Burnout Read online

  No bloodied bodies.

  No twisted wreckage.

  No memory.

  I’m not supposed to wake up in places like this anymore, not knowing where I’ve been or what I’ve done. Blacked out.

  No. I don’t wake up in places like this anymore. I’m different now. I’ve changed.

  When the recorded voice comes over the intercom, it’s like my body tries to jump, but it’s frozen in place, stuck inside itself, so it feels like every muscle is wrenched, twisted, torn.

  “This is the last stop on this train. Please leave the train.”

  I recognize that announcement. I know where I am. I’m on the L train, and this is the last stop in Manhattan. Everyone’s gotten off, and soon a whole other bunch of people will get on. Just wait, I tell myself, somebody’s going to come. Somebody’s going to help. I’ll tell them . . . what will I tell them? I will say, Please help me, I’m having an emergency.

  I manage to lift my head a few inches. The skin on my face sticks to the plastic seat, peels away slowly. I look at the seat. There’s a white splotch on the plastic where my cheek was.

  I don’t understand.

  I want to sit all the way up, but my brain starts spinning one way, and my skull starts spinning another, so I lay my head down and close my eyes and fall back asleep.

  I wake up because my right arm has that prickly pins-and-needles feeling. I stare at my hand on the floor, wiggle my fingers, pull up my arm so it’s next to me on the seat. It feels heavy and dark and thick. I keep it next to me, letting the blood work its way through.

  I hear a noise at the far end of the subway car, and I move my eyes to see the door between the cars open and the train conductor walk through. There’s a pause in his step when he sees me, and he watches me as he walks closer.

  I’m embarrassed to be lying down, so I push myself up, until I’m posed like a beached mermaid, still on my stomach, my legs stretched out on the bench. And then things go dark, like someone has switched off a light to the world. Just for a moment, just long enough for me to feel like I’m falling backward.

  “You all right?” the MTA guy asks. He is in front of me now. He has a graying mustache, and it twitches when he speaks.

  “Something happened to me, but I don’t remember . . .” I try to finish, but it comes out a dry croak. I swallow. My throat hurts so much that tears spring to my eyes, but my face is numb, I can’t feel them slide down my cheeks.

  He nods, like my tears have answered his question. “It’s okay, let me go call for help. Why don’t you lie back down?”

  I shake my head, clear my throat, ignore the pain, and say, “I want to sit up.”

  I roll over, sit up, and keep my legs on the bench because they’re too heavy to move. My arms are limp beside me, and for a moment I can’t lift my head from where it lolls on my chest and I can’t breathe and I’m going to suffocate and die right here and it’s just such bullshit, to die like this, without being able to fight and without anyone knowing how much I love them and how sorry I am for the things I’ve done. But then my neck muscles work, and I can lift my head from my chest and breathe again.

  The guy unzips his blue MTA jacket and takes it off, holds it out. I start to wave him away. Four deep cuts curve their way from the inside of my left elbow to my wrist. They are dark with new scabs, and as soon as I look at them, I’m suddenly aware how much they sting.

  “What happened to my arm?” I whisper, holding it out for him to see. My voice is raspy; my tongue feels thick, too big for my mouth.

  “I’m not sure, miss.” He stares at my arm, his nostrils flare a little. His mustache twitches. He lays the jacket on my lap and walks quickly toward the operating cubby. I let my arm fall to the side, banging my hand on the seat.

  “I’m having an emergency,” I call after him, but he doesn’t turn.

  I look down.

  No wonder he gave me his jacket.

  I’m wearing a dress. It’s pink, strapless, and it’s cut too low in the boobs and too high in the thighs. There is a tear on the right side where it couldn’t hold me in. I think it’s made out of plastic. I’m not supposed to describe my body as “burly” because Mom says that’s hate speech, but that’s what I am. I am a burly girl testing the seams of a too-small plastic dress. I would never wear something like this on purpose. I can feel the train seat on the bare backs of my upper thighs, and my skin crawls. I pull the jacket over me, covering my chest.

  The train conductor comes back, hands me a bottle of water.

