Ugly, p.22
Ugly, page 22
“That sounds fun.” She smiled at me.
“Yeah. I’m not super-big on the flowers, but it’s what she wanted to do. I’m going to get to make a three-foot-tall dragon.”
“That big? Wow.”
I nodded.
“That sounds exciting. Anything else this past week?”
“No.”
“Okay, then. I wanted to talk to you about something.”
I immediately felt a sense of foreboding, and the nervous rumblings started in my stomach.
“I wanted to discuss a diagnosis of a mental health condition.”
My stomach plummeted. She would tell me what was wrong with me. Make it official.
“How do you feel about that?”
“I guess it depends on what it is.”
She nodded again. “Based on your family history and your own history, which I heard about from both you and your mom, I believe you have clinical depression.”
Oh, wow. It was official.
Dr. Goldberg continued, “There is a form of depression called persistent depressive disorder, which is a chronic lower-grade depression, something that’s always there and keeps you down. I think this is the form you have. Does this ring true to you?”
I didn’t say anything. But then I nodded.
She said, “You’re white as a sheet. This diagnosis is something that may last your whole life, but we are fortunate to live in a time when there are good therapeutic approaches available. Additionally, there are medications that can alleviate the symptoms, if it comes to that. Many, many people suffer from depression yet still live normal lives.
“How do the medicines work?”
“They bring you up when you’re down. However, I would like to focus on therapy first, before considering medication.”
I didn’t say anything, still trying to take it all in.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. It’s scary to think I’ll never get better.”
“Depression is manageable. You will simply have to be more cognizant of your emotional state than some people might.”
I nodded. I guessed that made sense. Still, it was horrible.
God. Having a shrink was stressful.
My body hated me. And so did my mind.
Chapter 71
The next night I was working on the dragon drawing, but I was restless. I couldn’t stop thinking about my discussion with Dr. Goldberg. I needed to get my mind on something else.
Then, for some reason, I thought about the infamous self-portrait. I could enter that in the contest for the self-portrait category, but who knew what trouble that would cause. Maybe I could just do a more normal one.
Well, not totally normal, but not too creative.
“Izzy. Isabella.” She was sitting across from me at the dining room table.
She smiled, probably glad I’d self-corrected. “Yeah?”
“Can you take a picture of me?”
“You want a picture of you?”
I laughed. Not something I’d want under normal circumstances.
“Yes. But I need a specific one. I am going to make a self-portrait. Come here.”
I got into position, working on the drawing, and had her take one with me like that.
“The angle’s wrong,” I said after looking at it. “Take it from a chair.”
She took a bunch as I tried several positions and facial expressions, which had us cracking up. She handed me the phone and got down.
We looked at the pictures together.
“That’s my favorite,” she said, pointing to the one where I’d crossed my eyes and stuck my tongue out.
“That’s not the one I’m going to choose. I’m supposed to look like a serious art student.”
“Still. Show Mom when she gets home.”
“Fine, I’ll keep it.” I found one that looked kind of cool. My eyes were narrowed as I leaned forward to study the dragons.
“This is the one,” I said, holding the phone out for Izzy to see.
“I like that one.”
“Me too.”
“I want to do a self-portrait, too,” Izzy announced.
Of course she did. “Okay, I’ll take a picture of you. We can print it off so you can work from it.”
“What should I do?”
“Well, you don’t have to be doing anything. You could simply smile at the camera.”
“Oh, yeah.” She put her finger to her lips, thinking. “I know.”
Then she disappeared upstairs. I followed her because I needed to get new paper and colored pencils for the self-portrait. On the way back down I passed her room.
I walked in to see a bunch of clothes thrown on the bed. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to pick the right outfit.” She emerged from the closet with a couple of skirts.
I laughed. Of course she wanted to look perfect. She was hopelessly normal. “Well, you don’t want that shirt because the lace would be really hard to draw, and you also don’t want one with writing on it. Why don’t you just wear a simple t-shirt?”
She frowned.
“And you probably should do the portrait from the waist up. Otherwise it might get hard. Fabric is hard to draw, so you don’t want too much of it.”
“Okay.” She put the skirts back, and we dug through the stack on her bed until we found a green t-shirt. We had to compromise because this one had little decorative bling along the sleeves and collar. She figured she could do it.
We went back downstairs and both got to work. I worked like a dog all weekend and through the week—Izzy petered out on hers—and had it finished by the next Sunday night.
It was as cool as I’d hoped. This would be another contender in the contest.
Chapter 72
I went back to Dr. Goldberg the next Thursday.
“How has your week gone?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I can’t stop thinking about the abuse.” And I couldn’t. It was driving me crazy. I felt anxious almost all the time.
She nodded sympathetically. “That can happen, Nic. Do you think that means you want to tell your parents?”
It was strange, but I wasn’t sure. I was getting increasingly mad at them about it, too. They’d totally failed me. I shifted my legs to get more comfortable. They brought this guy into my life and didn’t protect me from him. I was younger then than Izzy was now. It wasn’t fair.
