Cut (15 page)
Authors: Patricia McCormick
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Depression & Mental Illness, #Self-Mutilation
“Yeah, I guess. Sometimes.”
He runs his fingers through his hair, not making any real improvement. I trace a line in the powdered sugar on my plate.
“Well, I am. You know, worried about you. Now.”
“I’m OK,” I say. It’s almost worse, him being worried. But I like it, too, a little.
Peggy doesn’t want us to pay, but my dad insists, and then says we’ll also take a dozen doughnuts to go. As we’re standing at the cash register picking out two of this kind, two of that, I whisper that he should leave Peggy a big tip. He gives me a couple of dollars and I walk back to where we were sitting and tuck them under my hot chocolate mug.
She thanks us and my dad reaches across the counter and shakes her hand. She doesn’t act like this is dorky so I decide to shake her hand too. Then she goes off to wait on a couple of punk rockers.
“You wait here,” my dad says. “I’ll get the car warmed up, then you can come out.”
“Sure,” I say. “OK.”
After a few minutes he comes back and says the car’s all warmed up; he looks ridiculously happy about this. I look for Peggy so she can see how I’m following her advice, but she must be in the kitchen. My dad holds the door for me as we leave Dunkin’ Donuts and he opens the car door for me when we get to the parking lot. I think about how normal we look compared to the punk rockers inside eating doughnuts; we must look like an oldtime dad and daughter from some black-and-white TV show, but I don’t care. I actually sort of like it.
He puts the car in reverse but keeps his foot on the brake. “So,” he says. “Where’re we going?”
This hadn’t occurred to me—the idea that there’s a next step. And that it’s up to me to decide what that next step is.
“Home?” my dad says.
I picture my mom and Sam sitting in the breakfast nook, tatting and sorting, Linus outside chasing a squirrel. Then I imagine Sydney blowing smoke rings on the porch. Tara inviting me to play Ping-Pong. And the circle of feet in Group the day I cried. I picture Ruby’s white nurse’s shoes. And your little fabric shoes.
I shake my head.
“Back to Sick Minds,” I say.
“What?” he says.
“That’s what we call it. Sick Minds. Instead of Sea Pines.”
“Oh.” He takes this in, then smiles. “You sure?”
I wonder for a minute if I am sure. Then I know I am. “Uh huh,” I say. “For a while.”
He makes his tkk, tkk thinking sound, then nods. “OK,” he says. He takes his foot off the brake and we pull out of the parking lot.
We cross the highway and swing past the pay phone where the operator helped me call collect. Then the businesses on the highway glide by, one by one. The carpet store with its loud sale signs. A video rental place. A Burger King, a Dairy Queen. I realize in an instant that the trip back to Sick Minds will be much faster than the trip away from it. “Could you go a little slower?” I say.
He doesn’t answer, doesn’t ask why, he just does what I ask.
I want to use every minute talking. But it’s my dad who says something first.
“I’m, uh, sorry, I never came and saw you there.” He says this quietly, glancing over at me, then back at the road.
“It’s OK,” I say.
“Will you quit saying that?” he says. “It’s not OK.”
“OK,” I say. Then, “Actually, I’ve got a lot of repressed hostility about it.”
He looks startled, then I laugh and he laughs and I offer a silent thank-you to Amanda, who couldn’t possibly know how she helped me.
“At least you brought Mom and Sam to visiting day,” I say.
“Where’d you get that idea?”
“I don’t know. I just figured …”
“Well, I didn’t.”
He checks the rear-view mirror, changes lanes, comes back to the conversation.
“She drove herself,” he says.
“Really?”
“Really.”
I imagine my mom driving, achingly slowly, her and Sam strapped in their seat belts, my mom leaning forward, her hands gripping the steering wheel.
“Wow,” is all I can say.
A band of light, the reflection from the rear-view mirror, shines across my dad’s features.
“Things are …a little different now,” he says haltingly.
“What do you mean?”
“After you …left, you know, for …what do you call it? Sick Minds?”
I grin; this sounds funny coming from my dad.
“We’re trying harder now,” he says. “Your mom and me. I, um, I’m trying to be around more.”
I can’t quite picture him at the breakfast nook while my mom tats and Sam sorts, but I want to believe him, because he seems to need me to believe.
We’re at a stoplight. My dad looks over at me, studying my face. A horn beeps behind us. My dad checks the rear-view mirror again, startled, as if he’s forgotten we’re on a busy road.
When we pull up to the entrance of Sick Minds, I ask my dad if we can drive around the block once before we go in. He takes his foot off the gas and lets the car glide past. We drive slowly by a few scattered houses, then turn the corner and inch past a housing development.
I clutch the box of doughnuts to my stomach and imagine what it’ll be like to see everybody again. The dashboard clock says 7:12. It’s only a few hours since I left, even though it feels like it’s been days. At 7:12, everyone will be in evening Study Hall. Sydney and Tara and Debbie. Even Amanda. Ruby will be patrolling the halls in her squeaky shoes. And suddenly I want to be back there. Right away.
“It’s OK,” I say to my dad. “We can go in now.”
I sit in the waiting room outside Mrs. Bryant’s office, the box of doughnuts still in my lap, while my dad goes in and explains. On the way in from the parking lot I told him I was afraid they’d send me to Humdinger or maybe even kick me out. “Let me handle it,” he said. I remembered Peggy’s advice and decided to go ahead and let him be the dad and me just be the kid.
When he comes out with Mrs. Bryant, I notice that his hair is still a mess from being outside in the wind; I have an urge to fix it for him, get a comb and make it all neat again, but I can tell from the look on Mrs. Bryant’s face that I have bigger things to worry about.
“You had us worried,” she says, after we all sit down.
“I’m sorry.” I know this is the good-manners thing to say.
“Well.” A sort of smile passes over her face. “I’m glad you came back.”
“Me too.” I mean this, suddenly, with all my heart.
They look at me like they don’t quite understand and I try hard to find the words that will make them see what I mean. “I …I want …I w ant …” And then I know what it is I wanted so badly the day Tiffany went home, the day it first felt like spring, when I pictured kids riding bikes, dads cooking on grills, moms making lemonade. “I want to get better.”
My dad starts patting his pockets like he’s looking for something. But I know he’s just trying to do something so he doesn’t cry. I smile at him because I know this isn’t something to cry about.
My dad and Mrs. Bryant are talking about dates, insurance policies, adult stuff. But all I can think about is how when I get back to the dorm wing, I’m going to see if it would be okay if I offer everyone a doughnut.
Then, tomorrow, I’m going down to your office first thing in the morning. And tell you everything.
You say it’s up to me to do the talking. You lean forward, place a box of tissues in front of me, and your black leather chair groans like a living thing. Like the cow it used to be before somebody killed it and turned it into a chair in a shrink’s office in a loony bin.
Fifteen-year-old Callie isn’t speaking to anybody, not even her therapist at Sea Pines, the “residential treatment facility” where her parents and doctor sent her after discovering that she cuts herself. As her story unfolds, Callie reluctantly becomes involved with the “guests” at Sea Pines—other young women struggling with problems of their own. Although their “issues” are different from hers, Callie is drawn into the group, finds her voice, and, gradually, confronts the family trauma that triggered her destructive behavior.
Cut
is a compelling and compassionate look at a young woman’s struggle to overcome the impulses that led her to inflict harm on herself.
Patricia McCormick
is the author of three award-winning young adult novels, including
Cut,
which was her first. Her young adult novel
Sold
was a National Book Award finalist. Ms. McCormick earned an MS degree at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and an MFA at The New School and has taught at both of these institutions. She has been named a fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She lives in New York City.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
