Juliet the Maniac Read online

  This was Honors English, where nobody was cool. But quickly I imagined what my compliance could turn into. Her and the little guy following me to lunch. Me introducing them to Nicole; the look she’d give me afterward. Blair calling me. Blair wanting to do homework together. Blair tagging along to parties, becoming a burden. I imagined a chain on my neck signaling NOT COOL, me eventually yelling at her when it became too much, her crying, the look of disgust and pain she would wear.

  So I ignored her. I became what I wanted. I became a bitch. I became cool.

  GIFTED AND TALENTED

  Everyone said Ms. Novak’s Honors English class was the hardest in the school. If you did well there, you’d be fine at the toughest college—good practice because I wanted to go to UC Berkeley, maybe Columbia. Our first major project was making magazines that showcased different aspects of life from the time of Madame Bovary. I paired off with Kelly Parish, who was funny and in all my Honors classes, and we decided to make a fashion magazine. Her mom dropped us off at the library, the big one downtown, which smelled like dusty books and piss. I read about women improving their complexion through arsenic and belladonna, while Kelly read about death by corset, each of us leaving with a giant stack of books. I held them in my arms, sniffing their old-book smell the whole drive home.

  That weekend, I didn’t go to Nicole’s house on Friday like usual, and I didn’t go to any parties, or even answer the phone, because I was locked in my room. I barely slept. Instead, I spent the weekend taking notes on the books, then rewriting them in my neatest handwriting until they were alphabetized by subject. I painted watercolor illustrations, measuring precisely with a ruler to ensure they were perfectly to scale. I borrowed my father’s neon-bubbled level, making sure my printed-out text was perfectly aligned. It felt something like fate as I worked, a divine guidance enveloping my hand, zapping everything into place, as cleanly and neatly as Tetris. I saw the magazine in the future, when I was famous for whatever type of art I’d be famous for, spotlighted behind glass in a museum, proof of my early genius.

  I had nightmares about Ms. Novak hating it, making fun of my writing and illustrations, smashing my future of prestige and genius. But when we got it back, her handwriting looped across the pages, spelling out words like Wonderful!, words like Brilliant! She gave us an A+. She never gave anyone an A+. I walked out of the classroom that day, blanketed in gold: perfect, shining, chosen.

  BUT THEN I STARTED HAVING PROBLEMS SLEEPING

  My eyes were always red, like I had pink eye or dust in them. My bones ached hot, a feeling of perpetual fever. I was desperate for sleep, devoting hours to just staring at the ceiling, but was never able to drift off until one or three or five. After a couple hours, my heart woke me up, beating against my chest too fast and insistent, and I’d be left feeling cursed by this change to my body.

  One morning, very early. My room was still mostly dark, but there were little trails of light beaming from the cracks in the curtains. They shot through the air in pale rainbows, and it was like being trapped in a prism.

  I sat up in bed. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. There was something wrong with my face. My eyes, my mouth, my nose—they were gone. In their place, there was now a bird. Its wings shuddered, in a way that seemed like it was dying. I raised my hand to my face. I touched where the bird was and I felt no feathers, just my nose. In the mirror I didn’t see my hand or that finger, just the sooty mark of a claw.

  I WAS AT A PARTY

  I didn’t want to be there but I also didn’t want to leave. I was sitting in a corner of the backyard, drinking beer that had gone flat and warm from a plastic cup. I lit and smoked cigarette after cigarette. I had gone to the party with Nicole and a couple other girls she’d made friends with in her classes. We’d done coke together as soon as we got there, and then I left to smoke and hadn’t seen them since. But I hadn’t bothered to look for them either.

  There were some guys out in the backyard too, guys I didn’t know but had seen before. They were doing dumb shit and laughing too loud. Either too drunk or pretending to be. Every once in a while they’d give me a look. I didn’t know what they were thinking. I didn’t know if they thought I was cute or crazy. At one point, I thought one of them said something to me, it sounded vaguely like “Hey you.” I didn’t want them to come over so I just glared. I didn’t care if they thought I was crazy. I didn’t have feelings anymore. It was like something metal had replaced my insides. Everything was steely and flat.

