Before the Exhale

Before

JUNIOR YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL

After the party, I don’t speak for days.

Not a word. Not a sigh. Not a sound. But if my mouth could form words, I would whisper six of them.

Why did this happen to me?

Time starts blurring together, the minutes, hours, days distinguishable only by before and after. When I look down at my hands, I don’t recognize them. Nails bitten to the quick. Freckle on the left thumb. Fingers so pale they belong on a corpse.

Fitting. It feels like a part of me died.

I let my body rot in the bed I rarely leave anymore, and I stop going to school until they notify my parents, who have no idea I’ve skipped six consecutive days.

Mom throws a hissy fit in the doorway to my bedroom, and Dad gives me the I’m so disappointed in you speech, and once they’re finally done ranting and raging, they forge me a doctor’s note to give to the main office.

They don’t ask what’s wrong, which is unsurprising, and when I make some misguided attempt at telling Mom what happened, she doesn’t want to hear it. Not when it involves a party I shouldn’t have gone to in the first place. Not when I’m a disappointment.

I shut down. I spin out. I raid my parents’ liquor cabinet, and then, alone in my bedroom, I drink too much. Way too much. So much that I end up in the hospital.

Now they ask, why did you do this? Now they ask, what were you thinking?

I don’t have it in me to give them an answer, and then summer goes by in a blur.

I return to school in the fall. Physically, I’m there. Mentally, I’m somewhere else.

I sleepwalk through senior year.