Blue Rose (A Flowering Novel) Read online

  After, I told Jack he needed to use Google a lot more often. He laughed, but then he pulled me close to him again. “I love you, Alana. I never want you to feel ashamed about this. I won’t hate you if you need to say no.”

  “I know,” I told him, “and that’s why it’s so easy to say yes.”

  21

  I decide to cancel my appointment with Melinda this week, because I need a break. I’m sure she doesn’t mind, after listening to me for nearly twice the allotted time last week, but I feel bad because I know it’s avoidance. I need to face the one thing I’m not ready to face, and so I pretend to be sick. It’s easier than telling the truth; the truth has always been a tricky subject for me.

  Instead of therapy, I go to the bar. As always, it’s sad. Midday, midweek, a bunch of lonely men. Of course, that’s exactly the point, and I made sure to wear a really short skirt and a tight sweater. They all look at me when I walk in. I came in here thinking that I would hook up with someone, that I would do something stupid to forget, but as soon as the two guys playing pool stop what they’re doing and I feel their eyes running over my body, I want to be sick.

  “Excuse me,” I mumble and I run to the bathroom. I don’t even get the stall door closed before I’m bent over the toilet, puking up the little food I’ve been eating lately. I don’t know what happened, but all of this therapy, all of this dealing with my past, it’s eating away at me.

  I slump back against the wall and the tears come without warning. It’s just this. My entire life is this. Me, dressed like a whore, crumpled in a bathroom stall and wishing I was someone else. I could go back out there and pick up a guy. I could head to the motel and someone would make me feel like he cared for me for a few minutes, maybe even a few hours if I let him, but really, all he cares for is my body. My mind is of no value to anyone.

  “Fuck,” I cry, but no one hears me. No one ever hears.

  I’m smart. Somewhere in the background of the shit life I lead, I am actually intelligent. I excelled at school, but mostly because homework was the only time I could do something that didn’t involve a guy touching me. It was also the only way I could be close to people who understood, to Jack and Dave, who might have been guys but who never saw me the same way. I wish I knew what they saw, what I am to them, because I don’t know why only they can see it. I don’t know why no one notices anything else about me. I didn’t ask to be pretty. I didn’t ask for this body. When I’ve tried to express that to people, even to therapists, I get called shallow or spoiled, as if I’ve been blessed with a gift and how dare I ruin it. Sometimes I wish I had cut myself across the face, so that the scars would make me as ugly as I feel.

  There’s a knock on the door, and I manage to stand. I wish I knew what the next step was, what path I could take that would make anything different, but I just feel like everything keeps being taken from me. Even when I’ve tried – and I did try – I end up losing. I tried to overcome things with my dad, to hope again in Jack’s arms, to believe in Dave after he forgave me for the Prom fiasco. But here I am, all tried out, and I’m still alone and worth nothing.

  “Miss?” The man who was tending bar opens the door slightly and pokes his head in. I’m standing but I couldn’t bring myself to the door to open it. “Are you okay? Do you need me to call someone?” he asks.

  “There’s no one to call,” I tell him. Who could he call? My mom? She’ll just call the insurance company until they increase my prescription. Jack? For what? So he can tell me he wants to die, when all I want is him?

  The bartender stares at me. I know he’s weighing his legal responsibility with his feelings of discomfort at seeing a girl ready to have a breakdown in his bathroom. I move to the sink, splash water on my face, and turn to him with a smile.

  “I’m okay. Just a little hiccup in my plans,” I say. “I’m leaving.”

  He looks relieved that I’m not going to make a scene and I head back to my car. I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to talk. I just want tomorrow to be different.

  ****

  After a while of sitting in my car, I do what I should have done in the first place. I go to therapy. Since I canceled my appointment, I don’t know if Melinda can still see me, but I go anyway. I’ve been avoiding talking about Jack, about Dave, but I need to stop this. I need this to end. I feel like I’ve been left behind and everyone is accepting their lots, while I just stay in this rut. I don’t know how to get out of it, but I do know that doing nothing is not going to be the answer.

  The receptionist is, of course, angry to see me. “You canceled your appointment,” she says with a clipped tone. “You’re lucky we didn’t charge you for not giving 24 hours’ notice.”

  “I appreciate that, but could you ask her if she has any time?” I hate standing here begging, especially with this judgmental bitch looking at my outfit and confirming her already formed assumptions about me, but I know that if I walk away, I will probably never come back.

  “Have a seat. She’s in a session, but I will ask her in twenty minutes when she’s done.”

  I wonder if people who have never sought therapy or who have never needed mental health treatment know how horrible the entire industry is. It starts when you take the first step, when you accept that you need help. You have to call the insurance company, who leaves you on hold while you’re shaking and you can’t swallow because of your tears. Eventually, they come back, only to give you a list of names of therapists whom you have to call yourself. Then, you start the phone calls and you discover that half of the providers are no longer accepting your insurance or that they’ve closed their practices. Of the other half, you either leave a message with a receptionist or on a voicemail. Then you wait. While you sit on your couch, unable to function, you have to wait for someone to call you back. Only a few do and they schedule something for several days or weeks in the future. Through it all, you think to yourself, Maybe I should just kill myself. Even the people who are in business to help me don’t care. But you don’t kill yourself. Instead, you go to the appointments and you hope a complete stranger can fix something about you that you have never been able to fix. And then, six to ten weeks later, you start over when the insurance company wants to review your benefits.

