Chapter 33
33
SUMMER BEFORE COLLEGE
I GO THROUGH THE DAY after the party without even a trace of a hangover. Youth is good for that; drink yourself to chaos and wake free of the consequences. Poison yourself within an inch of death—on purpose—and bounce back so quickly you’d think nothing ever happened. Some unknown mechanism lets us skip the pain. Call it genetics. Call it invincibility. Call it the power of a blank slate, of a body not yet punished enough to reveal its cracks. It’s an ability of which we aren’t even aware, but we miss it when it leaves.
Resilience is wasted on the young. Our ability to push past anything, even embarrassment, even poison. Spring back into life, gait unchanged, suffering nothing more than vertigo and an invisible heap of sorrow amassing in the pit of our stomachs. A growing heap of trauma. Add to the pile with every fake smile, every unacknowledged ordeal. Dig into it only years later. By then, the heap will have grown so large it will be impossible to see all at once. But for now, it lies dormant, growing, collecting misery.
—
AT FOUR O’CLOCK, A BLACK car shows up outside my house. From my second-floor window, I have a bird’s-eye view of anyone who comes and goes. I see the car pull up and know immediately who it is. There are only two cars in the Valdecasases’ garage. I duck back into bed and shimmy under the covers.
The doorbell rings. My window is open. Manny’s voice drifts through it clear as day. “Eliot?” Bang, bang, bang. “Eliot, are you in there?”
If my parents were home, the game would be up. They would answer the door and see Manuel on the front step and insist I come downstairs. They would ask why on Earth I don’t want to say goodbye. They would ask lots of questions. Questions I cannot answer.
“Eliot?” He isn’t giving up. As soon as the doorbell stops, he pushes the button again. “I know you’re in there. I see your light on. What the hell is going on?” Bang, bang, bang. “Just come down here. Jesus. I’m leaving, por el amor de Dios .”
Yes. Leaving, gone, unreachable. Exactly as it should be.
Pedophile.
Disgusting.
Evil.
I exhale unsteadily.
You don’t deserve him.
You never will.
He’s better off without you.
The car will drive away. His plane will take off. He’ll begin his new life in Boston. From then on, he’ll exist only as a number on a touch screen. A number I can ignore. It will pass. He will pass.
And he does. After ten minutes, the doorbell goes silent. I hold my breath. Through my open bedroom window, I hear footsteps trudge down stone steps. A car door slams. An engine roars to life. And finally, gravel flies beneath four tires as my best friend rolls away.
—
I MOVE THROUGH THE WEEK after the party like a body through water. If I kick hard enough, I move forward. But everything above the waterline is a disfigured blur.
I try not to think about the party. When I do, it appears to me with a ghostlike quality, a haze of darkness. So I try not to think about it. About the realization that I could be one of the most vile, disgusting types of human beings on the planet. The type of person who gets bullied by serial killers because even they can’t look at pedophiles without wanting to hurt them.
I roll onto my side. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck .”
—
MY SELF-IMAGE HAS BECOME A mental Jenga. A precarious tower constructed of beliefs I’m only half-certain are real. It’s sturdiest in the morning, because overnight I accidentally forget all the bad things I know about myself. I open my eyes with a full, solid tower. But the minute my brain awakens enough to remember its own existence, it begins to look for the things I’m supposed to be anxious about. All day long it searches. Every remembered evil is a block removed.
By the end of the night, I’m a hollow, swaying skeleton of the tower I woke up as. All it takes is a nudge of the pinky, and I fall to pieces.
—
WEDNESDAY MORNING, MOM POKES HER head in the door. “Are you okay, honey?”
“Yeah,” I say, eyes on the ceiling.
“Can I bring you some food?”
“I’m not hungry.”
She pauses. Then: “Are you sad?”
Beneath the covers, my toes clench. Carefully, I ask, “Why would I be sad?”
“Because of Manuel.”
She knows. How does she know?
But then she goes on: “It must be hard being apart.”
“Oh.” My toes uncurl and my spine relaxes. “Yeah. I’m sad.”
“Oh, honey.” She reaches out and strokes my hair, which spills over my pillow in a long tangle of dirty blond. “If it’s any consolation, I miss him, too.”
I almost say, It’s not , but I bite my tongue. I bite my tongue so hard it bleeds.
—
EVENTUALLY, I GIVE UP. STOP fighting. Let the Worries wash over me.
Lesbian , they say.
Pedophile.
Incestuous freak.
I squeeze my eyes shut and grip the blanket until my knuckles start to hurt. I know I’m not any of those things. I do. Sort of. Sort of not. Whenever I go looking for proof, all I find is more doubt. It’s like…I don’t think letting someone’s spit stay on my hand counts as cheating on my boyfriend, but what if it does? Who gets to decide, ultimately?
At every moment, I feel the universe watching me. Keeping track of my every move. Every bad, every wrong. But no one else can see it. No one else knows I might be a pedophile. No one knows how awful, how deviant, how disgusting I am.
