Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

I wanted to say, “Oh really, Doctor Orecchio? You don’t say! Please enlighten me with your worldly knowledge of antihistamines and scabies!” But instead I shrunk him in my mind. Smaller and smaller, his voice began to sound far away until finally he was merely a squeaking speck. “Figment,” I incanted. “Figment.” Then I put my feet back on the pedals and looked at the digitized display, continued as though nothing had happened.

“I’m not a figment,” he said. “You can’t pretend I’m not here.”

I already was, though. Soon he’d be gone.

“Every empire falls,” he said and then he grabbed my head and jerked it toward him. He kissed me. Then he left.

Miles later, the better part of myself would decide that the almost-tears were not for him, but for the drugs I didn’t have. I’d blown my purpose. The point of the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting was speed, and here I was empty-handed. I had four pills left and five pounds to go. There was only one John Doe. I’d hit a mathematical wall.

When you reach a mountain, turn it into a mole hill, Dr. Ogden had once told me. “I’m a cognitive behaviorist,” he said. “Do you know what that means?” I didn’t, but he said it meant there is a way for every will. His job was not to analyze the past but to strategize the future. It was the difference between being a detective and a jury. So how to make four not the product of two and two but a factor in some larger number? How to decide a sentence? My mother had had an affair. My father cooked up college plans. Dorothy left the country. Lucy birthed a baby. I? I needed to multiply four pills.

But I wouldn’t go in the vein of any of them; I would feign the deficit, disorder myself into attention deficit. I could pick symptoms. I would practice to perfect. And if I wasn’t convincing, Doctor Ogden owed me at least this. For every windmill crushed by the weight of purple doubts, for every belief that wasn’t achieved, for the monster he’d created for me: a prescription. An I for an I.

Inconclusion wasn’t a word, but that’s what the results of my research were. Half the symptoms sounded like everyone I knew — craving excitement, inner restlessness, a sense of underachievement, getting bored easily — while the rest were noon and midnight: Distraction or extreme focus, excessive engrossment or lack of attention. The warning signs grinned and frowned in tragicomic pathology. If I was going to get the drugs, I had decisions to make. But first I needed an appointment. I used a payphone at the school to make the call.

“Dr. Ogden’s office. Shelley speaking.”

“This is Alivopro Doyle,” I said. “I’d like to make an appointment with Doctor Ogden.”

“Dr. Ogden is completely booked for the next six months. You want to be penciled in then?”

“I really need one now.”

“And we don’t have one for you. Doctor Ogden is a very. Busy. Man. He doesn’t have any time to spare for new patients.”

“I’m an old patient. Could he make some time?”

“Make time!” Shelley the secretary said. “That’s not possible. Six months or nothing. What’ll it be, miss?”

“I’d rather nothing than wait.” I knew I was committing a mistake, but I was gravity, a force I couldn’t stop.

“So don’t,” Shelley said. “Goodbye.”

I went to the library to consider my options. I needed a solution better than an appointment. There were many students with ADD. Some, like Joel Tipton, had the drugs dispensed by the school nurse. The locks were probably prison grade after the drunk driving accident, and if I was caught lying to the nurse, saying I needed uppers when I didn’t have a prescription, I’d become code red again. I needed an idea, but my recent clarity of mind was gone. Maybe I should take a Dexedrine? If I did, I’d be down to three, though. No, I had to wait until I’d figured out a solution. Then I deserved a reward. I couldn’t think. Yet I could think. All I thought of was how I couldn’t think. I tried not to think about thinking or not thinking.

But there is a problem in figure skating called muscle memory. If the muscles become accustomed to a motion they will repeat that motion, wrong or not. Practice badly enough, and habits of mediocrity or worse will form. Practice could make involuntary imperfection.

“You’re so cute, you rape all mankind,” said a girl to a boy at the table next to me.

“You rape harder,” the boy answered.

I thought of Mark: I like everything about you except who you insist you are. Over, I told myself. It’s all over. And now that misnomer in place and activity, study hall, was over too. That blank hour was gone, and I’d have to go to physics.

Miss Redding demonstrated Newton’s Laws using crash dummy videos. The plastic men surged forward into the windshield, unable to hold back when the car hit a pile of big gray pillows. Joel Tipton began cheering for the crash, and Miss Redding impotently held a finger to her lips to quiet him down.

“Enough,” she said. I didn’t have enough.

Dead meat was my only thought now. Even walking to class, I’d felt like I was dragging a dead body, except the dead body was my own, and all around me were these ageing faces, and all I could think as they jeered and laughed was that they were moving toward death. We all were. I imagined everyone skeletal, then crumbling, then sediment, then reformed as stone. Why hadn’t I told the receptionist I was having an emergency?

“Wow!” Joel Tipton mocked. It was what was written in yellow script on Miss Redding’s T-shirt. Earlier she’d explained it was the name given the radio signal received by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in 1977. Miss Redding told us that’s what the scientist had screamed when he saw that the wave frequency so resembled what researchers had augured eighteen years before to be the most feasible communication from intelligent life. Traced to the constellation Sagittarius the centaur — half man, half bull — and never reiterated, scientists said if the message came from life beyond our knowledge, it should have been repeated. Its origin in life could neither be confirmed nor denied, but for seventy-four seconds it warranted that name. I didn’t want my life to be like the Wow! signal.

“Wow! Whoopee! Righteous! Woo-hoo!” Joel Tipton yelled. Clearly, he hadn’t taken his medication. But that was it: special ed! That was it: Joel Tipton! I wondered if he kept a supply of prescription speed at home as well as at school. He must for the weekends. My head was crowding with people and questions, with Joel Tipton and Dr. Ogden, with winning over or going under, with the possibilities that could flip so easily to impossibilities if I didn’t do things right. Never had I thought I’d lean on anyone, but now my hopes were predicated on the boy-next-door. Somehow, I had to make Joel Tipton like me enough to give me his amphetamines. To be liked had never been much of an end for me, but now it was the means, though when it came to Joel Tipton, he might enjoy my misery more than my money. He might out me to the school authorities. I wrote a note: We could be very useful to each other. Meet me after school. I nudged Molly Sanders and asked her to pass it to Joel. A few minutes later he passed a note back: Eat mold, Kaczynski. He preferred my misery.

When I got home, my father was packing my bags. I was supposed to leave for my visit to Columbia soon, and he was trying to figure out a way to cram a camera in the backpack with my clothes so that he could see the campus too. I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t want to go to New York anymore because that would be admitting that I’d never planned to go to Columbia, and admitting that I’d never planned to go to Columbia would be admitting that the money I’d accepted was for Dexadrine.