Obsessed Page 11

  Almost asleep, I’m swimming through a warm cottony—

  EVERYTHING YOU ARE TOUCHING RIGHT NOW CAUSES CANCER.

  I jerk awake and my legs shoot out straight and rigid. I hold my breath and don’t move, the way I always imagined I would react if I were to discover a burglar in my room in the middle of the night. My eyes are staring wide at the ceiling, heart pounding. Everything I’m touching. A pause. Touching? I’m not touching anything—I’m in bed. Three breaths. I shift slightly and feel the cool top sheet rub against my arm. Maybe I am touching something. Still frozen, I mentally survey my body. I guess I’m touching this top sheet. I glance down my nose at it, trying to stay as still as possible. That means I’m also touching this sheet. I envision the beige fitted sheet covering my mattress. I’m touching the duvet, I’m touching my pillows, I’m touching my clothes.

  I leap out of my cancer bed onto the carpet. Turning to look at it, I almost see dangerous rays emanating from where my body just was, like heat off a blacktop in the summer. I quickly strip off my clothes and throw them in a pile. Once I’m naked, a headache I didn’t even realize I had disappears. The knots in my shoulder muscles loosen slightly. Glancing down at the clothes at my feet, I wonder if a regular washing machine is able to clean out cancer rays. Then I make a mental note to avoid this set of pajamas in the future. I flail my arms to try to fling any remaining germs off me. Standing next to my bed, I am shivering in the cold night air. The covers were so warm, so comfortable. I crouch slightly, trying to keep as much of my body in contact with itself as possible.

  Where do I go? Where is safe?

  The blue rug.

  The blue rug? I scan my room. The blue rug. A panic rises in me. I don’t know what this means! Until I see it. Our upstairs hallway is decorated with two identical, cornflower-blue carpets. I can barely see the edge of the nearest rug through my doorway.

  Like a gazelle, I leap toward the small carpet, arms and legs stretched in all directions, and reach it in two bounds. I feel better as soon as I’m standing on it. A tension in my neck releases now that I know I’m safe. It’s not that the rest of the carpeted floor is dangerous, I think as I look out into the darkness, but instead that this specific carpet is chosen.

  It isn’t much bigger than a carry-on suitcase, about two feet by three feet. In the pitch-black hallway, I edge my bare foot around the carpet’s perimeter, getting my bearings, as my dad snores loudly down the hall. Exhausted, I slowly lower myself into a sitting position and the rug feels warm against my skin. After a few minutes, and with a heavy sigh, I let my head fall forward against my chest. I need to at least try to get some sleep.

  I gently feel for the edges of the carpet with my fingers in the darkness and gather a small collection of dog hair in the process. Scooting, grunting, adjusting, I place myself diagonally on the rug to maximize space. To keep myself safe, to keep my sleepy limbs from wandering to the surrounding beige carpet, I wrap my arms around my legs and squeeze them against myself. Tightly.

  My shoulder blades protest against holding on to my legs. I rotate, roll into a ball, lie still for ten minutes, get uncomfortable, rotate, and begin the whole process again. My head is aching, either from sleep deprivation or from resting on the hard floor. There is a small green dot glowing from something electronic in the den. The dog lets out a long, slow groan from downstairs.

  At least I finished my paper. That has to be worth something, I soothe myself, as my fingers complain loudly against their grip on my shins. And at least I’m not sleeping in cancer sheets.

  • • •

  I’m jerked awake by my mom’s alarm down the hall. Based on the drool on my arm, I apparently got at least a little bit of sleep. I hear my mom rustling in her bed, putting on her slippers, picking up her robe. I’m immediately on high alert, aware of her every movement, ready to dart if she comes too close to her bedroom door. I’m warm from sleep but quickly developing goose bumps all over my body. I can explain fainting and skipping practice and not eating, but this—I see myself curled in the fetal position, naked, on the hallway floor—is not something I can hide behind stories and lies. This would set off her maternal alarm.

  As I hoped she would, she moves into her bathroom and closes the door and I relax a bit. I wait until I hear the shower turn on before gently rising up from my carpet. Rotating my neck, rolling my shoulders, I stretch out. My joints pop as I move toward my bedroom, a little less steadily than expected. Glancing back at the carpet, I don’t know whether to feel gratitude or disdain.

