Juliet the Maniac Read online

  I took the candlesticks on the table and threw them against the wall.

  Then I grabbed the table itself and threw it on the ground.

  I went into the bathroom and locked the door. I started crying, the gasping ugly kind impossible to stop. My hands were shaking and I wanted to puke.

  She opened the door somehow. I was sitting on the bathroom mat when she came in, sobbing. She grabbed me by the arms. She was yelling. I didn’t even know what she was saying. Her mouth was blanked out. I didn’t mean to but it felt like I was choking and I hit her, not knowing if it was her face or body, just that my hand had connected with something softer than the wall. She left me alone after that. The air in the room settled, and I was breathing hard but my vision and hearing slid back into place. My face blotchy in the mirror, eyes glassy and hysterical. A little beast.

  My dad came home shortly thereafter. A floor tile had cracked when I’d thrown the table, so he was furious because they’d just had it put down. He told me I had to pay for it. I didn’t know how I was supposed to do that because nobody would hire a fifteen-year-old fuckup to do anything, and my allowance had been cut off to just lunch money until my grades improved, but I didn’t say that.

  My dad wasn’t like my mom and me when he got angry. He didn’t yell. But that day, the anger sprung out of him in pointed black daggers I could see stabbing the air, and his words seethed as he asked what was wrong with me, why was I acting this way, a look of disgust on his face before he sent me to my room. But he didn’t have to tell me. I already knew.

  HALLUCINATION #43

  I swallowed a handful of Benadryl to try and make myself pass out. It didn’t work. Instead of sleeping, I just read and read. I was down to teen horror novels, the only thing I could focus on. After a while I felt tired but still I kept the light on and kept reading. I fell asleep. When I woke up, a couple hours had passed. I noticed what looked like writing on my arms, but it turned out they were chains. There was blood on them.

  I looked closer, and I saw bones under the chains, torn skin, the bubbly tissues of fat, sinewy grains of muscle. I would have been alarmed but everything was glistening and pulsing and alive. Which made it beautiful. I shook my arms and the chains jangled. I expected it to hurt but it didn’t. I fell asleep again and when I woke up an hour later the chains were gone. In their place, my skin was coated in a thick scrim of glitter. I had burned hot into golden.

  I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO ANYMORE

  I no longer slept. It was so loud all the time. Each day I was assaulted by ringings and whispers, my heart pounding out the center of the chaos like a metronome, the order of the days splintering, popping apart, the ropes that once tethered me to the rest of the world had snapped and I had floated too far to find my way back. Each morning I was sick to my stomach, a feeling that only increased as the day wore on. The world falling away like bombs, leaving only me, the darkest war in it. There was nothing I could do. I was scared.

  I was only able to go to school one day that week. I sat in class, completely silent—no one talking to me, the teacher’s voice making noises but not words—unable to move because it felt like my bones might break from my body. I watched the normalcy around me, the students and their textbooks and their notes, the easy things I was supposed to do that had now become impossible. I was a freak.

  I ditched second period to go to the library. I wandered around the shelves until I found the books on psychiatry. It took a while because I didn’t want to get caught skipping class, so I kept on having to duck in different aisles where the librarian couldn’t see me. I picked out a book that was red and fat like a dictionary. It looked very official. I flipped through awkwardly, my fingers feeling stiff and plastic.

  I found the chapter on schizophrenia. It was the only thing I knew of that made sense.

  This is what it said:

  DIAGNOSTIC CRITERIA FOR SCHIZOPHRENIA

  Characteristic symptoms: Two (or more) of the following, each present for a significant portion of time during a 1-month period (or less if successfully treated):

  delusions

  hallucinations

  disorganized speech (e.g., frequent derailment or incoherence)

  grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior

  negative symptoms, i.e., affective flattening, alogia, or avolition*

  All I could think was: Fuck.

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  I am so fucked.

  The anger gurgled up inside me hot and quick. I clapped the book together, put it back on the shelf, pretending I hadn’t touched it. I walked out of the library. Then I just kept going. I saw the school narc’s yellow truck as I left the parking lot. He was sitting in it. I didn’t care. If he tried to stop me, I’d tell him to back the fuck up because I was a schizophrenic bitch.

  But he didn’t try. I didn’t have to tell him anything.

  I wanted to go somewhere, I wanted to get away. But I couldn’t think of anywhere to go. I couldn’t think of anything to do, anything that would take this away or make it better. There was no way to fix it. I just walked home.

  Crazy. Frequent derailment. Going to die. Fucked. Shit ass. The thoughts gathered in gray spiderwebs, tying together my limbs, caught in my hair.

  The problem had ruptured into something I could no longer ignore or keep to myself. I didn’t want to; I had to. I tried to plan out what I’d say to my parents but I didn’t really get anywhere.

  When I got home, I found some paper. I told myself I was describing somebody else so I wouldn’t cry. I was relaying the plot of a movie. I was merely transcribing the troubles of a friend. It wasn’t me who was experiencing this. Nope, not me. Not me. Just a girl.

