“Who would like to share their struggles this week with the group?”
No one volunteered, and Dr. Frolland looked around expectantly at all of us. No one ever wanted to share, I had gathered by only my second Group meeting, so I wasn’t sure why he seemed disappointed every time his questions were met with silence.
“Samuel, you’ve been awfully quiet tonight,” he said, his puffy eyes settling on me. I internally sighed. I had experienced plenty of struggles between the last Group meeting and now, but nothing I particularly wanted to talk about. Dr. Frolland was liable to circle back around to me and call on me every chance he got if I didn’t deflect the attention, however, so I tried to pick something of little significance.
“Well, uh,” I cleared my throat nervously, noticing all eyes were upon me once again. All but two; Quinn had the hood of her sweatshirt pulled up and was staring at the floor. “School started on Monday, that was kind of rough.”
“Oh, please do share!” Frolland clapped his hands on his knees with a sort of giddiness that made me want to puke.
“I mean, I don’t really like school all that much,” I said, hoping it would dismiss the topic. Boy, was I wrong.
“And why is that, Samuel?”
“Because it sucks.” A couple people smiled weakly and I shrugged.
“Please be more specific, Samuel, or we can’t help you.”
I felt a twinge of annoyance again. All Frolland’s talking was of “helping” this and “helping” that, yet I had yet to see any evidence that he had actually helped anyone in the room thus far. I played with a crease in my jeans and tried to make something up. “The, um, the kids at school don’t understand me.”
“Ah!” The counselor leaned forward, scrutinizing me like a scientist would a particularly interesting strain of mold in a petri dish. Everyone else looked toward me intently as well, and I realized I may have inadvertently said the most personal thing anyone had uttered at Group in quite a long time. “Please do tell us what you mean!”
“The other kids are different, that’s all,” I answered abruptly, sensing the conversation wandering down a path I didn’t want to explore. The statement wasn’t untrue, it was just that the reality of it wasn’t far from as dramatic as seemed fitting for Support Group. The only person I hung out with was Sean, and even he and I seemed to be growing a little distant lately. I had a bad feeling that his girlfriend had something to do with it, but Sean wouldn’t take it well if I told him I thought our friendship had been hijacked by his walking makeout session. This, of course, was not something I would be sharing out loud.
“Well, I suppose the admission of a cognitive separation from your peers is a step in the right direction,” Dr. Frolland said, but he still looked a little disappointed, which made me feel strangely self-satisfied. “Would anyone else like to share? Derek? Alice?” Both of them shook their heads in turn.
“I’ll go.” Quinn shifted in her seat a lead way back until she was looking up at the ceiling. Everyone, including Frolland, looked surprised.
“Very good, please do!” the counselor said, unable to hold back his enthusiasm. For someone who was paid to hear teenagers talk about the things that made their lives hell, Dr. Frolland was much more enthusiastic than he probably should have been.
“So, this week I was out kind of late on Monday night, just walking around this place near the freeway, and I came across this little liquor store called Midnight’s” she said casually, looking directly at a spot on the wall straight across from her. “It was like three in the morning and there’s not usually much good going on outside a twenty-four hour liquor store at three in the morning on a Monday. I should have turned around and gone home, but for some reason I couldn’t stop myself, I just had to go up to the window.”
I felt my breath catch in my throat a little. Quinn, who had refused to tell anyone why it was she was forced to come to support group, was about to admit to raging teenage alcoholism or something. I felt something twist in my stomach as I imagined her gripping one of those big plastic bottles of vodka by the neck and stumbling through a dark alley in a bad part of town. I couldn't help but feel instantly disappointed, for some reason. It seemed to me that the interesting, brooding-yet-attractive girl was supposed to have, well, and interesting and brooding-but-attractive vice.
Getting hammered wasn’t very attractive.
“So, I go up to the window,” Quinn continued. “It was pitch black in the parking lot because the street lamp was broken. Most of the lights in the store were dimmed, except for the area by the cash register where the guy behind the counter was sort of dozing off. It was one of those huge liquor stores, you know, the kind that looks like a warehouse on the inside and the whole front is glass windows. And I just stopped and… stared, I guess. Couldn’t pull myself away.”
Quinn trailed off and I noticed she was watching me stare at her out of the corner of her eye, so I abruptly looked away. The room went so quiet that it was like someone had sucked the sound out with a giant vacuum or something. Dr. Frolland, who was leaning on the edge of his seat intently, sort of sat up and looked around.
“Did, ahem, did you go inside?” he asked finally, clearly as confused as the rest of us as to why the story didn’t seem to have a climax.
“No,” she said simply, leaning back and looking around at all of us.
“So you didn’t, I don’t know, wait for an adult to come by and convince them to buy alcohol for you?” Frolland said the words convince and alcohol like they tasted dirty in his mouth and I realized that the Doctor might know about as much about her problems as the rest of us..
