Finding Audrey

“Look, it’s the celebrity!” quips Ollie’s dad, Rob. He’s been calling me “the celebrity” for the last four weeks, even though Mum and Dad have separately been over to ask him to stop. He thinks it’s funny and that my parents have no sense of humour. (I’ve often noticed that people equate “having a sense of humour” with “being an insensitive moron.”)

The children’s unit is at a big private hospital called St. John’s, which Mum and Dad got the insurance for through Dad’s job. (The first question they ask when you arrive is not “How do you feel?” It’s “Do you have insurance?”) I lived here for six weeks, after Mum and Dad worked out that there was something really wrong with me. The trouble is, depression doesn’t come with handy symptoms like spots and a temperature, so you don’t realize at first. You keep saying “I’m fine” to people when you’re not fine. You think you should be fine. You keep saying to yourself: “Why aren’t I fine?”

“I’ve been ill forever.”

“Not forever,” she says in calm tones. “I first met you…” She consults her computer screen. “March sixth. You’d probably been ill for a while before that without realizing. But the good news is, you’ve come such a long way, Audrey. You’re improving every day.”

“Improving?” I break off, trying to speak calmly. “I’m supposed to be starting a new school in September. I can’t even talk to people. One new person comes to the house and I freak out. How can I go to school? How can I do anything? What if I’m like this forever?”

A tear is running down my cheek. Where the hell did that come from? Dr. Sarah hands me a tissue without comment and I scrub at my eyes, lifting up my dark glasses briefly to do so.

“First of all, you will not be like this forever,” says Dr. Sarah. “Your condition is fully treatable. Fully treatable.”

Most people underestimate eyes. For a start, they’re powerful. They have range. You focus on someone a hundred feet away, through a whole bunch of people, and they know you’re looking at them. What other bit of human anatomy can do that? It’s practically being psychic, is what it is.

But they’re like vortexes too. They’re infinite. You look someone straight in the eye and your whole soul can be sucked out in a nanosecond. That’s what it feels like. Other people’s eyes are limitless and that’s what scares me.

“After a while, I’d like you to start interviewing people. Could you make eye contact with someone through a camera, do you think?”

I feel a blinding shaft of terror, which I tell myself to ignore, as my brain will often try to send me messages that are untrue and I do not have to listen to them. This is lesson one at St. John’s: your brain is an idiot.

“I don’t know.” I swallow, feeling my fists clench up. “Maybe.”

“Great.” Dr. Sarah gives me her angelic smile. “I know this feels hard and scary, Audrey. But I think it will be a great project for you.”

I can eat supper with my family. I can go to see Dr. Sarah in my safe little bubble of car-waiting-room-Dr.-Sarah’s-room-car-home. All the people in my therapy groups at St. John’s—they’re comfort people too. Because they’re not a threat. (OK, OK, I know people aren’t really a threat. But try telling my stupid brain that.)

It’s everyone else who is the problem. People on the street, people at the front door, people on the phone. You have no idea how many people there are in the world until you start getting freaked out by them.

So then. All the bad stuff happened. And I kind of slid off a cliff. And here I am. Stuck in my own stupid brain.

Dad says it’s totally understandable and I’ve been through a trauma and now I’m like a small baby who panics as soon as it’s handed to someone it doesn’t know. I’ve seen those babies, and they go from happy and gurgling to howling in a heartbeat. Well, I don’t howl. Not quite.

But I feel like howling.

Here’s the thing: does it matter exactly what happened and why those girls were excluded? It’s irrelevant. It happened. Done. Over. I’d rather not go into it.

We don’t have to reveal everything to each other. That’s another thing I’ve learned in therapy: it’s OK to be private. It’s OK to say no. It’s OK to say, “I’m not going to share that.” So, if you don’t mind, let’s just leave it there.

It won’t be forever. You’ll be in the dark for as long as it takes and then you’ll come out.

I stare at what he’s written, a bit taken aback. He sounds so confident.

You think?

My aunt grows special rhubarb in dark sheds. They keep it dark and warm all winter and harvest it by candlelight and it’s the best stuff. She sells it for a fortune, btw.

I lift a hand, my face twisted resolutely away, desperately wishing I could turn towards him, telling myself to turn—but not turning.

They talk about “body language,” as if we all speak it the same. But everyone has their own dialect. For me right now, for example, swiveling my body right away and staring rigidly at the corner means, “I like you.” Because I didn’t run away and shut myself in the bathroom.

I just hope he realizes that.

“You need to start widening your horizons. When we suffer prolonged anxiety, we have a tendency to become self-obsessed. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way,” she adds. “It’s simply a fact. You believe the whole world is thinking about you constantly. You believe the world is judging you and talking about you.”

“The more you engage with the outside world, the more you’ll be able to turn down the volume on those worries. You’ll see that they’re unfounded. You’ll see that the world is a very busy and varied place and most people have the attention span of a gnat. They’ve already forgotten what happened. They don’t think about it. There will have been five more sensations since your incident. Won’t there?”

