Girl on the Line

Prologue

The sun smiles down on me, the sky deep and bright as an upside-down sea, and here I am below it all: dressed like a giant slice of pizza, thinking of death. Not because the costume is filthy and heavy, or because I only make minimum wage, or because a gum-chewing, hair-twisting trainee is staring at me with wide, frightened eyes, or because it is mortifying being in a pizza costume on a familiar street corner—though all of this is true. I think of death because just last year, I tried to kill myself. I looked ahead and saw nothing but the end credits. And here I am, not only very much alive, but wearing this ridiculous costume that stinks of pepperoni. Dancing. For the last time. Tomorrow, this gum-chewing, hair-twisting new hire with her wide, frightened eyes standing before me will inherit my uniform and I get to be promoted to the reverent position of busser.

It’s going to be okay, I yell to her over the sound of reggae music blasting out of a passing Lexus. I promise. It’s really . . . it’s not that bad.

Okay, she says, in a tone that very much embodies the opposite.

Life is punctuated with uncanny moments like these, where the past and future self collide in the daze of present tense. Where my own deeds and stories strike me suddenly as unfamiliar, as not my own. As a wise old dude once said, I contain multitudes. Right now I am a human slice of pizza shuffling on a street corner who will later peel off this costume and put my girl costume back on and go work a volunteer shift at a crisis hotline. But last year, I should have been the girl on the other end of the line.

Part

One

Past

I imagined suicide would be simple: a bottle of pills swallowed on a sunny afternoon, lying alone in the lakeside grass, staring up at the shifting shapes of clouds against a sky as blue as a heartbreaker’s eyes. I imagined the sound of the leaves in the oak trees whispering goodbye in a language I didn’t speak, my pulse and my pain slowing to a stop. My body slackening, my eyes fluttering shut, something like the classic reprinted painting I had hung in my room, Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais, dead in a brook, surrounded by greenery, covered in flowers.

I hadn’t imagined the cold of the October day, the way the dry brown grasses scratched rough against my neck as I lay down, the sky gaping back cloudless and pale. I hadn’t imagined there would be ants everywhere and the vague smell of dog shit wafting from the brush, or that I would forget a pen to write a note to leave behind. I hadn’t imagined that I would forget to bring water, too, the way my dry throat would hurt from so many pills chafing on the way down, the excruciating minutes that ticked by where nothing happened, or how I sobbed, envisioning my family weeping at the news. I hadn’t imagined dying in regret and uncertainty in thirsty grasses, no flowers in sight, only empty Bud Light cans from someone else’s party. I hadn’t imagined it would feel like the furthest thing from Ophelia. I hadn’t imagined the internal thunder of nausea that rolled in, the deafening ear ringing, my stomach like someone holding a drill to it, the vomiting of bitter pills shrunken and softened by my own body. I hadn’t imagined I’d have to swallow them again as they heaved up, that it would taste so disgusting, that all I would hear would be an everlasting earsplitting bell as I lost consciousness.

And I never, ever would have imagined my last thought before the darkness closed upon me like a book shutting would be, Please don’t let me die.

It was July. I lay on a trampoline next to Jonah in his backyard; his parents were out of town. The night started when the sun and moon were trading shifts. I brought my Edna St. Vincent Millay book. We took turns reading aloud.

Am I kin to Sorrow?

Are we kin?

That so oft upon my door—

Oh, come in!

Nothing turns me on like poetry read aloud. So soon our clothes were half off, our breath shallow, sweat cooling on my face, the hot night air feeling like not enough, never enough, in the best way. His hand was on my hand. My gaze was up to where the stars swam in a black, forever sea. Dark shapes of leaves seemed to shiver our names. Life moved through me, wild, alive. I was so in love it was a scream and not a feeling. Jonah and I were eternal in that moment. We were in the eye of that hot summer night. I could feel his pulse in our grasped hands and it could have been my own.

I want all of life to be like this, I said.

Journey, he told me. It can’t.

I knew he was right and yet I still didn’t believe him.

I wrote a note to myself that night in the back of the Edna St. Vincent Millay book.

Dear future self,

When you get sad, don’t forget the night you lay under the stars with Jonah Patterson. The way the air smelled, like honeysuckle blossoms. The warmth of him. The way the atmosphere darkened so gradually you barely noticed until it was night.

If you could look at a graph of my life, at the events and resulting moods that shaped it up until my suicide attempt, it would resemble a jagged mountaintop. Sharp peaks drop gut-wrenchingly into valleys. No plateaus. But is that a negative thing? Sometimes it’s been heart-burstingly wonderful. My love can swallow the whole world. My sadness can eclipse it.

