39. Caleb
THIRTY-NINE
CALEB
Exam week has a very specific taste associated with it for me. Burnt coffee, stale vending machine chips, and that weird metallic tang in the back of your throat when your body’s convinced something bad is coming, even if the worst thing on the calendar is a blue book and a Scantron.
Campus looks like something straight out of a zombie movie. People shuffling around in sweatpants, clutching iced coffee like IV bags. The library is a war zone of highlighters, cracked spines, and broken spirits. Somebody in the corner’s been crying over organic chem for, like, an hour.
I’m… fine.
Fine-adjacent.
Running on caffeine, adrenaline, and vibes.
The safety plan in my notebook says, “Exams are stressful. Don’t over-pathologize normal stress.” Dr. K’s words, not mine.
So in other words, I’m tired, wired, behind on sleep, and the noise in my brain is humming at about a five. Maybe six on a bad hour. That’s… manageable.
If I keep moving.
If I don’t let my thoughts get too loud.
Psychopathology is the worst possible class to walk into during exam week. The lecture hall is overheated, everyone smells like stress and deodorant trying its best, and the PowerPoint title on the screen reads:
Childhood Maltreatment and Long-Term Outcomes.
Cool.
Awesome.
Love that for me.
I slide into my seat, notebook out, pen ready. My head nudges the volume dial up half a notch.
“Today,” Dr. Han says from the front, “we’re going to look at a longitudinal study of children who experienced severe neglect and physical abuse before the age of ten and how that shaped their functioning in early adulthood.”
My spine locks, and my brain starts flashing red.
“Remember,” she adds, like this is a fun TED Talk, “we’re looking at data. These are patterns, not destinies.”
The first slide of the case summary clicks up.
Subject A: Removed from biological mother’s care at age six after reports of severe neglect, food withholding, and physical abuse from mother and mother’s partner.
Spent several months in foster care before being placed with biological family.
Presenting problems at age twenty-one: chronic anxiety, nightmares, difficulty with trust and intimacy, academic overachievement alternating with academic burnout, and suicidal ideation in late adolescence.
The words swim for a second and my vision tunnels. This is ridiculous. There are a thousand kids with that story. It’s not mine. It’s not—
My hand has a death grip on my pen, knuckles white.
In for four.
Hold.
Out for six.
I force my eyes to the second bullet point. Foster care. I never did that. Mom ran us ragged, but she never let anyone take me.
“Notice the pattern,” Dr. Han is saying, pointer tapping through the slide.
“Early deprivation often leads to hypervigilance and a strong performance streak. These young adults are used to their survival depending on reading a room, pleasing caregivers, and performing well enough to be considered ‘worth keeping.’”
Somebody laughs, soft and uncomfortable.
Perform well enough to be worth keeping.
Yeah. That tracks.
She flips to a graph—incidence of suicidality versus perceived caregiver support. The line is ugly: high suicide attempts when support is low, dropping as support increases but never quite touching zero.
“It often doesn’t matter,” she continues, “how much support appears in early adulthood. The nervous system is still primed to expect loss, rejection, and punishment. So even when things are objectively better, the person may still behave as though they’re one misstep away from catastrophe.”
The back of my neck prickles and Martin shifts in the seat next to me, scribbling notes like this is just another lecture. My leg starts bouncing under the desk. Inside my head’s at a solid seven now and rising.
“Let’s pause here,” she says. “I want you to take a minute and write down your reactions. Emotional, intellectual, or both. Then we’ll discuss.”
Reactions.
My reaction is, “I need to leave my body immediately.”
Instead, I write:
Data ≠ destiny (bullshit but okay)
Hypervigilance, performance → “worth keeping”
early deprivation → “more space = more ways to fail,” feeling
My handwriting goes a little jagged at the end.
“Alright,” she says. “Thoughts?”
A girl two rows ahead raises her hand. “It’s… sad?” she says. “That even when things get better, their brains don’t really… let them feel safe.”
“Good,” Dr. Han says. “Anyone else?”
A guy behind me says, “I mean, some of these kids probably had it worse than others, right? Like, not all neglect is equal. Some people just… toughen up.”
If I turn around, I might throw something at him.
My chest hurts.
In for four.
Hold.
Out.
Someone else says, “It kind of makes sense they’d crave intensity, though, right? If everything used to be life-or-death, ‘normal’ probably feels boring. You’d want something big enough to drown out the noise.”
Crash.
There it is.
I feel myself step half an inch sideways in my own skull, the way I did in the restaurant bathroom before Miguel grabbed my knees and made me breathe.
