Tiptoe Through the True Bits

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I wasn’t always like this.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I used to be normal. It was a while ago now but I can still remember it. I can remember trips to the beach with my family, and birthday parties with my friends, and so on. But all that changed.

I have no family now. I have no friends.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Fucking tap tap.

I let out a long sigh and gazed around me at the room I had found myself confined to. There were hideous pictures of fruit and angels hanging off every wall, and the chair I was perched upon was a disgusting shade of orange, and built of scratchy, coarse fabric. From the corner of my eye I saw the secretary, incessantly tap tap tapping away on her computer. She was old, but she was the kind of woman who refused to admit she was old. She had peroxide-blonde hair teased into a bouffant, and when she talked into the phone I could see the layers of make-up she had caked on collecting in the creases of her leathery skin. And she kept on tap tap tapping away on that keyboard. I thought the sound might actually push me to my breaking point, but thankfully the door opened behind her and the tapping finally ceased as she glanced across.

The doctor was a tall man, and he had silver hair and suspiciously white teeth as he smiled over at me. “Elise LeBeau?”

I nodded and rose to my feet, slowly making my way towards him. He held the door to his office open for me and waved me in, closing the door behind us.

This room was much more tasteful than the waiting room. There was no art on the walls, and no awful scratchy nylon chairs. Instead there was rich mahogany and dark velvet and the smell of coffee lingered in the air.

I watched him as he crossed the room and sat behind his oversized desk, filing through some paperwork as I shuffled from one foot to the other.

“Please, take a seat,” he smiled, gesturing towards a black leather armchair on the opposite side of his desk.

I reluctantly obliged, and let the soft leather swallow me up as I leant back into the deep comfort of the chair.

He didn’t need to introduce himself. Today alone I had heard his name a thousand times. Are you ready for your appointment with Dr. Gould? Dr Gould will help you, Elise, I promise. We’re sorry, Ms. LeBeau, Dr. Gould is running a little late this morning. And even on his desk he had a golden slab with DR. GOULD engraved upon it in obnoxiously large letters.

There was a large window behind Dr. Gould’s head that I couldn’t help but find myself staring out of. The view from his office was spectacular, looming down on the whole of Manhattan like an overbearing older sibling that I never met.

“So, Elise,” he began, turning his notepad to a fresh page and twirling his pen between his fingers. “Your aunt tells me you’re having some trouble.”

I rolled my eyes and crossed my arms across my chest. Surely he didn’t think it would be that easy. He couldn’t have been a complete moron, I mean, he had a PhD for God’s sake, surely he couldn’t have been that stupid.

My aunt thought I was “troubled” and “broken”. She never explicitly said that to me, but I know that’s what she was thinking. She’s too easy to read. It was the glances over the dinner table, and the hushed phone calls to my school principal, and the way she tiptoed around me. Every time she would speak to me, I think she expected me to explode and hit her or something. She was terrified of me. She just didn’t get it.

I am not a violent person. I am not out to seek revenge for the death of my family. I am just adjusting to the new life I have been thrown into.

An event like this tends to give you a new perspective on life. My perspective was that nobody cared what I said, so why bother? At first, it started off as an experiment. I wanted to see how long I could stay silent for without somebody noticing. Five days. Five fucking days I went without speaking a single word, and nobody cared. My aunt didn’t care. My fuckwad of a cousin didn’t care. My teachers didn’t care.

Not one person asked why I was mute. For five whole days.

And then, of all people, it was her that finally turned to me during English with a sneer on her perfectly formed lips, and said, “So, what you’re just never going to speak again?” From either side of her, her cronies giggled and turned their ski-jump noses up at me and told her she was the wittiest person to ever grace the planet.

Oh Chloe, you’re so funny!

She could go to hell. They could all go to hell. She turned back around to face the front of the class, still sniggering, and I glared so hard at the back of her head that I thought I might actually blow it up. God I wish I had. But she didn’t even notice. She just went back to bitching around with her poisonous friends.

How I loathed Chloe Edwards.

Dr. Gould cleared his throat and I looked back to him. I realised I had been staring out of the window for a long time. He looked at me expectantly and I shrugged, leaning further back into the chair cushions.

“Your aunt tells me you’ve stopped talking.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. How did he really expect this to all go down? Did he think he could just coax me into talking again? No fucking chance. I just sat there and picked at my fingernails.

I heard Dr. Gould sigh and rustle through some more papers on his desk. God, he was a messy bastard. I always thought shrinks were meant to be these super-anal neat freaks, but this guy was severely disorganised. I wondered why, and then I realised that I was trying to analyse my own psychiatrist, and I smiled to myself at the irony. Inwardly, of course.

