Ernest Shackleton was an Antarctic explorer. Someone once said, “For scientific leadership, give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems to be no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.” That’s how awesome he was. He’s not remembered for conquering Antarctica. He’s remembered for surviving it against all odds.
When Shackleton’s men were stuck on the ice without hope of land, without hope of rescue, and every single moment could be called a treacherous brush with death, they found to their surprise that things settled down pretty quickly. Only a few days after their ship, the Endurance, went down, they settled into routine and their sense of constant danger gave way to a sense of…boredom.
That’s basically what’s happened to me.
I am so bored. Everything in a hospital is very routine. Pain checks, check-ins, bed checks. You’re expecting One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and it’s just checkmarks on a whiteboard.
So I’ve been writing, and trying to edit what I’m writing here, because the TV doesn’t have TCM and the only thing on is Law & Order in every flavor. We have a big library I could use, and it has a bunch of movies, but the nurses will not get me any DVDs, because I am theoretically capable of wheeling myself there and getting them myself.
My leg still hurts, but that’s not why I won’t go out there. It’s that I don’t want to see who’s here. I’m hiding. I’m going home in two days, and if I just play my cards right, I can get out clean, unscathed, virtually scarless.
In here I’m safe.
But the only thing to do is write.
Maybe that’s Roberts’s evil plan. Bore me into writing down my secrets.
I look at this morning’s entry, before I got off on that Shackleton tangent…How did that even happen?
I ate breakfast.
I cringe because it’s true and if Roberts wants me to write true things, that’s what she’s getting, but it’s just so dumb to write it down. Now I remember how I got distracted. I cross out “breakfast” and write in:
really weird-looking eggs that are the consistency of blubber
…because I thought that earlier and wondered what it would be like to eat blubber like they did on Antarctic missions. And then I got lost in all that stuff about Shackleton.
If I hadn’t remembered to write it down, it would have been lost forever, that weird thought about blubber. And in a way, it’s more true than just saying breakfast, even though it’s probably wrong because I don’t know what blubber really feels like. But saying it that way feels more real.
When I look up, Eleanor is standing right next to my bed.
I didn’t even hear her come in.
We just kind of stare at each other for a second. You have to understand, she’s not like normal people. You can’t just say boring stuff like “Hey, how’s it going?” to her. I mean, she’s wearing her fleece shark costume with teeth hanging down over her head. It’s beyond filthy, and all the teeth are stained and brown. It’s the kind of thing that would seem like an affectation if anyone did it in school, like one of those cool kids who think they’re so offbeat that society can’t stifle their creativity, and they all listen to the same hipster music and read Sartre and practice Buddhism and threaten to kill themselves and stuff, and everyone knows they’re the real A-list kids even though they say they’re outcasts. Everything they do seems like watching a TV show, like they’re asking you, “Am I interesting?” every time they get dressed.
But you look into Eleanor’s eyes and see: this girl’s the real deal.
So we just kind of sit there in silence for a long time, which is hard if you’ve ever done that. Silence is pretty much always uncomfortable for me, except with George, of course.
“We’re going to be best friends,” Eleanor says finally, as though we’ve been having a long conversation and this is its conclusion.
“Okay,” I mumble. My heart is racing.
And then she erupts, chattering on about her various brushes with the law. Her mom is an artist and her dad is really rich, so she goes to boarding school in France. She hates boarding school because it’s all so pretentious, but she misses her boyfriend. She’s a criminal and an artist and schizophrenic and amazing. She hears voices and has spirits who follow her. They’re totally real to her, she tells me. But she hasn’t seen them since she got here because she’s doped out of her mind.
“So what are you in for?” she asks.
“I crashed my car. Broken leg.”
“No, what are you in for. What’s your story?” She pokes me hard. Her arms are covered with thin white lines. They look so delicate I don’t know what they are at first.
“I don’t understand.”
“Yeah you do. You know. I can see right through you.”
I bite my lip.