It’s always been that way, since I was a kid. My parents called them big feelings. I threw epic tantrums when I didn’t get my way, screamed loud enough to wake the neighbors, bawled at sad movies. But I was also funny and made people laugh. I loved art and singing. My little sisters followed me everywhere and hung on my every word.

When you walk into a room, my dad’s always told me, the sun rises.

Do you still feel that way, Dad, as you sit with me in this fluorescent white hospital room with a wet face, your chin in your hands? As Mom paces the linoleum floor in her running shoes, squeaksqueaksqueak, and asks me again why, why did I do it? I can’t answer. Not just because I don’t know, but because my throat is rubbed raw from where the tube went down so they could pump my stomach this morning. Out the water-flecked window, it’s raining, a rarity in Southern California. Good. The world should be raining when I feel this way—like my entire body, my whole being, is one giant ache. I don’t even have it in me to weep, though the want is there. I’m a shell, pumped clean and empty.

Why, Journey? Just tell me why, Mom repeats, standing in front of the window so I’ll look at her. Her bottle-red hair’s a cloud around her head, her signature smoky eyeliner’s not there, she’s wearing exercise clothes like she raced from the gym. She doesn’t even look like my mother right now.

I close my eyes, thinking, I am such a screwup I can’t even die properly. I remember how I panicked when the black curtain pulled itself over my eyes yesterday and I thought I was dying. Then suddenly I didn’t want to die. I make no goddamn sense.

Stop asking her that, Dad says. If you can’t compose yourself, go take a walk around the block.

My dad’s still wearing his badge from work that has a smiling picture of himself with much shorter hair on it and says Seth Smith, Guidance Counselor. He’s wearing the same shirt now as he is in the picture—a dorky Hawaiian number with flamingos on it.

Compose myself? Mom asks him, hand on hip. Like you, you mean, sitting there in silence?

Dad points to his tear-wet face. What do you think these are?

I don’t know, your cheeks? Mom says.

I’ve been crying my eyes out, Dad says.

You want a Parent of the Year trophy?

My dad stands up, grabs his pork pie hat.

I’m sorry, Mom tells him. I’m—stressed. And hangry. My blood sugar—

I’m going to sample the scenery is all he says before walking out the door.

Sample the scenery is a classic Dad euphemism. It means he’s pissed and he’s going for a walk. Just like when he snores on the couch and claims he’s deeply meditating.

I close my eyes, pretend to sleep, while Mom sighs. This is what he does, she says, to no one in particular. This is what we do.

This is the first time my parents have lingered in the same room since the family meeting ten months ago when they broke the news of their separation to me and my two sisters, Ruby and Stevie. The Christmas tree was still up; tinsel shrapnel littered the floor. My sisters’ tear-sparkly eyes matched the tinsel.

We’ll always love each other. This doesn’t mean we’re any less of a family, Mom had said, her eye shadow suspiciously blue, her outfit showing a bit too much cleavage. Like she was already relishing the thought of singlehood.

We’ll still be the best of friends, Dad had said then, reaching over the coffee table to pat Mom’s ringless hand.

Now Mom slides a stool next to me and takes my hand. She kisses it. My mom has the loveliest eyes—pale gold, an almost impossible color. Right now, though, they are cried tiny, crusted with yesterday’s mascara.

This was a cry for help, she says.

No.

It was.

That she would dismiss this as a gesture makes me want to scream. But I’m too raw to scream. Well, I guess you know me better than I do.

You’re being facetious, but I actually do. Because I’m your mother. I know every part of you—even the baby, the kid you were, that you forgot. You’ve always had to make the biggest statement. You’re upset? Throw a tantrum. Your sister is born? Start crapping in your closet and threaten to put the baby in the trash can.

And this is supposed to make me feel better . . . how exactly?

This is nothing in the big picture, she whispers to me, petting my hair. This was just—just a way to get us to hear you. And we hear you. We love you. It’s going to pass. You’re going to feel better.

Already I know I won’t feel better.

What if I actually wanted to die? I ask her, not blinking.

She doesn’t blink, either, but her eyes glass over with new tears.

Then that would be the hardest thing in the world to hear as your mother. She wipes her eyes. But luckily I don’t believe you.

Knock knock, Dad says, walking in.

What the point of the knock knock was, I couldn’t tell you, because he’s now standing behind my mother with an ice cream sandwich.

Thought this might cheer you up, he says.

She can’t eat that after getting her stomach pumped, Mom says, standing up.

Oh. Dad stares at the ice cream sandwich and makes a face like he feels sorry for it. You want it?

No refined sugar, she says. You bought it, you eat it.

I’m vegan, remember?

You only remind me every time I see you. She grabs her purse. I’m going to the cafeteria before I chew your head off.

That leaves Dad and me alone. He drops the ice cream sandwich in the biohazard bin. He sits on the stool next to me and folds his hands together.

