OCD Love Story (34 page)

I shrug.

“I'm sort of screwed,” I say. I've tried not to think about
the next time the impulse hits me to see them because I know that's about to get much, much harder.

“What do you like about them?” Beck says. “What's so special about them?” It is a question I have asked myself, but no one has asked me out loud. Not even Dr. Pat. I think once you have that OCD label people stop asking for reasons, since everything you do is probably just from the disorder. I'm flummoxed. Speechless.

“When did you see them first?” Beck says. My jaw remains dropped because, again, no one has asked me this before. I've said the whole thing about magic eyes and people popping out at me from nowhere, and that's true, but I have a little fuzz along the edge of my answer, like there's more to it, more to uncover.

“God . . . I don't even remember . . . not long ago . . . ,” I say. I scrunch up my eyes to make myself remember something more. “It's a recent thing.”

“You just heard them or saw them one day?”

“I guess I heard them first. Before my session. Heard them talking about stuff . . . ” For a moment I think it's there: a Reason. But then it fades back again and there's nothing. “I can check. It's probably in my notebook . . . ” I almost scramble to my purse to get it, and the thought of flipping through it and putting pieces together makes me truly, truly happy for a moment. Like I'll get a real relief, the sort of relief that actually chills out my whole system.

But I don't have the notebook. Dr. Pat has the notebook.

“What if I never find out the reason?” I say. I don't know if he'll know what I mean, because I don't know if
I
really know what I mean. “Do you think I'll be okay if it was just a thing that happened? Would that be weird? What if there wasn't a real reason? I mean, maybe I'm just kinda crazy.”

“Sometimes crap just happens,” Beck says.

“Yeah, sometimes people just do really fucking weird things.” I put down the photograph of Violet. “Sometimes there're real reasons, but sometimes maybe there aren't any.”

“Yeah.”

I touch some of the rawest parts of Beck's skin. His neck, the place where his thumb meets the rest of his hand, his chin.

“I'm sorry. This is, like, truly grotesque. My skin is falling off. I mean, this is not okay. There goes the theory that I'm less psycho than Jenny and Rudy. . . . ” He's sort of tearing up. “I thought I was getting better.”

I thought he was getting better too.

I thought
I
was getting better. This blows. And his sad, sad face hurts me. The scrapes on his skin, the dry patches in between each finger. I know how badly he wishes they could be hidden.

“I'm sorry,” he says, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry . . . ” I let him finish the eight times, but then I dive in. Because I can't fix the dried-up bits of him, the itch of too-clean skin, the haunting
eyes of his little, gone sister, but I can do this, at least.

“I've got other stuff to tell you,” I say. I have no interest in showing Beck how disgusting my thigh bruises have gotten. But something much deeper inside me doesn't want him to lie there thinking he's the only one whose crazed tendencies are showing up on his skin. So I unceremoniously take off my pants.

“Oh—” Beck starts. He thinks we're going to do it again, and I'm sure we will sometime, but I shake my head vehemently and hold up a hand to make him wait. He sinks back into the bed and my pants come off one leg at a time. I guess when we did this before—got undressed—we didn't take the time to inspect each other's bodies. I turn to the side so he can get the full effect of the black and blue and purple and yellow and red
thing
that is taking over my leg. There's no hiding his reaction—it's like a punch to his chest. But then he leans forward and touches it. Even just that light touch hurts, which is funny since I'm used to pinching it. But when I'm in the moment, compulsing, I'm far enough gone in the anxiety and the release that I don't think about the pain.

I'm not like a cutter. I don't
want
it to hurt. Jenny doesn't want that pinch of hair coming out. Rudy doesn't like the bit of blood that comes with the bit of pain when he excavates his face. These are things I don't have to say to Beck, who is nodding at the size and shape of the bruise, at the flush of my face.

“That it?” he says at last. And I guess it is.

“I think that's it. But I need you to come to Dr. Pat's with me.”

“If we leave the house, does this count as a date?” Beck says. “Our seventh date?”

“Oh,” I say. “I forgot you were counting.”

He swallows eight times.

• • •

An hour later we're with Dr. Pat, at my house, in front of the fireplace. Dr. Pat must be from some kind of good New England stock, because she gets a fire going like only a real New Englander can: rolled balls of newspaper, strategically lit corners, a slow burn rising into a real flame.

“Cozy,” Beck says a little sarcastically. I snort,
snort
, because Beck's dry moments of humor are so sparse and unexpected they always catch me off guard and I can't help the little noises my body makes in response to him.

Then Dr. Pat brings out that stupid pink notebook. My heart basically stops as soon as I see it. I want to devour it. I want to eat it, so that the words, the moments I captured, remain inside me. Safe. Just when I'm readying myself for the explosion of anxiety coming my way, my mother appears with a stack of notebooks, all mine, all filled with clippings. Months and months of collected data to protect me from the terrible things I could potentially do or become.

I go numb from anxiety. This is new: tingling fingers and a locked jaw. Awesome. I thought I'd experienced the full
spectrum of symptoms, but there's always more. The numbness makes it hard to breathe, too, and Dr. Pat's saying over and over “What level, what level?” and Beck is looking me in the eye and it's a ten, a full-on TEN; this is definitely what a ten feels like. And Dr. Pat puts the pink notebook in my hand and my head is screaming at me to read through it, to take more notes, to try to remember and write down exactly what was said the other night when they caught me.

But I throw it in the fire instead. And we watch it burn.