“I broke my leg. It’s just…standard procedure,” I say, parroting back what I’ve been told. She gets off the bed and goes to the door.
“You know, we might be allies. But I need allies I can trust, Miss”—she consults the chart on my door—“Miss Sadie Black. And in the grand scheme of things, embracing the truth of your plight is likely to do more good than harm. You can’t fight an enemy you don’t understand.”
She steps out of the room.
“Wait!” I call after her. She grins and returns to me.
“It’s the silence that makes you crazy, you know? Who am I going to tell, anyway? No one would believe me. I’m psychotic. I’m a liar.”
“Right. But I’m telling the truth.” I think I am, at least. Sometimes I don’t even know.
“Oh come on. You want to tell someone. Tell me. What is it? Raped by a football player? Alcoholic? Bulimic? Suicidal cry for help—”
“It’s nothing! There’s just been a misunderstanding about the car crash.”
“Because of your friend.”
“What?” My heart stops.
“The one you don’t want to talk about.”
“How do you know about that?”
She smiles. “I have my ways. I am invisible to those in power.”
She raises her eyebrows expectantly.
I hold my breath. I grit my teeth, weighing the options. I know better. But then, there is something about being in the glow of someone interesting and watching her listen. Having her full attention is such a rush. My little life seems so magnified in her eyes.
I’ve never told this to anyone. Not even Lucie. Definitely not Henry. But my mouth is already moving, even though part of me is trying to choke back the words. Before I can stop myself, I reply faintly:
“His name is George. And he’s…not real.”
She cackles maniacally. “His name is George? Just George?”
“Well…yeah.” George doesn’t have a last name, I realize. I never considered it important.
“Is he a person or a monster or what?”
“A person. But he’s just kind of an imaginary friend. Not like a hallucination or anything.”
“Sure, sure. And what do you and George do?”
“We hang out,” I say lamely.
“Do tell.”
“Mostly we go places that I read about.”
“How?”
“We just do. Haven’t you ever daydreamed or…like…imagined something?”
“Sure,” Eleanor says, exasperated. “But I want details! Details! Technical tips and tricks!”
I sigh. It’s hard to explain.
“Well, I just…think about it,” I say. “And then the thinking becomes daydreaming and the whole world fades away and I’m with George.”
Right then, we hear footsteps. Our heads snap to the door like two meerkats.
“Cover for me,” Eleanor whispers. I nod. She slips into the bathroom, where I can barely see her hair and shark fin in the mirror.
It’s a nurse.
“Hello,” I say.
“Was someone in here with you?”
“No.”
She raises an eyebrow at me. “Are you sure? Dr. Roberts is going to be here in five minutes.”
“Yes, I’m sure,” I say, too formally for it to sound true. “I was, however, reading aloud.”
“All right. By the way, a boy called—”
“I know,” I say, clutching my T-shirt on instinct, like wringing his neck. “I’ll call him later.”
“He must be nice, such a sweet young Romeo, calling you all the time.”
“That story doesn’t end well,” I tell her.
“Yes, but it begins so beautifully.”
She sighs dramatically and leaves. I grin. She’s not so bad.
“That was close,” Eleanor says, apparating herself to my bedside. “The doctors here are morons, but the nurses have laser vision.”
“Will you get in trouble for being in here?”
“More for poisoning the minds of America’s youth. Don’t worry, though. Roberts is a lamb compared to some.”
“She’s trickier than you think,” I tell her. My notebook is under the covers and I run my fingers over its bony spiral binding. “She wants me to write down stuff about George. She thinks it’ll make it easier for us to talk about…things. But I know she’s going to use it against me.”
“Why are you doing it, then?”
I think about it, and I don’t have a good reason except…a person in a white coat told me to. Milgram experiment in action, I guess. Stanley Milgram did this famous experiment where a person dressed up like an authority figure told random people to give electric shocks to a stranger, and a lot of people did it even though they could hear the person screaming. Sometimes they kept going until the person stopped screaming altogether. I feel a little ashamed.