  And soon it became true. I floated out of my body, somewhere above my head. I watched the girl with the sun-bleached hair and the skinny arms, as she sat at a desk covered in papers and books and trash, writing a letter. Her name was Juliet. She was fifteen years old. She was the daughter of Helen and Robert. She was no genius. She was just crazy.

  She wrote all of it down.

  Note to parents, November 1998.

  SPECIAL DELIVERY

  I left the letter under their bedroom door. My mom came home shortly after. I heard her footsteps as she went up the stairs. Several minutes later, she knocked on my door. The look on her face was soft and concerned and I wanted to tell her everything, the way I used to when I was little, but I couldn’t make myself say anything at all. I just cried and pointed to the letter I’d written, which she’d placed next to me on the bedspread, like if she didn’t touch it any longer than she had to it wouldn’t be true. When my dad came home, I heard the two of them go in their bedroom, their muffled voices going back and forth for a long while.

  THAT NIGHT

  They decided we should go to a family therapist. My dad got the name of a lady from someone he knew at work. “It’ll be good to get some outside help,” Mom said to me, more than once, in a way that made me think she was mostly saying it to herself.

  Between the letter and the appointment, I went into my parents’ bedroom to look for something, a pen or a pair of scissors, and I found a stack of my books on their desk.

  I picked them up, flipped through the titles, trying to figure out why they were there. The Bell Jar, Go Ask Alice. This book about a girl who has a breakdown and likes to talk to goldfish. A book about a boy in foster care.

  The dots connected. To my parents, this was a stack of explanations. They must have thought I was bored, crafting something to fit my teenage melodrama. Wasn’t that hilarious. Super funny.

  THE THERAPIST

  Her office was in a business complex behind a bank, this building we’d driven by dozens of times on the way to my junior high but I’d never noticed before. It was real ugly, designed to look like some sort of historic mission but failing miserably. We took the boring brown elevator up to the second floor, walked down a boring brown hall into a boring brown offi
ce, where my dad went up to the counter to check us in. My mom and I sat down in the boring brown chairs. She seemed nervous. She didn’t pick up any of the magazines they had laying around, just stared straight ahead, her back perfectly straight in the chair, like some sort of zombie. When my dad finished the paperwork, he did the exact same thing. It was creepy.

  I hated the therapist right away. She had frosted blond hair, short and sprayed with too much hairspray, and was wearing this ugly maroon business suit, with a big, stupid-looking silver brooch on her lapel.

  She asked us how we were and we said we were fine. My parents talked about how smart and talented I was, while I just sat there. Then they started describing my anger and my bad grades and the drugs and my yelling. They were talking like I wasn’t even there, looking only at each other and the therapist. Then they handed over the letter I had written, folded into quarters so you couldn’t see the writing until you opened it. The therapist read it with a look on her face like she was a bad actress pretending to be concerned:

  Things are quickly becoming unmanageable.

  Concern.

  Slept one hour last night.

  Concern.

  When she was done, she folded it back up. She wanted to speak to my parents for a while. I went back to the waiting room.

  I tried to look at the magazines. To my parents, I had become an abstract problem, a plumbing leak or a lingering cough.

  The therapist called me in, to talk to her alone. When I passed my parents in the hall, I couldn’t even look at them. I tried to pretend I wasn’t angry when I sat down in the chair, but immediately she said, “You seem upset.”

  I said nothing. She asked what was on my mind. My first reaction was to ask her if she was reading off a script, the one they had for angry teen girls, except I started crying. She pushed over a box of Kleenex and told me it was OK, like she was still following the script.

  “I don’t know what to say,” was what I settled on.

  She sat there, looking at me in a way that I tried to tell myself wasn’t judgmental, just interested. After a long while, she finally said, “I think you’ve said it all in this note.”

  “I guess I did.”

  “So what about your parents,” she said. “How do they feel about all of this?”

  I had stopped crying, mostly. “I’m not sure. We haven’t talked about it,” I said. “My parents read the note and then my dad made this appointment.” He’d looked upset afterward, but I couldn’t tell if he was mad or sad or just nervous. My mom hadn’t said much either.

  “Well, they love you very much,” she said.

  “I know. That isn’t the problem.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  Where to start when everything was wrong. I’d already explained it the best I could. I had an urge to grab the note, now sitting on her desk, crumple it up, burn it, as though by doing so it’d turn me into a different person. “I just don’t think they take it seriously,” I said, and then I told her about the books.

  She smiled. “I heard about the books. I understand. That seems like it would be very upsetting, to tell them all that and have them think you’re making it up. But try to imagine where they’re coming from. They have a beautiful, smart daughter who is suddenly not doing well at all. It’s the kind of thing that’s hard to believe.”

  Imagine where they were coming from? It seemed absurd, but I stuck to the script. I asked, “So what do you think is wrong with me?”

  “To be honest, I’m not fully equipped to make a diagnosis. My specialty is in family dynamics. But I’ve written you a prescription, and given your parents the name of a doctor who’s better qualified to work with this kind of thing.”