My hands shake, and I have a cold flash. My limbs turn to ice.
This is new
, I think, and shiver from the sudden drop in temperature. The obese Anxiety Man sits on my chest, and I'm caught, paralyzed in that cold, weighted-down, shaking place for what seems like hours.

It is maybe seven minutes.

And then it drops. Slowly at first. I find myself at a nine, and then an eight, a seven-point-five.

I throw in the next notebook, and the next. I'm at a seven. A six-point-five.

A calm, normal-temperature six. The buzzing in my head stops. The pressure on my chest is still there, but lighter.

My mother makes hot chocolate and we experience the single weirdest afternoon of my life, watching my OCD notebooks smolder in the fireplace while stirring minimarshmallows into the Swiss Miss. Just me, my mom, Dr. Pat, and Beck.

THERE'S NOT MUCH WE CAN
do but look at Jenny and her peach-fuzz head.

“Oh my God, that's a thousand times better,” I say. It's not the same as a compulsion. This time I say it not because it's eating away at my throat or because it's of dire importance. I say it because she needs to know that I'd rather see her bald than to see her destroying herself. Rudy's eyes go huge from how pretty she looks. He's drinking her in and the rest of us relax, for maybe the first time ever, into our awkward metal seats. It's a weight off seeing her like that, clean and even and brand-new.

“Can I touch it?” I say with a grin. I don't know who I think I am. Beck's the one who made the breakthrough in group and Jenny's the one who has obviously made some kind of breakthrough at home, and I'm just the girl who yelled at everyone last time we were here. But Jenny nods and grins back and I rub her head before Dr. Pat can reinforce the rules.

“Good” is all Dr. Pat says. “Good.” Then she pulls out a knife. Just like that. A knife that must be from her kitchen. It's
sharp and real and glinting, but no one else is flinching. Just me. “This is for Bea,” Dr. Pat says, and everyone nods and acts like the knife is some harmless mitten or banana.

“That's way worse than my Swiss Army knife, huh?” Rudy says.

“I'm sorry. I have to go,” I say. It's a reflex, just the same as a doctor knocking your knee with his little hammer-thing. Just as automatic. I trust the reflex that says, definitively,
no
.

“Bea,” Dr. Pat says. Just that. Just my name and the knife glinting at me as she holds it out. “Hold it to my heart,” Dr. Pat says. This cannot be legal. I shake my head.

“Hold it to
my
heart,” Beck says, and I know that's for sure not okay, because Dr. Pat puts her hand on Beck's back to tell him no. “Fine,” Beck says. “How about just Rudy's knife? You know as well as I do”—Rudy is taking his little knife off his key chain and I'm shaking and I think this is actually somehow going to happen—“that this can't hurt anyone.”

“Okay,” Dr. Pat says. “Rudy? Can we . . . ?” But he's already handing it to Beck. I'm all sweat and fast breathing and when I look around the room, I expect the rest of them to have some kind of cloud of panic crossing their faces, but there's nothing like that. They're looking on with placid, matching smiles of support. I'd like to scream at them, show them my notebooks of research about normal-looking, even occasionally
pretty
girls just like me snapping, losing their minds all of a sudden, and killing people.

I mean, I have evidence showing what a bad idea this is. Evidence that shows just how unpredictable we all are.

But I don't have the notebooks anymore.

“Okay,” Beck says. “Stab me.” It's that dry humor again. The thing I love about him is now biting me in the ass. I'm breathing in short gasps, and when the knife is in my hand and erect, I'm shaking so hard I think I might drop it. Dr. Pat's kitchen knife lies beside me too, just to add to the stress. The journey of lifting the knife to Beck's heart is epic. And once it touches the hard mass of his chest, my anxiety is at a ten.

“I can't take it, I can't do it! It's a ten! Please let me stop!” I sob in Dr. Pat's direction, but she and the group only lift their shoulders and bite their lips and wait it out.

I'm going to kill Beck,
I think. But I don't.

And then, like last night, the numbers start to drop. I do not spontaneously combust from the anxiety. It starts to subside. Like a toddler throwing a tantrum, it's worn itself out and is giving in. I'm at a seven. And I think:
I'm so not going to kill Beck.
And then:
I don't even know how to hurt someone with a Swiss Army knife.
I don't really get below a four and a half. I don't turn into some monk all of a sudden. And when Dr. Pat says I can take the knife away from Beck's chest, I'm relieved.

But. A little space has been created where I don't have to be afraid.

Then I'm thinking about shipwrecks on Caribbean islands, which I'm sure never happen. But I think about them anyway, as if they could. There's this horrible situation, and about a million very real things that could happen, and you're not exactly happy to be shipwrecked and you've got a lot of problems to solve and shit to work out. But you're on this island, and in the middle of building your hut and hunting for fish and, like, doing basic first aid on your injured friend, you take a break and lie in the sand and look at the way the palm trees swing a little in the warm wind. And the sound of the ocean hitting the shore is lovely, and you're in maybe the most beautiful place you've ever been.

So in the same moment you're terrified and amazed at the sobering reality of the world around you and the purity of the beauty.

Would you trade in that moment? Would you risk being shipwrecked to be able to see the most beautiful section of the human world?

I guess that's just a long way of saying I'm happy to be here. Beck and I are smiling goofy smiles at each other, and my stomach flips around thinking about getting naked with him on the mountain, and maybe again later in my room. It's like, I'm scared and there're a lot of ugly things, but I'd rather be shipwrecked on this lovely island than safe in a sad, gray cell. You know?