  I look down at my bed. All the danger, all the fear I felt so intensely last night is gone with the new morning. It looks and feels like my bed on any other day—no cancer sheets, no death rays. It is somehow different than it was in the exhausted hours of last night. Minutes pass and I stand there, observing the bed. It feels completely safe, even though it was so recently labeled as cancerous.

  “Honey,” my mom coos as she walks down the hall to wake me up, as she does every morning. “Haven’t heard your alarm go off yet. Are you sure you set it?”

  Oh no. Mom. Do something. Act normal. I leap without thinking into the bed, roll over, jerk the covers over my shoulders, and close my eyes.

  “Sweetie.” She turns the corner into my room. “Time to wake up! Up, up, up!” She moves toward me and sits on the edge of the bed. “Hi, you. Good morning!” She strokes my face. I hope she can’t tell how hard I’m breathing. “How did you sleep?”

  I stretch the way I do every morning. A deep, long stretch starting with my arms and moving down to my legs. I yawn, rub my eyes. “Really well.” Another stretch and a groan. “I was so tired from writing that paper, I fell asleep right away.”

  “Oh, your paper, that’s right. I hope you weren’t up too late?”

  “No, no.” I pretend to yawn again. “Not too bad.” I nuzzle my head down into my pillow and close my eyes.

  She kisses the side of my head and stands up. “Okay, get in the shower. Don’t diddle-dawdle. I’m making cinnamon rolls.”

  Listening to her walk downstairs, I stay still in bed, waiting for the rumble. The attack. The furious monster charging toward me to tell me that my bed causes cancer and I just doomed myself to a painful, short life. Braced against the empty room, I know there has to be a punishment. Last night these very sheets caused cancer. But, surprisingly, all I hear is my mom shifting cookware in the kitchen cabinets. The Today show blaring in the background. The heater pumping softly.

  I shift around in the bed, rub my hands tentatively against the bottom sheet. My insides are calm. My head doesn’t hurt. I have no bees in my ears. It doesn’t make sense but . . . these sheets are benign. I’m filled with a wave of relief. Oh, thank goodness. I still have a bed.

  But why? my mind insists, projecting itself into my happiness. How are the sheets and pillows safe now when they weren’t last night? I’m questioning myself as much as my monster. I don’t actually expect him to answer—he only talks when it suits him. Looking at the ceiling, I remember last night’s ban on sharpening my pencil, which had only applied to the Les Mis paper. It was a temporary rule.

  Maybe that’s what’s going on here. But that doesn’t really make sense, I insist to the air. How will I ever know? How will I keep track of the dangers if some things are permanent and some are temporary? How am I supposed to function if I never—

  A rough shake of the floor. An earthquake created by anger. Don’t question me.

  I jerk back to attention like a disciplined soldier in boot camp. I nod once, stiffly, and return to staring at the ceiling, doing my best to stamp down the pushy thoughts in my mind.

  After a few minutes, I stand up and walk to the bathroom.

  The water of the shower, like always, is calming. My muscles ache from a night on the floor, and I know I have to turn in that horrible paper this morning. But the shower is nice. For now, I feel a little bit better.

  Opening the curtain against the blaring lights and winter air, I feel a static i
n the room before I’ve even wiped the water from my eyes. Reaching for my towel, my fingertips are stung. Electrocuted. Shocked. By the same hot pink towel I used yesterday and the day before. Different from any message before, it is an electric NO. A physical notification of its danger.

  I pull my arm back immediately and stumble toward the other side of the shower. The sensation still burns on my fingers, and I shake my hand hard to try to decontaminate it. I picture tiny splatters of cancer flying off the tips of my fingers and sticking to the wall.

  I’m dripping and not sure what to do. But looking again at the pink towel, I know the truth. Towels cause cancer. Not just this one, but all of them. I’m not surprised.

  I do my best to wring my hair out before stepping onto the bath mat. I only use my left hand, because I can still feel the electric cancer germs burning on the fingertips of my right. Bouncing around slightly, I try to shake off as much loose water as possible, while scanning the bathroom for a towel alternative. It’s warm in here now from all the steam, but I know that a world of icy air waits for me on the other side of the bathroom door. I reach down to pick up a crumpled T-shirt that I wore as pajamas earlier in the week. At least I could use it to dab off parts of my—

  That’s cheating.