“No,” Quinn said again in unchanging tone. “I don’t drink.”
“Uh-uh.” Frolland said, clearly unconvinced. Quinn’s face flashed with an emotion I couldn’t quite read before she settled into her usual stone-faced expression. The counsellor scribbled a long note on his clipboard and looked up at the clock on the wall. “Well, we’re just about out of time. Same time next week, but I’d like for everyone to please pay more attention to their struggles so we can discuss them next week. I can’t help you if you can’t help yourselves, kids! Now, how about we recite the mission statement before we all go home?”
I pulled on my sweatshirt as the other kids weakly repeated the words in monotone. The little room was filed with the scraping of chairs and everyone made a beeline for the front entrance. I leaned back against the same stone wall I had the week before and scanned the parking lot for my parents.
“Do you ever feel like Support Group is a giant waste of time?” Quinn slid up next to me with that sort of half-swagger she walked with and parked herself right on the wall next to me.
I stared blankly at her because, yes, of course I thought Group was a giant waste of time. What I said, though, was: “I don’t know, this is only my second time.”
“So, really, you’re perfect to assess the so-called merits of this freak show!” She said brightly, but her face remained absent a smile. “You haven’t been tainted by false hope or recovery yet.”
“Recovery?” I repeated, shoving my hands in my pockets. “I’m not sure how I’m supposed to be recovering when I’m not quite sure why I’m here in the first place.”
“Because you’re bitter,” Quinn said with a sideways glance, and I couldn’t help laughing a little. The corners of her lips turned upward just enough for me to instantly remember why she caught my eye the first time. “Seriously, that was the best one-liner I’ve heard in Group so far.”
“It wasn’t really a joke,” I said with a shrug.
“Of course not,” she said immediately with a serious expression. “If that’s exactly how you describe it, that’s exactly what it is.”
“So you’re here because of… uh, an un-curable..”
“An incurable case of apathy, exactly,” Quinn said as she leaned down and picked at her shoelaces, which I noticed were still frayed at the ends. “No matter what kind of label these people want to slap on your problems, they have no right to tell you what you’re going through.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, intrigued.
“Well, take Derek over there.” Quinn pointed a sneaker at the sandy-haired kid built like a refrigerator. “All day long Frolland and Company will tell you he’s a recovering drug addict, see, but it’s more complicated than that. You don’t just watch your dad blow his brains out with a shotgun when you’re eleven years old and come out the other side just fine. Derek, I would say, suffered from chronic dependence upon chemically induced memory loss. You can just say he was hooked on heroin, but that doesn’t give you the all-important why.”
I was about to open my mouth and argue that despite her lengthy unofficial diagnosis, facts were still facts, but something stopped me. Was I at Support Group because I was bitter?
No.
I was at support group because Frolland had diagnosed me as depressed.
It had nothing to do with the why.
“Alright, then,” I said, a little taken aback by how much thought she must have given the subject. “What’s your why?”
“My why isn’t nearly as interesting as you’d probably think,” Quinn sighed. I thought back to almost a week ago when Sean and I had followed her to wherever it was she had been going. Something inside me fluttered at the thought of some kind of existential adventure with her. It was weird. I don’t flutter.
“Try me.” The words slipped out of my mouth because it felt like the right thing to say. Quinn leaned back and seemed to inspect me head to toe.
“You serious?”
“I guess.”
“Whys are too important for guesses.”
“Oh. Well… okay. Yes.”
“Yes, what?” Quinn didn’t seem to be willing to let this go without a fight.
“Yes, I’m serious,” I said somewhat wearily.
“Better cancel your dinner plans,” Quinn chirped, pushing herself up from our perch on the wall. “Follow me.” She set off at an easy pace across the grass behind the building toward the main avenue beyond. I opened my mouth to protest and has no choice but to follow her before she disappeared down the street. I pulled out my cellphone and began furiously texting my mom that Sean had invited me over for dinner and I didn’t need a ride home because he was picking me up. My mom proceeded to tell me that they hadn’t even gotten in the car to come pick me up yet--classic. I caught up to Quinn at the sidewalk on the other side of the lawn and fell into her pace as she headed toward a quieter neighborhood.
“Where are we going?” I finally asked, three blocks later. Quinn shook her head and pointed across the street to one of those suburban shopping centers that reeked of middle-aged moms in yoga pants grabbing frozen yogurt after the morning workout. We crossed the street during a lull in traffic and cut across another lawn and part of the parking lot before she finally stopped in front of a smoothie shop.
“Want one?” Quinn gestured to the tall glass front of the store, which sported a giant poster depicting a very enthusiastic strawberry leaping head first into a blender--morbid, really.
“That’s why we came all the way over here?” I asked, feeling myself make a face. For the first time I wondered how the hell I was going to get home now.
“No!” For the first time that evening Quinn laughed. She looked up at the sky and around the parking lot. “It’s not time yet. But these smoothies are pretty good. C’mon, my treat.”
