CHAPTER EIGHTEEN | CLARICE STARLING
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I decide to live, then.
If there's one thing I know how to be, it's stubborn.
After skipping every single meeting after the first one—and sincerely hoping no one devoted any precious time to discuss my less than appropriate behavior—I discover Claudia is no longer speaking to me.
She tried to at first, reaching out via text during the remainder of the week and attempting to strike up a conversation with me during World Literature lectures with Nadia's help, but my lack of effort to reciprocate those communication attempts made her give up along the way. Though she hasn't adopted the passive-aggressive tactic of pretending I don't exist, things aren't how they used to be before I walked out on that group, and I'll have to learn to deal with that.
My new sense of normalcy is fueled by the realization that my whole life will never go back to how it used to be, when my biggest concern was what to wear to university the following morning. If I can't go back to that, even though I agonize over everything I've lost every waking moment of my day, I'll have to make do with what I have and find my new normal.
September fades into October, giving place to warmer, slightly duller tones, and Juneau is coated in hues of orange and yellow. I have to start wearing thicker clothes from the very beginning of the month, clothes I wouldn't wear until November in Chicago, and choose to look at it as something I'll have to adapt to instead of as an obstacle. If I can't be normal the way I once was, then I can at least try and find something new and comforting to hold on to. Not everything in Juneau is starkly different from Chicago.
Halfway through the month, I put on my big girl panties and walk into Doctor Albott's office with my head held high for the first time since I arrived. A nagging voice at the back of my brain begs me to look back over my shoulder because I haven't done it once since leaving the house, which surely means I'm being followed and am in danger, and I almost give into it. Keyword being almost.
It's not that big of a deal. Really. There are far bigger leaps I'll have to make, far bigger more difficult things I'll need to face, but Doctor Albott holds small steps with an iron grip and routinely insists I need to feel proud of myself for doing the littlest things, even those that seem insignificant.
Fighting against a compulsion is exhausting. It takes every ounce of energy and motivation buried deep within me to do it and, even worse, to keep doing it even when I don't want to, even when giving up and letting go is the safest choice . . . in theory. The actual fear has yet to vanish, following me everywhere I go, and, just because I'm not giving into the temptation of checking my surroundings, it doesn't mean I'm not wary.
Today, I'm shaking like an earthquake when we meet, but I don't look nearly as wrecked as I did that one time I had to tell her all about the duality of Jake Horton. It's not necessarily an improvement as much as a return to baseline, and that's the one thing I'm not patting myself on the back over, but I don't ever want to see myself hit such a low point again.
She doesn't offer me tea because of that, I believe.
I'm shaking from the cold when I get in, only relaxing when she closes the door behind me, a habit she adopted after a month of sessions because I assume I must have been pretty annoying when I was unable to stop glancing at it. I feel much safer when she closes the door in my place, saving me from looking stupid around people who don't give a damn about me, and I suppose I should tell her that, but it's not something one knows how to word in a way that doesn't sound absurd.
I can't thank her for closing a door. I can't thank her for locking me in a room that is far from being the last one I'll ever find myself stuck in, like a fly repeatedly heading face first against a window. I can't thank her for doing my urges and compulsions a favor by enabling them when we've spent two months trying to dim their influence. It feels hypocritical and disingenuous to even place her in this situation, like I'm telling her straight to her face that our work together means nothing to me, but I can't stop.
That's the thing about compulsions: you know what you're doing, you know they're exhausting and leave you on the verge of tears, on the rare times you're not cowering against a wall, you know you don't want to do them, but you can't stop. Time moves on normally for everyone but you, and you always feel like you're running out of time, always feel like something catastrophic is about to happen or will happen if you don't do the things you hate doing.
Realistically, you know what's happening. You know there's no objective reason for you to be feeling this way, like your world is crumbling around and inside of you, but then something inside you explodes and you feel strangely validated, like the universe you created in your head is trying to tell you, "see? What did you think was going to happen?".
"I've been concerned about you," Doctor Albott tells me, as she settles into her seat.
I turn to look at her, sitting with a leg beneath me, hip pressed against the side of the couch. "Did I do something wrong?"
Her face is unreadable to me, like it always is, except on those occasions she purposefully lets some emotion show to put me at ease, a touchless hug from across the room. "Something about you feels different."
"Good different or bad different?"
"I can't tell. Your clothes have changed color, for example." I shrug. Adapting my wardrobe to the new weather also comes with changing the colors to duller tones, in an attempt to blend in with my surroundings. If you don't stand out, people won't even look at you twice. "I don't know. You seem more . . . jaded, in a way. Has anything happened?"
