Ruin Everything

“Please, please, just go see him. He’s great. He’s an expert in all kinds of disorders in teenagers,” Joyce begged.

“I’m fine, Joyce,” I replied. She sighed.

“You still have nightmares, and you get freaked out when you’re left alone. That’s not fine. Just let me set up an appointment. If you really don’t like him, you never have to go again, I promise. But, just one appointment?”

And that is exactly how I ended up sitting on the couch of Doctor John Colquitt, hands folded in my lap as he stared at me, then at my chart. He had a rectangle for a face, his jaw strong and square. His salt and pepper hair was buzzed as if he’d been in the military, which wasn’t exactly flattering to the shape of his head. His brown eyes were intense, taking me in and sizing me up. He was a thin man, with thin, almost delicate features; thin eyebrows, sharp sloping nose, dainty hands with baby fingernails. He held his pen on the tips of his fingers and tapped it slowly on the notepad he held on top of his chart, which was balanced on his crossed legs.

“Cassara Jankowski,” he read. “I thought your mother was Joyce Barakat.”

“The Barakats took me in and adopted me when my mother abandoned me when I was 13,” I explained. “Joyce is more of a mother than my own ever was, but I kept my own last name.”

“Why’s that?”

I shrugged. As much as I wanted to open up, spill everything to this man, there was still that nagging in the back of my mind. It chided me for even being there, for seeking help for something that didn’t need to be fixed. I had made it 17 years without a single shred of help. I shouldn’t be here. But then, there was Joyce and Jack, their constant worrying that I was sleeping okay and eating enough. They were what mattered now, not my mother or the stupid Jankowski way.

“I suppose,” I choked out, taking a deep breath. “I suppose I kept my own last name to remind me of where I come from, to remind everyone else that I’m not a Barakat, not the same way Jack is or May is. There’s no way I could forget Mom and everything she taught me, but it’s easy to forget that life when you’re lying on the plushest couch in existence, watching crystal clear movies on a flat-screen television.”

“So the Barakats treat you well?” he asked, scribbling on his notepad.

“They treat me like I belong there,” I replied.

“That doesn’t mean they treat you well,” he pointed out.

“They treat me like I’m their own child, like I’m a princess. They bought me a car, for Christ’s sake!” I said.

He nodded.

“Joyce told me a little bit about your past, how your mom abandoned you and Jack found you and they took you in. Would you like to talk more about that?”

“What do you want to know?”

“What you went through, how it felt, what you were thinking as these things were happening,” he responded. I sat for a while, collecting my thoughts on the subject. I had spent so much time trying to forget the nights I spent, covered by the thinnest of blankets, huddling inside my bare room for warmth.

“I used to blame myself, especially the first year after Mom left. I wasn’t sure what I’d done, what made her leave me behind. She’d been gone for about a week and a half before Jack noticed anything was wrong. I stayed in the apartment we’d lived in, hiding when the landlord came by and using what was left of my savings to buy myself food. It was terrifying. I was thirteen, I wanted my mom to care about me and take me with her. I couldn’t believe that she’d just left. She’d taken everything with her though, including all of my stuff. But she didn’t take me. I’ve often wondered if she knew she’d left me behind. She got so high sometimes that she called me Sam, my older brother who died when he was an infant. It’s entirely possible that she just didn’t realize and by the time she did, her pride was telling her not to make a fool of herself and come back for me.”

“Was your mother a good mother while she was raising you?” he asked.

I laughed, genuinely laughed. “Not at all, no, she was horrible. She had absolutely no patience. She once hit me because I wasn’t tying my shoe fast enough. She wasn’t encouraging, or motherly in the slightest. I know that now, because of Joyce, but back then, that’s all I knew. I thought mothers told you that if you brought another friend home for the night, you would be facing the belt. I thought mothers told you not to go after what you wanted, to play soccer and make friends. I thought, I thought that all mothers were like her.”

“You said she hit you, did she do that often?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because she was a horrible mother,” I repeated.

He smiled slightly. “I meant, what did you do, in her eyes, to cause this to happen so often?”

“Despite having two kids, my mom hated kids. She never wanted me, or Sam. She wanted to be left alone so she could drink and do drugs and fuck whoever she wanted. Maybe that’s why she left, because she didn’t want me anymore. I was hindering her ability to be free. That’s probably why she hit me too, to punish me for being born.”

“How did getting hit make you feel?” he asked, his voice gentle and calm as he wrote.

“It made me feel, I don’t know, worthless, I guess. How can you not? Mom would go through spells where she would completely ignore my existence. I had to make myself dinner and had to walk to school, and had to get myself ready for games. I had to be responsible for myself as soon as I was old enough to walk. It wasn’t fun, it didn’t make me the best person to be around, but it made me who I am today. My mom hit me, she verbally abused me, and she abandoned me. She wasn’t much of a mother. She practically left me to die. How do you think it made me feel?”

He opened his mouth and just as he started to speak, the buzzer on his desk reminded us that an hour had passed. I was free. I had done my time. I never had to come back. I never had to see Doctor John Colquitt’s stupid rectangle face ever again. I jumped up, gathered my jacket and started towards the door.

“Cassara?” he asked as I pulled open the door to his office. I turned and faced him. “I hope we can meet again.”