  And then our time was up. I joined my parents back in the waiting room. They both smiled at me, tiny grim little robotic smiles. It made me wonder if the therapist coached them on how to act. My dad went to pay the bill. The receptionist said the price quietly but I still heard what she said. Two hundred fucking dollars. The insane thing seemed to be paying that much just for a prescription.

  I still didn’t even know what was wrong.

  We went across the street to the shopping center. My mom dropped off my prescription at the pharmacy. My dad and I waited in the car. We didn’t say anything because talking was pointless. My mom came back and we went to McDonald’s to get hamburgers while we waited for the prescriptions. We never ate McDonald’s. My dad was always making fun of the fat people who ate there, called them fat piggies eating from a fat piggy trough.

  I didn’t know what to order so I got a Big Mac because that was on the commercials. My mom and dad ordered the same.

  We sat there eating our hamburgers, still not saying anything. My mom said the therapist was nice, but all my dad and I could do was nod. The cheese was rubbery and slimy and everything tasted vaguely like plastic. It made me want to vomit, but I continued chewing and swallowing anyway, watching my parents as they chewed and swallowed, the thoughts buzzing separately inside all of our heads, and it felt like we were insects, biting off nutrients with our mandibles. We chewed. We swallowed.

  DOCTOR’S ORDERS

  The prescription was for Tegretol, a mood stabilizer, and Wellbutrin, an antidepressant. They were supposed to take up to a month to work. I was just supposed to wait.

  So I waited.

  SIDE EFFECTS

  All the medicine seemed to do was make me dizzy in the mornings. I kind of liked it. It was a little bit like being drunk. It made it easier to go to school, this doctor-prescribed slurry haze.

  TAKE TWO

  I went to the new-new psychiatrist a few days later. He was skinny and silver haired, kind of reminded me of Mister Rogers. I liked him better than the lady immediately. The shelves behind his desk were filled with books, not just psychiatric books but novels—Jane Eyre and Madame Bovary. He was easy to talk to and nothing I said made me cry. He did things in a way that made me feel calm because his script seemed scientific. I took a quiz, like at school where you fill in the bubbles, but these were all about how I’d been feeling.

  Did I ever think of harming myself?

  Why yes I did.

  Did I find it difficult to concentrate?

  Yep, all the time, thanks for asking.

  Then he had me go across the hall, where a nurse in an old-fashioned nurse cap took my blood. Three vials, each with a different-colored top.

  Afterward, I went back into his office. There, he told me that I was bipolar, type I, rapid cycling. I liked the specificity in those phrases. I liked that the thing wrong with me had a name now.

  The thing that hadn’t changed was my medication. The medications and doses were kept the same. The psychiatrist said I would get used to the dizziness, and, eventually, they would start to work.

  “That seems impossible,” I said. “It seems impossible to just sit around and wait.”

  He seemed to get it, but in the end, he said there wasn’t anything else he could do. “I know it’s hard,” he said. He smiled at me. It was a sad smile.

  AT SOME POINT

  I thought there were cameras hidden in my room. I thought there were people watching me from the bushes also. I kept the curtains closed, but I was concerned they could still see through the cracks.

  I started to change in the closet. I didn’t want them seeing me naked. The closet was so narrow, I smashed my knee into the wall when I was putting on jeans.

  It occurred to me that this was completely insane. I couldn’t come up with a good reason why anyone would want to spy on me. But I kept changing in the closet anyway.

  Then I started thinking there were cameras in the closet too. If I held very still, I could hear the whirring of a tape. I got a chair from the kitchen so I could look in all the corners but I didn’t see anything. The whirring continued. They were smarter than me.

  AND THEY CALLED ME JOAN OF ARC

  I heard God a few times too. I thought it was God, at least. She had a female voice, and never had a
lot to say. Mostly it was stuff about me having been chosen. I always wanted to respond, Chosen for what? But it was like having an argument, where you only think of the good comeback once it’s too late.

  If I was a different person, I might have tried harder to listen. But holiness is supposed to be something you work for. Something you pay for by sitting and praying and trying very hard to be quiet for a long time. I hadn’t done those things. I didn’t want to be special, I didn’t want to be chosen, I didn’t ask for anything holy to enter my heart.

  I started to pray. I prayed over and over. I prayed for the opposite of salvation. I prayed for abandonment. I prayed for God to forget me.

  But still I heard the voice:

  You are chosen.

  SUPERFREAK

  I had been on the medicine for a few weeks, still dizzy in the mornings but there weren’t as many noises or shadows. Maybe it was starting to work. It wasn’t enough.

  It was Friday, early December. I hadn’t talked to anyone all day. I didn’t see Nicole or anybody else during lunch because I had to take a make-up test for Math. I hadn’t studied and I couldn’t make sense of the questions, so I just started filling in bubbles. I made sure each one was very dark.

  When I finished, there were only ten minutes left until the period was over. I spent it walking around campus very fast, pretending I had somewhere important to be. When the bell rang I couldn’t imagine going to class. I went out to the parking lot, laid right down on the blacktop in a shadowy spot between two cars. I watched the sky. It was very blue. All day long I’d had this roaring in my ears, like I was surrounded by bugs.