“Well…I refuse to write anything about George. It’s too dangerous. But I can’t really do what she wants, so it doesn’t matter anyway,” I tell her.
“Can’t do what?”
“Write a story. A true story or whatever she said. I tried, but it sounds stupid.”
Eleanor gets up and stands on the bed, towering over me. The movement from her standing shoots waves of pain up my leg, but I’m so stunned I barely notice.
“I’ll bet it’s a great story!” she shouts down at me. “But don’t write it for them. Write it for me. I have an appreciation for the fine art of hallucination.”
“He’s really not a hallucination.”
“Daydream, then, my little dreamer.” She drops down. “So tell me about him.”
“What do you want to know?”
“What does he look like?”
“I don’t know. Like…a guy,” I tell her. “He’s got black hair and blue eyes.”
“Is he hot?”
At this point, I notice Eleanor’s pretty brown eyes, and the bloodshot whites. They reminded me of Henry’s eyes when he gets offstage after a concert: the way he’s completely disoriented and can’t even hear me. He always looks like he’s struggling to break through from some other world. I wonder where Eleanor is coming from.
I can see her toenails through her threadbare socks: bright red. I notice the pink bandages on her arm, and how they are covered in words I can’t read, like they’ve been tightened and the words have been misaligned. And then I realize that she is staring at me, and I am staring at her and saying nothing, and so I have to answer her.
“I like his eyes,” I say, still contemplating Eleanor more than George. Of course he is hot, in a way. But not in a way that is easy to explain. He’s hot to me. It’s like when you see a picture of someone you know well and they appear to be so much less than who they are to you. Describing him ruins it all.
“Tell me about them! Specifics!”
It’s strange. It’s hard to pull his face to my mind even though I knew it so well. I am filled with Eleanor.
“Well, they’re blue.”
“Blue how?”
“Blue…like the ocean.”
“Like the ocean? That’s called a cliché. You can’t describe someone’s eyes like they’re the ocean, unless you go full Princess Bride and they’re like the sea after a storm.”
“Well, what if it’s true?”
She taps her temple, thinking.
“I suppose if the truth is a cliché, then…you must accept it no matter how boring. Or trite,” she concludes.
I don’t like that. Nothing about George is a cliché.
“Well, it is true,” I start, thinking of his eyes. Blue could be so many things, if you really paid attention. “But they’re a totally original kind of blue, just like the ocean is new every day. Sometimes they’re ice-blue like the polar seas. Sometimes they’re blue as water over white sand. Sometimes they’re blue like the deep ocean where the fish that light up live. Dark blue. Dangerous blue. They’re blue like they could capture a ship for Davy Jones’s locker, and all the pirates would never care that they were dead because they would have gotten to see that perfect shade of nocturnal ocean blue.”
She grins.
“Blue like that ocean is certainly not a cliché.”
“I’ve never seen the ocean.” It’s true: in all our family trips, we never made it to the coast.
“Could have fooled me.”
“Me too,” says a voice from the door.
Dr. Roberts is standing there, looking in on us.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to steal Sadie for a while,” says Dr. Roberts.
Eleanor leans in close.
“Promise me you won’t tell her a thing. Save your stories for me,” Eleanor hisses. She spits a little in my ear, but I don’t mind.
I nod.
“Eleanor, you’re not supposed to be in here,” Roberts says, her hand sweeping toward the door. “You girls are welcome to socialize in the common room.”
“I knew you were special,” Eleanor whispers in my ear. And off she swims, a shark on land.
“Did you write your story?” Roberts asks, settling herself in.
“It’s not done,” I tell her.
“Oh? But that means you are working on it, right?”
I don’t want to tell her about my brilliant “true” observations:
Nothing is on TV.
My socks are blue.
I want pizza.
I just give her my most masterful sullen-teenager stare. She clears her throat. I win.
“So what would you like to talk about today?”
“Nothing.”
