Nothing to Lose

Chapter Two

I sobbed all the way home.

That’s an understatement.

I threw a tantrum that would have made toddlers raise their eyebrows and tell me to chill out. I kicked. I screamed. I begged and pleaded like an innocent man on death row, and I was relentless. In all honesty, where I found the energy to give such a dramatic display I’ll never know. I’ve never felt so absolutely desperate, and it’s a feeling I can only liken to what, I assume, being kidnapped feels like. I didn’t care about the medical diagnosis I’d been given, I didn’t care that I was considered extremely lucky to have been “caught” in time to reverse most of the damage, and I certainly didn’t care that I was likely to be the cause of a traffic accident if I kept trying to open the car door while we were speeding down the freeway towards Clayton from Dublin.

“Let me out! I’m not going! I’m not going!” I gasped through the melodramatic tears that blurred my vision, “Please...I’ll eat, I swear, just let me go home!”

My mother ignored me, staring straight ahead and weaving through the cars in an effort to get me home faster. I refocused my attention from talking my way out of things to  making as big of a scene as I possibly could. I thought, in my delusional state of panic, that if someone saw me freaking out the in passenger seat of a car and pleading to be released, I might be lucky enough to have someone call the cops. This, theoretically, would buy me enough time to escape and run into the hills to become a hermit that little kids would create urban legends about to scare their friends at Girl Scout Camp.

While I had already accepted my future as a creature that plagued children’s nightmares, my life is (currently) not a movie, and the drive home did not result in my epic getaway. It resulted in my dad (who, being six foot one and a third degree black belt, was much stronger than a critically underweight fourteen year old girl) prying me out of my mother’s car and threatening to call an ambulance if I continued to undermine the efforts to captivate me. It was at this point that I realized I really didn’t have much of a choice, and instead turned to capitalizing on my inevitable future.

“I’ll go if you get me a dog.” I have no idea where this came from, as the last thing on my mind was having a pet, but I figured I might as well get something (because, apparently, saving my life wasn’t a big enough benefit) out of this fiasco, and I can always chalk this irrationality up to the fact that I hadn’t really eaten in the past month.

“Oh come on.” My dad said as he muscled his way into the house with me flailing my limbs in a desperate attempt at making an escape, where he unceremoniously dumped me onto my bed.

“Do you want to pack Crystal?” My mom asked in her fake, “everything-is-gonna-be-okay” voice as she held up my old stuffed kitten.

“No. She will get dirty and contaminated and disgusting. Hospitals are awful. I hate hospitals. She will never see the inside of a hospital.” And with that, I threw the kitten across the room with a carelessness that did not reflect my vehement protection of her purity.

“Stop. Packing.” I cried, knowing that nothing I said would change anything. “I’m not going. Stop. Packing.”

“We have to go.” My mom said through her tears that kept reappearing. Normally, seeing my mother cry would invoke some form of guilt, but now I was selfish. My only concern was with staying in the safety of my own home and avoiding, at all costs, the hospital that I never thought I’d end up in. In an act I’m ashamed of to this day, I leapt from my perch on the bed and dove at my mom, mustering up the strength that I was reluctant to admit was dwindling with every minute. I yanked the suitcase out of her hands, pushing her away and screaming bloody murder.

“Steve!” She called in exasperation to my dad, who was on the phone making plans to have my brother taken to a friend’s house after school. He ran back into the room and pulled me into the kitchen, not with the tenderness one might expect would be given to a girl whose doctor had just declared extremely fragile.

“Here, I’ll make you some tea for the ride there.” My mother said, attempting to placate me with the only non-water beverage I allowed in my limited selection of food, unsweetened ginger tea. At the time, my diet could be summed up a list that could be counted out on one hand: 1. Plain tofu 2. Vegetables that I deemed ‘safe’ (i.e. broccoli, carrots, peas) 3. Limited amounts of lentils 4. Sugar free packaged oatmeal 5. Unsweetened tea.

I took to sulking in the corner of the kitchen while the water boiled and my mother loaded up the car, where I briefly considered grabbing my camera and using this as an opportunity to create a depressing photo essay of my stay in the hospital that would ignite my artistic career and receive reviews that described it with words such as “raw” and “tragically beautiful”. I decided against this in favor of feeling sorry for myself and having no photographic evidence of a time that marked the failure of efforts for perfection. As we began the two hour drive to my temporary home, I pitifully thought to myself that this must be ‘it’. The moment everyone has that defines them as a person. The time that everyone has that is challenging but results in the development of them as a human being and creates a deeper understanding of human suffering and a more complex personality.

These thoughts were quickly thrown to the back of my mind in favor of imagining four hundred ways to escape and rub it in Dr. Knight’s face.