Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [93]
“Bastian called me complicated,” I said, breezing through her door. “You know who else calls me complicated? My mom. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think a potential lover should remind me of my mom. And if you start singing Avril Lavigne, our friendship is over . . .”
It wasn't until I was in her room that I noticed something was odd: Dexy was crouched on the corner of her stripped bed, wearing gray yoga pants and a T-shirt, her hair in an unkempt ponytail. It was the most unassuming, un-Dexylike outfit I'd ever seen on her. And the walls—usually strung up with Christmas lights and strings of beads and feather boas and other spangled, glittering personifications of Dexy herself—were bare. And then there were the lumpy garbage bags on the floor, stuffed with what I could only assume was the aforementioned wall décor and the contents of her now empty closets.
“Dexy, what's going on?”
“I have to leave,” she said in a childlike voice. Her face was as red and raw as a skinned tomato. She was rocking back and forth and back and forth. With each swing of her body, the bed squeaked as if in pain.
“What?!” I asked as I sat next to her on the flimsy mattress.
“This whole Mini Dub thing has really . . . freaked me out,” she said, her eyes wild, like every mug shot on the serial killer trading cards.
I was willing to put up with all her Jackie O. bullshit. I knew I had to tolerate some over-the-top overtures if I wanted to be friends with someone like Dexy. After all, her exuberance is a considerable part of her appeal because it's so lacking in myself. But I'd had it. This was taking the grief a bit too far.
“Dexy!” I yelled, grabbing her by the shoulders. “Enough with all the death drama!”
She lazily turned to look at me, almost as an afterthought.
“There's a lot you don't know about me,” she said in a hollow voice.
And that's when I learned everything I should have already known about someone I called a friend.
Dexy is bipolar, clinically so, and not in that casual way that people (like me) use to describe moody people (also like me). I knew Dexy has been taking meds for years—far beyond the usual Prozac and Ritalin, Strattera and Concerta—stuff I've never heard of and I'm a Psychology major. But it didn't seem like a huge deal. Sure, she popped more pills in a day than I have in my entire life, but a dependency on pharmaceuticals is hardly uncommon around here. In fact, I'd always had a perverse sense of pride in knowing I was one of the few people at school who didn't medicate my chronic blues, choosing to feel sad and real rather than happy and fake. And when Dexy popped a few extra Adderall to zoom through midterms and finals, I didn't blink. I don't know if it's the jaded influence of New York, of Columbia, or of college in general, but as I've said before, behaviors that would have been troubling in high school pass as normal now. I mean, I used to be really worried about my chronic insomnia. But here, no one thinks twice about not going to sleep until the sky whispers a purple-pink hint of a sunrise.
So I listened while Dexy taught me the difference between a few harmless personality quirks and mania. When I was sixteen, I was saddened when Hope moved away, but I never seriously considered suicide. When Dexy was sixteen, she was saddened when her first boyfriend dumped her, so she washed down a bottle of sleeping pills with vodka. She passed out, puked it up, and was put into a psychiatric hospital for three months. When she came out, she channeled her excess energy into creating characters and costumes, a different persona she could pretend to be every day because it was easier than being herself. She learned to always keep busy, so she would never be quiet enough to listen to her own dark thoughts. She put on a good front. And the prescriptions, combined with regular appointments with a psychologist, had kept her fairly stabilized throughout the remainder of her high school years. Enough to convince her