“How about some coloring. It’s very trendy right now. You’re going home in a few days. Could be a new hobby?”
She pulls some blank paper and an impossible quantity of crayons and pencils out of her briefcase of secrets. It must be bottomless to fit all that. She sets some on the little table I have across my bed.
“Are we going to do that stupid thing where you ask me to draw a house and a tree and it reveals my darkest secrets?”
She laughs.
“We can draw a house if you want to. Here: draw me your house, and I’ll draw something for you too. Then you can know all my darkest secrets as well.”
“Fine.”
“Shall we listen to some music? I have these speakers….I noticed you have an iPod.”
“It’s a mix from my boyfriend. He sent it to me.”
“Oh? I heard there’s someone who keeps calling you, but you won’t take the call. Is that Henry?”
“Yes,” I groan. “It’s Henry. My boyfriend, Henry.”
“Not George?” I can practically hear her salivating.
“No. It’s Henry calling. And the music’s not private. It’s just his music and some bands we like. You can listen to it if you want to,” I say. She pulls out the speakers and I plug the iPod in to shut her up. In an instant the air is full of pure electrified punk rock. She cringes. One point to me. Some of Henry’s favorite music is hard to like.
We settle in and start drawing, but I can see her watching me, so I don’t know how many of her deepest darkest secrets are going on that paper. I try to focus, but my thoughts start to wander as I draw. I can’t get lost now, especially with her sitting right across from me. I have to be careful. There’s no way I can get away with daydreaming right in front of her. I focus as hard as I can on my house.
I start with the basement, where I draw two big squares: one for my room, and one for the laundry/storage place where all our old stuff is in boxes. It’s kind of like the part of a museum that’s off display, like our archives or something. After the crash, all of my parents’ travel and radio stuff got put in the basement: the records and suitcases and cassette tapes.
In my room, I draw little rectangles for the bookcases and my bed, and a little circle for my beanbag chair, where I like to sit and read. I draw the stairs up as even, neat lines. On the ground floor the kitchen becomes a geometry problem of cooking ephemera my mom never uses. The little island that used to host all my dad’s and my projects—Lego fortresses and Hot Wheels death circuits—rises in the middle of it. The living room, the bathroom, the master bedroom, all in a ring. The great big TV is reduced to a thin little rectangle from above. On the second floor, I outline my dad’s cave and my mom’s craft room—which are remarkably similar in their contents—and the other bathroom. I’m kind of fuzzier on those rooms. My parents shut themselves in their offices just like I shut myself in the basement. I write their names on their boxes instead.
Outside is where Old Charlotte used to be, so I fence in our yard and draw her in even though she’s gone.
That’s it, I think. That’s everything.
It looks awfully empty like that.
So I go back to the boxes in the basement and label them. Sometimes I forget that we have a second floor of the house. Our boxes I never forget.
Our whole life from before is in those boxes, but my parents don’t care. It’s nothing but a bunch of old junk to them now. Now they listen to classical music and NPR and run a respectable business. That’s what was fated for us, I guess. Besides all the records and all the things you need to play them, we have the whole collection of Mom’s Beatles stuff that you can’t imagine was easy to find in the 1970s when she was a kid. Like, Beatles shoes and cups and pins and pictures. She has newspaper clippings from when John Lennon was shot. Real ones, not even printouts. She has all these posters she made out of cut-up pictures, and all these drawn-over books of guitar tabs with her handwritten notes on them.
My dad’s got all his days on the road in boxes down there too: camp stoves, suitcases, cool old sleeping bags and stuff. He always wanted to take road trips when he was a teenager. My parents were going to live in a VW van at one point and just see the whole world. They thought they were going to have the most mobile life you could build, without furniture, without rules, without anything. Their lives were going to be motors and music and me. We were going to be vagabonds forever. It all packed up very nicely in the end.