You are so brave, he says, wiping his eyes.

Can we just be quiet for a little bit? I ask.

Like for the rest of my life? I don’t add.

I adore my parents. But there should be a word for the unbearable burden of their love.

The last time I almost died was the best night of my life.

My favorite band, Girl Cheese, had come to town. They’re a three-piece all-female band I found online whose videos I fell in love with, who write adorable harmonizing vocals with lyrics about stuff like how delicious pizza is and thrift store shopping and bisexuality. The three girls are in their twenties and live in New York, dress like vintage princesses, and play glitter-painted instruments. I had been obsessed with them all year and they finally stopped through Goleta to play an all-ages venue. Jonah and I went. They played all my favorite songs. I bought a T-shirt and talked with Girl Cheese at the merch table for ten whole minutes. They were even cuter in person. They signed my record. It was magical.

At midnight, a bunch of us were hanging out in the parking lot—Jonah; Marisol; her boyfriend at the time, Lloyd; a few of Lloyd’s buddies, Wendy and Otis, who I know from film class. Otis said he knew of an apartment complex a few blocks away where we could sneak into the hot tub. So after a quick 7-Eleven run for Slurpees and Funyuns, we did, skinny-dipping in the dark and trying our best to keep our laughter to whispers.

Next we went out to the only restaurant open all night—a diner with tired-eyed waiters, soggy fries, and two Yelp stars. Wendy and Otis lived in my direction and offered to give me a ride home afterward. Usually I’d have to be home way before midnight, if my parents even let me go to a show in the first place. But now that my parents were separated, the rules had changed. I had no curfew. There were still rules for Ruby and Stevie, but my parents were too distracted and too guilty to enforce them for me anymore. It was after two in the morning. The streets were empty, the moon was bright.

Dear future self, I wrote on my diner receipt. Remember the gorgeous night that felt like morning would never come.

Wendy, Otis, and I rolled down the window so the barely cool dead-of-night freeway summer air blasted our faces, fresh. We cranked Girl Cheese and sang along, trees whipping by, shadows barely darker than the inky sky and twinkly star shrapnel. I remember the feeling of my heart in my chest, so strong, bursting with song; the grin on my face seemed permanent, joy coursing red through my veins. I sat shotgun, dancing.

And in one second—one second that now seems to last a year in my memory—Otis, who drove, eyed the rearview and yelled, Oh no, you guys—

Then there was a confusion of noise. Metal scraping, crunching, the grill of a semitruck crushed against the front of the car. Heat and the color orange exploded outside my window and a single thought accompanied by a quiet terror rang all throughout my being.

This is it.

Then the car was still, Otis’s door crushed against the median. My side of the car was still ablaze; it smelled like chemicals melting. Wendy screamed at us to get out. She climbed out the back door and Otis and I somehow immediately scrambled over our seats and followed her. We ran up the freeway, where traffic had stopped for the accident. We ran up the wrong away, away from the semitruck turned over on its side, a river of gas lit up in flames. Away from Otis’s car, where the shotgun seat was now burning. Wendy, Otis, and I held hands and watched as the whole scene exploded like an action movie and firefighters showed up and people stopped on the freeway stepped out of their parked cars to gawk and point. I shook, cold, in shock, and answered police questions. An ambulance came and took us to the hospital. Besides a small nick where my head had hit the windshield, and Otis’s mild concussion that caused him to keep asking What happened? and forced us to explain ourselves again, again—we were okay.

We had survived, what a miracle.

We had almost died, what a horror.

The accident was only a little over two months ago now. Even though I escaped without a scratch, it did something to me. My big feelings became colossal. The world now seemed, at times, unbearable. I was sick to my stomach from fear. I cried over nothing. I thought of death constantly—haunted by it, afraid of it, obsessed with it, drawn to it. These changes were easy to dismiss, because they built up over days, and weeks, and I’ve always been so much. I was already a loaded weapon. The accident just clicked my safety off.

Present

The crisis center doesn’t look like a crisis center. It’s a lavender Victorian in the south part of town. Unassuming, white picket fence, painted porch with a swing on it. There’s no sign on it. Just looks like someone’s house. On the inside, besides an office space set up in the front with long tables, volunteers hunched over old-school phones and speaking in quiet voices, you’d think people live here. We gather in a back room set up with folding chairs, strung with a Tibetan prayer flag, lined with built-in bookcases. It smells lived-in, loved, warm, historic.

Training for the hotline is two full weekends and every evening in the first two weeks of the new year, fifty hours total. Brutal. The first day I arrive I’m greeted by the training coordinator, Davina, an Indian American woman with long braids, tortoiseshell glasses, and a brilliant smile. I know her from the in-person interview last week, where she was so happy to have me join this small bastion of new volunteers.