  This is what I think about as I wait. I spend a lot of time waiting. Maybe my layer of hope really is full, because I imagine it’s only hope that keeps a person coming back. Hope that a button will be pressed, that a switch will be flipped, and that suddenly the world as it is will be different. It will no longer be a place where a girl’s father takes her virginity because she’s pretty, where innocence is sold as a commodity, and where people hate you for something you never wanted. People talk of rainbows and unicorns, but I don’t want that. I’m not delusional. I just want to live in a world where I don’t have to bear the weight of it all alone.

  “Alana? I thought you were ill?” I didn’t hear Melinda come out to the lobby. She looks at me like my mom probably should have looked at me at any point over the last ten years, like she wants to put me back together. I have to resist the urge to either break down crying or run to her arms for a hug.

  “I realized I needed to come.”

  “Okay, well, you’re in luck. I don’t have anyone right now. Come on back.”

  I follow her to her office and, as soon as she shuts the door, I begin speaking. “I went to the bar instead of here, looking for a guy. Looking for something stupid. But I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to do it. I don’t want to be a cheap fuck to yet one more stranger. I don’t want to be me anymore.”

  She sits but she doesn’t say anything. She simply nods and lets me continue.

  “I don’t know how to live without Jack. He’s up and down and he’s been depressed and even if he gets better, he’s looking for a life that doesn’t include me. I can’t tell him, because I don’t want him to stay because I’m a burden. But I don’t know how to do this. Everyone’s gone.”

  “Alana, I think you need to take a de
ep breath, and then you need to tell me everything.”

  I nod, breathe, and finally tell the entire truth.

  22

  Over time, the three of us became inseparable. That winter, Jack and I broke up for the last time. Nothing was different. We were still doing homework, hanging out with Dave a few times a week, and getting drunk more than ever. He and I had been experimenting more with sex, but not to the degree that we would later. After there was nothing but sex.

  However, even the sweetness from the summer was starting to die. When we made love, it was usually after a fight or when we had been drinking, and I had begun to resent him. I knew that he was angry at me for not stopping him, because he’d started to see it after we’d sleep together, but I never said anything. Still, the chasm grew and eventually it was unpassable. When the holidays came, we spent them with Dave, all of us drunk, and we didn’t even give gifts. We were broke, but it was also that we were retreating into ourselves. I hated it, but I didn’t know how to stop it, so I just let it happen.

  By the time February came, Jack and I were over and Dave was becoming more obvious about his feelings for me. One weekend, the three of us were supposed to go to Dave’s house to do homework, but Jack said he had band practice and that he couldn’t make it. So I went to Dave’s alone. I expected him to be drunk, but instead, he gave me a poem that he wrote and apologized for feeling the way that he did about me.

  “Jack’s my best friend,” he said. “And I know you still love him.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We’re over.”

  “I know, but you’ll never really be over.” He looked sad and I was lonely, so I kissed him. It was a stupid thing to do, because he was right. I still loved Jack and Dave wasn’t really someone I was interested in, at least not in that way. However, the kiss was some kind of agreement that I would be his girlfriend and so I was. We didn’t do anything else that night or for a while. It was nice being with Dave, because there was no pressure. We never fought. He was happy that I liked him and I was happy that someone cared. Dave stopped drinking as much and Jack started drinking more. I tried to pretend that it didn’t bother me, but the worst part was that I thought of only Jack, even when Dave was kissing me. I tried not to, but I loved Jack with every part of myself. Dave was only a bandage for a wound that would never heal.

  Still, somehow it worked. There was no talk of sex at first and, despite all of the rumors around school, we dated for a couple months without even a hint of there being more between us. We just kissed, like we were still in middle school, and he worshipped me. It kind of hurt, because every sweet thing he said was filtered through my head in Jack’s voice, only to remind me that I’d lost him.

  Prom came and I did what I did. Dave broke up with me, hurt and broken because he had respected me too much to push for sex. And then I slept with four total strangers and let them make me the whore everyone knew I was. But after Jack broke me that Wednesday by my locker, I didn’t even feel guilty when I called Dave, crying and pleading with him to understand. Eventually, he gave in to my requests to try again, although we both knew that it was nothing but loneliness, and that I didn’t really want him.

  That summer, Dave broached the subject of sex, tentatively, because we didn’t talk about Prom anymore. I’d started to convince him that I did care, and I think he believed it. So, I just did what I always did. I gave him myself, because I didn’t know what else to do. He was sweet and nervous and scared, but I just walked him through it like it was the same as fixing a car. After that, we had sex regularly. I never felt a thing for him, although sometimes I got physical pleasure from being with him. Still, I was dead inside and I think he knew, but every time, after, when he would repeat how much he loved me, I just pretended that it was enough.