  Eventually, the boys left me alone. I guess they’d given up, either trying to talk to me or talk shit about me. I felt safe enough to stare at them now. I didn’t want anything from them, they were just something for me to look at that wasn’t the backyard or a plant and I was bored. Now that I was looking at them full on, I could see something coming out of their chests, from their hearts, like glow-in-the-dark string. At first I thought it was just a special effect. They were tied up in each other, going back and forth, twisting thicker and then thinner and then they’d get thick again. A girl came out onto the patio. She ran to the side and vomited in the bushes. She had the strings too, hers pale and flimsy, but they reached into the boys’ and when the ends met up each strand grew stronger. The boys were laughing. She finished puking and went back inside, the strings trailing and knotted behind her.

  After a while Nicole came out to find me, and she had the glowing strings too. Hers were greenish and especially beautiful. I watched them tangle up with the dumb boys’ as she walked past them, as she walked toward me. I looked down to see if mine would come out, but nothing happened. There was only darkness in front of my chest. Someone had severed the wires.

  THIRD PERIOD WAS THE WORST

  In school, during Biology class, the shadows came together and glued themselves into shapes. An army of shadows pressing against my chest, jabbing their fingers into my throat. The noises they made, not like humans or even demons but like shuffling paper, something ambivalent and clinical. I watched as skulls erupted from the walls, wild in psychedelic rainbows. I tried to shut the shapes out by closing my eyes, but the colors flickered brighter across my eyelids. The shuffling rumbled into thunder, laughter filling in the gaps. I tried to slow my breaths, imagining myself as a tree with solid roots sinking into the floor, but the chaos just swelled into violence. I felt blood, wet and sticky. It poured down my arms. It was horrible.

  I forced myself silent and still. I tried to zoom out to a wider angle, see the girl wearing jeans and a white shirt, normal. Be normal. There was no blood on my arms. But I lost the illusion when I started making choking sounds, the fingers jabbing too sharp. Mrs. Jernigan stopped class to ask if I was OK. I tried to say I was fine but couldn’t make the words. I watched the jeans-wearing girl’s face turn red. She wasn’t normal. She was choking over fingers that weren’t even there.

  Mrs. Jernigan asked another student, this quiet girl I’d never spoken to before, to take me down to the nurse. Everything went away as soon we got into the hall.

  The first thing the nurse asked was if I had asthma. I didn’t. I told her my heart was beating really fast and I felt dizzy. She made me sit in a chair with my head between my knees, and when I felt better, she handed me the card of a psychiatrist. It was probably an anxiety attack, she said. I threw the card away. I figured it wouldn’t happen again. I would try harder to be normal in the future.

  But a couple of weeks later, it did. Same closed-in feeling, same noises, same skulls. That time I didn’t even try; I just got up and left. At first I figured I’d go to the bathroom, chill out for a couple minutes, then head back. But as I was sitting there on the toilet, it occurred to me that this only ever happened in that one class, and it all went away as soon as I exited the room. The shadows never followed me. I didn’t want to go back in that shit.

  I sat on the floor of the bathroom until class was over. At one point a girl came in to pee. I pretended sitting on the floor of the bathroom for no apparent reason was a perfectly logi
cal thing to do. It seemed to work.

  It was embarrassing to have to go back and get my bag. Mrs. Jernigan was still in there, the classroom empty, her head bent over the pile of papers on her desk. I told her it was an anxiety attack because I didn’t know what else to say. Except then I started crying, the frustration of failing to be someone else. Mrs. Jernigan came over and hugged me and I wanted her to stop but I knew it was the wrong way to act so I just stood. I kept telling her I was sorry, and she kept saying it was OK. She didn’t seem to mind, but it was always difficult to look her in the eye after that. Instead, on the days I was able to come to class, I kept my head down, listening carefully to her lectures, taking orderly notes, making sure the evil couldn’t slip in the gaps.

