Maureen Johnson - The Madness Underneath

“Hello,” she said.

She sat on Jazza’s bed, drew her knees together, and put her hands on them. She looked at her hands, and then at me. It appeared that we were going to have some kind of talk. I had never had a talk with Charlotte, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready or willing to have a talk with Charlotte. But the one thing I had learned about living at school—you don’t always get a choice in these matters.

“I don’t know if I could have come back,” she said.

“Oh, well,” I said. “You know.”

Charlotte took that empty statement as a profundity and shook her head in understanding. I started to wonder if she was feeling quite right. The Ripper had nailed her in the head with a lamp on the night of my attack.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I wasn’t at first,” she said. “I didn’t sleep at all for a week. I was exhausted and crying a lot. I was having anxiety attacks. I’d shake all over, and my thoughts would race. My parents thought they might have to take me out of school for a while…Then I met this amazing woman. She changed everything.”

For one terrible second, I thought Charlotte was going to tell me that after getting hit on the head with a lamp, she now saw ghosts. That would not be funny.

“She’s a therapist.”

“Oh,” I said, sinking in relief. “I have one of those. It didn’t do much.”

“She’s really special, though. She changed my life. She’s the only reason I was able to go on with the term. I genuinely feel better after talking to her. I just came from her office, actually. I feel really good.”

Strangely, I could see how good Charlotte felt. It was something about her eyes, the relaxation in her body.

“She knows about you, and she says you’re welcome to call. She’s a private practitioner, but she doesn’t charge.”

“Doesn’t charge?”

“I think she’s independently wealthy. She only takes clients by referral, and she specifically treats victims of violence. I met her through a friend of Eloise’s.”

The door opened, and Jazza came in, dragging her cello case.

“Oh,” she said, seeing Charlotte sitting on her bed. “Hello…”

Jaz hung by the door, clutching her cello for protection. Charlotte stood slowly and stretched.

“It really is good to have you back,” Charlotte said. “Here. I just wanted you to have her card, in case you needed it.”

There was one toss of the red hair and a nod to Jazza as she let herself out.

“What was that?” Jazza asked.

“The name of her therapist.” I held up the card. Jazza snorted. Actually snorted.

“She’s been quite the victim, ” Jazza said. “She’s probably furious you’re back to steal the spotlight.”

It was oddly comforting that the attack had messed someone else up—apparently, much worse than it had messed me up. And yet it was also a little annoying. If anyone had a right to be messed up, it was me. Unless I too was acting like that—seeming wounded at one second, utterly confident in the next, my personality flickering on and off like a yard sale lamp.

“Did she look weird to you?” I asked. “Like, relaxed?”

“I have no idea.” Jazza pulled her cello into the room and tucked it into the corner by her closet. Jazza had time for everyone except Charlotte. There was an old feud there, one that predated my arrival. Charlotte was the full moon that brought out the werejazza.

I looked at the card. Clearly, this woman had talent if she had fixed Charlotte, but in the end, she was just another therapist I couldn’t talk to. I dropped the card into my top desk drawer.

“I have a date tonight,” I said. “An actual date.”

“This seems to surprise you.”

“No.” I reclined back on the bed. “I just…a date. It’s so formal-sounding.”

“Is it formal?”

“I think we’re getting dinner,” I said.

Dinner and…perhaps we could have a redo on the making-out fiasco. I spent a pleasant few minutes visualizing what that might entail. I got to the part where the imaginary hand was just sliding under my imaginary shirt…

Where it encountered my scar. My terrible, nasty, jagged, ugly scar. The imaginary hand withdrew in horror. My actual hand reached up under the bottom of my shirt to see if the scar felt as bad as it looked. It could definitely be felt. What was my boyfriend going to do when he saw my scar? My newly labeled boyfriend, who had only tentatively ventured into that territory anyway. My shirt had never come off. I had no idea when we would get to the shirt-off phase. Maybe now we never would, because we’d both know what was under there, aside from the customary attractions.

“I need to show you something,” I said to Jazza. “And I need you to be honest with me. Can you be honest with me?”

“Of course.”

“No, I mean actually honest.”

I stood up and lifted my shirt, pulling it up to just under my chest, revealing my abdomen. I had grown used to the scar. It had to be a shock to see it for the first time, all Frankensteiny with the hash marks across the cut line where the sutures were made.

“It looks bad,” I said, poking at it to show her. “But it doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“It doesn’t look…that bad. It’s not that bad.”

It was totally that bad. Her pained expression and wide eyes and massive lie told me that. It was time to stop talking about it.

“Actually,” I said, lowering my shirt, “I’ve seen worse scars. I told you about the time my grandma got a questionable boob job in Baton Rouge a few years ago?”

“No?”

“She got the boob job because she had a coupon for it. Twenty percent off. She had a surgery coupon. She got her boobs on sale. Those scars were worse.”

This was a partial lie. My grandma really did get her boob job with a 20 percent off coupon from the local paper. We were pretty horrified when we found out, but we found out pretty late, after the surgery was over and she’d been recovering for two weeks. I don’t think there was any bad scarring, though. That was the part I was lying about.

“They definitely don’t seem real,” I went on. “They don’t move. But they’re real-ish. They’re bigger, and they stick straight out. She calls them ‘my new front porch’ whenever she talks about them, which is a lot. She wears these low-cut tops and says, ‘Just getting some sun on my new front porch.’”

That part was entirely true.

“What I think,” she said, as she repositioned herself and straightened up, “is that you are very brave. And it looks fine. It’s not bad. It’s not. It’s just—a line.”

“But my bikini modeling career is over,” I said. “Unless it’s for pirate bikinis. They don’t mind it if you have a bitchin’ scar when you wear a pirate bikini. That would be amazing. A little skull and crossbones on each boob—”

Jazza held up a hand, possibly because I was saying “boob” too often.

“You don’t have to make jokes,” she said. “Have you been downstairs? To where it happened?”

“I skipped that,” I said.

“Do you want to go now? You and me,” Jazza said, offering her hand. “Together.”

There was something about Jazza Benton that just made the world stable and right. She could rock a sensible sweater and mutter at you in German. I’d missed her face, with her big cheeks and small-animal-of-the-forest eyes.

I went downstairs with her.

The bathroom was at the end of the short hallway, just a few doors down from the common room. Even as we walked just a few feet in its direction, it was like we were in a different world, a world where I descended into somewhere quiet, where my fears lived. The door was new. I’d heard that the last door had been broken down when the police came in, ripped right off the wall. I pushed it open.