuating from needing to throw up to asking for a conjugal visit. Doc is already seated across from me; cool, composed, and she has a file in her lap. I wonder just how composed she would be if I told her of my two dilemmas, though I have an idea of how she would react to the visit.
“How are you today, Tally?” Her voice is calm as usual.
I look up at her, meeting her eyes and doing something that I have never done. I open up and let her in. “I’m confused, frustrated, angry, elated, excited, and scared.”
Her eyebrows raise and she clears her throat before she speaks.
“That’s a myriad of feelings.”
I’m not in the mood to deal with her open ended statements that are really disguised questions. My eyes dart around the room and my legs begin to bounce up and down. I know this feeling. I dread this feeling.
“Could you please, for once, just drop the psychobabble? I need to talk to someone who isn’t going to make sexual jokes or dream up my future and how many kids I’m going to have. So please, can you be that person?” I’m hovering on the edge of a panic attack but I’m clawing at the ledge trying not to fall.
“I can do that,” she eventually says, laying the folder down on the floor. She waits patiently, body relaxed, hands in her lap and eyes showing genuine interest in what I have to say.
I suck in a deep breath and the words come with it as I exhale. They pour from me like a river, its dam failing and raging water that has been set free. I tell her it’s the visitor—Trey, that he doesn’t know that I am a patient and that Candy has been helping me keep him in the dark. I tell her about our first meeting on the bench and about the day that Candy told him I went out swimming with friends, implying that other guys were there as well. I tell her that I’m glad he was jealous, but then he was gone for three days. I explain exactly how low and hurt I had felt. I know that I’m smiling foolishly when I tell her about our talk when he finally came back and about his honesty regarding his feelings.
I feel the words flying out of my mouth, one right after the other, and frankly some of them might be so jumbled that she misses them entirely. I cannot help it. I need to get it out, to get it off my chest so that I can breathe.
My heart speeds up as I tell her about today, about the past two days. How he had come every day and just sat with me. Sometimes we talked non-stop and then sometimes we just sat, both trying not to get caught staring at one another, until Trey ultimately just said, “to hell with it, you’re beautiful and I want to stare at you.” Yes, I inwardly swooned and I’m not ashamed.
Finally, all of it is out. I watch doc’s face and can tell that she is se
arching for something un-psychobabble-ish to say.
She clears her throat before she speaks. “You like him.”
Okay, so it’s not the earth–shattering, squealing response I would normally get from Natalie, but I accept it.
It isn’t a question. But I treat it like it is.
“I do. Very much.”
“He’s kind, attentive, funny, intelligent, and obviously very caring since he comes to see his mother every day.”
I’m not catching on to why she is stating the obvious, so I just nod.
“You feel a close, strong connection to him because you have spent time getting to know one another but haven’t taken the next step of becoming physical.”
I frown. “Doc, this is starting to sound like babble.”
“I am simply trying to understand you and because I am not the type of person to tease you with sex talk or fantasize for you about what your babies would look like. I will try to help you break down the walls and separate the feelings that are overwhelming you.”
I roll my eyes and toss my hands up. “Well, you tried. I’ll give you that much. So, get on with it. Examine, peel away, carve out, or whatever other description you like to use.
“You’re being released in two days. You have shown that you have the ability to reasonably cope with difficult situations. You have developed relationships instead of seeking solitude. Your medicine is working. You will have a week and a half to acclimate yourself back into everyday life before you start school. You need that time, Tally. You need to see that you are in the driver’s seat and the disease is no longer in control.”
I sit there staring at her, unblinking, still as a statue. My mind is still stuck on the words, You’re being released in two days. I feel as though a baseball bat, swung by the world’s greatest batter, has just nailed me in the stomach. I try to catch my breath, try to get even a millimeter of air into my cut-off wind pipe. My mind is screaming at me, telling me that I should be ecstatic. I should feel proud that I have come so far from that scared, broken girl who crawled in here nearly three months ago.
“Tally!” The demanding tone of her voice snaps me back from my growing fear.
“How can you be sure that I’m ready?” I sit staring at her. My veins feel like they are filling with ice and my heart feels that at any second it will cease beating.
“You have been able to maintain a friendship with a guy that hurt you and you didn’t lash out. Instead, you reacted in a rational manner. I know that it’s hard, but you are taking control.”
“I’ve lied to him so that he would think that I am normal, that I’m not some F'd up girl who cuts her arms when she can’t cope anymore. How’s that for rational?” My words are sharp and I’m shaking: with anger, fear, or pain. I don’t know which. Possibly all of them.
“I don’t think that was irrational behavior. I think that was a girl who has been rejected by her peers and her parents because of something that is beyond her control, who saw an opportunity to have someone see her as something other than a mental health patient.”
“And that makes it okay?”
“I didn’t say that,” she tells me as she leans forward in her chair. Her eyes are filled with fierce determination, but also with hope. “You need to tell him the truth before you leave. He deserves that much and you need the closure. He has been good for you, even if he didn’t know the truth. He has helped you to realize that you are still a human being with feelings that can be good. He gave you something nobody else has bothered or could give you.”
“What?” I choke out, not realizing that tears are slowly falling from my eyes. “What has he given me?” I ask again, attempting to control my quivering lip and hiccupping breaths.
