Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [10]
But after I came home early from camp that summer, I suddenly had a new task: keeping my terrible secret. It took all of my determination, and all of my drive. I was putting on a super performance nearly every day. I was pretending that nothing had changed, even though nothing at all was the same.
When the camp staffer dropped me off at my house, my parents weren't home. With all of us away at camp, my parents had driven back to Michigan to visit relatives. Some friends of my parents were staying at our house. By the time I arrived home, I had pulled myself together enough that I only looked a little drained. That was easy enough to explain.
“I have a bad flu,” I told them. “I just want to go to bed.”
They called my parents, and reassured them that I was fine, with nothing wrong that a few days’ bed rest wouldn't fix right up. So nobody seemed surprised when, armed with this excuse, I went into my room and stayed there, sleeping most of the day … and the next.
By the time my parents returned, the worst seemed over. I must have seemed more myself, because they didn't seem unduly concerned. The only person who was concerned was my best friend, Gail. And she was only worried that I was mad at her. Quite by accident she had dropped by and found me home from camp three weeks before she had expected me.
“You didn't even call me!” I could hear the hurt in her voice. She had stayed up late before I had left, sewing my name tags into my clothes, just laughing and being with me before we were to be separated for the summer.
It was the first time I ever kept anything from Gail. We had been as close as sisters. We did everything together. We got our hair cut together, we slept over at each other's houses, we studied together, we got kicked out of the library together for talking. When she had troubles in high school, it was me she confided in. When her parents got a divorce, she cried on my shoulder. When I hit my teens, and began feeling gawky and awkward, it was she who reassured me. I told her everything.
But this time, I told her nothing. I was evasive. I mumbled something noncommittal, and she left, the hurt still clearly showing on her face. But what could I do? How could I tell her, or even my parents, about the Voices, about what was happening to me?
As time went on, sometimes I thought I was mentally ill, but I only vaguely knew about mental illness. What I did know I had only learned from whispered conversations. There was one girl in school who—the rumor had it—had gone crazy and torn her room apart. She vanished from school for two weeks. I was very disturbed by her experience. When she came back to school, I wanted to help her. I wanted to know what had happened to her. But I didn't want to tell her what was happening to me. I was afraid of how she would react. I was afraid of how others would react. I watched them shying away from her, treating her almost as if she were now a time bomb ready to go off at any moment.
Her experience made me doubly sure I wanted to keep my own secret. I didn't want to be a crazy person. People shunned crazy people. They feared them. Worse, they called the men in the white coats to come put them in straitjackets and take them away to an insane asylum. I couldn't let that happen to me.
Sometimes I thought I was possessed. The Stephen King horror movie Carrie came out that year. The psychedelic feeling, the crazy sense of being in touch with the occult, the images of blood, and of speaking to God and to the devil—that was what I was like, I decided. I saw Helter Skelter that year too, the movie about Charles Manson and the murder of Sharon Tate. It stirred up old recollections: We had been in Los Angeles the year of the murder: I remember going to the driveway every day and picking up the newspaper emblazoned with headlines about the gruesome murder. Demonic cults, possession, insanity—it all rang bells with me. I didn't need a doctor, I needed an exorcist.
In school one