  I STARTED SPENDING A LOT OF TIME BY MYSELF

  Nicole got a boyfriend. He was this idiot senior with a criminal record, a BMW, and spiky hair. Like, he really was an idiot—he could barely read, and a conversation with him wasn’t even a conversation so much as a string of observations:

  “It’s Thursday already.”

  “The sun is hot.”

  “Jake’s party was gnarly.”

  “Chemistry is hard.”

  I couldn’t understand why Nicole liked him, other than his body and the car, which he made sure you were always aware of by wearing wifebeaters and carrying his keys around in his hand. I couldn’t understand what they did together, what they said, what they had in common. Mostly all they seemed to care about was getting fucked up at parties and making out.

  She tried to set me up with one of his friends, inviting me to the parties, which were always terrible and boring, revolving around doing drugs and games like Quarters and Beer Pong and not much else. It seemed like a good idea to date one of them—they were good-looking and popular—but I couldn’t stand the thought of someone whose idea of high humor involved blumpkins. (Blumpkin: when a guy gets a blow job while he’s taking a shit.)

  A couple weeks into their relationship, we went over to some older guy’s house, maybe twenty-five, who lived in a run-down apartment by the beach papered in peeling seventies wallpaper and surf posters. Everyone was hyped-up due to a big bag of coke and a handle of 151. Their shit music, some sort of rap-metal, was so loud everyone had to yell. I did four lines and two shots and got an instant headache.

  Some guy tried to talk to me. He had long greasy hair, zits all over his chin, wore a Padres hat flipped backwards and a football jersey. I pretended I couldn’t hear him, hoping he’d go away, but he only squished in closer, placing his fat hand on my thigh.

  “Get the fuck off me,” I said. I had made a vow before I’d gotten in the car that I would try to be nice. I would try to have fun and be open-minded. But that music and those drugs and that disgusting hand. I stood up. I knocked over a cup sitting on the table, the contents spilling onto some magazines.

  “Whoa whoa whoa,” someone yelled. “Party foul!”

  “Fuck all of you,” I said and left, fucked up but not high. I walked down a few blocks to the ritzy shopping center for the rich tourists and spent all my allowance money on a cab ride back home.

  After that, Nicole stopped inviting me out on weekends. I was supposed to grovel back into her good graces, but I couldn’t make myself do it. Instead I gave up, didn’t even try to make other friends, just spent the weekends by myself, weird and alone.

  EXTRACURRICULARS

  I wasn’t sure if the problem was me or the school, but I couldn’t handle it at Carmel Heights anymore. Like something magnetic—trying to go because it was normal, but as soon as I got there the poles flipped, pushing me away. So I pretended to be sick all the time. I had a stomachache, or a migraine, or I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before (often true). Most of the time, my excuses worked. On the days they didn’t, I got out of Mom’s car with my backpack and headed to the school doors, but as soon as she drove away I walked back home. I spent a lot of the time in the canyons behind our house, smoking pot and listening to my Discman, reading or writing poems.

  One day I went up there in the afternoon and I stayed too long. The sun was starting to set and the air was getting darker and colder. I hadn’t brought a jacket and I was probably missing dinner. I was sitting in the bushes where nobody could see me. I was busy watching the plants grow. The branches twisted up to the stars. The leaves stretched and spiraled, weaving themselves into nooses and snakes. The flowers disintegrated into lace, and I put my face under it, a mourning veil. I was ready to die. I was ready for the people to cry for me.

  DUNCE

  We were reading The Odyssey in English class. The goal was to categorize everything: when Homer mentioned a color, the role of Odysseus as hero, the way women were treated. When I finally went to class, I saw everyone else’s notes, little colored Post-its like flags, long trails of highlighted text, invented codes of letters and symbols, definitively marking each item as clearly as roads on a map. My book was unblemished, the spine barely cracked, pages still crisp and new.

