Page 44 of Revenge Cake

It was too much pressure.

I could tell I was headed for a panic spiral if I kept obsessing, so I’d changed tack. I skipped three classes the first week back to try and find my chill. I baked. I watched movies. I even got a massage.

Nothing worked.

I look at the mirror on my bedroom door, wondering how I’m going to use makeup to mask the wraith staring back at me. My sunken eyes and pale lips are a giveaway that I’ve lost more than a single night’s sleep.

Suddenly, the otherworldly aura descends, and the area around me starts to buzz.

Oh, no. No, not this. Please not this.

The furniture in my room looks bright. Electric. Menacing—as if the whole universe is against me, everything from the relentless sun in the sky to my cheap IKEA desk.

It’s happening. There’s no going back now.

The spiral has begun.

I could have a panic attack for any reason at all, something as small as a first date to as big as a ballet solo in a packed auditorium. Sometimes I’d even have one over something I’d done dozens of times before, like a class presentation. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, but once it begins, there’s no stopping it.

I know it in my gut.

This won’t be my only panic attack.

I’ll have one tomorrow, and the day after that, and probably another one that night, and then I won’t sleep, and I’ll live in a simmering state of panic for the next three days until I finally pass out from exhaustion for a few hours, but then, of course, panic will haunt my dreams in order to keep my body from fully resting, a reminder that no matter what I do or where I go, I can’t escape it.

As if out of acceptance, my chest rises and falls in a shallow pant and the muscles in my hands and feet starting twitching.

In an attempt to pull myself out of my head, I frantically reach for the phone sitting face up on my desk.

Me: Can you come over?

As if he’s a magical antidote to anxiety, my body immediately starts to relax after I press send. I think of his kind, smiling face. Logan. My shelter from the storm.

I hear Bob Dylan’s voice singing a similar line in my head.

Jesus Christ, has there ever been a worse singer than Bob Dylan? It reminds me of the endless, claustrophobic drives to Malibu in the back seat of our family Honda Accord with my brother’s feet in my face as shitty classic rock played on my dad’s Satellite radio. I remember wondering if we had all died in a car accident that we didn’t remember, and hell was just a slow torture of monotony. That I would spend eternity in a limbo of the present, with a window view of cars against a smog-pink sky in the start-and-stop LA traffic. My brother farting and then extending his long arm into the front seat to press the child window lock. My parents gossiping like teenagers about the uncle and aunt we’re on our way to visit—“How much do you want to bet they’re going to order a two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine tonight?”—all but forgetting my brother’s and my existence in the back seat.

I wonder if I’m still in that Honda Accord right now, only starting to wake from a dream designed specifically by the devil to make the monotony more unbearable.

I find myself walking in circles as if the ritual could stifle Bob Dylan’s raspy voice. “Shut up, Bob!”

I halt when I hear my phone vibrate.

Logan: Is everything ok?

Me: I’m just nervous about my interview.

Logan: I have to stay after for a bit to ask my professor a question, but I can come right after that.

I imagine Logan in a flannel plaid shirt sitting at a desk, rapt by a lecture about god knows what. Engineering shit. I love the black square glasses he wears only for class, and the way they make his green eyes look large and vulnerable. “I can’t see the lecture notes without them,” he says, with that self-deprecating half-smile.

Somehow the thought makes me sad, like I’m an unhappily married sixty-year-old lady wistfully remembering her perfect college boyfriend. The best she ever had.

No, no, no. Negative thoughts. Self-loathing. None of this is good. I’m starting to unravel.

It’s only when I see Logan’s startled face as he stands in my doorway that I realize how long I’ve been pacing in tiny circles in my cramped bedroom. “Hey…” he says softly. He approaches me slowly as if afraid to startle me. A hysterical giggle bubbles from my chest as I realize how insane I must look. “Are you that worried?” He sets a hand on my forearm as if to steady me.

Immediately the tears come in streams. I giggle again out of embarrassment, but it sounds more like a sob. “I’m a mess right now.”

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