Dr.Droopy once described self-hate as “addictive.” I thought that was ridiculous. How the hell could you crave self-hate just as much as you crave a chocolate cupcake or a drug-induced high?
But I get it now. I do.
I don’t know how to turn it off, but what I do know is this: I’m addicted to the Worries. I’m addicted to self-torture and self-hate and any other version of the self that reaffirms my belief that there’s a deep, disgusting darkness within me.
And what’s the best way to avoid relapse? What did Speedy tell me all those years ago?
Getting clean isn’t a question of doing. It’s a question of not doing. Of not going back. Of not getting high again. Of not calling the wrong people.
Not doing.
I start to research recovery. I read articles on Twelve Steps and relapse. What I find, exactly as my father said in his own story, is that the two highest risks are people and location :
A “high-risk” location or person is one that brings up memories of time spent engaging in substance abuse. The best course of action is to avoid these people and places altogether.
The best course of action is to avoid these people and places altogether.
Avoid them altogether.
Avoid them .
—
AND THEN, A DAY LATER, a new voice. Similar to the Worries but not quite the same.
Fat , it says.
Lazy.
Get up, you sad piece of shit. You’ve been lying in bed for days. Go for a run.
I nod to no one. Exercise. Yes. Exercise is good. Running is good. Running helps sweep the Worries away.
I get up. I tie my shoes, numbly. I look up, right into the full-length mirror on my closet. Right into an eyeful of the rolls and wrinkles folding my stomach. I see those rolls, and I think about the pelvis they protect, the same pelvis that pulsed when it saw a child.
And then, from some ugly pit of my mind—that same place that cracks open in the seconds just before you slip into the safety of sleep, that brief glimpse of the black unconscious shielded from you by your waking mind—a thought creeps to the surface. I hate this body , the thought says. I hate it. I would burn this body alive.
—
I RUN EVERY DAY FOR the rest of the week. And as I run, I make a plan. Just a shell of an idea, really. One that will infuriate my parents and push away my best friend and drive me far into the jungle, far from any of the “acceptable” paths my siblings have already worn down for me. But it would do something else, too. It would protect. It would allow me total control over my diet, my exercise, my routine, and by proxy, the inside of my head.
On Friday, my phone buzzes. The device vibrates loudly atop the glass surface of my bedside table. I lift it up. There, on the screen, is a name and face I know all too well.
This time, I pick up.
“Jesus, finally ,” comes Manuel’s voice through the speaker. “Are you okay? Jesus. I’ve been worried sick. I just finished Freshman Week. I didn’t know if you’d pick up since you didn’t answer any of my other—”
“Manuel,” I say. “Stop calling.”
“Stop…” His voice goes dead. He whispers, “What?”
“I’m sorry.” I wait for tears, but they don’t come. Already, my body knows that this is the correct decision. That it doesn’t deserve to hear his voice. Not even over the phone. He was my Person all these years. My primary connection to a life spent in Worry. If anyone would bring about a relapse, it would be him.
“Eliot, what the hell?”
“Don’t call me.”
I hang up.
I log in to the University of Michigan’s online platform for accepted students. I click rescind . Then I bend over the carpet and dry-heave until it feels like my throat might pop from my mouth like a paper snake from a can of peanuts.
—
I CHOOSE NEW YORK. IT’S a city to which my family has no known ties, and I vow to make it my own. I’m going to start fresh— truly fresh, for the first time in my life. No Beck family privileges. No siblings who came before me. No contact with anything that could trigger the return of my OCD.
Mom and Speedy are, naturally, furious. “You’re making a huge mistake,” Mom says in one of our frequent, low-intensity arguments. “College degrees do nothing but help you. By not getting one, you’re closing hundreds of doors and opening none.”
“You’re wrong, Mom,” I say. “I’m opening the only door that matters.”
“You realize that we won’t give you a penny if you do this?” Speedy asks.
“Yes.”
“And you realize that if you went to college, we would pay for your entire life for four years straight?”
“Yes.”
“And you still want to do this?”
“Yes.”
Mom’s eyes roll up to the ceiling, as if she’s searching for God.
“Guys. Relax. I’ll get a job. I’ll get a roommate. I’ll support myself. I’m a hard worker. You know this. And it’s always been my dream to live in New York.”
“It has?” asks Speedy.
“Yes.”
This is semi-true. I did indeed decide that it had always been my dream to move to New York—three days ago.
My parents look at each other. I know that look. It’s a look I’ve seen hundreds of times. It’s the look that says, This is a bad idea. It says, This is a bad idea, and if she were our first kid and if we were twenty years younger and not so damn tired, we would stuff her into the back of the car and drive her to college ourselves. It’s the same look they always share immediately before I get away with something my older siblings would never have gotten away with.
There will be more low-grade fights after this one. More cajoling, more forehead grabs and eye rolls, but it doesn’t matter. With that look, I know I’ve won.