  “This isn’t my dress,” I croak. I try to open the water, but my hands are shaking. He gently takes it from me, opens it, and hands it back.

  “Transit cops will be here in a minute.”

  The darkness comes again. Three heartbeats long.

  When the light comes the MTA guy is waving his hand in front of my eyes and saying, “Oh man.” I drink the water. First a sip, and then a gulp, and then I’ve drained the whole thing. “I feel really weird right now.”

  He swallows, and nods, takes the empty water bottle from me and sets it on the seat behind him.

  I sigh and pull my feet off the bench. They fall to the floor with a thunk-thunk. My feet are filthy, all the way up to my calves. Caked with dried mud, tight on my skin, itchy.

  “Have you seen my shoes?” I ask.

  He shakes his head, hesitates, and then says, “Do you remember what you took?”

  I blink at him, pretend not to understand. “I can’t find my shoes.”

  “I know, hon, but you need to remember what you took. The drugs,” he says.

  The drugs! He said it like he was saying the boogeyman! Or terrorists!

  “I don’t do drugs.” I say firmly, just like we role-played at New Beginnings. He doesn’t understand. “I made a promise. And I went to rehab,” I assure him. “I’m just having an emergency.”

  I’m not making sense.

  “It’s . . . it’s going to be all right,” the MTA guy says, trying to sound reassuring. “The cops will call your parents for you.”

  “My mom’s upstate,” I tell him. “She’s painting at a friend’s cabin. She can’t come get me.” My voice cracks.

  It happens again. Darkness crams itself between the seconds and I tumble right in. “Did you say something?” I ask, when the seconds splice themselves back together.

  “I said, everything’s going to be okay.”

  “My mom didn’t want to leave me alone in the apartment, but I told her she could trust me, and now look what happened.”

  “I’m sure she’ll understand.”

  “My dad will come first. He’s in Greenpoint, but he’s not my real dad. He’s the Tick’s dad. My dad was a sperm donor. But I call the Tick’s dad Dad, you know? Because he is. Even if we don’t live with him.”

  The MTA guy blinks at me, and I want to stop talking, but I can’t.

  “I’m clean. Clean as a whistle. They tinkle-test me at school. I leave the sample with the school nurse.” It is killing my throat to talk this much, but he doesn’t believe me. “Something happened to me,” I tell him, “you have to help me. I didn’t do this to myself.” I hold my arm out again.

  “Help is coming. You need to calm down now.” I hear a slight hint of a Southern accent.

  “You think I’m on drugs?” I ask him.

  He manages to shake his head and shrug and sigh all at the same time.

  “Is that what you told the cops when you called them?”

  “I just told them there was a girl that needed help. That’s all.”

  “Do you think they’ll put me away?” I groan. “I bet they try to put me away again. Rehab’s no joke, mister, even the one I went to, which was like the neutered version. It’s not Nan’s Fun-Time Musical Sing-Along, you know. I don’t want to go back there. I don’t need to go back there.”

  “And you won’t go back,” he tells me, “because you haven’t done anything, right?”

  I smirk at him. “You know that’s not ho
w it works. I’m a kid.” I make a zero shape with my hand and hold it up. “I have zero rights. They’ll send me just because I look like a screwup, when really I’m just having . . .”

  Darkness.

  “An emergency?” he asks, and his voice brings things back into the light.

  “Right! An emergency.”

  “I think you’re going to be just fine. The cops are going to be here soon.”

  “The cops,” I repeat. “It’s all going sideways, isn’t it? I mean, I’m sitting here, suffering from some kind of non-drug-induced amnesia, and my brain is all funny and I’m hearing myself talk and it sounds like somebody else is talking, except it’s coming out of my own mouth, you know? And all this is happening and you’ve called the cops and they’re going to put me back in rehab and my mom is going to be so upset and my little brother is going to cry. But I’ve been trying so hard and I haven’t hung out with Seemy in months because I’m not supposed to anymore and I don’t hang out with anyone. I’m like a self-declared leper. I’m getting Bs this semester, did you know that? So . . . I think I’m just going to go.”

