Fuck this! I shout at my parents. I stand up from my chair and say again, Fuck this!
Marya, sit down.
No! I shout. I pace in circles around the room. The other patients and their families watch me from the corners of their eyes. My brain is burning. I stand over my parents, waving my arms. You can’t just keep me here! I scream. What about my civil rights?
You have no civil rights, my mother points out. Not until you’re eighteen.
I’m moving to California, I say.
What are you talking about?
I’ll live with Anne (she’s my father’s first wife), and I’ll go to school and everything.
They stare at me.
It will be totally good for me, I say, honing my argument—this plan has just occurred to me in the last three minutes, but now it is essential, imperative, that I go. It is the most important thing ever in my whole life.
I perk up, suddenly loving and cheerful. It will be totally healing for me, I say. I will totally get better. You won’t have to worry about me. I’ll totally take in the sea air. It’s very centering out there.
California will be perfect. No one will watch me.
I’ll totally take long walks on the beach, I say. I’ll walk in the sunshine and celebrate the rain. I’ll get back in my body. I’ll do yoga. I’ll totally blossom. You see? It’s perfect. It’s just the thing.
My parents look at each other.
A few weeks later, they let me out of lockup, and I’m sitting on a plane.
1990
Here I am, healing. Centering. By now I’m convinced that my eating disorder is entirely sensible, necessary, that I’m completely sane and everybody else is nuts. Obviously I had to get out of there.
I rattle through the salt-air night in the back of a pickup truck, heading for Bodega Bay. The bottles of booze, the baggies of pot, the friends from school. We trudge through the dunes, lie on our backs, stare up at the ocean of sky. I am in heaven. This is my hideaway. Here, I can starve without anyone stopping me. I can drink myself high, smoke myself into a steady drifting down. Here, I can write all night. If I can just make it through high school, I can escape to college in some city far away. I’ll be a writer and show them all that I am not a fuckup, I can make it, I am real.
The moods are steady, sky-high. My mind is racing ahead and I chase it, writing as fast as I can, failing heart stuttering, body disappearing. I can do anything. Nothing can stop me.
I’m a flurry of motion, sitting on the floor of my bedroom, arms flying, shuffling papers into piles, brain racing, reading snippets of writing, hopping up to get something on my desk, making rapid little red-pen marks on the pages, cutting and pasting, short of breath, pulse pounding, I am back in my element, where I can do a thousand things at once, fueled by the rabid energy triggered by the booze, no food, no sleep, I stand up and compulsively do three hundred leg lifts, balancing on the back of the chair—and I leap onto the chair and pierce my nose with a safety pin—and I climb out my window onto the roof, flinging my head back to look at the glorious blanket of stars and their halo, and the round-bellied moon—and I spin around in circles, arms out, teetering near the edge, dizzily gazing out over the dark, thick woods that surround the house—and I hop back in the window, grab my jacket, and dash down the stairs and out the door.
I walk down the long driveway onto the winding dark road that runs nearby, the Spanish moss hanging in heavy swags from the cypress and eucalyptus trees. I walk down to the strip mall in town, the neon signs fizzling in the night. I am violently alive. Every snap and spit of the neon pierces my eyes. A few cars go by, the whoosh of their tires making a hollow echo in my ears. This is my secret life, these nights I prowl and hide in shadows in the dark, walk the roads near their guardrails, the hills dropping sharply from the road to the valley below. Eventually, the lights, the noise, become too much, and the frenzied intensity begins to fray, tearing at my brain, slicing through my body like razor blades, and I walk down the road to my boyfriend’s house. He is older, stupid, stoned, and he passes me the joint and I take a deep drag and pass it to his sister and get up to get myself a drink. I flop belly-down on the carpet, watch the interior of my mind as it empties of thoughts. The agitation begins to subside, and I slide into a rocking, gentle nothingness. We watch idiotic reruns on TV. I am starving, and the hunger pinches at my gut. My head lolls. I lay face down on the carpet, the laugh track on the television rolling over me. I fall asleep.
I am lost, a satellite orbiting the world. The energy is turning dark, the sunshine of the early months here in California fading. The starving and the drinking and the disembodied sex—all my methods for stilling my thoughts are starting to fail me. I tell myself it’s not happening. I tell myself I’m all right. I can stay here. I can stand this. Surely, this will stop.
But a part of me knows I’m going to die, and doesn’t care. In fact, I wish like hell I would. I’m seventeen, and I’ve had enough.
1991
Caught again. Yellow-eyed, skeletal, bitchy, I am hauled back to Minnesota by my parents. Hospital, take two. Organs failing, deathly low weight, sick as a dog, but I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. I sit on the floor, head nodding, nothing but static in my brain, my mother trying to get me to talk, speak, show some signs of life, my father making desperate jokes, trying to make me laugh. He cries and my mother cries, and through my fog I hate that they cry, and hate myself for making them cry, and, trying to form words, I tell them they don’t need to worry, I’m fine, please just leave me alone. Desert Storm plays a weird soundtrack to my days, fiery explosions on the TV screen, tanks barreling over entire towns, screaming people, that world far away—and I am far away too, lost in my own mind. The other patients hang limply over the arms of the couches and chairs, or stand in corners pretending to look at something, pacing in tiny, rapid circles, bouncing up and down, trying to burn off the calories that are keeping them alive. I lie awake at night, the bed bruising my bones, and listen to the wild, endless chatter of voices in my head.
Hospital, take three. Then the doctor’s had enough, tells my parents to put me in a state institution and leave me there. Instead, they find the last resort, a locked institution for kids as crazy as me. My last chance.
I am standing outside a square, two-story brick building. It’s ten degrees below zero, no flesh to keep me warm, and my mother grips me tight until the staff of this new place pulls me away. I look over my shoulder at my parents, they cry, I hate myself, I look forward, go away. Three triple-locked doors close one by one behind me as I follow the staff person inside, up the stairs, down the hall.
We are all crazy, under eighteen, the dregs of the system, the failures, the rejects of families, foster care, juvenile hall, we have been removed from society, a danger, a blight. We are a twelve-year-old car thief, a rapist,