“Unless you want to stay home, Vicky. That’s an option.”
I honestly would like nothing better than to stay in my room and not come out for a very long time, but putting it off will only make the fear of it even worse.
“I’ll go,” I say.
Jenna calls around midnight, after Lipton’s gone and I’m in my pajamas but unable to sleep until I hear from her. I crawl into bed with my phone.
“They took me to the hospital,” she says. “I had to talk to this lady in the psych ward and I told her I was fine, but they wouldn’t let me go until my mom got there. She was freaking out for a while or I would’ve called sooner.”
Jenna starts telling me what happened, how Tristan was really nice at first but everything was going too fast. He kept pressuring her to do things she didn’t want to do. Every time she resisted he’d say, “I thought you were cool” and “I didn’t realize you were such a tease.” She was afraid to break it off with him because her only friends were his friends, and then she’d be completely alone.
I keep murmuring “I’m sorry” as she tells the rest, how he got her alone at a party, and kept pressuring her.
“I told him I only wanted to be friends,” she says. “That I wanted to go home. And he got mad.”
“He didn’t—”
“No. But he wouldn’t let me leave the room so he could tell everyone we did. Then he made it sound like I was totally obsessed with, you know . . . And the rumor spread and everyone was saying stuff about me and I just got really depressed.”
“I should’ve been there for you. I’m so sorry.”
Neither one of us says anything for a while, but it’s not awkward. I can hear her breath. I’m sure she can hear mine. We’ve sat in silent togetherness a thousand times, just being there for each other. It’s normal. Comfortable.
“I can’t believe you found me,” she says quietly. “On a cliff in the middle of Wisconsin.”
I swallow, wanting to ask but afraid to know the answer, of finding out how close I came to losing her. “Are you okay? I mean, you’re not . . . you wouldn’t . . .”
“I wasn’t going to jump or anything. I mean, I thought about it. I didn’t want to go back to school. I didn’t want to do anything. I just wanted it all to stop. But then I hiked up there and looked out over the valley. It was clear and I could see really far, and I guess I realized there’s so much more out there, so much ahead of me. I really want to know what happens next. With you, with me, with . . . I don’t know, the world.” She laughs. “It gets better, right? I mean, high school isn’t forever.”
“Thank God.”
Jenna laughs again. “I knew you were Vicurious. And she wouldn’t abandon me. You wouldn’t.”
“But I did. I thought you were better off without me. I abandoned you.”
“I deserved it, the way I was acting.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I don’t know who I was trying to be. Someone I don’t even like. And then you wouldn’t talk to me and I texted stuff I didn’t mean. I don’t know why I did it. I’m so stupid.”
“And I imagined the worst, and then it really was the worst. I’m like a walking, talking, self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“We both screwed up, big-time.”
“And then I made Vicurious.”
“Which, holy crap.”
We laugh, and talk about all the crazy images I posted, and the yin-yang, and even the name Vicurious, how it all started with our friendship. We make plans to see each other over Christmas. We’re not sure where, but one of us will fly to the other. Even if my fear of the airport, and walking through security, and taking my shoes off in front of people, and sitting next to a complete stranger kills me . . . I will see Jenna in December.
“What about Vicurious?” she asks. “You going to keep doing it?”
I sigh. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll talk to Mrs. Greene about it. She’s my, uh . . . therapist?” I say it like a question, because I’ve never really spoken it aloud. I have a therapist.
“School counselor Mrs. Greene?” says Jenna.
“Yeah. She’s going to help me figure some stuff out, I guess.”
“Mom said she’s getting me a therapist, too. And I’m changing schools. I’m really going to need you, Vicky. Promise you won’t disappear again.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
We talk until we’re both too tired to stay awake, but right before we hang up, Jenna says, “I hope you keep Vicurious.”
And I feel a twinge, a jealousy of my own creation. “You like her better than me, don’t you.”
“No, dummy,” says Jenna. “It’s just that she’s the only thing that got me through some days.”
34
“IMAGINE THERE’S A TIGER IN the room. Right there.” Mrs. Greene points to the far corner. “What do you do?”
My eyes dart to where she pointed. There’s no tiger, of course.
“Would you fight it? Run?”
I shake my head. “I’d sit very still. Hope it doesn’t see me.”
“It sees you. It’s walking toward you now. Getting closer.”
I make myself smaller.
“It’s right in front of you. It looks hungry.”
It’s been a week now since my unmasking as Vicurious, and this is my third session with Mrs. Greene. She’s trying to help me understand why I behave the way I do, why I panic over normal, everyday stuff. The suggestion that I’m about to be eaten by a tiger is triggering some of my usual reactions. Palms sweating, heart pounding.
“When your brain senses danger, there are three defaults,” she says. “Fight, flight, or freeze. You can try and attack the tiger, you can bolt, or you can do what you did, which is to freeze.”
“And get eaten?”
Mrs. Greene chuckles. “Luckily, we don’t run into a lot of tigers around here.”
She pulls out a diagram of the brain and points to this little almond-shaped blob on each side. It’s called the amygdala, and it’s the asshole that’s been ruining my life, apparently. Whenever it senses danger, it pulls an alarm. And in the absence of a fire or hungry tigers, mine has decided to pull the alarm for everything else.
Which explains a lot.
Like, how sometimes I can’t speak at all and other times I can’t stop. Or the way the roaring in my ears drowns everything else out. “When there’s a tiger in the room, it’s kind of hard to think about anything else except how to not get eaten,” she says.
I’m hyper-focused on the tiger, or whatever is my tiger. Things like walking into class late, conversations with strangers, getting called on by a teacher . . . all the things on my Terror List.
I’m supposed to write them down now. My tigers. Then we’ll figure out how to tame them. (Or keep them in their cages at least, and learn to trust that they won’t get me.)
For now, it helps to have someone who sees my tigers for what they are, and tells me, “It’s safe, it’s not going to hurt you, you’ll be okay, you can do this.”
That someone used to be Jenna. Now it’s Lipton, and Mrs. Greene, and my mom. Someday, I hope I can be that person for myself.