Besides the fact that I now have nightmares every other day, giving me no time to recover because I'm too exhausted to the point of dozing off and falling asleep during my lectures, nothing in particular has happened. Every day is a battle I know I can't win, a constant reminder I'll never have the life I've always wanted to have, and it leaves me feeling lost at best, unsure where to go from here, and I've been doing everything I can to find an alternative. I can't get answers as to why all of this happened or how I'm supposed to move on, so all I have left is the present.
The possibility of never moving on with my life and being stuck with these fears and memories terrifies me more than feeling like I've betrayed all my friends for even daring to dream of a world where I'm okay. I owe it to them to at least try, to not turn into the jaded nineteen-year-old sitting in front of her therapist like there's nothing left out there for me, but what else do I have? My own brother, who didn't even fly home to attend the funerals, feels more like a stranger than family.
I often think of my dad, alone at home in a big house. I'd give anything to be back there with him, something I've told him countless times, but he insists that this is where I need to be for my own sake, to not worry about him, to focus on getting better.
If this is all there is, if I'm going to turn into a shell of who I used to be, untrusting and alone, then there's nothing to get better from. There's nothing to get better for, if the future has reserved nothing but bleakness and grayness for me. It'll be me and my trauma and the anonymous Final Girls.
"Nothing happened," I tell her. She doesn't look convinced, but I don't have it in me to try and make her believe me. "Everything's fine."
Deciding to live is the bravest thing I've done in a while, but it's a life of mediocrity and settling for the bare minimum.
It's not that great of a life, especially when I'm still convinced danger is lurking around every dark corner, even those in every room I spend a considerable time in, and I can't shut off my brain to prevent that from happening. It's not normal, and I won't ever get a chance at having a normal life again, with everything being forever tainted by Camp Comet's events. Even when I'm older and wiser, even when nothing in my life reminds me of what happened, the dark memories will still hang around the deepest parts of my brain, sucking all the good moments like a black hole.
"I know we've been talking about normalcy and what it means to you, but I don't want you to keep hanging on to that like an ultimate goal," she says, like she has a privileged view to the thoughts swimming around in my head. I clench my jaw, looking away from her like that will stop her from saying the right thing all the time, even when I don't want her to. "I don't want you to spend the rest of your life chasing one single thing, one you might never find. I think we might have to unpack the meaning of normal for you and what it entails, what you think you have to do to reach that state. We need to unpack what you think will happen if you don't find it."
I huff. "Does it matter? Things won't ever be normal again. Unpacking what that means is useless."
"If you think normal means not missing your friends and Zach anymore, that's not going to happen. It's something you'll keep carrying with you because they were a very important part of your life, especially for as long as they were, and that's okay. You're not disrespecting their memory for holding on to what they meant to you and who they were, but you're also not disrespecting their memory for choosing to move on with your life. It never stops being a part of you, but you need to process your grief and miss them in a healthy way. Hanging on to a version of reality you call normal by not processing your grief and mourning your friends properly isn't the right way to go about this, even if it's the easiest way. Even if it's the most comfortable way. If that's what normal means to you, you'll never achieve the happiness you think you will."
I rise from my seat, arms crossed, and go back to pacing around the room. She lets me do this relatively often, agreeing it doesn't do anyone any good to sit still for forty-five minutes, and it helps get my thoughts into motion. Sometimes, that's not a good thing. Being alone with my thoughts can be dangerous, especially when I'm given the opportunity to overthink.
"See, that's not the kind of acceptance I want," I continue, twisting my hands around each other. "I know it's a proper stage of grief, but I don't want to just . . . accept what happened. I don't want it to feel justified. I don't want Jake to be right when he said everything happened for a reason, even the things he did." I dare look out of the window. There's no fox sparrow sitting on the windowsill today. "I don't want it to be considered acceptable. I don't want this suffering or their deaths to have been for nothing; if I dare look at a future that's not normal, won't I be feeding that narrative?"
A gurgling sound coming from her side of the office informs me she's pouring herself a cup of tea. I've read stories about patients being offended with their therapists drinking tea or coffee during a session, arguing it's distracting, but I've found I don't mind. With the way the office is decorated, full of Doctor Albott's personal belongings and snippets into her personal life, I feel comforted by the thought that this is meant to be a homely space.
"Accepting what happened that night also means accepting what happened to you, not just to everyone else." When I look at her, she brings the blue porcelain cup to her lips, staining the rim with red lipstick. "Accepting what happened involves understanding. Sometimes it involves rationality, even when you can't find intellectual explanations. Sometimes there's no rational explanation. Acting like nothing happened or clinging to hypothetical scenarios, thinking in counterfactual terms, holding onto a false sense of normalcy will only hold you back and prevent you from healing. You don't need to justify how you're feeling or how you're reacting, but accepting these feelings and reactions will help you handle these stressful and triggering situations in a safer way. You can't filter out triggers forever. You can't avoid them for the rest of your life. Accepting and understanding these painful things is vital for you to get better and revisit your concept of normalcy. You owe it to yourself, Wendy. Cut yourself some slack."