  I feel his sneer as much as I hear it. Of course it’s cheating! I snap back at him. Anything that could be even remotely beneficial is off-limits. My monster is as committed to making my daily life more difficult as he is to protecting me from danger. I throw the cotton T-shirt back onto the floor and roll my eyes.

  I’m quickly ashamed by my thoughts, my tone of annoyance. My protector is guarding me from cancer, from an early death. He was the one to tell me about counting steps, and bartering, and my computer and notebook paper and pencils. Without him, without his guidance, I would be the me in my dream. I’m swept with a wave of deep guilt and quickly usher the rogue emotions into a dark closet in the back of my brain. Glancing around furtively, I hope I hid them before my monster saw.

  A puddle has formed under me on the bath mat. How do I dry off without a towel? I can’t use other fabric—that’s cheating. But I’m sopping wet—I need something. What about a fan? I wait for a response, a rumble, a sign. I picture myself standing under the ceiling fan in my bedroom being blown dry. What about a fan? I ask again internally. The thick humidity of the bathroom is silent.

  No response is a good response. I have a plan.

  “Allison, breakfast!” my mom calls up from downstairs.

  “Coming!” I yell down at her as I swing open the bathroom door. “Two minutes!”

  It is a few seconds before I’m hit by the wall of freezing air. The searing cold almost punches the breath out of my lungs and my wet skin screams against its touch. I dart down the hallway, dribbling a trail into my bedroom. With the flip of a switch, my overhead light glares on, and the ceiling fan blasts into action.

  Until this moment, I didn’t know that the cold could actually make your teeth chatter. I thought that was something invented for slapstick childhood cartoons. But it’s real. And it’s uncontrollable. On its highest setting, the fan is jerking in violent circles on the ceiling, putting its full effort into cooling me down. I’m shivering wildly, but I rotate my body under the airflow until I look passably dry.

  I throw on a sweatshirt and pajama pants from the floor, relishing their warm cotton. My dripping hair immediately soaks a large dark spot onto the shoulders of the sweatshirt.

  My morning routine is so mechanical that I almost always arrive at the counter for breakfast in the same five-minute window. Right when Al Roker appears to tell me what’s happening in my “neck of the woods.”

  “I thought you said you made cinnamon rolls?” I say to my mom as I enter the kitchen. There is a boring-looking bowl of Special K at my seat.

  “I burned them, sorry. Just have cereal.” She notices my crestfallen look. Breakfast is my main meal of the day, the meal my monster typically doesn’t have time to steal from. I was looking forward to something hearty. “Oh, please, give me a break. I got distracted upstairs and didn’t hear the oven beep. Eat your food. You will be fine.” She has no idea. She sits down beside me and turns up the volume on the television.

  Reaching past me for the milk, my mother glances at me with a start. “Oh, honey. You really should blow-dry your hair before you come down for breakfast. Or at least wrap it in a towel. You’re dripping everywhere.” She gently clenches a handful of my hair in her fist, and water falls loudly onto the linoleum. I curl my arms into my oversized sweatshirt for warmth and don’t respond.

  I’m watching the weather forecast glow at me from the television screen and chewing mindlessly on cereal. It’s going to be cold today. Hopefully my hair dries before I have to go outside. Maybe I could wear a hat. Do I own a hat? My winding thoughts are interrupted by a growing sense of agitation. Anger, aggression, annoyance. I can feel the emotions strongly, but it’s strange because they seem to be coming from outside me. I know and understand the message, but it isn’t my own.

  I ready myself against an attack, placing my hands flat against the kitchen counter. Thundering steps. The yelling. This weird feeling has to be a precursor to an angry warning message, like the twinge. My muscles are tight in anticipation, but after a few moments no thought has arrived.

  The powerful sense of annoyance and frustration is getting stronger, though. Focusing in on the emotion, I realize it is billowing up from the kitchen barstool underneath me. Like the static from the towel, the cover of the seat is now electric against the bottom of my thighs.

  I shoot up from the stool and jump to the floor, my torso knocking into my mom. I hear her grunt slightly, her cereal slosh onto the counter, but I’m staring at the blue-and-white fabric of the seat cover. Without words, it tells me it no longer wants to be sat on.

