That Summer by Jennifer Weiner (read more books .txt) 📕

Finally, her mother had taken her to her pediatrician, the man who’d given her Disney stickers and cherry lollipops after her shots. Diana had loved to bite them and feel the candy shatter on her tongue and cling to her teeth.

Dr. Emmerich shuffled through her chart and finally said, “Your mother’s worried you’re depressed.”

“I’m not depressed,” Diana said. “I’m fine.”

He gave her a probing look. “Is it a boy?”

She shook her head, hair swinging around the soft, pale moon of her face.

“A girl?”

She shook her head again.

“Drinking? Drugs? Too much pressure at school? Anything you tell me is confidential. I won’t tell your parents. That’s a promise. But they’re worried, and I am, too.” He sighed, and put his hand on her arm, gently. “I don’t like to see a girl’s spark go out.”

Somehow, after all the questions, all the people asking and begging and insisting that she tell them what was wrong, that was what made her start to cry. His hand on her arm; the kindness in his voice, the idea that her spark had gone out. The idea that she’d ever had a spark, and that it had been stolen from her.

“I’m fine,” she said again, in her robot voice.

Dr. Emmerich sighed and wheeled his stool away from her, back toward the counter. “I’m going to give your parents the names of two psychologists. They’re both women, and they’re both excellent. Even if everything’s okay, it can be good to have someone to talk to.” He wheeled himself back and looked her in the eyes. “People care for you. They want to help. You just have to let them.”

But she couldn’t. She couldn’t, because there was no helping her; no fixing her. She was a broken thing, thanks to her own stupidity, her own dumb, naive, trusting nature. And now, for as long as she lived, she’d be hearing those boys laughing at her. She’d remember what had happened; what they’d done. It would be the first thing she’d think of in the morning and the last thing she’d remember at night.

Tenth grade, eleventh grade, twelfth grade all went by, in the same unhappy gray miasma. Hours felt like they were endless; months passed by with Diana barely seeing the oak tree outside her bedroom window that had once been her preview of the seasons. Now she hardly noticed when the leaves were changing, or when leaves were gone, or when they’d come back, fresh and new and green again. She ate, late at night, until she couldn’t feel anything, stuffing cookies on top of cold chicken on top of ice cream on top of bread. Sometimes she’d eat so much she’d vomit. More often, she’d just stumble to bed and lie there, half-asleep, her stomach aching as much as her heart did.

College, said her parents. So she went to the University of Massachusetts, where she lasted three semesters. It was the boys that were the problem. She’d be walking across the campus and catch sight of someone whose hair and height reminded her of Poe, or she’d be in the student center, eating lunch, and hear a laugh that sounded like one of the boys from the beach. Her roommates dragged her to parties, but the taste of beer made her gag. Her sisters came and collected her for a road trip to Florida, but the smell of sunscreen made her queasy. After three semesters’ worth of Ds and Fs, her parents had let her come home.

It’s a waste of money, she heard her father saying wearily to her mom. If she doesn’t want to be there, we shouldn’t make her stay. He’d gotten old in the years since her summer on the Cape. There was a gauntness to his features; hollows under his cheekbones, circles under his eyes. His skin hung loosely on his face, like he’d lost weight he couldn’t afford to lose.

Diana tried temping, working nights in banks and law firms, entering data into computers, but the problems that had started after her return continued to plague her. She’d sit down with a stack of invoices, then blink, to find that an hour had passed without her having typed in a single number. After a few months, the firms were no longer able to place her, and her mother got her a job working the graveyard shift in the custodial services department at Boston University, cleaning offices and classrooms between ten p.m. and six in the morning. A van picked her up at the distant parking lot where she was allowed to leave her car; a supervisor gave her a mop and a bucket of cleaning supplies at the drop-off point; a different van picked her up in the morning. Her coworkers chattered, talking about their kids or their boyfriends or their husbands. They traded parts of the dinners they’d packed—half a meatball grinder for a Tupperware full of chicken with mole; baked ziti for spicy beef patties. Diana kept to herself, and, after a while, her coworkers left her alone. She didn’t mind doing the dirty jobs—prying chewing gum off the undersides of desks, scrubbing toilet bowls, mopping the men’s room floors. At least she could be alone, with her Walkman earphones plugged into her ears. She would mop, or spray down the mirrors and wipe them clean without ever looking at her own reflection, and, while she worked, she would think about whether she could kill herself and make it look like an accident. The world hurt; every man she saw was a man who could hurt her. Could she drive the car off the road on an icy night and hope the police would think she’d lost control? “Accidentally” step in front of the T?

She thought about the Dorothy Parker poem:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

You might as well live, she told herself, and went plodding through her nights and sleeping her days away until, one