“If you tell them, it will be difficult at first. But then over time, it will get easier. Most people who have supportive families find that they’re glad that they opened up about it. It often heals old wounds no one knew were there.”
I felt myself blink.
“Sometimes it’s hard to move forward in therapy when you have big secrets,” Dr. Goldberg continued. “But it is entirely up to you.”
Maybe she was right about the wounds. What if I just kept getting madder and madder? It seemed possible, given how things had been going.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” I finally said, surprised at my decision.
Dr. Goldberg nodded. “Let’s talk about how you think the conversation will go.”
We talked about it. She said she would start the conversation off and that my mom might be angry at first because she would be so surprised. We agreed she’d feel guilty right away. I didn’t know how she’d act then, honestly. Dr. Goldberg said sometimes people lash out, but I didn’t think Mom would. She was too conflict-avoidant.
Finally, she went to get Mom, who came in looking confused. “What’s going on?”
I looked at the arm of the couch as I felt it shift when she sat down.
Dr. Goldberg said, “Nic revealed something to me that she wants to tell you about.”
I wasn’t looking at Mom, but I imagined her looking confused. “What?” There was a pause, and I said nothing.
“Something that happened to her when she was young,” the psychiatrist prompted.
“What is it, honey?” Mom asked, sounding as confused as I’d imagined her.
I couldn’t look at her.
“Are you really ready to talk about this, Nic?” Dr. Goldberg asked gently.
“Okay,” I said. I looked at Mom, whose face was tense with worry, and had to turn away again.
“Remember Dad’s college friend, Rob?” I asked. I noticed I was wearing the jeans with the loose thread again.
“Yes,” Mom said. “What?” There was another pause, and she shakily said, “No.”
“He … did stuff to me.” There, I’d said it.
Mom groaned like she was in pain, and I could feel her looking at me, though now I was staring at the horses again. They went blurry as my mind spun.
“What did he do?”
“I don’t want to talk about the details,” I said tightly to the horses. “But it was illegal, as it should be.”
“Oh, God,” she said, her voice cracking. She scooted over and hugged me even though I hadn’t turned around. She sounded choked up when she asked, “How could I not know?”
She held on to my shoulders and asked, “How could you not tell me?”
I gritted my teeth. How could she blame me? I was fucking nine.
Mom’s eyes widened and she gasped and said, “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault.” Then she hugged me again like she’d never let go.
“Mom, it happened ages ago.” I was glad I couldn’t see her face since she had me in a death grip. Which felt better than I might have expected.
She petted my head like I was four years old and asked, “Dr. Goldberg, what can we do?”
“Legally, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“You can file a complaint with the police. They will have to investigate. But I’ll be honest, these cases can be hard to win, and it will require Nic to go through a lot. I’m not advising you either way, but you should think about it.”
“Mom, could you let go?” I asked because I thought I might cry from the emotion I felt rolling off her.
I accidentally looked at her face when she moved away and saw it was tear-stained. She left her arm over my back and gripped my shoulder, but she gave me some space.
Then Mom asked Dr. Goldberg a whole bunch more questions, and I didn’t listen. As much as I hated him, I didn’t think I wanted to relive any of it. I’d have to talk about the exact stuff he did, and made me do, and that was humiliating, even if I logically knew it wasn’t my fault. This was just how things were.
Chapter 73
Saturday afternoon, I finally put the finishing touches on the drawing downstairs. It looked awesome. Both dragons looked good, but it was obvious from the way I’d shaded the one in the background that it would be the victor, even though the overconfident one in the foreground thought it was over.
The foreground one was seen from the back, but he was turning away. Arrogant. The background one had obviously just risen from behind the top of the mountain in a fierce position of power. Her wings and talons were extended and she zoomed toward him.
It was a more subtle variant of my original self-portrait. I could claim ignorance of the deeper message. “No, it’s only two dragons fighting,” I could say.
I stared at it, flushed with pride. I’d really concentrated and had managed to get it done well before the contest deadline. I had fixative spray upstairs.
I went up to my room and grabbed the spray just as my computer pinged with an IM from Sam. I told her about the finished drawing and we chatted for a bit. While we talked, I started thinking about the last couple days. They’d been hard, because both my parents were acting so weird about the big revelation. The abuse one. They’d handled the depression revelation a couple weeks ago fine. Mom kept breaking into tears when she looked at me. Not every time, but it was getting old. Dad was patting me on the shoulder a lot more and kept asking how I was. For once, he’d looked at the dragon drawing and admired it.
The thought that I could tell Sam about it all crossed my mind, but I rejected it as soon as I’d thought it.
We finished chatting, and I tossed my computer on the bed so I could work on this new dragon figurine I’d just gotten. I started the first coat in silver.
The side door of the house, which was right below my window, slammed shut. Caleb must have someone over.