I’d laugh, only my stupid lizard brain has disabled the laugh button for now. I’m too frozen up with tension. I am owed so much laughter. Sometimes I hope I’m building up a stockpile of missing laughs, and when I’ve recovered, they’ll all come exploding out in one gigantic fit that lasts twenty-four hours.

“I mean, books! What happened to books? That’s what we should be doing! Reading the Booker short list! Not watching all this toxic, mindless television and playing brain-sapping video games. I mean, what are we doing, Chris? What are we doing?”

“Absolutely.” Dad is nodding fervently. “No, I totally agree. Totally agree.” There’s a slight pause before he says, “What about Downton?”

“Oh, well, Downton.” Mum looks wrong-footed. “That’s different. That’s…you know. History.”

“And The Killing?” My parents are addicted to The Killing. They gorge themselves on like four episodes at a time, and then say, “One more? Just one more?”

“I’m talking about the children,” says Mum at last. “I’m talking about the future generation. They should be reading books.”

The thing about Mum is, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s just, no adults do. They’re totally ignorant, but they’re in control. It’s nuts. The parents are in charge of all the stuff like technology in the house and time on screens and hours on social media, but then their computer goes wrong and they’re like a baby, going, “What happened to my document?” “I can’t get Facebook.” “How do I load a picture? Double-click what? What does that mean?”

And we have to sort it out for them.

So Mum probably would cheer if she heard Frank wasn’t on the team anymore. And then in the next breath she’d say, “Darling, why don’t you take up a hobby and join a team?”

Linus might come over. He might not. Either way is fine. Either way, his decision is about himself, not about you. You are not responsible for his feelings.

What’s the point of you? Try this, for starters.

And underneath there’s a long list. He’s written a long, long list, that fills the page. I’m so flustered, I can’t even read it properly, but as I scan down I catch beautiful smile and great taste in music (I sneaked a look at your iPod) and awesome Starbucks name.

What I’ve learned is not to fight my lizard brain, but kind of tolerate it. Listen to it and then say, “Yeah, whatever.” […]

So when I freeze in sudden terror at the entrance to the supermarket, I force myself to smile and say, “Nice try, lizard brain.” I actually say it aloud, and exhale for twelve beats. (If you breathe out really slowly, it regulates the carbon dioxide in the brain and calms you down, instantly.) […]

And you know what? It kind of works.

“Sweetheart, I know you think it’ll be a cathartic experience and you’ll say your piece and everyone will come away the wiser,” says Dad. “But in real life, that doesn’t happen. I’ve confronted enough assholes in my time. They never realize they’re assholes. Not once. Whatever you say.”

Dr. Sarah isn’t wild about hearing about Izzy or Tasha or any of them. She’s all, like, “Audrey, you aren’t validated by other people,” and, “You’re not responsible for other people’s emotions” and “This Tasha sounds very tedious, let’s move off the topic.”

She even gave me a book about unhealthy relationships. (I almost laughed out loud. Could you get any more unhealthy than the relationship between me and Tasha?) It was about how you have to be strong to break free from abuse and not constantly measure yourself against toxic people but stand strong and distinct like a healthy tree. Not some stunted, falling-over, codependent victim tree. Or whatever.

“Look, Linus…” I try to explain. “I have to do this.”

“Don’t give me that bollocks!” he yells. “I thought your therapist banned those words? I thought the only thing you ‘have to’ do in life is obey the laws of physics? Didn’t you learn anything? What about living in the present, not the past? What about that?”

I stare at him, silenced. He was listening more than I realized.

“You don’t ‘have to’ do this,” he continues, “you’re choosing to do it. What if you have a relapse? What then?”

“Then…” I wipe my damp face. “I won’t. I’ll be fine. I’m better, in case you hadn’t realized.”

Here’s what I’m not supposed to do after a stressful event: Ruminate about it. Brood. Replay it over and over. Take responsibility for anyone else’s emotions.

Here’s what I’ve been doing ever since my fight with Linus: Ruminating about it. Brooding. Replaying it over and over. Taking responsibility for his fury (yet resenting it). Lurching between despair and indignation. Wanting to call him. Wanting to never call him again.

“Sweetheart, you’re so much better every week. I mean, you’re a different girl. You’re ninety percent there. Ninety-five percent. You must be able to see that.”

“But I’m sick of this bloody jagged graph,” I said in frustration. “You know, two steps up, one step down. It’s so painful. It’s so slow. It’s like this endless game of snakes and ladders.”

And Mum just looked at me as if she wanted to laugh or maybe cry, and she said, “But, Audrey, that’s what life is. We’re all on a jagged graph. I know I am. Up a bit, down a bit. That’s life.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about everything. And I guess Mum was right about the jagged graphs thing. We’re all on one. Even Frank. Even Mum. Even Felix. I think what I’ve realized is, life is all about climbing up, slipping down, and picking yourself up again. And it doesn’t matter if you slip down. As long as you’re kind of heading more or less upwards. That’s all you can hope for. More or less upwards.

I think Mum’s really pleased I’ve got my eyes back. She said they were the first thing she looked at when I was born. My eyes. They’re me. They’re who I am.