“Well, well, well,” Will says, sliding his breakfast tray down next to mine and slipping into the seat beside me. “Fancy seeing you here.”
I shovel another bite of soggy pancake in my mouth and shoot him a sideways look. “Where else would I be?”
Across the table, Red clears his throat and sends Will a warning glare that he promptly ignores. “I don’t know,” Will says. “Maybe holed up in your room somewhere, jerking off to ‘Damaged Girlz R Us?’”
I cast Red a seething glance. “Thanks a lot, dude.”
“I didn’t tell him anything,” Red says. “He saw you leave.”
Will smirks. “I had fifteen bucks on you getting kicked out last night. You’re lucky I like you. Otherwise you’d owe me big time.”
“You have a serious problem, you know that?”
Will chortles into his coffee, and I laugh, too.
Red tosses down his fork. It bounces off his tray, splattering syrup in my direction.
“Dude!” I exclaim. “What’s your problem?”
“You’re my problem, Eli.” Red’s face is pink under his freckles, and his hands tremble. “You don’t even get it, do you? Will’s right! If Mr. Fisher or Howard or any one of the orderlies saw you last night, you’d be gone. And it’s like you don’t even give a shit.”
I peer up at him, surprised at his outburst. “She’s leaving soon.”
“So what? You’re just going to float until she does? Then what? I’m sure there’s another crack whore on her way up from detox. Oh, that’s right, you got a thing for cutters.”
His words sting like tiny shards of glass. “Back off, Red,” I say, my voice low, dangerous.
Red snatches up his tray. “You know, being here is a big fucking deal for me. I don’t have some polo-playing prick with deep pockets to pay my way.” He stares down his freckled nose at me, his pale lids grey and heavy, his voice thick with disappointment. “This place is probably my only chance.” His stiff shoulders rise and fall, the helpless gesture of somebody who doesn’t know what else to do. “It might be yours, too.”
Will and I sit silently for a minute, both of us watching Red lope across the dining hall, dump his tray, and head out through the double doors. Will breaks the silence first. “Damn,” he wheezes.
“Yeah.” I stare at my tray, my appetite swallowed up by guilt and embarrassment. I stab a piece of pancake and swirl it in aimless circles.
“Well, the good news is, this isn’t a long-term problem,” Will says.
I peer at him sideways.
“That chick goes home today. She gives her final testimony tonight.”
And then I can’t breathe. I scan the room for Libby, like it’s already too late, like I won’t even get to say goodbye. I spot her on the far side of the room, dumping the rest of her breakfast in a trashcan. I pick up my tray and head after her, leaving Will sitting alone.
I catch up with Libby in the hallway outside the dining hall. She’s talking to someone, a girl I don’t know, with hipster glasses and dreads. I stride right up to them, take Libby’s arm rough in mine, and spin her around.
“Hey!” she exclaims.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
The hipster girl gives me a look like she’s wondering if she needs to call for help or something, and I realize that I must look deranged, because that’s how I feel. Like I’m going out of my mind.
Libby’s eyes search my face, and I don’t know what she sees there, but her arm relaxes in my grasp. She turns to look at the girl beside her. “It’s okay, Celeste. I’ll meet up with you in group, okay?”
The girl nods, casts me one more furtive glance before scurrying off down the hall. I drop Libby’s arm. I am a madman. I am out of control.
“What the hell, Eli?” Libby demands.
“You’re the one that owes the explanation. Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?”
For a second, Libby looks genuinely confused. “You knew I was leaving.”
“Not today!” The words explode out of me, and even though I know how ridiculous they sound, there is a tidal pool of emotion rising inside me, and I’m powerless against it.
A small group of kids pass us on their way out of the dining hall. They send suspicious looks our way, and Libby grabs my arm, dragging me farther down the hall, away from the dining hall exit. “Keep your voice down,” she hisses.
“I just . . .” I take in her fierce stare, the rigid posture of her back, and all the anger drains out of me. My arms are suddenly dead weights hanging limp from my sides. “I thought we had more time.”
Libby laughs. The sound is vicious, and it cuts deep. “More time for what, Eli? More clandestine kitchen visits? More walks in the woods? Or was it more kisses you were after?” Libby’s upper lip curls, and her eyes flash dangerously. “Grow up, Eli. This is real life, not summer camp. It’s hard and it hurts. I’ve got enough things on my mind without some rich junkie with a serious case of denial tagging around all the time.”
Libby’s anger is toxic and sudden, like a plug pulled from a smoke bomb. It seeps out of her pores and annihilates anyone in its path. I thought we were past this, this maniacal need to flatten anyone who gets too close. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe this is who Libby really is.