  All of senior year passed in a sequence of redundant days. We went to school, the three of us did homework, sometimes Jack left, Dave and I had sex a few times a week, and every so often, Jack and I fought. Jack applied to colleges, all far away, and Dave signed up for the army. There was one afternoon in January that was a little different, but no one ever knew about it except for me and the secretary in guidance.

  It was one of those weird winter days, when it’s cold but it looks like spring is coming tomorrow. After I finished my math quiz, I stared out the window and watched the way the sun hit the snow, glaring and shiny except for the edges where the sand had damaged the beauty. Jack and I weren’t talking again, although I don’t remember why and I probably didn’t even know at the time. But as I looked at the glowing center of the snow draped in sunlight, I had a moment of selfishness. I asked for the pass and walked to guidance, instead of to the office, and I took a brochure for a university in the city. That night, as I filled out the application online, I could almost see myself sitting in a coffee shop near campus, studying psychology and being someone different. Three days later, after I had already hit send, they came to me to tell me about Jack. And that girl I could’ve been died in his closet with a part of him. I couldn’t leave, couldn’t be anyone else. Because no matter how much I wanted that, I still loved him too much to be anything but his.

  Jack got accepted to school, of course, as did I. But I didn’t tell anyone and I chose to stay at home and be around in case Jack needed me. Dave never asked and we were still together, but it was simple. I loved Jack. Dave was a friend and college was a fantasy. Jack was the only truth I had in my life, the only good thing that I could cling to and I didn’t care what I had to sacrifice. I just wanted him to see me the way he had before Prom.

  Dave left for the army over the summer, and he told me that he didn’t expect me to wait for him. I got my one letter from him a few weeks later, and it was the last one he ever sent. Jack showed up that summer, after months of fighting and barely talking to me, and we pretended nothing had changed over the past two years. Then, in August, he went away to school, and I became the only girl I was ever going to be. The dumb, weak slut who brought nothing to the world but a pretty face and a soulless body.

  23

  “I still don’t understand why you blame yourself,” Melinda says when I’m done.

  “Because I chose this. I could have been someone else, but I loved him and I ruined it and then I clung to him like it would change. But I’ve never made an effort. I always wanted it to be different, but I lived my life exactly the same. I could have been different with Dave. I could have made better decisions. I didn’t, because I’m too stupid to do so, and now I hate myself.”

  “Okay, so make an effort now.”

  I sigh. “What effort? I can’t fix it. It’s not Jack’s fault that he wants more than me. It’s not anyone’s fault that I’m a whore.”

  “You’re not a whore. You were put through some terrible things, but in some ways, you’re right, Alana,” she says. “You did make a choice and it isn’t anyone’s fault. You decided you didn’t deserve more and you have made it impossible for anyone to give you more.”

  “I don’t deserve more.”

  “Why?”

  “Look at me,” I argue. “Look how I’m dressed. I have fucked more guys than I can count. I meet anonymous strangers and let them do whatever they want to me in dirty motel rooms. My own father saw me as nothing but a whore. The men who have come into my mom’s life have looked at me like I was part of a package deal, as if they could have me if they just put up with her. I ruined Jack. I ruined Dave. They were decent guys and I was the first girl either of them slept with. I wasn’t strong enough to be with Jack, and I didn’t even let Dave mean anything to me. Everyone always said that I was good for only one thing – and I have been.”

  “I know you’ve been told this before, because there’s simply no way you haven’t, but maybe you’re finally ready to hear it.” She pauses and sips her tea. I don’t know what her big revelation is and it makes me nervous. Even if it’s kind, I feel like it will hurt. I hate when people say that they need to tell me something and then pause dramatically, as if it accomplishes any
thing but increasing my anxiety. It doesn’t add effect; it just makes me panic. “What was done to you was unacceptable, Alana. But you are in control of your life now. You can’t fix the past and it’s unfortunate that it is what it is. However, you have a great deal more to offer – and you need to decide when you’re ready to see those things.”

  “What do I do?” I ask and she looks at me like I’ve asked her an impossible question. It’s how I feel, though. I honestly don’t know what to do. And for the first time, I want someone to tell me. I just want someone to fix me. I want to do whatever it will take to stop feeling the way I do all the time.

  “About?” she asks me.

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know, but I just want the answer.”

  She smiles. “If I had the answer, I wouldn’t be here with you. I’d be the richest woman alive and I’d be famous for knowing it. What I can suggest is that you talk to both of them. Dave and Jack. You care for them both, but you need to begin to see them for who they are and not who you imagine them to be. You also need to see yourself for who they see.”

  “Dave stopped talking to me years ago,” I remind her.

  “Have you written? Called? Tried to resolve that?”

  I shake my head. I haven’t. Just as I haven’t listened to anything Jack has been telling me since we were kids. I feel a little angry at Melinda right now. How dare she break the bubble of delusion that’s surrounded me for years? Especially if she can’t tell me how to start anew. There are shards of my past at my feet, but I have no idea how to move forward.