Freedom of Sketch

The Fall

The shivering trees shed their humble green coats and shake off papery orange leaves, carpeting the yard. We walk around in the piles, crunchcrunchcrunch, stumbling in loose, laceless shoes. Our shadows stretch, thin and awkward, across the lawn. Beyond the brick wall, the flat sky blushes a faint purple. The stars are shy tonight; we have to strain our eyes to count them. When the night staff arrive, the sun has already gone to bed and left us inside an empty black bowl.

The late September breeze sighs on our skin, cool and sweet, the tail end of summer. My heart aches at the change. In one respect, I appreciate the arrival of fall. Time is still alive; the world is still breathing, moving forward, growing. The circle of life remains intact. At the same time, I resent it. My days are confined to a box; I am still dangling, upside-down, in limbo. More tally marks for the wall space behind my bed. Summer is the train I missed, the smoke I can't grasp. I can't settle down if there's no rewind button for my life.

Tonight is one of the last nights where it's just warm enough for the staff to agree to leave the yard doors open. Some of the girls drape themselves over armchairs, or huddle in front of the television, where the commercials focus on back-to-school supplies and similarly depressing subject matter. 'Tis the season for pumpkin-spiced beverages, new notebooks, and rakes.

A group of girls, led by Violet, bets their snacks in a short-lived game of poker, then starts a catty, profanity-laced conversation about the "dirty cunt nurse" who confiscates their cards. Others cheerfully twitter about celebrity crushes, reality shows, and pop-rock bands while weaving friendship bracelets out of lengths of brightly-colored thread. Underneath their casual, everyday clothes are bodies that remember the fiery lick of razor blades, the dizzying edge of starvation, the latest fall down the rabbit hole. It's safer to be here, locked in self-created dysfunction. We're immune to the taste of our own poison.

I isolate myself and pull a piece of thread from my sweatshirt, winding it around my fingers until the tips are numb and purple. I unwind the thread and watch the crisscrossed white stripes fade as blood floods back in. Then I wind them up again, tie them together, wrap the thread around in a sharp spiral down my wrist, unwind. If I unravel the whole sweatshirt, will I have enough thread to tie around my entire body to make it numb? I spend the next half hour inhaling the empty conversations riding on the sterile, circulated air, purifying myself from the inside-out. I keep winding the thread, tighter and tighter, watch through the window as an airplane traces the Big Dipper, red lights blinking on its wings. My tortured fingers throbthrobthrob. My heart beats, and I wait.

The techs break us into groups of four to a table to decorate mini pumpkins, our sweater sleeves rolled to our elbows. I hold my pumpkin sideways and concentrate on painting a detailed skeleton face on it. Toothy grin, hollow eyes, upside-down heart for a nose: simple, spooky, perfect.

I glance over at Lizzie. She's resting her head on her hand. Her eyelids droop; her gaze is unfocused and her mind is drifting somewhere dangerous. I wonder if she's remembering our past.

***

The year I turned fourteen, my mother banned me from trick-or-treating (which she decided was too "immature" for someone my age), and assigned me the task of candy distribution so she could stay inside the warm house and watch her favorite menopausal crisis movies, recorded on the DVR.

At first, I was pissed, but then Daniel helped me transform my innocent, white-collar front yard into a misty haunted cemetery. We drenched the grass in red corn syrup (an action that later got me grounded), created tombstones out of spray-painted cardboard, wrapped the bushes in fake cobwebs, and bought a fog machine with the money Daniel saved from his job at a gas station. The two of us crowded together in front of my bathroom mirror and painted our eye sockets black and our skin gray. Eyeliner, plastic fangs, face paints, and little tubes of gel blood littered the vanity. Items clattered into the sink as we groped around for our cell phones and sodas. I couldn't help but notice how the mirror framed our reflection. Our eyes met, Daniel's lively gaze briefly kicking my heart out of rhythm.

After the sun set, we assumed our positions behind the pillars on my front porch, waited for our unsuspecting victims to come skipping and giggling up the brick walkway, then leaped out to scare them. They screamed and clutched at one another's overpriced polyester costumes, but their glistening eyes brightened as soon as we revealed the consolation prize: a big bucket of sweets we'd been guarding. Even so, several high-strung parents threatened to sue us for giving their precious toddlers post-traumatic stress disorder. But Daniel and I were invincible creatures of the night - that is, until he decided to leave at midnight to go to a party where he got shitfaced drunk. Before this October, I was only vaguely familiar with PTSD.

***

Last year, as was tradition, Lizzie, Daniel, and I gathered in a circle on my bedroom floor and spilled our leftover candy into the middle so we could pick through the stash and find our favorites. But Lizzie numbly sat there with her hands on her thighs and did nothing, her expressionless eyes looking at everything but the candy. And when I asked her what was wrong, she reminded me of her ongoing diet, to which I responded that she was crazy since she was "soooo skinny!" I didn't understand that she had a real problem and I didn't know what kinds of things you should and shouldn't say to people with those types of problems. All I really knew was that we weren't as happy as we should have been. The adults reminded us that we were in the prime of our lives and so incredibly fortunate to be teenagers, but we didn't agree. Something was missing, something more than the thirtysomething pounds Lizzie had lost since sophomore year.