“Uh, you sure? That seems…”
“Seems what?” She asked, raising an eyebrow. “What, a girl can’t pay for a guy’s smoothie? What are you, some kind of chauvinist?” She let me grossly attempt to backpedal myself out of that one for a good thirty seconds before laughing and shaking her head at me. “I’m just messing with you. Come here.” She pulled open the door and waved me inside. I tentatively followed. “So what do you want?”
I’d never seen a menu with a sheer volume of choices like that before, it almost made me dizzy just looking at all the rows and columns. There we fruit smoothies, chocolate smoothies, yogurt smoothies, plant smoothies, and everything in between. Quinn must have seen that I was lost because she stepped up to the counter and ordered two pistachio-strawberry smoothies. She dug a ratty old leather wallet out of her back pocket and paid with a fifty dollar bill from a small stack of the same, which really seemed to irritate the cashier. My thoughts briefly flashed back to telling Sean she was a drug dealer, but I shook it away immediately; there was probably a perfectly normal reason she would be carrying that much cash. The guy behind the counter handed me my smoothie a minute later and Quinn led the way back outside.
“Yeah, I know,” Quinn said when she caught me eying the bright cup in my hand somewhat skeptically. “Pistacio-slash-strawberry doesn’t sound like it’s good, but it is, I promise.”
“If you say so,” I said, and took a small sip. She was right it was good, really good, in fact. It was a little salty and earthy but it definitely didn’t taste like it was made from nuts. Quinn plopped down on the curb and slowly nursed her straw, gazing off at nothing. I sat down beside her and let my eyes wander across the parking lot, wondering how I came to be at this place at this time with the girl with the green shoelaces.
Oh, that’s right. Because I’m bitter.
I smiled to myself and glanced over at Quinn, who was oblivious to the world around her. When you’re a teenage boy, you can’t help but notice--a lot--that you are a boy and girls are girls. Quinn just seemed so down to earth that I hadn’t really noticed she was of the female race. Despite her tomboyish clothes and her messy dark hair, Quinn was definitely a girl, which made my breath catch in my throat a little bit. I didn’t spend any time around girls, probably because they thought I was weird and I couldn’t stand Melissa, and for the first time I felt a little nervous. Wait, is this a date? I thought suddenly, feeling my palms grow damp at an alarming rate.
“There it is.”
Quinn’s voice cut through the silence and I jumped a little, afraid that she could read my thoughts. She was pointing across the parking lot at a huge brown building I hadn’t really noticed, one of those wholesale liquor stores that usually called themselves a “wine cellar” or something like that. I looked it up and down, searching for whatever she was trying to point out to me, but nothing seemed remarkable about it. “It’s just a liquor store,” I said blandly.
“I’m not talking about the liquor store,” she said impatiently. “To the right of it, next to the pizza place.”
Indeed there was a little pizza parlor to the right of the liquor store, but sandwiched between the two was a tiny storefront that I never would have noticed if Quinn hadn’t pointed it out. I couldn’t quite read the sign from across the parking lot but there was a dim neon sign glowing bluish-white in the window. “Wait, hold on a sec,” I said, beginning to put two and to together in my head. “This is what you were talking about in Group, wasn’t it? The liquor store, the sign…” I trailed off, squinting at it in the growing twilight.
“Yeah,” was all she said.
“You weren’t standing in front of the liquor store,” I said in realization. “You were over there.”
“Well, I never technically said I was looking at the liquor store, just that I was outside of it.” she replied with a grin. I suddenly felt kind of awful that I had assumed she was a teenage alcoholic or something. I felt my face flush a little.
“I can’t read that from here,” I said, intrigued. I got to my feet, smoothie in hand, and started across the asphalt toward the store. As I drew nearer I could see that it was a dusty and worn looking bookstore called Booked Solid. I stepped up onto the sidewalk and paused in my tracks. I read the sign. Then I read it again. The bluish glow played tricks on my eyes from behind the glass and I rubbed them as I read it one last time. Quinn stepped up onto the sidewalk, arms crossed, and stared into the window.
“Mesmerizing, isn’t it?” she said softly.
“Weirdly, yes,” I replied, unable to take my eyes off it. It was a very plain sign written in a simple script, but it was absolutely captivating to stare at through the streaked glass in the window. “So this is it, then? Your why?”
“Most of it, I think.”
“Makes sense,” I said.
“Doesn’t it, though?” Quinn took a step back. “Let’s go, or I’ll get stuck staring at it all night.”
“Yeah,” I said, not really paying attention. Quinn reached out and put a hand on my elbow. The feel of her warm skin on mine shocked me back to the present and I turned to follow her back the way we came. I stopped though, and glanced back at the sign, wondering if it was as true for me as it was for the girl with the incurable case of apathy. The words hung onto my lips and I whispered it out loud, just once, into the fading light in the empty parking lot:
"I am the author of my own catastrophe.”
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