Page 83 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
“You can’t?” He sounds baffled. “Do you have another best friend you aren’t telling me about?”
“Of course not,” I say. “But I signed up for this writing group that responds to prompts via email, and I have to get this out by Sunday—”
“No seas tonta, psycho,” he interrupts. “That can wait until tomorrow.”
“Nope. No can do. I’m a Saturday-night-only girl now. And only if all my work is done.”
You see, if I skip out on one night of work, what’s to stop me from skipping tomorrow, too? What’s to stop me from disregarding the assignment entirely? And all that free time—it can only have one conclusion. A return of the Worries. Of myaddictionto worrying.
I didn’t understand that before, but I do now.
See, there are two kinds of cravings: safe and not safe. For a normal human, that distinction is easy. Chocolate cupcake craving? Safe. Heroin craving? Not safe. But when you come from a family of addicts, the line blurs. Craving a chocolate cupcake or a vial of heroin or the horrible familiarity of immediately jumping to the worst-case scenario…they’re the same. They’re all the same. They come from the same place—a hidden place you cannot see or name—and they do the same thing to your mind. They gum up the inside. Clog the pathways through which other thoughts normally pass. And it doesn’t end with sobriety. It lingers in the blood. Festers. Weaves invisibly up the branches of your children, and your children’s children, and so on and so forth, like heartrot up a hardwood trunk.
Because of this, for addicts, for true addicts, the type who wear addiction in their very blood, there is no middle ground. It’s all or nothing. You lean into the craving or you cut it out, all of it, even the things just tangentially related to the craving, things you might not have meant to cut. There is no middle ground. Just ask Speedy. If he could have cut cocaine and kept wine, he would have.
So, yes—I used to take Fridays off. But not anymore. I can’t. I might not be an addict, but addiction is in my blood. It’s in all of our blood—me, Karma, Caleb…everyone. It’s curdling, rotting us from the inside out.
And of every way I want to be tied to my family, that’s the very last.
—
FOR SO LONG, I LIVEDlike this: Chase the thoughts. Feed them. Water them. Let them grow, fester, snake around your mind in a white-grey tumor that will eventually cover it all, every last inch of healthy pink tissue.
But I’m different now. I’ve learned. Don’t chase, Eliot. Let thethoughts float through your head. They aren’t real. They’re just thoughts, and they can’t hurt you. Dig your fingers into the cracks of the crusty grey tumor. Wiggle them apart. Make room. Pull off entire chunks of the cancer that has for so long controlled a life that should be your own. Expose the raw pink tissue beneath. Let it breathe. Let it produce thoughts long unthunk. Pulsing, tender, squishy.
—
IN APRIL, MANUEL GETS Aletter from Harvard. We gather around the counter at the Valdecasas house—me, Manuel, Valentina, Che, and Juli, one of the rare nights his parents are actually home—and he opens the envelope, fingers trembling. We all lean over his shoulder. Straining to see his future.
Juli bursts into tears.
“Itoldyou so,” I try to say, but my words are drowned out by his mom’s sobs.
Manuel looks up in shock. “Dios mío, Mom. Are you okay?”
“It was worth it.” Her face presses to the fabric of her husband’s shoulder. “Dios mío, Che. It was all worth it.”
—
I GET INTO NONE OFmy top choices, all of which are within spitting distance of Boston. I feel a pit open in the base of my stomach. During my morning writing sessions, I push my pen so hard that it tears the paper.
—
AT THE VERY LAST MINUTE,I gain a spot at the University of Michigan, selected from their long waitlist. And by the time high school graduation rolls around, my OCD is…notgone…but under tight control. The most terrifying thoughts have faded to backgroundnoise. Dr.Droopy was wrong; my diseasecanbe cured. All I have to do is turn my mind to healthier things, like goal setting and ambition. To lean in. I can’t believe I spent almost a decade obsessing over whether or not I was a liar or a cheater or in love with my brother. All those concerns feel far away. So far away.
“See?” says Speedy on the day of my last appointment with Dr.Droopy. “What did I tell you? No drugs necessary.”
—
AFTER GRADUATION, WE HEAD UPto Canada with the rest of my family. We only have a month on the island before we have to come home and pack our lives into the smallest number of boxes possible. We’ll be apart for the first time since Manuel moved to Chicago, and we’re desperately aware of our own expiration date.
We aren’tworried, though. Of course not. We’re Manny and Eliot. The package deal. We’ve got it all figured out: we’ll visit every month, and after four years, we’ll get our degrees and move to a new city together—it doesn’t matter where, as long as we have each other. Manuel will get a job as an investment banker or rocket scientist or whatever the hell you do after going to Harvard, and I’ll live on his couch.
But before then, we have a month. One month in our favorite place on Earth. That’s it.
We’re going to make the most of it—which includes me putting away my notebook.
We do everything we can. We’re up at eight and done with breakfast by eight thirty. We ski. We hike. We tube. We take out thePeriwinkleand buzz out to explore the many deserted islands around us, picking blueberries and talking about nothing. We haul three cans of paint out to the largest rock on Cradle and paint a mural on its bumpy surface. We unroll a pair of paper-thin air mattresses on the beach by Chelsea Morning and spend the night under the stars.The next day, our backs hurt so badly we do nothing but lie on the couch and read oldArchiecomics.