  The MTA guy stopped paying attention, but now he looks at me. “No, I think you should stay.”

  “Nah.” I stand up, cringing at the pain in my body, and try to smile at the guy. “I’m just going to bail. You’ve been awesome. Seriously, they should, like, promote you or name a train after you or something.”

  “The cops are on their way,” the guy says, and even though he says it like it’s supposed to be reassuring, it sounds like a threat.

  “Come on, man,” I say, “I’m fine. Really. I’ve got to get to school. It’s Halloween, you know.”

  “Halloween was last night,” he says, shaking his head a little.

  “It was?”

  He nods.

  “Well,” I say, “I guess that explains the dress.”

  A businesswoman steps onto the train, looks at us. The train conductor shakes his head slightly at her, and she steps back off, says something to the other people that were going to board behind her. I watch them in the reflection of the far window, looking in at me as they walk to the next car.

  “I’m really just going to . . .” I trail off, catching my reflection in the window behind him. “What happened to me?” I ask, leaning forward to stare at my reflection. My hair is gone, or most of it, anyway. What’s left is chopped into short, uneven chunks. And my face is painted like a skeleton. White, with messy black circles around my eyes and mouth. And my eyes. There is something wrong with my eyes. “Ah, hell,” I groan. “I’m going to scream now.”

  CHAPTER 3

  TODAY

  I scream so loud the MTA guy shoots out his hands like he wants to keep me from screaming myself to pieces. But I jerk sideways, out of his reach, and even though I’m screaming and I’m scared, I think, You can run now, and I do.

  I go for the open door at the end of the train, but I overshoot it and smash into the end of the car. I grab on to the doorjamb and launch myself out of the subway car and onto the platform, though I don’t make it far. I land on the strip of little nubby yellow things that line the edge of the platform, meant to keep people from slipping and falling into the pit and getting creamed by a train.

  The nubs dig into the soles of my bare feet, painfully separating all the little bones, until I get to the smooth tiles in the middle of the platform. I slip immediately, crash to my knees, and when I look behind me, I see the MTA guy running out of the train, talking on his radio. There are a bunch of other people on the platform, and some spread out away from me, some step forward like they want to help. I scramble back up and go for the stairs.

  My mom says bodies like ours are made for football and slaying dragons.

  Dollface, don’t you know the big-boned girls are the ones who’ll save the world? I don’t need my body to save the world, I just need it to save myself, and right now it’s doing a piss-poor job. Mom says I shouldn’t curse my body, I shouldn’t wage a war I can’t win, but right now, trying to heave my big-boned glory up these stairs, all I can do is hiss, “Come on!” I am a bear lumbering up a mountain. I am the mountain, too.

  I want to shoot like fireworks from the subway station; I want to explode in the air above Manhattan before all of my color sizzles away and I dissolve into nothing. But by the time I see the light of day above me, I am gasping for breath, using the railing to pull myself up one step at a time, my body heavy like wet sand. It is rush hour, so people pushing their way to the surface surround me, and a few of them look back at me after they pass. I want to say, I’m fine. I want to say, Help me. But I can’t breathe, so I don’t say anything at all.

  I worry the MTA guy is behind me, so when I finally make it out of the subway onto the sidewalk, I force myself to start walking.

  Calm down, calm down, calm down, I tell myself, my breath still catching in my throat, tears still streaming down my face no matter how fast I wipe them off. The paint on my skin is so thick I can’t even feel my hands on my face. Under my fingertips the paint feels like hard plastic that’s been shattered with a thousand hairline fractures, a puzzle that refuses to come apart even though I dig at it with my nails. People look at me in alarm, and I pretend not to notice.

  Car tires pull up the confetti carpet from last night’s Halloween parade as cars dodge and weave down Sixth Avenue. My bare feet pick up torn bits of papier-mâché, dried Silly String, and other, more organic things I try not to identify. I should figure out where I’m going. I should figure out where I’ve been. The scar on my forehead itches underneath the face paint, but I can’t seem to dig down enough to scratch it, so I rub it with the coarse fabric of the MTA coat sleeve instead.