I look at my drawing and it feels small because it is small. So I draw in every single thing I know is in our house, even the things I don’t really notice anymore: fancy pillows on the bed, the lamp in the living room, the windows and doors and chairs. My mom buys tons of furniture now, so I have lots of things to draw. I lose myself completely in the details and when I remember I’m supposed to be focused and not give anything away, Roberts is looking at my paper.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she says.
“It’s fine.” I shove the paper at her. “There’s the house. Are we done?”
“You’re very precise,” she says, examining it. She hands me hers. It’s two sticks with a roof, basically, and some flowers in the yard. It looks kind of like a little kid drew it. “Most of the time people draw the outside of the house. It’s interesting that you drew the floor plan,” she says.
“Yep. Fascinating. I’m probably a serial killer,” I say. Roberts laughs.
“Well, what do you think it means?”
“Probably about as much as the fact that you drew red flowers in front of yours.”
“I have red flowers in my yard right now. They’re my favorite part of my house. I love all these details in yours. You must really care about your house. What are these empty boxes up here, though?”
“My parents’ offices. I didn’t finish them.”
“Why?”
“Why are you making me do these stupid things? Write a story? Draw a picture?”
“I asked you to do it. I’m not making you do it.”
“But why?”
“Because we sometimes…reveal ourselves in what we write or draw or say or do, in ways we can’t see, ourselves, very easily. And when we talk with another person, we may figure out things we wouldn’t have realized any other way.”
“But I don’t want to ‘reveal myself.’ I want you to just believe me when I tell you I wasn’t trying to kill myself. Because that’s the truth. That’s my true story: I crashed my car into a tree and it was an accident. The end.”
“So, why don’t you want to do it, then?” I rush to answer and she holds up her hand. “And don’t say because it’s stupid…think about it for a second.”
I do. I wait a long time so she’ll think I’ve delved really deep into my subconscious, and then I tell her:
“My English teacher made one of the exam questions last year ‘Why did Mary Shelley write Frankenstein?’ The answer was, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein because she was afraid of childbirth. Like it was a fact. Not like she sat down to tell a story, but like she just sat down and said, ‘I’m afraid of childbirth, and hence I shall write Frankenstein.’
“I don’t think people write stories like that. And it’s kind of rotten, to just disregard that she wrote a really kick-ass scary story. It’s like the story doesn’t even matter. And I don’t know if you ever even get to know what you mean when you tell a story. But you can know what you’re saying. And I just think that we should look at the facts, and take people at their word.”
“But that’s exactly the point, isn’t it? That maybe we can see something new as readers.”
“But how could we ever know that it’s true?”
“We can’t,” she says, shrugging. “Just like I can never really know what’s inside your head. All I can do is provide…feedback. Help you identify themes, ask questions, challenge suppositions…but you’re writing this story. You can write a lot of stories from the same facts. It’s interesting to look at which one you choose to tell.”
Dead end. Obvious trap. Abort mission.
“So what do you think of my house?” I ask.
She looks at it for a moment, then she tucks it into her briefcase to be analyzed with the rest of me.
“Honestly? What I’m wondering is…what you stand to gain by changing the subject.”
Oh, Dr. Roberts. You must love us teenage girls. So ready to break at any moment. So ready to erupt into a fountain of answers if only someone would listen. If only someone would speak that one sentence that is so insightful it cuts through the sarcasm. You must love the challenge. The puzzle. Just what is wrong with Sadie Black?
Well, fat chance she’ll be finding out. I will outsmart her. It’s nothing personal. That’s simply how it is. She’s the enemy—
“Sadie? You’re wandering, aren’t you?” she says, and I snap to attention.
“What?”
“You looked like you were somewhere else.”
“No.”
“Sadie. Don’t you think people can see when your thoughts are somewhere else?”
“I’m not crazy!”
“No one said you were.”
Blunder. If this were a game of chess, what I just did was a blunder. Roberts takes the board. Black flips the board onto the floor. Chess pieces everywhere.
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” she says after an awkward minute.
“Then what do you think?”
“I think you’re complicated, and you’re trying to figure some stuff out.”
