The Quiet Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

together. We got our hair cut together, we slept over at each other's houses, we studied together, we got kicked out of the library together for talking. When she had troubles in high school, it was me she confided in. When her parents got a divorce, she cried on my shoulder. When I hit my teens, and began feeling gawky and awkward, it was she who reassured me. I told her everything.
    But this time, I told her nothing. I was evasive. I mumbled something noncommittal, and she left, the hurt still clearly showing on her face. But what could I do? How could I tell her, or even my parents, about the Voices, about what was happening to me?
    As time went on, sometimes I thought I was mentally ill, but I only vaguely knew about mental illness. What I did know I had only learned from whispered conversations. There was one girl in school who—the rumor had it—had gone crazy and torn her room apart. She vanished from school for two weeks. I was very disturbed by her experience. When she came back to school, I wanted to help her. I wanted to know what had happened to her. But I didn't want to tell her what was happening to me. I was afraid of how she would react. I was afraid of how others would react. I watched them shying away from her, treating her almost as if she were now a time bomb ready to go off at any moment.
    Her experience made me doubly sure I wanted to keep my own secret. I didn't want to be a crazy person. People shunned crazy people. They feared them. Worse, they called the men in the white coats to come put them in straitjackets and take them away to an insane asylum. I couldn't let that happen to me.
    Sometimes I thought I was possessed. The Stephen King horror movie
Carrie
came out that year. The psychedelic feeling, the crazy sense of being in touch with the occult, the images of blood, and of speaking to God and to the devil—that was what I was like, I decided. I saw
Helter Skelter
that year too, the movie about Charles Manson and the murder of Sharon Tate. It stirred up old recollections: We had been in Los Angeles the year of the murder: I remember going to the driveway every day and picking up the newspaper emblazoned with headlines about the gruesome murder. Demonic cults, possession, insanity—it all rang bells with me. I didn't need a doctor, I needed an exorcist.
    In school one day, I found myself especially disturbed by one literature assignment. I confided to my journal what I could confide to no one else:
    We're reading
The Bell Jar
in English. I absolutely hate it! I have never been so emotionally upset about a book before. The symptoms of the crack-upped Sylvia Plath-Esther Greenwood are me. Of course not everything, but enough. Maybe I'm descending into madness myself. Especially with the wounds of this past wonderful summer being remembered. I'm so upset. I didn't sleep for 23 nights. Esther G. only didn't for 21. I always put myself down, note the bad and not the good, am paranoid, am the A student who would seem least likely to … am afraid to commit myself to relationships, have an alias for all sorts of weird things (at least I don't have to worry about not eating or washing my hair) and don't know who or what I really am. I'm scared and afraid. I want so badly for [my teacher] to understand my fears and set me at ease, but she can't and doesn't. We will be finishing discussing the book next week …
    I had always wanted my parents to be so proud of me. It was so important to me that I reflect well on them. So how could I destroy my parents by letting them know their daughter was possessed? At all cost, I had to keep it from them.
    So for my last year of high school, as the Voices came and went without warning, I played a game of cat-and-mouse. I kept on going to school, I kept on studying. I went to the prom, applied to college, went skiing with my friends, listened to music or talked about guys with Gail. But always I had to be on my guard. When the Voices began to shriek, I had to stay