You Win

Mrs. Leevy had a tendency to freak out about the smallest of things. When I was younger, she’d call almost once a week if she ran out of milk or bread or something. It seemed like she was always running out of necessary things and calling us up and asking if she could borrow two and a half pieces of bread. So I’d always end up delivering them to her because my mom was always desperate to get me out of the house somehow, and because she claimed she never had enough time.

I thought about this as I drove the few blocks to the Leevy house. There could be a number of things Mrs. Leevy was freaked out about. The only difference this time, was that she hadn’t said what specifically was wrong over the phone. I wasn’t delivering two and a half pieces of bread. I was going over there because something else was wrong.

The front door was wide open when I got to it, so I walked right in.

“Hello?” I called.

Suddenly there were footsteps coming down the stairs and Mrs. Leevy appeared in front of me, straightening her blouse and blinking rapidly. “Caroline. Good to see you. Tulip doesn’t seem to want to come out of her room, even though she has a piano recital in twenty minutes. I thought that since you are her closest friend, you might be able to get her out?”

I stared at her for a moment. She looked exactly the same as she always did, except she was a little off. Frazzled. Mrs. Leevy needed control. I had learned this through Tulip and through my own observations. If she could control something, she would. She had controlled Tulip up until this point, and when finally she was denied this privilege, she had snapped a little. There was something in her expression that reminded me of an insane person.

“I’ll go upstairs,” I said, relieved that it wasn’t something more serious, like Tulip had run away or Tulip had collapsed because of fatigue (I was constantly worried about this because she was so thin).

I put my ear to Tulip’s door, and when I didn’t hear anything, I knocked softly. Still nothing. “Tulip? Are you in there?”

What if she had jumped out the window? What if she really had collapsed from fatigue and was lying unconscious on her bedroom floor—

“Caroline?” Tulip’s voice floated to me through the door.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Oh.”

“Can I come in? I mean, you don’t have to let me in if you don’t want to—”

The door opened a crack but nothing more. I pushed it open and stepped into her room, closing the door behind me and re-locking it so Mrs. Leevy wouldn’t come in and make everything worse. Then I looked at Tulip, sitting on the edge of her neatly made bed. I stared at her.

“Tulip! Your hair…”

It was no longer a pale pink, but a dark red. Also, most of it was on the floor. There were a pair of scissors sitting innocently on the end of her bed, shiny and clean.

Tulip ran a hand through the remaining choppy tufts of hair on her head. She sprinkled a few leftover clippings onto the floor with the rest of the dark red hair. It almost looked like blood, staining the white carpet. She didn’t say anything.

“Well… there’s still enough left that we might be able to turn it into something nice—”

“Don’t,” she said, abruptly cutting me off. “I don’t want you to fix it.”

I hesitated for a moment. It was an eggshell moment. Fragile. I couldn’t afford to say the wrong thing. Tulip couldn’t afford to hear the wrong thing. I didn’t know what was going on and I couldn’t even fathom what was going on inside Tulip’s head.

“What do you want me to do, then?” I finally asked. I wanted to sit down next to her on the bed, get closer, make sure she knew that I was there, but I stayed where I was because I didn’t know how she would react.

“I want you to understand,” she said quietly. “I just want someone to understand.” She spoke slowly and precisely, meaning every word.

“Help me understand, then.”

She looked down at her lap. “I don’t know. Lately… I’ve just been trying to figure things out. Figure myself out. And it’s like the more I figure out, the more I… hate. But I can’t stop. I think and think and think. And it’s addicting. And I do it to myself and I hate it. And it’s like everything I do just makes me hate myself more.”

I blinked.

“I know that’s really messed up. I’m sorry for saying all that, oh my God. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that—”

“No, it’s fine. I’m glad you did,” I said weakly, my tone betraying my words.

“No you’re not,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry. I should have just kept it to myself.”

“Tulip, it’s okay to tell people things. It can be scary, but it’s good to tell at least someone what’s going on—”

“You don’t get it!” she yelled suddenly, showing years’ worth of frustration. It startled me—I had never heard Tulip yell before. I hadn’t even known she was capable of it. “You have people who are there for you, Caroline. You have people to go to when you need them.”

I thought about Maggie, how despite being a little selfish now and then, she was always there, just a phone call away. I thought of Carter, how he could get under my skin like no one else, but how he also knew everything that made me who I was. Luke even flashed through my mind for a second.

“You wouldn’t understand what it’s like to feel something—and not be able to let it out. To have horrible thoughts and nowhere to put them. So they stay in your mind. They pile up one by one, because you don’t have anyone to talk to about the things that you’re really thinking about.”

“Tulip, you have people—”

“You don’t get it, Caroline. You just don’t. You’ve got your perfect little life with your friends and your ‘boy problems’. You don’t realize how lucky you are. You don’t realize what you have.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“You don’t know what it’s like to be truly alone.”

She looked at me and I could see it in her eyes—her green eyes, full of clarity. I saw it. She wanted me to say something—but not just anything. She wanted me to say the right thing, to prove her wrong—that maybe I did know what she was talking about.

I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

“Every day gets harder and I don’t think I can do it anymore.”

She said it with a stoic expression on her face. Her words were simple, but her voice was weak and hollow. She was saying things without censoring them first. She was giving me a look into what it was really like to be her, to think like her. And she sat there, looking up at me with big eyes—and there was nothing I could think to do for her, nothing I could think to say. I felt responsible for this, for all of this. Yet I couldn’t do a thing.

I sure as hell wasn’t going to give her some half-assed attempt at optimism. She didn’t want empty words of false comfort. As I looked at her crumble before me with no one to pick up the pieces, it finally got through my thick skull that all she wanted was someone to be there—to understand. To hold her up when she felt weak. Someone she could go to when she did feel weak.

“What about your mom? I know she’s there for you.”

Tulip’s mom was probably the nicest lady I knew. There was no way she’d let her only daughter think like this, be like this, if she knew.

Tulip shook her head. “Ever since… you know.” Since she tried to commit suicide. I resisted the urge to cringe. “She just avoids talking about things. She makes sure to ask how I am and everything, but it never goes deeper than that. I think it scares her more than it scares me.”

I stepped forward and sat down next to her on the bed. We were eye level. “I know it gets bad sometimes.”

“You don’t.”

“I do. But I don’t know what it’s like to feel down and have no one there to pick me up. And I never want you to feel like that again.”

She looked down at her hands. There were a few pieces of red hair still on her shoulder and I brushed them off. I thought about how you can see someone almost every day, but not have a single clue what they’re really going through because they keep it all inside.

“You will never be alone as long as I’m here.”

She seemed so small and defenseless. I had no idea what was going through her mind. I had no idea what it was like to be Tulip—to have to pick yourself up when the reason you’re down in the first place is you. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t help her in some small way.

“You don’t deserve to feel like this.” I wanted to help her somehow. I wanted to make everything better. “It’s going to be okay, Tulip. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. Her words held an undertone of frustration. “How do you know? You can’t just say that.”

“Yes I can. Because I’ll be here. I won’t let you be not okay. If you need someone to talk to, come to me. And that’s not an offer. That’s a command.”

A corner of her mouth tugged up a little.

“That color red looks good on you.”

She scoffed.

“The shortness of it really accentuates your cheekbones.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Tulip, I’m going to make you happy if it’s the last thing I do.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’d like to see you try.”

“You will.”