And then, for some reason, I smile.
“I think you’re complicated,” she told me so sweetly, like a serpent, “and you’re trying to figure some stuff out.”
Then I smiled because I’m an idiot. She almost got me.
I outsmarted Roberts for now, but I must be careful. Every moment is a battle. I have to remember that.
I stop before I write something I will regret. I’m trying to remember it all, to observe everything like an explorer, but it’s almost impossible.
See, even explorers fail at that. It’s like, if you climb Mount Everest, a lot of that time is alone in your head walking. But do people write down step after step? No, they write down the interesting parts. That’s just how a journal works. It’s exactly like the pain in my leg: every day is full of it, punctuated by little moments of talking, little checkmarks on a sheet. Sometimes exciting things happen. But mostly the adventure is pain.
Pain is the measure of my time, like steps taken on a journey. But I won’t remember that. Or rather, I’ll remember, but I won’t feel it. Even when I write it down, it doesn’t make it real to the person I will be in the future.
I am in constant pain.
See, that doesn’t carry that pain forward. It’s just a statement. The word pain is just the shadow of a stranger who’s already gone.
I could paint a better picture, and maybe I could feel it then. Maybe I could carry that pain out of myself and into another person. But do I want to remember that? Or do I want to let it go?
What is it possible to save with words?
George. George. George. I write his name down as faintly as possible, but even that doesn’t bring him here. George written down is just a word. Like pain.
I stop and stare at the page.
I completely mark out those featherlight words in black just in case. I know better than to write even his name.
My heart is pounding. What was I thinking? If I write his name and Roberts sees it, they’ll take George away. If I tell Roberts about George, he will die.
I black out half the page around where I wrote his name, destroying everything near it. Just to be safe.
It would be nice, though: storing George in my notebook just in case. But if I came back, if I read what I wrote, would I even be the same me who wrote these words? Could I resurrect him from a few scribbled lines? I don’t know if I could even save George by putting him in this journal.
But what else can I do?
George has always lived in my head. I never thought that was an unsafe place for him to be. I never thought—never even imagined—that anyone could take my thoughts from me. But Eleanor says they can steal your dreams, and I think she knows. This place I’m in, it can change what you think. It can uncover your deepest treasures and take them away. It can make things that once made sense to you unrecognizable. It can make you a different person, and those things you didn’t write down…they’re just gone.
What would I do if I lost the Star Palace forever? What would I do if I somehow lost George?
Dr. Roberts made me smile. She found a crack.
I can’t talk about George, because then everyone will know I’m crazy. They will take my thoughts away, fix me. I live a beautiful life of shattered options, coexisting all at once, all of them unreal. I know that sounds crazy, but I’m not insane. You’d have to be insane not to want this.
George and I have lived in hundreds of worlds and hundreds of books. We passed our O.W.L. exams side by side. There are no mountains we have not scaled, no oceans we have not explored, and yet still there’s infinitely more to see. He’s taken me to Amsterdam countless times, to drink countless bottles of stars. I don’t know why I live this way, but I can’t stop. I’d die without George. I’d be empty.
My hand hovers over my notebook. Am I strong enough to walk out of here with George safe inside my head? Maybe a message in a bottle, to some future me, is his best shot.
Maybe if I wrote down our stories and did the best I could, made them as beautiful as they felt, I would be able to find him again.
I try to remember without going to him. I try to think of what it looks like from the outside, so I don’t get sucked under. In these memories, I am a character in my own story, and that character is behaving…strangely.
Sadie hadn’t gotten out of bed for days. She had been lying on the bottom of a black ocean.
I stop. I don’t want to think about this. And anyway, I could never capture what it feels like to be with him. I’m not good at anything, not even telling my own story. Why bother to try?
Instead I write George a note that no one else could understand.
I am so sorry. I’m sorry I let myself get us here, and I’m sorry for every time you have called me and I have turned away. I am yours, and you are mine. I want us to have forever, to seek and find.