  I want to stop walking now, but I’m afraid to. It feels like if I stop, everything will stop. All the people around me, the cars, the noise, the wind, the world, it will all just stop and everything will fall over like cardboard cutouts and I’ll be standing on this freezing cold sidewalk by myself in a city full of dead things.

  I keep walking.

  I shouldn’t have gotten off the subway. That was a “bad choice.” That wasn’t a “good decision.” Dr. Friedman wouldn’t approve. She would want to know why. Why would you get off the subway, Nan? That man was going to help you. She’d give me that same puzzled look my mom always gave me when she wanted to know why, why, why I did the things I did. And the answer would be the same. I don’t know. I just did them.

  If I had stayed on the subway, the cops would have come. And if the cops had come, they would have asked questions, and I wouldn’t have had any answers. And grown-ups hate it when you don’t have answers. They’d have brought me to the hospital. They’d have called my mom. Ma’am, your daughter is an idiot. You’d better come quick. They’d have poked me and prodded me and tried to make me remember.

  What if I don’t want to remember?

  Why would I want to?

  Why would I want to know a story that ends with me waking up half naked with no memory and most of my hair hacked off? That’s what people don’t understand about blacking out. Most of the time it’s for your own good. Why would you want to remember stumbling into Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and puking into the holy water in front of a busload of horrified Japanese tourists?

  Just for example.

  That’s the sort of thing that’s funny only if someone else is telling the story, telling you what you did, laughing with you about it because it’s actually so terrible you think you might cry. That’s the sort of thing your best friend and you could laugh so hard over you pee your pants.

  But I don’t have friends anymore. On purpose. I’m a lone wolf. And I’m stoic. I’m a stoic lone wolf who walks quietly through the halls of her new school, talking to no one. It’s better that way. Nobody gets hurt. Especially me.

  My stomach hurts. Cramps. Like I ate something bad.

  I turn down a side street to puke, and get slapped in the face by a screaming gust of wind. It stops me in my tracks, its chill
so sudden and so cold it feels like my body is finally being shocked into wakefulness. The urge to puke is gone.

  It is freezing, and it is wonderful. It feels like it knocks the darkness right out of me.

  “What do I do now?” I ask the wind, but it only howls in response before dying down, leaving my skin tingling with its absence. I look up at the sky. It’s an ocean of gray clouds, low and flat and swollen with unfallen rain or maybe snow.

  The wind comes again, this time from behind, and I let it move me forward. I slip my hands into the coat pockets to warm them. The fingers of my right hand brush against soft paper. It’s a five-dollar bill. I stare at it and then down at my bare feet.

  I should buy some shoes.

  And then I should go to school.

  Most stores are closed at this early hour, but down the block I see a bright red awning being rolled open by a guy in jeans and a T-shirt. He must be freezing. The awning says 99CENT PLUS! As I approach, the guy yanks up the metal security gates covering the front windows and door, and starts pulling things out of the entryway onto the sidewalk—two white buckets of fake flowers, a torn cardboard box filled with black vinyl belts, a stack of white plastic lawn chairs.

  I’m not sure he’s officially open yet, so I just walk right by him inside before he can stop me.

  “Do you have shoes?” I ask, turning as I hear him walk in behind me. “I need some shoes. And maybe a hat.” He just stares at me. “It’s real cold outside.”

  “Slippers are by the dog food,” he finally answers, going behind the counter so he can watch me in the security monitor. “End of the first aisle.”

  I follow his directions, my feet breaking out in pinpricks of pain as they warm up. “Just slippers? What about shoes?”

  “No shoes. Just slippers. By the dog food,” he answers. “Hats are there too.”

  At the end of the first aisle I find a plastic bin overflowing with pairs of pastel slippers made out of cheap terry cloth. They are the kind with just a strip of fabric that goes over your foot, leaving your heel and toes exposed. They’ll do until I get to school and put on my gym shoes. I pick out a blue pair in my size and then study the knit hats that are hanging above the slippers. There are eight of them, and they are all bright orange.