“Who did this to you?” I whisper, peering down into her face. “Who made you this way?”
Libby winces, and for a second, I can see her, the real her, free of angry, screaming scars. For a second I can see through her pain. Then her expression freezes over, and the look she gives me is one of disgusted pity. “I was always going to leave, Eli. This was always going to end.”
She turns and storms up the hallway. I want to swear at her, throw something. I want to beg her to come back. I scream after her, not caring who hears me. “You’re crazy, you know that? You’re fucked in the head!”
At the end of the hall, Libby shoots me the bird over her shoulder. And something snaps inside me. I aim my words at her heart. “You think I don’t see your game? All you want to do is hurt people! But nobody is as damaged as you. You’re the one that can’t be fixed!”
Libby disappears through the double doors at the end of the hallway without so much as a backward glance. I sag back against the wall, suck in deep, ragged breaths.
“Dude,” Will says.
I look up to see him standing in the dining hall door, a steaming cup of coffee in each hand.
“You okay?”
I shake my head.
I’ll never be okay again.
At group, I slouch in a chair next to Will, hood up so Howard won’t call on me, pass when he does anyway. I skip my session with Richard Fisher and head to the nurse’s office where I claim a migraine that earns me a couple ibuprofen and a few precious hours of avoiding Libby.
At lunch, I have to walk right past her, tray in hand. She’s sitting with a couple of girls I recognize—the hipster glasses and dreads and a pint-sized goth chick with ear spacers and neon green braces. Libby’s hands flutter wildly while she talks, and laughter rises from their table like birdsong.
She’s leaving, and I have nobody left.
It’s goddamn fucking hilarious.
She glances up at me, her eyes barely registering my presence before she turns back to her friends. My appetite fades like a chalk drawing in the rain. I storm across the dining hall and dump my food, tray and all, into the industrial-sized trashcan.
The rest of the day passes like sludge moving down river. At the gym, I walk on the treadmill at about a 2.0 mph pace while Will and Red sweat it out with Prison Tat. I doze through afternoon group and spend my self-reflection time on the visitors’ stoop, surrounded by other people’s used up cigarette butts. I skip out on dinner, determined to avoid running into Libby again, and spend the next few hours on my bed, slipping in and out of a restless sleep where my dad rides his motorcycle through dreams painted red, black, and yellow, and Libby’s words play on repeat like some kind of fucked-up mantra: This was always going to end.
It’s dark outside when I wake up; my stomach’s complaints are too loud to ignore. Maybe there’s still food in the dining hall. At least a bagel or fruit, something to tide me over. I’m lacing up my shoes when there’s a quick knock on the door, and Red sticks his freckled face through the narrow opening.
“Hey,” he says.
I push up off the bed and head for my closet. “What do you want?”
“Libby’s about to give her testimony,” he says, stepping fully into the room. “I thought you might want to hear it.”
“Pass.” I grab my hoodie, stuff my arms into the fleecy sleeves. “I’m going to get some food.”
“There are donuts in the rec room.”
I stare at Red accusingly. “I’m surprised you give a shit.”
“Look, I didn’t come here to fight.” Red runs his hand through his hair, rippling the orange spikes. “I thought . . .” He stares down at his hands. “Everybody deserves the chance to say goodbye.”
I think of Lisa, Red’s ex, the goodbye lost to smashed metal and shattered glass. “Thanks,” I say weakly.
Red nods. “So I’ll see you down there?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “I don’t think Libby wants me there.”
“She does,” Red says. “Even if she doesn’t know it.”
After Red leaves, I stare at the door for a minute, considering. Libby’s picture crinkles in the pocket of my day-old jeans. I pull it out, her words in the hallway seeping from the wrinkled paper like toxic dust.
I crush the picture in my fist and paper ball it to the trashcan. Red doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
I zip up my hoodie, tug it up high around my ears, and head down the hall. I’m not going for Libby. I’m just going to grab a doughnut, and then I’m out.
Richard Fisher’s at the podium when I enter the rec room. He’s opening the meeting with a reading from some recovery book, and I pretend to listen as I trail past the refreshment table at the back of the room. I grab a couple of doughnuts and drop into an empty chair in the back row. It creaks loudly, disturbing the kid in front of me. “You know, refreshments are for after the ceremony,” he whispers.
I lean forward, motioning with the fat jelly doughnut in my fist. “Wanna share?”
His eyes widen as I take a huge bite, squirting red jelly down my chin. Blinking rapidly, he swivels back around. I lean back in my chair, my mouth chalky with powdered sugar. “That’s what I thought,” I mutter, swiping my knuckle across my sticky chin.
