Angie's Thought

Angie had just turned thirteen.

She’d been looking forward to it. It had seemed like a magic number, signifying some mysterious shift in her life. But, after her birthday party, she felt the same as before.

She wasn’t upset. She was resigned. Like the quiet part of her had known that after her birthday she would feel the same as before. 

So around this time, shortly after turning thirteen, Angie entered into a small depression. She couldn’t think of anything to look forward to. After school she went to her room, shut the door, closed the blinds, put on her night light, grabbed the fuzzy blanket from the drawer under her bed, and slept until dinner. 

Although Angie hadn’t yet begun cataloguing the common fluctuations of her emotions, she knew this was a small depression, not a big one. But her mom became concerned. Not because of the behavior itself, but because of the sudden shift before and after her birthday. It was like the power had gone out in the house, and she could not find the cause. She spoke to Angie about her concern. 

One evening, after dinner, the sky that pale blue dark before night, Angie’s mom quietly opened the door to Angie’s bedroom, walked to Angie’s bed, and sat on the corner facing the door, her body turned to the door, her head turned to Angie. She laid a hand on Angie’s foot, which was peeking out from the bottom of her fuzzy blanket, and said, “Angie, can we talk?” Angie did not want to speak. She told her mom she was fine. Her mom pressed. Angie became upset, because she knew that this was just a small depression, and the fact that her mom could not recognize that made her feel that her mom did not recognize her. Angie’s mom left. 

Stung by Angie’s rejection, Angie’s mom decided that maybe she had spoiled her. Angie was her only child, and they rarely fought, and whenever Angie wanted something, if it was reasonable, she usually got it. This was not how most kids were raised. This was not how Angie’s mom had been raised. Her parents had greeted every request with suspicion, and only gave what was earned. Angie’s mom hadn’t wanted to raise Angie that way. Up until now, that hadn’t been a problem. But now, it appeared, it was. So Angie’s mom punished Angie by giving her chores after school. This would kill two birds with one stone, she figured. It would teach Angie a valuable lesson about gratitude, and it would keep her out of her room. 

But Angie did not understand why she was being punished, and so she felt that she was being punished because of the feelings she was having. She felt she was being punished for feeling the wrong things. So she stopped speaking to her mom. This seemed to confirm to Angie’s mom that, yes, in fact, she had been spoiled. If simple chores elicited such a dramatic response, that was a sign of being spoiled. 

So Angie’s mom responded with more chores, telling Angie that if she didn’t change her attitude, the chores would only increase. 

This confirmed to Angie that, yes, in fact, she was in trouble because her emotions were wrong. This outraged and confused her, and she did not know how to process the outrage and confusion. Not only that, but the outrage and confusion stemmed from the fact that she was no longer allowed to do what she normally did when she felt emotions she could not process, which was to sleep in her room. So, unable to process her feelings, the feelings grew, and grew, until the quality of the feelings took on a frightening unfamiliarity. Angie became afraid. 

Up until this point, she had grown familiar with the various peaks and valleys of her emotional world. But now she was in new, uncharted territory. This frightening unfamiliarity extended itself into the physical world. Her house suddenly seemed unfamiliar. Her room suddenly seemed like someone else’s. Her mom, who had always been a static representation of a certain kind of safety, suddenly seemed like a dangerous stranger. For the first time in her life, a constant, ever-present panic seeped into her skin and remained. She began to have nightmares. When she woke, the nightmare feeling remained. She began to feel she had to do something. Since what she had done before was no longer an option, she felt it was important to do something completely different. 

Instead of hiding in her room with the things that comforted her, she decided to seek discomfort in the world around her.

She’d always come straight home after school, and if she didn’t, it was because of a plan, agreed upon with her mom. So she decided one day after school not to come home. Instead she went to the Kwik Trip behind the school, at the intersection with the CoachUSA bus stop. She did not text or call her mom to tell her she was doing this.

What she felt while sitting there, on the plaster bench painted to look like stone outside the front door to the Kwik Trip, watching the buses pull up to the curb, hiss air from their hydraulic systems as they lowered to let the people off, what she felt while sitting there, knowing that no one knew where she was or what she was thinking, what she felt was the first good feeling she had found in this new, uncharted emotional world she had now entered. It was like a high, this feeling.

Riding the high, she looked down below at the fear she had been feeling for the past few weeks, and, outside of it now, it seemed suddenly terrifying, even more terrifying than it had been when she was in it. She looked at the fear. She looked at how she felt now. She looked at the bus.

Just before it was about to pull away, she ran to the door, hurried up the steps, pulled her wallet from the small zipper in her backpack, and handed a twenty dollar bill to the driver. The driver, a tired looking old man with a grey mustache, accepted the money with his eyes on the road, and Angie shuffled past the passengers to an empty seat in the back of the bus. She sat, and it took several moments for her mind to decide how she felt.

But as the bus pulled away from the curb and entered the stream of traffic, as it picked up speed and began rushing towards some new destination—Angie did not know where the bus was going—the thought that made its way into Angie’s mind was… Well, it’s not mine to share. It was Angie’s thought.