Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [14]
In London during the second semester, I grew increasingly depressed. The Voices were back in force. There almost never seemed to be a time when the Voices left me alone. Still I kept forging on. I had to keep going. I couldn't let go.
Gail Kobre was in London with me, on her own junior year program from Skidmore College. We wrote reports together on Disraeli and Gladstone. We studied British history, painting and sculpture. We stopped in Trafalgar Square to have our pictures taken with the lions. We went to pubs and drank beer, ate tea and crumpets and tried to make the Queen's Guards laugh. At one time during the semester we cut our fingers and smooshed our blood together. We'll be friends forever, we said. Blood sisters. Nothing will come between us.
Of course it wasn't true. The Voices were already between us.
Keeping my secret grew harder and harder. When I got back to Tufts, Lori and Tara and I had moved in together along with another girl. We lived in a big house off campus. We shopped for food, piling up cookies, cakes, candy and donuts. Sometimes in the supermarket we tore into boxes of chocolate chip cookies and polished them off before we hit the checkout counter. We were always dieting, though. We switched to eating Twinkles, reasoning that since they weren't chocolate, they weren't fattening, like Ring Dings. We starved ourselves all day, and stuffed ourselves like pigs at dinner, finally pushing ourselves away from the table, moaning our secret code: ISF—I'm So Fat.
I kept up with them. I had to. I kept laughing with them, joking with them, rising at 5:00 A.M. with them for our part-time job waitressing at Mug ’N Muffin, a coffee shop in Harvard Square. But my hands had begun to tremble. I had begun smoking in Europe, a chic thing to do, I thought. Now I had trouble lighting up without a steady hand.
My highs were higher, my lows lower. In my high moods, I spent money wildly, recklessly. Sweaters, books, candy, tapes, records—I bought more than I could ever need, more than I could ever use, more than a college student could ever afford. My thoughts would race, speeding faster than I could talk so no one understood me. I loved everything in life, from the gripping winter weather to the power of a slamming door, to laughing back at the Voices.
The Voices were with me nearly constantly these days. Where once I could retreat in sleep, now not even that refuge was left. They followed me into the night, and followed into my dreams. I went for days without sleeping.
In my low moods, I kept to my room, refusing to go to class. Partly, it was the blackness of the depression that was making it impossible for me to move. Partly it was dread: The Voices were beginning to command me to hurt people, and I was starting to fear I might obey. If I stayed in my room, I was safe.
Lori Winters began to see that I was upset.
“Come into my room, if you can't sleep,” she said. So night after night, long into the night, I sat in her room, smoking cigarettes and shaking, while she tried to coax from me my secret. But I could tell no one. I thought increasingly about hurting myself. I sat in the library, up all those flights of stairs, and considered jumping.
The problem was here, it was here at Tufts. I had known it all along. I should never have come. I would leave here, I would leave the problems behind. So I drove across the river to Boston University, wrote them a check, and told them I was transferring. The next day I transferred back. Something was about to snap.
Finally I called my parents. I told them as little as possible.
“I'm having some problems,” I told them. “I think I need to talk to someone.” They were already perplexed by my decision to leave Tufts in my senior year. I was just about to graduate, they said. Tufts was so much better a school, they said.