Above the Vaulted Sky

Seven

By spring, everyone in school knew me as the crazy girl who couldn't stop screaming. They'd whisper as they walked by the table where my friends and I ate lunch. Or they ate, and I choked down the contents of my lunch bag that I never wanted to touch.

I could tell the whispers made my friends uncomfortable. "You guys don't have to sit with me anymore, you know," I said one day, trying to be nice but also silently begging they wouldn't leave me alone.

My friends and Davy looked at me with those same pitying eyes I was tired of seeing. That was the first time I realized I was in hell, and I was selfish enough to drag my friends to hell with me.

I had screaming episodes nearly every day at this point. I'd gotten permission from the school to walk out of class whenever I needed to, but doing this only made the eyes of my classmates more nervous. I wasn't violent, but because I was crazy, people thought eventually, one day, I'd attack someone.

My first time in the psych ward, there was a girl who attacked people. Her eyes were wild and made me shiver. The first of the two times we acknowledged each other was when she was being "escorted" back to her room. She stopped right in front of me and snarled, "Look, it's the fucking banshee."

The day before that trip to the looney bin for teens, Constantine sat me down at her kitchen table. "Now you listen here, babygirl," she said, and I expected I would be lectured to come back in a few days completely healed.

"Now you're smart," Constantine said. "You're smarter than most kids your age, with all them advanced classes. You know that, right?"

I actually thought I was crazier than most kids my age, but that wasn't what she asked, so I nodded.

"When you get big, you're going to be special. You're going to be a doctor or the president or a poet, you understand? Don't you let anything silly like boys or a little bit of screaming get in your way."

I knew I didn't want to be a doctor or the president, but being a poet sounded okay. That night, my mother and I went to a bookstore and bought books of Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and John Clare. My mother chewed her cheek when she saw the books, but then shrugged and put the books in her basket. My mom seemed to glow as she strode through the store, valiantly ignoring the stares thrown at the pale, skinny girl with shaking hands following her.