As he shoved things around on his desk in search of something, I let my mind wander back to my childhood, and the things that he wanted me to talk about. I had had a great life, growing up. I had a mom and a dad who loved me and who loved each other. I was a miracle, they told me, because my mother suffered three miscarriages before I was conceived. She was told to stop trying, she was damaging herself physically and mentally, but she wouldn’t give up. And then I came along, and I was adored from the second that pee stick turned pink.

My parents showered me with love. Every day they would tell me that I was the best thing that ever happened to them, and each night before I went to bed, they would each kiss me goodnight, and tell me that they loved me.

With a happy home life comes a happy state of mind. Until a few weeks ago, I was the happiest kid ever. I had a great, albeit small family, and I had a wonderful boyfriend, and I had a group of close friends who cared about me and thought I was funny and cool, even if everybody else thought I was a loser.

I didn’t care that I wasn’t the most popular girl in school, or that I was eighteen and still had no idea what I wanted from life, because I was so happy that I could burst. I thought I had it all.

And then it was ripped away from me.

“Aha!” Dr. Gould announced proudly, holding aloft another notebook. He handed it over to me, along with a sharpened HB pencil, and said, “Draw something, Elise.”

I blinked up at him inquisitively.

“Your aunt tells me you like to draw,” he said. “I want you to draw me something. Anything.”

I sighed and opened the notebook. It was brand new. The pages were crisp and shiny and white. Reluctantly I pressed the pencil to the paper and began to draw.

I wasn’t really sure what I was drawing until it was almost finished. I wasn’t paying attention. I was just letting my hand do all the hard work as my brain remained oblivious. Huge swirls danced across the page and I scribbled at them furiously.

When I was finished, I stared down at the paper in disgust. If Dr. Gould hadn’t taken the book from out of my hands, I probably would have ripped it into confetti and eaten it, or something. I didn’t want him to see what I had drawn. I was ashamed. I wanted to snatch it back immediately but it was too late.

He stared at my drawing for a long time, making little notes on his own paper as he did so. It drove me insane, having to sit across from him and watch as he picked apart my life with his shrewd observations and his half-moon little glasses.

After what seemed like forever, he looked back up at me.

This was only my assessment. He just needed to make sure I was crazy enough to warrant being sent to a psychiatrist. I’m sure I gave him a lot to work with from that drawing. I’m sure he thought I was a fucking lunatic. Lock her away immediately! I half expected him to scream. She’s a threat to herself and everybody around her! Don’t be fooled by the silence!

“I am deeply concerned for you, Elise,” he said slowly and solemnly as he closed the book and handed it back to me. “You are obviously grieving, and that is quite understandable, but to be honest I find your drawing a little crude and disturbing.”

I stared back down at it myself. At the monochrome flames that engulfed the tiny girl on the page. She had dark, straight hair and big lips and thick eyebrows, just like me. And she was burning. She had panic in her eyes as she began to melt and fall apart, and all I could do was watch as she burned and withered before my very eyes. I was looking at my own death. I was burning.

Obviously I was a nutcase, or I wouldn’t be here. I quickly closed the book and hugged it close to my chest.

“Elise, I want to see you in three days,” Dr. Gould continued. “When you come back, I want to see another drawing from you, okay? Anything you want.”

I nodded and chewed at my bottom lip.

The doctor took a deep breath and stood up from his chair. Slowly, I too rose to my feet.

“Come with me,” he said, as he crossed the room and exited back into the waiting area. I took my time in following him, deeply embarrassed about everything that had just happened.

As I entered the waiting room, my eyes became transfixed on a man. He was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. He seemed to be about my age, and he had long, black hair that fell gracefully around his face, and smooth, pale skin. But, truth be told, I barely noticed any of this at first glance because all I could see were his hazel eyes as they burnt right through me, making a chill run up my spine and all the way through my brain to my occipital lobes, making my vision temporarily blur.

After a short moment of this intense eye contact, I looked down towards the floor, twisting my feet inside my shoes like a child. I felt Dr. Gould’s hand on my shoulder and glanced up at him. He handed me an appointment card and I took it with a nod.

“I’ll see you on Wednesday,” he said quietly, so that nobody else in the room could hear.

I nodded and turned the card around between my fingers. He gave me a weak little smile before turning back to the other crazy people waiting to see him. “Gerard Way?” he called.

The beautiful man with the long hair and the hazel eyes stood up and made his way over to Dr. Gould. As he passed me at the reception desk, I smelt the faint allure of cigarette smoke from his body, and I shivered.

Then, before I made any more of a fool out of myself, I walked out of the waiting room, down the thousands of steps to the front door, and out into the blistering Indian summer air.