I’m still here. I’m still sitting in a lecture hall with bad carpet and worse lighting.
But the edges of the room have gone fuzzy, like someone smeared the picture with their thumb.
“Caleb?”
The sound makes me jump.
Martin’s voice, low. “You okay?”
I nod once, shortly. “Yeah,” I whisper. “Just… taking notes.”
It’s technically true. My pen is moving, except the notes just look like…
not destiny
but feels like prophecy
I make it through the rest of the lecture by sheer stubbornness alone. When it’s over, I stand too fast and the room tilts.
“Hey,” Martin murmurs, touching my elbow. “You sure you’re good?”
“I have therapy,” I say, the words coming out clipped. “In, like, twenty minutes.”
His face softens. “Okay,” he says. “Text me after. Or, like, send me an emoji that tells me you’re not emotionally dead.”
“I’ll send you the skull,” I say automatically.
“That’ll be confusing.” His face scrunches. “Pick a different one.”
I huff something that’s almost a laugh and push out into the hallway.
Therapy.
Good timing for once.
Dr. Kaur’s office smells like peppermint tea today and that weird diffuser oil I’ve never identified. Today she’s in a soft gray sweater, hair pulled back, expression already attentive in that way that makes me feel examined and held at the same time.
“Rough day?” she asks, taking in my sweaty, shaken appearance.
I drop onto the couch and let my backpack slide to the floor. “You could say that. I feel like someone peeled me,” I say. “Like an onion with all its layers. In Psych.”
Her eyebrows lift, concerned. “Tell me what happened.”
I launch into it. The lecture, the case study, the graph, and the class comments about destiny and toughness and craving intensity. The way my body responded was like I was eight years old again and getting yelled at for eating too fast.
“I know it wasn’t literally me on the slide,” I say, picking at a loose thread on my jeans. “I know that. But it felt… close enough that my brain was like, ‘Ah, yes, this is the part where we implode.’”
“How did you keep from imploding?” she asks.
“I… did the breathing,” I say. “Box breathing. Grounding with my pen, thinking about the texture, the weight. I kept my ass in the chair. I didn’t bolt. Which felt like a miracle.”
“That is a small miracle,” she says. “Your nervous system was getting a lot of reminders of past experiences. And you stayed with your body instead of leaving it completely. That’s significant.”
“It didn’t feel significant,” I mutter. “It felt like barely not falling apart in public.”
“Sometimes that’s what progress looks like,” she says. “Not that you never get triggered, but that you have more tools when you do.”
I lean my head back against the couch, staring at the ceiling. “It just… hit too close,” I say. “That line about survival depending on performance, about being ‘worth keeping.’ I keep thinking about… if Dad hadn’t gotten me. If nobody had. What version of Subject A I would’ve been.”
She nods. “Those are understandable thoughts,” she says. “But notice that they’re counterfactuals. ‘What if.’ Your brain is very good at running simulations. It doesn’t mean they’re true.”
“Yeah, well, tell that to my brain,” I mutter.
Dr. Kaur smiles gently. “I would, if I could. In the meantime, we talk to the parts of you that can hear me.”
I snort. “Good luck with them.”
We unpack the lecture. The graph. The way my shoulders went up to my ears when that guy said, “Some people just toughen up,” like trauma is some kind of fucking gym membership that you go to to bulk up your coping skills.
She asks where I felt things in my body, and I tell her. “Chest, neck, jaw, and in my hands.”
“And what did you want to do in that moment?” she asks.
“Leave,” I say immediately. “Or fight. Or both. Punch him and then run.”
“And what did you actually do?”
“I… stayed,” I say. “And then I came here. Instead of pretending I was fine and letting it rot in my head.”
Nodding once, firmly. “That’s excellent use of your system,” she says. “You’re learning to bring things into the room instead of trying to handle them alone in the dark.”
“Yeah, well, the dark has shitty ventilation,” I say.
She laughs softly. “I’m going to steal that,” she says.
We talk about the “prophecy” feeling. The way data that’s meant to be descriptive lands in my bones like fate. She brings me back to the safety plan, to the idea that knowing my patterns doesn’t doom me, it gives us leverage.
“Your history is relevant,” she says. “It explains a lot of your tendencies. But it does not write your ending. Do you hear the difference?”
“I hear it,” I say. “I don’t… feel it yet.”
“That’s okay,” she says. “Feeling usually comes after practice. For now, let’s work on what you do when that prophecy feeling shows up.”