  Even though I hadn’t been in class, I’d tried to keep up with the work. But I hadn’t seen any of the right things. Instead, I’d only noticed the violence. It was hard to miss: blood, stabbed, wounded, beheaded, dead. The words had stood out like they were the only ones in the book, this feeling that it had been written thousands of years ago simply to attack me, now, here, in the future. I leaned over my desk, shielding my book with my body, hoping no one would notice my obvious absence of work.

  I went straight home after school. I would catch up. I would notice the things everyone else had. I read all of Book 1 and most of Book 2 before realizing I hadn’t highlighted anything at all.

  I thought about the time I’d just wasted doing nothing. I still had all the math homework and the science and it crumbled down on me until my lungs felt void of air. I closed my eyes and tried to think. I just needed to slow down, break it apart, page by page, paragraph by paragraph. If I could understand what each sentence said, then I could piece it all together and everything would become clear. I read a paragraph. It seemed like gibberish. I read it again. I read it again. The letters looked like random objects, fluttery and weightless as confetti.

  I decided to switch to my science textbook, biology, the orderliness of chromosomes and Punnett squares. But that book seemed meaningless too, written in cuneiform rather than letters. I tried to make sense of the pictures but they appeared diced up, the white pages surrounding them too luminous, as though I was viewing them through a kaleidoscope. There was something wrong with my head, with my vision. I looked at my hands and I could see the individual molecules that made up my flesh, the air between them, neon pulsating veins. I was dissolving, slipping from the human world into an angel, a demon.

  I ran to the bathroom and threw up straight bile, the same neon yellow as my unused highlighter. The act shocked me back into my body. I rinsed out my mouth and lay down on the bed and cried. The dreams I had of going away and being smart and cool in Berkeley or New York felt like discarded photographs, something I was watching get wadded into a ball, inevitable garbage. My future. It was trashed.

  MY LAST TIME AT NICOLE’S HOUSE

  I hadn’t been over there in a couple months. The whole house had changed. They’d furnished the place. There was a collage of photos on Nicole’s wall, showing her and her boyfriend and her new friends doing things like going to the beach, making silly faces, at Splash Mountain at Disneyland, their mouths matching O’s. I wasn’t in them. I wasn’t friends with these people. There was only one photo of me, from last summer when we went to church camp. The girl in the photo was blond and smiling, indistinguishable from the rest of the glossy teens on the wall.

  I sat there on her bed and she put on a CD, not punk but Rage Against the Machine, and she talked at me, not with me, telling me things about her stupid boyfriend and stupid parties and stupid people. I tried to interrupt a few times, saying I was having a hard time just making it to school, but she barely looked at me before going back to her
original train of thought. That weekend, she was supposedly going on a mission trip, but really she and her boyfriend were going to Cabo. She’d bought a new swimsuit, did I want to see? These were the kind of things we were supposed to be talking about; she was instructing me. Every time I failed to respond correctly, ask the right questions in the right voice, her face flickered in annoyance at what she clearly saw as my choice to be abnormal. I watched her body, the tenseness of her arms as they crossed against her chest, as her chin tilted away from me, as her legs edged together until we turned into strangers.

  I wasn’t too upset when her phone rang and it was my mother. The thing that did make me upset was what she said, and how she sounded. She told me to come home right away. Her voice was clipped, like she was mad. I figured maybe the school had called. Usually I was the first one home and I just erased the message. I was trying to think of excuses for why I’d been absent. I got my period; I felt sick.

  Nicole’s mom drove me home, saying she had to go to the grocery store anyway, and surprisingly Nicole came with us, even getting out of the car to hug me before I went in, her arms light around my shoulders in a way that felt condescending.

  Inside, my mom had some of my things out on the kitchen table—a razor, a lighter, a used pipe I’d made out of aluminum foil. My face went hot as soon as she’d called, and it got hotter when I saw she’d gone through my stuff.

  She started screaming right away, about my grades, my truancies, my sullen demeanor, the pot and the cutting: “I don’t even know who you are anymore. You’re not my daughter. You’re a disappointment.” She got right up in my face, and I couldn’t stand the noise for another second. I couldn’t really see anymore; everything had gotten fuzzy and dark on the edges.