I finished the silver coat and let it start drying. That was my last unpainted figurine so I lay back on my bed, hands behind my head.
I thought about Dr. Goldberg, which made me feel both calm and stressed, which was weird. It was because of her that there was this new strain between me and my parents. But when I was in her office, it always felt like things were getting better. We’d soon be starting the cognitive behavioral therapy she’d told me about.
She’d also told me something I loved, because it was so true and vindicating. Pessimistic people tend to have a more realistic view of the world.
Sometimes they took it too far, but my interpretation of this was that optimistic people were basically delusional.
For some reason, I thought of Gina and Susan and their unreasonable view of me. They tried to apply the same logic to me that applied to other people, and it just didn’t work.
Bridget was so different from them, the way she didn’t think of me as weird. I remembered her reaction when I told the table what Logan had said to me in Texas. It made me smile. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in the room for his reaming.
Actually, come to think of it, he hadn’t been that much of a bigger dick to me since then. A little, but not bad. Small favors, I guess.
I remembered that I had planned to spray the drawing. I got the fixative off my shelf and headed down the hall toward the stairs to grab the drawing.
I heard Caleb and Logan talking downstairs. For a second, I almost paused, but screw it. I wanted to get this thing sprayed.
When I stepped into the kitchen, I saw Logan in the dining room studying my drawing. He looked up and saw me and then got this evil look on his face. Like dead in the eyes. He took the lid off his coffee and held it over the drawing.
I gasped. “Don’t.” He wouldn’t. He was an artist himself.
Then he tilted the cup until a bit spilled onto the drawing, right in the middle.
“No!” I charged him and pushed the cup out of the way. A bunch splashed everywhere, some on his shirt but most on the floor.
Caleb came in from the den looking shocked. “What the fuck, dude? She’s been working on that for ages. Not cool.”
Logan looked pleased with himself and set the cup down in front of the drawing. He wiped coffee off his arms. “Come on, let’s go,” he said. Then he was out the front door.
I stared at the drawing in true horror. There was an almost circular pool of brown about two inches across almost dead center.
Caleb walked by and stopped for a second. He looked at the drawing and said, “Man.” But then he was out the door, too.
Why had I left it out? I should have known something like this would happen.
Chapter 74
I got my shit together and ran into the kitchen to get paper towels to blot up the liquid that hadn’t soaked in. My mind was spinning, but there had to be a way to fix this. There was still an obvious stain and the paper was buckled. It was right in the middle, so I couldn’t crop it out. It overlapped the edge of the mountain into the sky, and covered some of the fire, so I couldn’t just dye the whole mountain and pretend like it was on purpose.
I grabbed the picture and took it upstairs, and started googling anything I could do, my hands shaking on the keyboard. Pretty soon a plan emerged, but it was desperately time-sensitive. Antique paper was kind of brownish, right?
I snagged the coffee from downstairs—the large cup was about half full—and then grabbed a couple of black towels from the bathroom. I set these on the floor and put the drawing face up on top of them.
This was the moment of truth. Did I have the guts to pour coffee on my beautiful drawing? I smelled the liquid in the cup. I recoiled—disgusting. How could anyone drink coffee black? I guess if your heart matched it, maybe. Mine didn’t.
First, I snapped a picture.
I took a deep breath and poured coffee on the corner of the drawing. It spread in tendril-like fashion. I poured some right on top of the foreground dragon. Then on the left side where there was more of the burning shrubbery.
It had spread to a lot of places, but there was still plenty of white. So I poured more on it, a little bit here, a little bit there. I had to take a paintbrush to spread it out because it was starting to pool in the middle. I used some paper towels to soak the excess up. But the paper was already starting to buckle in other places, and the coffee was pooling in those areas. I left some of that to give it a more natural look.
Once it was covered, I left it to soak for several seconds, my heart beating like crazy because I’d just poured coffee on a drawing I had spent so many hours on. But Logan’s work had sat that long while I was frozen in inaction. Then I used paper towels to blot up all the liquid.
The next order of business was to keep the paper from buckling too much. I grabbed another roll of paper towels. I technically needed newspaper for this, but paper towels would have to do. I frantically pushed everything off my desk so the drawing would fit, barely. Then I put some wax paper down, then a layer of paper towels, then the drawing face down. I put several heavy books on top of it.
A knock sounded at my door, which sent my stomach jumping again.
“Yeah?”
“Hi, honey, can I come in?” Mom.
“Okay.” God, she probably wanted to talk again.
She opened the door and poked her head in. “Smells like coffee.” As she walked on in, she said, “Did you finish your drawing? I noticed it wasn’t downstairs. I want to see it.”
Shit.
She looked around for the drawing, settling on the desk.
“What are you doing? What happened?” she asked, sounding alarmed.
“Logan happened. He poured coffee on it.” God, it hurt even to say it.
“What?!” Her eyes went wide.
