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Gert’s life is starting to make sense again, finally. It’s been 8 months since the anxiety became a diagnosable problem, 12 since Amy had died, and 10 since she had last spoken to any member of PRIDE Jr. She can feel her toes all of the time now, Lisa her therapist is really, really great, even Molly seems to be perking up again. Maybe it’s all gonna be okay. She’s even starting a new med after the Lexapro gave her horrible headaches and insomnia. Her petition about student rights to free contraception was going to the school board next week. She was cautiously optimistic about life, and Ellen, her Student Inclusion Panel co-chair, seemed nice. Everything was going well. So why was today so shitty?
Something had been out to get her since last night, when she stayed up until 2 because her computer crashed at 11 and lost half of her 10 page appeal paper for English. Who the fuck assigns a paper due on a Tuesday? Then she woke up late, Roberta had a flat tire so she and Molly had to call a Lyft last minute, and Ellen was sick so she had to deal with Principal Goiter and his ridiculous, sexist questions alone.
“Are you sure we need gender neutral bathrooms? I mean, we don’t have many transgendered people here, and they’re free to use the bathroom of their choosing, staff cannot stop them.” Goiter looked like he had been molded out of week old tuna, and then someone had dusted his head with the remains of a barbershop floor. He smelled like the kind of must that only develops when you don’t teach someone to clean their space properly and food ends up rotting under their desk. Gert’s stomach, already in knots, rolls when she tries to take a steadying breath.
“Sir, with all respect, I have the testimony of over a dozen kids, not all of them even gender non-conforming, who say they are harassed in the bathrooms by peers- may I add, mostly peers who participate in sports here. A gender neutral bathroom opens up a safe place for these kids to go in school. No one should have to avoid their basic bodily needs because some jocks- other peer feels it is okay to police their habits.”
Goiter squints. She knows he knows this would look good in the newsletter, and that she always ends up on the news. He just has to get there in his big fat head, c’mon- “Alright, Gwyneth. I’ll talk to the head of construction about adding this to the renovations coming up here. That is not a promise, mind you. Dismissed.” She wonders, on days like today, why this school isn’t run by a normal hippie woman principal like her friends at the performing arts school. Builds her character, she guesses. She might end up like her parents, dealing with bureaucrats like the Wilders and Minorus her whole life because she’s too spineless to pull out of some miserable deal. Fuck, she must be getting sick.
Now that that’s over, she’s hoping the day is looking up. One win might lead to many, right? Wrong. The library had checked out the last copy of her required reading, her head throbbed, and she had made weird, prolonged eye-contact with Alex today, but her brain was too fried to see what he was trying to communicate. She hoped it wasn’t ‘have you read the IT club’s new proposal yet?’ because she hadn’t and certainly wouldn’t be today. She was pretty sure something in the vegan potluck her parents community garden friends had last night had made her sick. Maybe it was the new meds?
If it was a new meds she was well and truly fucked, because Lisa was out of town for 2 weeks and basically unreachable. The switch, if any needed to happen, would be minimum 3 weeks from now anyway, unless she showed signs of true allergic reaction. She felt no stigma in taking medication or going to therapy, but it was hard sometimes to accept herself fully, and not be annoyed with all of her shortcomings. Like today, instead of having a healthy breakfast like Molly, all she had had was orange juice and ibuprofen. She knew that was hard on her liver, but she just didn’t have time. She had spent first passing time crying in Janitor Wiley’s closet, because it was right next to her class and Mrs. Wiley always gave her a pat on the back and steered clear.
Either way, her head was spinning by 9 am, and Chelsea in her Algebra 2 class told her she looked peaked. She was too distracted to bite Brandon’s head off for his sexist garbage rant in homeroom, too woozy to even try and give her patented ‘good morning save the children’ speech, even though today it was going to be over pushing for comprehensive and inclusive sex education on a federal level, a fight that had taken her three months with Principal Goiter to win.
The day was shitty, and by 11 am Chem the buzz in her head that sometimes accompanied an anxiety attack started, low and slow. 2 hours until lunch now, she could make it. She tried to write in her planner to avoid collapsing on her desk. She had Algebra 2 problems, Chem stuff over that ass-kicking equation bullshit they were learning, she needed to take a trip to the public library for her required reading, she had a club meeting right after school, so she needed to text Molly and then Venmo her enough for her own Lyft home. Okay, deep breaths. Government— there was a test on Tuesday next week, which meant she needed to text the study group about finding time this weekend to study. Her freshman tutee needed time on Spanish and Bio this week, two one hour blocks probably meant tomorrow and Friday at his house. Greasy little kid, but a genuinely hard learner.
The bell rings, and she starts up from where her face was apparently pressed against the desk the whole time. She catches Karolina’s eye across the room, and a jolt runs through her whole body. Her face is, as usual, etched in a kind of perma-smile, like something got sucked out through her ears what was supposed to convey the rest of human emotional spectrum. The image falters, for a second, when Gert catches her eyes. She must look like walking death if Karolina’s not beaming. There was an almost concern in her eyes, and Gert is almost gonna go say something when Lacy tugs her sleeve and starts to fall into step next to her.
“Hey, you gonna be okay getting to English? I can lend you my notes for today if you need to go to the nurse.” Lacy is sweet, and always takes Gert’s flyers, and has that unfortunate Karolina-esque combination of pretty and charismatic that means Gert kind of melts when she talks. Karolina has, at this point, slipped into the crowd. Gert musters up her least pukey face.