Journey will be our youngest volunteer ever, Davina tells the three of us as we sit in the folding chairs, and I can see why: two of the other volunteers are clearly retirees, older women named Willa and Francie. They’re adorable. They both dyed their hair a faint blue over the white and apparently do everything together the way I hope Marisol and I will when we’re granny-aged. But I feel a sea of life experience and lack thereof between us, and when Davina gets up to use the restroom right before we begin, instead of engaging them in conversation, I scroll on my phone. We’re still waiting for our fourth volunteer. A part of me hopes they don’t show, and I can bow out of this wild plan with no responsibility whatsoever. But then the door bangs open and a girl blazes in, guitar slung on her back and lipstick so red it seems neon, an explosion of kinky ginger hair and a nose ring and a startling smattering of freckles on her light brown skin to match. Willa and Francie go quiet, watching her.

Sorry! the girl says, dropping her enormous bag and guitar at her feet. She looks around the room with a grimace. What can I say? I like to make an entrance.

This girl carries the sun in her hair. I wish I glowed like her. As if she senses my envy, she meets my gaze and smiles.

Nice jellies, she says, pointing to my glittery, see-through shoes.

Nice leopard-print flats.

Gracias. I’m Etta, she says.

Journey, I tell her.

"Don’t stop believin’," she belts out with pop star pizzazz.

Never heard that one before, I say.

Seriously?!

No.

We giggle. Etta introduces herself to Willa and Francie. I am in love with your hair! she almost yells. Then they giggle. Etta has that effect on people, apparently. She’s like human laughing gas.

When Davina comes back in, she hands the four of us brick-heavy binders and begins by walking us through the chapter list and outlining what we’re going to learn, all the sections with their laminated pages on everything from mental illness to bullying to eating disorders. She explains how hotline shifts work. It’s like a teacher going through a syllabus. Then she turns to us and asks what made us want to come here and volunteer. She asks me first, smiling, waiting for my answer. The silence seems to deepen as everyone listens. Davina asked me this same question in the interview. I wasn’t expecting to have to share my answer with Etta and Willa and Francie, too. But I repeat the same story.

I have a friend who recently tried to kill herself, I say. I, uh . . . I just want to be able to help her if she ever needs it again. And people like her.

Willa and I got sick of the soup kitchen, Francie says. "You wouldn’t believe the drama that goes on there."

Politics, Willa says, shaking her head.

Yes, that’s the word. Politics. We’re just little old ladies who want to help people.

You two are the cutest, Etta says. I can’t even handle it.

Willa and Francie giggle.

And you, Etta? Davina asks. What about you?

I, um . . . well. She twists her hair. I guess it’s because I feel like I suck at helping people. I’m no good at it. And I—I’m afraid to. I want to be better. But honestly, I don’t even know if I can. Okay, that probably makes no sense. She emits a tiny scream. I’m so nervous right now!

She doesn’t seem nervous. She seems ebullient.

You’re doing just fine, dear! Willa says.

Well, whatever your reason, I’m so happy you’re here, Davina says. I promise the experiences will be intense and frightening and sometimes heartbreaking, but they are also incredibly rewarding.

More rewarding than handing out rolls at the soup kitchen, I hope, Francie says.

Only one roll per person, Francie! Willa says, mock yelling.

Oh, yes, how could I forget.

The two women giggle at some inside joke.

You two, Davina says. Do I have to separate you?

More laughter. Davina lets the room get quiet before putting her hand on the binder in her lap.

Let’s open up to page two, Davina says.

We begin the work. It’s not easy work. It’s not work that really has right answers all the time, besides some rules that are spelled out up front. We walk through a scripted call where Davina role-plays and acts out possible scenarios, and then discusses our responses with us.

After this first day of training is over, Willa and Francie go follow Davina for a tour of the back garden. Etta and I stand up and with our bags.

That was so intense, Etta says.

It was.

Do you think you’re going to go through the full training?

Aren’t you?

Sure. It’s just . . . a lot of hours. She slings her guitar on her back. But then again, Willa and Francie are here, and they’re my favorite people I’ve ever met in my life.

I smile.

Do you think they’re a couple? she asks. That would make me love them even more. I hope when I’m their age I’m as cute as them with a cute little wife who dyes her hair blue with me.

Wow. A girl who is into girls. Took me two years of high school before I met anyone at school who was openly queer.

I think I love it here.

The next day, the second day of training, I come back and it’s just Davina, Willa, and Francie.

Etta wasn’t able to commit to the time the training requires, unfortunately, Davina says. But we’ll carry on without her.

I’m kind of shocked at my disappointment. Etta was so intriguing. We could have been friends. And the next weekend, I come in and it’s just Davina and another empty chair.

"Willa and Francie decided to