thoughts on a page

right. this is a very sad story (i apologize) but it was definitely good for me to write it. it's also an older story (from last fall) so if it sounds a little different than my usual style, that's why. :) hahaha, it's also a little long. oh well. enjoy! WolfGrrl

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I want to start off by saying I didn’t really know her; we had a class together (in one of those big lecture halls, where no one knows anyone else) and I saw her around campus or on the bus sometimes. But the first thing I noticed about her was her smile. It was brittle, easily broken. Like a superficial shield to keep the world away. She wielded it continually in social settings; in fact, every time I saw her she was smiling that broken-glass smile and it cut something in me, even though I didn’t know who she was or why she needed that shield of normalcy.

She came and went in my field of view, and I forgot about her in the rush of life and everyday responsibilities. But I didn’t forget her smile, and maybe that was why when my friend Annabeth started to smile that way it rang a bell, dimly, in the back of my mind.

Annabeth already had enough “issues” to last a lifetime. But somehow I’d never noticed that she wasn’t always around or she wasn’t always as…engaged as the rest of us when we talked and laughed and ribbed each other. In fact, I didn’t notice that she’d been growing quieter and quieter and smaller and smaller until I noticed her smile, and if it hadn’t been for that other unnamed girl I wouldn’t even have noticed that. So I asked her about it one day when we were studying in the lounge, waiting for our mutual friend David to get back with the pizza. 

“Hey Anna, is everything OK?”

“Sure.” She looked at me like I was crazy, and maybe I was because when I met her gaze I felt like I was looking at two people: one who thought I was crazy and one who was begging me for…something. Something important. The dichotomy in her eyes made me uneasy, and I let the subject drop.

The semester passed, and it was almost Thanksgiving when Annabeth suddenly went missing. We had French together and one day she didn’t show up for class. Annabeth was always in class and always on time – I was the one who would forget to set his alarm (or sleep through it). But Annabeth was obsessive about things like that, and so it was a shock when she wasn’t there to learn about irregular verbs in the past tense. 

I texted her and considered my duty done, but at dinner I still hadn’t heard back and her friend Pam had called me, wanting to know where Anna was. That was when I realized she was missing, and for some reason I pictured her smile, and then that other girl’s smile. The two images hovered in my mind all night, making it impossible to sleep. So I was awake earlier than usual the next morning, and I heard my cell when it rang.

“Anna’s in the hospital.” I could barely understand Pam she was crying so hard. “They said…they said she’s anorexic and that they’re putting her in that program for really sick people – the one where they force you to eat and you can’t see your friends or go home…” She rambled on incoherently, but it didn’t matter because I’d stopped listening even though I still had my cell pressed to my ear.

Anorexic. But she couldn’t be, could she? Suddenly feeling chilled I tried to draw an image of Anna in my mind but I couldn’t. I knew her – she was a friend, we had class together three times a week – but I couldn’t picture her at all. All I could see was her smile, that damned, brittle smile, and with the image came the memory of that moment when I asked her if she was OK and she said yes, but her eyes said no.

No, I realized with growing horror and shame. She hadn’t said yes. She’d said “Sure” and anyone who has lied to their parents knows that there’s a big difference between “yes” and “sure.” I hung up on Pam without bothering to say goodbye and sat down on my bed, feeling like there was a Chevy parked on my chest.

Annabeth died. They tried to save her; from what little news I got from Pam (who got it from Anna’s brother) they tried really hard to save her, doing all kinds of scary, crazy shit to keep her alive. But she’d gone too far for them to pull her back and she died. I took my last exam on the thirteenth of December and then flew down to Wilmington, North Carolina to attend the funeral. It was a cold, sunny day with a stiff breeze, and everyone’s faces were red and numbed from the cold. I felt numb in more than just my hands and my nose though; I was numb inside, hit hard by the idea that someone I thought I knew so well could be someone I didn’t know at all.

Worst of all were the what-ifs: they plagued me at odd moments, and especially at night. I’d lie in bed and try to remember every moment we’d spent together (which was weird in and of itself, since I hadn’t thought of Anna as anything more than a friend) so I could analyze them. But I knew even from the handful of memories I was able to collect that it was a pointless exercise. I’d never before realized how superficial all my relationships were; Annabeth was someone I saw almost every day and talked to nearly as often, but she’d managed to keep something so huge from me without any effort at all. A smile. That was all I had to remember, even though I was haunted by the ghosts of all the things I hadn’t done and didn’t know. A damned, brittle, broken-glass smile and a glance where “sure” was very far from “yes, I’m fine.”

I don’t know what happened to that other girl – the girl with the original smile. When I went back to school in January I had a different schedule, and I hoped when I didn’t see her that maybe she did too. But I rode the same bus, and the weeks passed and she never came.

Not knowing meant I could give her a happy ending if I wanted to; I could fashion a fantasy where they had caught her illness in time and saved her. But not knowing also meant that I didn’t know for certain. Annabeth’s funeral, painful as was, had provided closure. With that other girl – the unnamed girl, the original girl – I was haunted by a different set of what-ifs. It was no longer the “what if I’d noticed in time?” and “what if I’d said something or pressed harder to get her to share?” that ran around in my head when I crashed at two AM, jittery from caffeine or buzzed from a night out.  My what-ifs had grown up and grown teeth, and they gnawed at more than just my social conscience; after all, I’d known Anna personally, and I had no idea who this girl was. But over time her ghost became more real to me than Anna’s, and it was her ghost who prompted me to step up when I saw that smile on my brother’s girlfriend’s face four years later.

Liz wasn’t like Annabeth; her smile covered something different. But it was the same code, the same silent scream for help under the veneer of “I’m OK.” I don’t know how much I helped Liz, but I do know that I felt better when I reached out to her, and not just better in the immediate, short-term sense. 

I graduated from college, went to grad school, got my doctorate. I bet you think I’m a counselor or a doctor or a therapist, because of what I’ve told you. I will tell you that I see that broken-glass smile every day, sometimes multiple times a day, on the faces of the individuals that pass through my room. I see an Annabeth or a Liz hundreds of times a year, for a hundred different reasons and at a hundred different intensities. And standing beside me, unseen and unremarkable, is that first girl who will always wear the brittle, broken-glass smile in my memory. My ghost girl, who looks at me and, without me ever having known her, pushes me to reach out to the people behind those smiles and keep them from becoming ghosts themselves.