“Thanks, Lacy, I’ll be alright. I was just up late with that paper for Paplese, you know how those kill. If you’d be willing to let me see your notes for Chem today sometime, I’d be forever in your debt though.”
“Of course, text me to remind me later, I’ll get you a pic!” Lacy spots some other girls she knows and, good person act over over, scurries off. Gert’s head throbs as the rush of lemon-scented air passes her. She catches, for a split second, Nico looking at her with something slightly less than a scowl on her face from across the quickly emptying hallway. Hm. She feels too shitty to truly register anything that might mean. She steels herself for conversation about Shakespeare on a sick stomach.
She spends most of English bent over her desk, sweating out her demons while a few kids toss around half-baked analysis of Ophelia’s function in Hamlet’s narrative and whether Shakespeare should be read homoerotically or his meaning was lost to the annals of a different time. Gert assumes. She thinks she fell asleep, and Layla behind her has been kicking her chair for 28 minutes straight. Lunch, lunch is so soon, she can at least go to the bathroom and lean her head against the cold tile until she stops seeing double. The bell rings, and Gert is gonna make a beeline for the bathroom when Chair-Kicker Layla calls out “Hey Gert, you’re coming to the Knitting For Quitting event today at lunch right?” Fuck teen smokers and fuck raising money for proper education. Fuck everyone, and the fact she is supposed to show up to this crap because she’s a motherfucking Co-Chair of this bitchass school. Gert turns to Lacy and smiles.
“Course! Wouldn’t miss it!” She leans against a stretch of lockers. She wonders how else this day could get shit on.
Gert’s going to puke in the lunch line. She hasn’t eaten all day, just the fucking orange juice, and she’s going to give it right back to to mother nature in the form of Atlas’ biofriendly tile in about 30 seconds because the broccoli-tofu-rice mixture smells like fresh hell and the kid in front of her definitely is not wearing deodorant. This is the least opportune time because she can hear Him. He’s three people behind her, maybe four, saying some shit about tightening up a formation that would sound like distracting innuendo if she wasn’t going to Puke Orange Juice Right Here.
The anxiety begins to set in, and the puking feeling doubles. She ditches her tray, muttering an apology to the lunch lady, and tries to push upstream through the mass of kids in line, out the back way. She can’t fight through and ends up jostled out to the mouth of the cafeteria, breathing heavily and trying to find something to grasp onto to keep her from being sick, and finding nothing. She can’t move, can’t stop, she feels herself puke and can hear the laughter but it’s coming from somewhere else. The world is spinning and she hears a voice, a boy’s voice, call out her name. “Hi Chase.” she thinks. She falls on the floor in a dead faint.
When she comes to, she is laying on a nurse’s cot, antiseptic smell curling up into her nose. She feels fuzzy, like a fake version of herself, all warm and sleepy even though everything hurts. The lights are bright even under her unopened eyes, and a voice is saying her name.
“.... Miss Gertrude Yorkes. Do you know what happened to her, young man?”
“No, she just threw up and then fell over.” Chase, what’s he doing over there? He should come here, the bed has plenty of room. Gert almost makes a noise, but holds back.
“So Miss Yorkes fainted, and instead of waiting for the help that was already on its way, you picked up a person in unknown condition and carried her to my office.” Wow, okay, Gert is definitely still dreaming. This is a dream warped into some kind of weird nightmare.
“Ma’am, the foot traffic in the caf is insane, she was gonna get trampled. I just, I had to get her out of there.” He sounds kind of panicked. Fuck, she’d screwed up.
“Alright, Mr. Stein. It’s alright, she’s just fine. You go on back to class now, Miss Yorkes is in good hands. Her parents have been notified.” Chase makes an aborted noise, like he was going to say something more, and then footsteps recede. Gert shifts and falls back asleep.
It was a stomach flu combined with dehydration and overwork, according to the ER doc who does Stacey a favor. Gert is back to school in two days, with the promise to drop one club and go to the nurse if she so much as stubs her toe. She bounces back to into school, memory of Chase in the nurse’s office carrying her on its cloud of reassurance. Walking down the hall toward him, she hears his friends snickering. They’re glancing at her, and her steps falter. She hears Brandon start speaking, and the hope falls out of her like a deflating balloon.
“Teach her to do a juice cleanse, huh? Ran out of reasons to attract attention already? It’s only October, she’s losing her touch.” None of these were even particularly good comments, but Chase is laughing at them all the same. Well. Never say she can’t take a blatantly obvious hint being thrown in her face with the force of a semi-truck. They were back to status quo, and not a second too soon. She turns around abruptly and heads to the janitor’s closet. He doesn’t get to see her cry.
Chase watches her go, stomach heavy and heart aching. He’s glad she’s okay, really. He just, it’s not like he can go back. She doesn’t want him, she wants the boy she had before. Chase doesn’t know where that kid went, and he’s not willing to watch her hate him for real. It’s easier, like this. He’s okay.
He wonders if Chandler’s gonna have decent vodka at his party tonight, cause he really needs something to take the edge off. He can’t live with the panicked image that has haunted him for the past couple of days, Gert’s pale face and limp arms as he tried not to sprint to get her to the nurse. He shakes it off, turns back to the boys. What the fuck is his life anymore? He hopes it doesn’t get weirder than this.