  “What are you doing, honey?” My mom is watching me. Her voice is alarmed, her last words quaking slightly. “Is everything okay?” She reaches out toward me and holds on to my arm. “What’s wrong?” She brings her other hand up and laces fingers with me. She’s almost as scared of what’s happening to me as I am.

  The look on her face pulls me three steps closer to reality. Once I stood up, the fierce anger from the stool subsided. It is now only giving off gentle rays of discontent. The furniture version of a sidelong stare. I yank my eyes away from it.

  “Oh, no, nothing!” I pivot on my toes toward her. Our eyes meet, and I let out an awkward half smile, half cough. “I just remembered that I have a little bit of homework I need to do before school. Thank you for breakfast!” I spoon in two more mouthfuls of cereal and kiss her on the cheek. She smiles at me, but it’s not her real smile. It’s not the all-healing maternal smile. It’s forced, her cheeks straining under the effort, skin cracking rigidly at her wrinkles. Her eyes are questioning, eyebrows slightly raised. The smile is saying everything that she is trying to keep inside.

  One of the kitchen chairs gives me an eyeless wink as I walk by. I flinch, pretend not to see it, and focus on avoiding cracks in the linoleum. I turn to the barstool at the counter and whisper, “You’re welcome,” as I leave the kitchen.

  CHAPTER 10

  Upstairs in my bathroom, I feel smug about my recent discovery. I must have some sort of secret telepathy. A way to communicate with furniture.

  What I now know to be a cancer towel hangs nefariously from its hooked perch. An aura of death surrounds it, and I keep my arm as close to the opposite wall as possible as I reach for my makeup bag and open the top drawer of my cabinet to get my hairbrush, bobby pins, hair holders. Grabbing the handle of the brush, I feel the sizzle. The electric buzzing inherent in all things dangerous. I pull my hand back immediately, but it has already set something off. I have no time to react, to protect myself or my possessions. The top bursts off the volcano, and lava pours down toward me, sounding remarkably like a swarm of bees.

  HAIRBRUSH. HAND SOAP. HAIR HOLDERS.

  My eyes swing wildly around
the bathroom.

  MAKEUP. TOOTHBRUSH. TISSUES.

  I lean against the cabinet and stare intently down at the bathroom counter, moving my face to within inches so my entire field of vision is taken up by the creamy white swirls of the granite. After a few moments my thoughts calm, and the bees swarm away into the distance.

  Hairbrush, hand soap, hair holders, makeup, toothbrush, tissues. The losses whoosh quietly around my mind, like the debris from a tornado caught in a leftover wind. Bent over, staring deeply into the white, I let out a long, slow breath.

  I look up at myself in the mirror above the sink. My hair, having had about twenty minutes to drip-dry onto my sweatshirt, has formed into icy, wavy dreadlocks. Without a hairbrush, the fine blond strands have knotted together, clumped into tangles. The constellations of pimples across my forehead and chin glare against my pale, malnourished, shivering skin. Dark circles gleam under my eyes.

  I give a slight shrug at my ugly reflection. Our eyes connect: Not much we can do about this, I guess. I’m trying to convince myself that it’s not that bad, that I don’t really need makeup, that I’m one of those girls who is naturally pretty. But the mirror ahead is screaming a drastically different story. I almost don’t recognize myself.

  In the hallway I ease slowly around the blue mat from last night. My bedroom at the end of the hall is an advertisement for Pottery Barn Teen, a jubilant explosion of color and pattern. The walls are plastered with posters, mostly of baby animals. I have decorated every inch of open wall space between them with handwritten notes from friends, snapshots, celebrity pictures ripped from Teen People. The bed, covered in a bright geometric comforter, is layered with pillows and a lifetime’s worth of stuffed animals I can’t yet bear to relocate to the attic. The huge stereo that used to sing me through my morning routine sits in dusty silence since its ban. It glares at me from the wall, a dark shadow in my otherwise comforting room.

  My stomach is grumbling with hunger as I pull open the double doors to my closet. All my school clothes hang quietly organized in front of me. With my mother’s intense work schedule and my own demanding routine of school, practice, and homework, we don’t see much of each other during the week. So, to make up for lost time we would spend about one Saturday afternoon a month at the mall in an age-old mother-daughter bonding ritual. Making our way through my favorite stores, she would often comment, “If all it takes to get your teenage daughter to hang out with you is to take her shopping, then why not! Sign me up!”