Red and Will are on the opposite side of the room. Even from here, I can see Will’s jaws working around a piece of hard candy that’s currently saving his life. Red nurses a steaming cup of coffee. I crane my neck for a glimpse of the front row. I spot Libby’s rigid shoulders, the shocking contrast of her hair. She’s sitting next to a woman who could be her sister, her shoulders slight, her ink black hair bleeding purple at the ends.
After a few minutes, Richard Fisher turns the podium over to Libby. I watch her walk to the makeshift stage. She’s wearing grey dress pants, like the kind my mom wears to work, and they look about two sizes too big. Her pale blue shirt is buttoned at the cuffs, and her hair hangs loose around her shoulders. The dark eyeliner’s gone, and her pale cheeks are painted with matching pink circles. She’s Elizabeth, not Libby. I wonder if that’s part of her exit strategy.
She clears her throat, and her shining apple cheeks flush darker. “Twenty-eight days ago, I came here with a list of problems as long as my arm,” she begins.
I duck my head to stifle the bitter laugh that rises in my throat, not sure that list has actually gotten any shorter.
“I used to think that having all those problems meant something was wrong with me,” Libby continues. “I’d look at the other kids at school, the cheerleaders, the honor roll kids, and I’d think, they have it all figured out. If I could only be like them, everything would be okay. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get it right. I was still me, a tattooed freak with a C average. My problems weren’t going anywhere.”
I picture Libby walking down the halls of her high school, her hair dyed blonde, her arms hidden behind fat squiggles of permanent marker, black ink smudged on her cheek, and my chest hurts a little.
“When I found Xanax, I found armor. I didn’t have to care anymore about what other people thought of me, and I didn’t have to think about my problems. I could pretend they didn’t exist. It was like a shield I could disappear behind—a cloak of invisibility.”
Libby twists her hair up off her neck and holds it there, casting a wry smile around the room. “Being invisible sucks.”
Her hair falls soft around her shoulders. She takes a sip of water, swipes the moisture from her upper lip. “I think that’s why I started cutting. Because if I could still feel pain, that meant I was still alive. I hadn’t all the way disappeared.”
An image flashes through my brain, dark and unsettling—Libby drawing a razor across her wrist, blood seeping to the surface like water through sand. Is that what I was to her? A razor blade against her skin? A bleeding reminder that she’s still capable of feeling something? Is that what she was to me?
“In recovery, I’ve learned that problems are a part of life,” Libby continues. “In fact, I think the only guaranteed experience in life might be pain. But it’s how you handle that pain that matters. You can let it consume you, or you can embrace it and move on.
“For a lot of people here, dealing with their problems means turning them over to a higher power. But I don’t buy it.”
A few people shift uncomfortably in their seats. Leave it to Libby to give a final testimony that smacks every other testimony full in the face. Maybe I’m imagining it, but I swear her gaze lands on me.
“I don’t believe in unconditional love,” she says. “I don’t believe that it’s possible for someone to love you that much, love you in spite of your problems, love you in spite of your pain.”
In the front row, the purple-haired woman yawns, makes an obvious show of checking her watch, twisting it on her tan wrist so that it catches the light and sparkles.
Libby’s eyes shift away from my face. “I don’t know, maybe I’m a pessimist, but in my experience, that kind of love doesn’t exist.”
Yeah, or maybe that’s because you chase it away with a sledgehammer. Right then, I know that I’m not sticking around to tell her goodbye. Will was right. Libby is a praying mantis. She chewed me up and spit me out. But even in my pulverized state, I have too much pride to let her revel in the damage.
I start to stand up, but my chair creaks again, and the guy in front of me gives his neighbor a wide-eyed Can you believe this guy? look. I sink back down. I’ll sneak out afterwards, when everybody else swarms to congratulate Libby.
“One of the best things that Fish . . .” Libby catches herself, shoots an affectionate glance at Richard Fisher who nods in response. “. . . Mr. Fisher helped me to understand that the second step doesn’t have to be about any one kind of God. It’s about any source, bigger than myself, that’s strong enough to hold the weight of my feelings. For me, that’s art.”
My mind travels back over the paintings I’ve seen Libby do in art class—the broken and disfigured self-portrait that first met me in the art room.
“Through art, I can explore any feeling that I have. I can put it all out there—no matter how dark, no matter how disturbing, no matter how painful. My art is big enough to handle it all.”
I know I’m not imagining it this time. Libby’s gaze settles right on my face, her eyes electric paddles on my heart. And then she looks away, and I can’t take this anymore. I stand up, not giving a shit about my squeaky chair, and walk out of the room.