I exhale through my mouth. It does nothing to clear the thick smoke in the office. "What if I'm never able to stop running away? What if the rest of my life is meant to be spent running from room to room? When will I find this final room?"
She sets the cup aside, then leans forward, folding her hands over her knees. "You'll have to stop running at some point. Our goal here is to make it so you stop running because you want to, not because you have to."
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When I get home, I'm so exhausted from fighting with Doctor Albott—if one can even call it that, but it's frustrating to have her disagree with me and point holes in everything I say—that I don't have any energy left to dedicate to the piles of coursework accumulating on my desk and in my laptop or to help Xavier in the kitchen.
I feel like an open wound, like a ticking bomb about to explode and swallow the entire world in the aftermath, hypersensitive to everything. I'm not ready to face Xavier after the day I've had, after the confrontations I've had with everything I believe in versus those I should believe in. Calling these coping mechanisms maladaptive—not that she did it, but I felt it was implied by her word choice and topic of conversation—feels unfair, especially considering they're what has kept me alive this whole time.
Xavier is in the kitchen when I get there. He's prepping the oven for a baking dish while a pot of pasta cooks on the stove, a reminder it's chicken parmesan ziti day, which I've conveniently forgotten about. It's not a dish that requires the efforts of two people, but I know he likes including me in his cooking hobbies to ease the transition between my two living situations, and I should be more thankful.
There are many things I want to tell and ask him, but the timing is never quite right and I constantly lose any windows of opportunity I find. Whenever I find the courage to walk up to him, something happens and we never talk about anything, which is how I suspect we've survived together for as long as we have. We're both avoidant, not taking after Mom, and it's no surprise this is the compromise we've silently reached to live in harmony. We don't poke at old wounds, and we don't give each other the chance to do so, which isn't the healthiest of dynamics, but it's functional and keeps us both satisfied.
The only downside to this strategy is that we can tell when the other is dying to bring something up. Xavier sees me hanging around the kitchen like a vulture and I'm certain it's bothering him that I'm not opening my mouth to say a damn thing, choosing to sit by the kitchen islands to pretend not to watch him instead. Something tingles in the back of my head, a growing feeling of panic with a source I can't pinpoint.
"You're hovering," he groans, pouring the shredded chicken and the marinara sauce into the now drained pasta pot, stirring it gently. "Do you need something?"
"Can I ask you something?"
"Do you have to?"
I cross my arms over the marble countertop, resting my chin on them as I lean forward. "I guess not."
Xavier briefly looks back at me over his shoulder. "What's up? Having you sit there just to sulk is far more distracting than having you there asking questions."
I take a deep breath, which is considerably harder to do in this position. "Do you think me living here has been beneficial to either of us, or do you think it just stresses us out?"
His shoulders stiffen. "I don't think that's up to me to decide. The only person who gets to say whether this has been beneficial to you is, well, you. I like having you around." Once he finishes tossing the pasta and the chicken around the pot, he carefully pours a portion of it onto the baking dish. "I think we've grown past the awkward part. Why do you ask?"
I shrug. "I don't know. Therapy was a bit demanding today. Doctor Albott is making me reconsider all these things I've taken for granted and their meaning, so I guess part of me is just . . . grasping at straws to check whether I've been living in a completely different reality all this time. I don't want to be a burden to you. I know you moved out for a reason, and I'm scared that me being here with you might remind you of all the reasons you left." I stare down at the floor. "I'm always scared I'll wake up and you won't be here anymore."
The kitchen falls silent for a while, the only sound being that of the cheese shredder as Xavier destroys mozzarella and Parmesan for the layers. It may very well be my cue to get up from my seat and leave him to his own devices, with him being greatly fond of privacy in his kitchen, but something keeps me glued where I am—what it is, I'm not sure. It may be the anticipation of an answer, the fear of what it will be, or simple curiosity.
I don't want to admit Doctor Albott is right all the time, but maybe she has a point when it comes to the need to understand and validate my emotions and feelings. My life would be a thousand times easier if I were able to diagnose whatever I'm feeling instead of losing the answers in my brain fog.
"I didn't leave because of you," Xavier eventually reveals, carefully layering the cheese over the pasta and the chicken, along with basil. The familiar scent of an almost ready warm meal fits snugly around me like a tight hug. "You don't need to worry about me leaving again. This is my home."
Something in my chest tightens. "I've never known a home without you in it."
He finally turns around, eyes glistening with emotion. "I'm sorry I left without saying goodbye."
I nod, throat already clogged. "I'm sorry I didn't try harder."
We apologize a lot in this household, I've found. Nothing ever gets solved just through the power of an apology, but it still feels like a nice starting point.
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enjoy the calm before the storm friends! your favorite character callum will be back next chapter