back down, paused the TV show, and opened up a new document. Email notifications flooded the side of the screen. I was about to X them all out when I froze: Tessa hadn’t remembered to pose as me and email about being sick, had she?
“Shit,” I barked aloud. It was almost five on a summer Friday, so my boss was already gone. I had pages I was supposed to ship today. Why hadn’t anybody called me? I snatched up my purse, still crumpled in the hallway. Maybe her assistant was still in the office. Maybe I could make up something dramatic, something dramatic but not fact-checkable, so I couldn’t have been in the ER, but maybe I’d witnessed someone getting in a crazy accident, and somehow my phone had died and my watch wasn’t working and I’d spent all day off the grid in Urgent Care and then a police precinct—
My fingers, feeling for the smooth familiarity of my phone, stopped fumbling around in my purse and instead I dumped the contents onto the wood floor. Wallet, lipstick, gum, eye drops, pack of tissues. No phone in sight. I checked the zipper pockets, just to be sure. Let out another loud, low groan.
A few tears squeezed out of me, a single little sob over everything, my entire disgusting oeuvre.
I trudged back over to my computer. I wouldn’t fiddle with the margins this time; I wouldn’t open an old notebook and find space to glue in the entry. But the act of recording had always soothed me, the steady clack of my fingers against the keys.
I’ve spent the entire day wishing I had some powerful depressants on hand so I could knock myself out for a while, but it wouldn’t even matter because then I’d wake up tomorrow or in the wee hours of tonight and still be me. I’d still be this rabid, unpredictable stranger pushing against the inside of my skin. Sometimes I wonder who I’d be if things had gone differently. Maybe I’d be calmer and more competent, less prone to blanks in my memory and erratic behavior when handed a drink, if my brain hadn’t been stewing since childhood in a constant bath of Prozac and Lexapro and Tofranil and Wellbutrin and Ritalin and Adderall and god only knows what else. If my parents hadn’t been such fucking cowards. If they’d actually considered the long-term consequences of a fucking tsunami of chemicals crashing into a developing brain. I can almost see the alternate timeline on Earth 2, the one where little Lindsay just knew acceptance and love.
For now, though, I’m fucked. Fucked and fucked up, and who knows how much is my own doing and how much is my parents’. By now, it hardly matters. All I know is my brain’s so warped that a single bump of cocaine has permanently screwed everything up. I’m scared—scared of my brain, scared of myself. Today I told another person about the Warsaw Incident. Now another human knows, another living person with the knowledge that she should stay far away from me.
I noticed that my arms and legs were freezing, my teeth chattering as if I were out in the cold. I was sprinting toward a cliff and couldn’t stop until I’d leapt, until the ground below me gave way to air. I let out a loud whimper and felt my fingers moving furiously.
My parents were right to be afraid of me, to place a pill next to my water glass every night at dinner and to not let me eat until they’d seen it slip down my throat. I don’t know what’s in me, why I’m like this. I didn’t think that side of me would ever show itself again. But it did, last night. Now I know for sure.
A dizzying swoop, like I’d done something irreversible. I went back to the top and added a salutation:
Dear Edie,
I read the whole thing over once as a bird screeched outside my window. I moved the cursor to the trash icon. Then I just closed my laptop, the draft left buzzing like a wasp trapped inside the window screen.
Chapter 14
I managed to leave the house late the next morning, blinking into the sun in slight surprise that it all still existed. I picked up groceries and a bag of expensive coffee beans and whirred them in my coffee grinder, enjoying the growl and the slight thrill of a spinning blade, one that could take off my fingertips if it