I hadn’t even made it to the car when my cell phone rang, the screen flashing CRYSTAL at me like an insult. I honestly debated. For the first time in the few months we’d been friends, I considered whether I wanted to answer her call.
Yeah, of course I did.
“Hey.”
She was crying. “Can you please come over? Please?”
I told her I was sweaty, stinking. I needed to change. It was late. I was tired.
“Please? Oh my god, please.” More sobbing. More hysterics.
In the weeks that passed since my stay at the hospital, I had begun to feel more clear-headed, more normal. More like an… “everyday” kind of guy. Therapy and medication and the occasional visit to the gym all combined to grind down the jagged edges of my dark thoughts, smooth them to wrinkles; hiccups versus disease, speedbumps versus walls.
And with a stronger, healthier mind came realization. Clarity.
I began to see Crystal for what she truly was. Not a fun, hot girl with an overly constructed face and a passion for makeup, but a truly disturbed individual. I finally accepted that it wasn’t normal for a girl her age to do to her face, her body, what she had done. The obviously neurotic need for more and more surgeries, fixing and tweaking and moving her features like puzzle pieces. Her mother, too, I now understood, was disturbed in her own right. The way she acted with Crystal. With me. Her strange way of pushing us into each other.
All these thoughts were tinkling like wind chimes on a breezy porch when I saw her name appear on my phone. It was like a door of sanity inside my head shot open and all those coherent pontifications poured into me, a waterfall of understanding that stopped me in my tracks and halted my thumb’s progress over the word ANSWER, the pad hovering above it like a man about to press the big red button that sent nukes trailing sky-wide cottontails to start the end of everything.
But I did answer. And then the sobbing, like I said. The hysterics.
“I’ll come over,” I said. “I’ll be there soon.”
I knew before I got into the car I’d made a mistake. I also knew I didn’t want to keep doing this. Seeing her. I needed to move on, get things back to normal. Get normal friends and find a job. My savings account was running thin and I felt more emotionally and psychologically stable than I had in years.
Resolute in my thinking, I started the car, let out a kept breath, and drove to Crystal, knowing in my heart I would be seeing her for the last time.
6
THIS IS A great time to tell you about the one and only group session I ever participated in, and I’d only done it because Crystal had insisted. “It’ll be hilarious,” she’d said.
In group, everyone talks about how depressed / upset / scared / fucked up they are. About their horrible lives and their chemically-imbalanced brains. About their suicide attempts or the fight they had with their girlfriend / boyfriend / parent / kid / husband / wife that finally pushed them, arms flailing, over the edge and down.
It was during this singular group session that I learned, for the first time, about Bobby.
Bobby was Crystal’s ex-boyfriend. It was his dumping of her that sent her into the final, deathly spiral, her own futile run for death’s door and ensuing psychotic break. Apparently, she’d been caught outside his house a few hours after he’d delivered the bad news of their relationship’s demise (the deed apparently done in a red corner booth at the neighborhood Denny’s). After said pronouncement, he quickly left, dropping enough cash to cover the bill and a generous tip before high-tailing it out of there, riding bent-for-hell on his Kawasaki before she could come to her senses and chase him down. Later that same night, the police, who’d been called by a neighbor, spotted her hiding in a cluster of bushes beneath his living room window. She tried to run but they chased her down easily as she struggled to locate where she’d parked her Honda, her clothes muddy and ripped.
It’s a testament to her slight frame and nightclub appearance that they didn’t use the cuffs until they spotted the kitchen knife she clutched in one tight fist.
She spent a night in jail despite Bobby’s refusal to press charges (later she revealed that a restraining order had been put into motion), and after a psych eval had ended up assigned to the Green Ward until such time as the supervising psychiatrist deemed her stable enough to release.
At the time, I’d thought the story pretty funny. Like an episode of some cable comedy. But as I spent more time with Crystal, I became more attuned to her “off” moments – like the slap – or the time she pretended to run me over with her car and then almost inadvertently did just that. Or the way she acted around her mother at times, sulky and absent both, as if she’d gotten lost in a memory that was too sad for her mind to properly process.
I think those lost moments was her thinking of Bobby.
7
I ARRIVED AT Crystal’s house twenty minutes after we spoke on the phone, simultaneously worried and sickened the entire drive there. Worried about her, about what might be wrong, hoping it wasn’t a serious relapse. Sickened that I had to go there again, not able to shake the feeling I was somehow being trapped, ensnared in this strange web she had spun, a surreal funhouse friendship that clung in tatters to parts of my mind like elements of a bizarre and troubling dream; nightmares of the distorted physicality of her reengineered visage, the ghost-like way her mother plied us with alcohol at every given turn then slipped away like a wraith, face split with the not-so-sly smile that intimated the blessing for a conjoining that would never occur.
Almost as haunting were the absences in her life. The holes between the taut webbing. The father always spoken of but never seen. The mysterious, nameless brother mentioned only as if by accident, and always dropped abruptly, as if it had fallen into the conversation like a spilled drink that’s quickly sponged away before it can do any real damage.
And the ex-boyfriend. Bobby. What had ever become of her obsession with him? Was her love cured so quickly? A raging, burning flame extinguished with nothing more than the passing of a few weeks and a slight alteration in medication? Was it possible? But if not, then why the silence? Why wasn’t she still mooning over him, or insulting his name, or insisting on some form of revenge?
Unless I was the revenge. Ah, yes. Of course. But I was being an uncooperative weapon. A dulled knife. An empty-chambered pistol. I mean, what was the point of finding a new lover, someone who allowed you to throw the heat of newfound burning lust into the face of the one who had hurt you… if only to be spurned? Rejected once more. And worse, denied the satisfaction that comes with one-upmanship. With dominance.
I was as futile to her as I was to myself.
And yet I had a role to play. The platonic friend who came running when she called. The balm to soothe her ragged, frayed feelings, erase the despair of loneliness, to be steadfast in the face of the rising storm of anxiety that I was also so very familiar with.
When she answered the door, I had physically braced myself for the impact of her pushing herself into my arms, her waxen face smeared with tears, her body hot with the feverish exertions from sobbing her heart out.
Instead the door was thrown open to reveal a smiling, almost giddy, Crystal. Her hair was yanked into a tight ponytail, pulling her eyes – wide and glassy as a stuffed deer – even further apart than normal. She had a drink in her hand (gin and tonic by the looks and smell of it) and wore a tight black tank top above what I was fairly sure were black panties, and nothing else. She grabbed me roughly by the scruff of the shirt and yanked me inside.
“Oh my god what took you so long!” she yelled dramatically before releasing me, stumbling under my own forward propulsion toward the living room. “God damn I need another drink.” She tilted the remaining contents of the glass into her mouth, belched, then bellowed, “Mom!”
I heard glasses clinking in the kitchen. Ahead of me the television was on and turned up loud. A police drama by the sound of it. Sirens and screaming. Beyond the living room was the hallway that led to the back bedrooms. One of the doors in the hallway opened and Crystal’s mother stepped out.