“That is for you to figure out. Consider it your final assignment.” She stands up and I realize that the session is over. It’s over and I still don’t know what just happened. One minute I’m pouring out my heart about Trey and the next I’m told that I’m leaving.
As I leave doc’s office, I walk slowly, as if on autopilot, retreating to my room, the only place that I can call my own. As I turn the corner, my eyes land, not on my door, but on the figure standing in front of it.
Trey’s mom is standing there, her arms folded across her chest, leaning against the wall as if she has nowhere else to be, which, she didn’t. As I reach her, I mentally say a quick thank you to Trey for telling me her name yesterday. I try to smile and I wonder if it is convincing, but suddenly I don’t care.
“Tally,” Lolotea says curtly.
“Hi Lolotea, it’s nice to finally meet you.” I’m begging her in my mind to just go. We’ve met now please go. Apparently, she can’t read minds.
“It is time that I speak with you.” Her words sound oddly formal and I realize that I don’t want to speak with her. I want to hide. I want to run. Fight or flight. Candy already pinned me as a flight kind of girl. Instead, my feet are moving of their own accord, following Lolotea down the hall.
We reach what must be her room and an ominous feeling envelopes me as she closes the door. The feeling is heavy and I think that it just might drop me to the ground.
“You are lying to my son.”
Okay, we’re just going to skip the pleasantries. Fine. My day has already gone to shit. Let’s just top it off with a good verbal thrashing from Trey’s crazy mom.
“It’s complicated.” I cannot believe I just said that and the tightening of her lips and narrowing of her eyes tells me that she can’t believe it either.
“I may be in a mental hospital, but I am not dense. So please, un-complicate it for me.”
This was not my plan for tonight and I fight the urge to stomp my foot and tell her how I was supposed to be curled up in a ball on my bed freaking out. But I won’t say that, not to Trey’s mother.
“I have bipolar disorder. Everyone knows it: my parents, my friends, the entire freaking school. The fact that I am in a mental hospital is the gossip of the century. People whisper around me and refuse to look me in the eyes, like at any second I’ll snap and start screaming that the voices won’t shut up.” I’m crying again and it pisses me off. I wipe my eyes, frantically trying to clear them, to remove the evidence of how badly all of it has hurt me, is still hurting me.
“Trey treated you normally.” Her voice is softer, gentler, and when I look at her through the wetness in my eyes, I see understanding in them, not the condemnation from minutes ago. “He saw you, not the disease.”
My knees shake with the effort to hold my body up and I reach to the wall for support.
“He loves you.”
NO, I scream inside, but outside I calmly shake my head.
“No, he doesn’t. He can’t love me. We’ve only known each other a week. Plus, he doesn’t know me, not really. He knows the Tally I wanted him to know.”
“I disagree. He knows the Tally who doesn’t have to pretend to be okay because everyone is judging her every move, her every word. He knows the Tally who is able to be exactly who she really is because, in his eyes, she is not broken. She is whole.”
“But I’m not. I’m not whole.”
“With him, you are.”
Her words reverberate in my head as a sob escapes my erratic breathing. That’s it, that’s all I can take. Without looking back, I turn, fling the door open, and rush into the hall. I reach for the rationality that Dr. Stacey is so sure that I have and collect myself enough to not be a spectacle. I hold it together just long enough to reach my room. Now, all bets are off. I let the tears loose and give in to the shame of what I have done. Pain, as though a knife were plunging into my chest, rips through my heart. But would I bask in that pain? Physical pain: that I can handle. Physical pain I would welcome with open arms. But this anguish, terror, and indignity that is running through my veins, wrapped around my nerves, and invading my mind, I can’t handle. This pain stays once the tears have run out. The dull ache of it stays with me like a festering wound that refuses to heal.
I
don’t hear the door open and only vaguely register the arms wrapping around me, offering me comfort that I do not deserve. I have no idea how long I lay on the cold floor. I don’t care anymore.
“Pinky,” I hear the worry in Candy’s voice. “The dumbest thing a person asks in these situations is ‘are you all right,’ because it’s obvious that you definitely aren’t all right. So I have concluded a better question is, ‘who do I need to kill?’”
I want to laugh, I really do, but there is no laughter in me. The laughter left once I decided to accept that what I had done was selfish, and so very, very wrong.
“Sit up, Tally.” She uses her firm, I won’t take any crap, voice. Out of habit, I obey. I lean back against the wall and she sits beside me.
We sit like that, no words, just nothing, and I feel myself putting up the walls that had taken months to tear down. It was the only way I was going survive what I knew I had to do.
“You’re not going to tell him are you?” Candy finally asks.
“I can’t.” My voice is hoarse from the tears and weeping. I try to clear it but it’s useless.
“It doesn’t have to end just because you’re leaving.”
“Yes, it does. He would find out the truth if we kept seeing each other.”
“And that’s a bad thing?” she asks.
I look over at her, feeling lost by her words.
“You of all people should understand. I would not survive seeing the revulsion, or worse, the pity, that I would see in his eyes. I’m used to seeing that look every day from my parents. I need to remember the way we have been together. I need untainted memories of the tiny bit of time I stole with him.”
I can tell she wants to argue, but she stops herself and just pats my leg. “Okay,” she relents.