Read Online Hancock Park by Isabel Kaplan - Free Book Online Page A

question was that? I stared past Sara Elder, past her hair and her gaze, to the orange tapestry with the heart in the center, hanging on the wall behind her. I tried to see if I could count the stitches from where I was sitting.
    â€œBecky?” she leaned forward.
    I leaned back. “I called your emergency line. Emergency. You didn’t call me back for two days. My life is doing a belly flop into who the hell knows where, and you’re supposed to be there for me. Thanks for nothing.” I surprised myself with the fury that rushed out of me. My breathing came in faster bursts, and my eyes stung.
    â€œBecky, is this really about you being angry with me?”
    I wanted to scream, “Don’t give me that psychobabble bullshit!” But instead I just sat there, seething.
    Sara Elder went on, talking about how this wasn’t the end of the world, and I had to concentrate on me, and I don’t really know what else she was saying because I, admittedly, wasn’t giving her my full attention.
    Then, toward the end of the session, she asked, “How are your meds? You seem a little on edge.”
    Thanks to Sara Elder, I basically had a pharmacy in my bathroom. Everything but the ADD stuff. I’d never had a problem with paying attention. Unfortunately. Just the opposite. I tapped my feet, one then the other and back again, and clenched my hands, one, two, three. I had todo things in multiples of three. “No, I’m doing wonderfully, thanks for asking,” I responded, coating my words with sarcasm.
    â€œWhy don’t we up the Topamax by half a milligram? That ought to help even out your moods a little bit. I’ll call the prescription into Rite Aid, okay?”
    I nodded and stood up to leave. “Okay. Bye.”
    I walked out into the hallway, still disappointed in myself that I hadn’t fully expressed my rage, and that she hadn’t responded to it at all. But at least I was getting more Topamax. Maybe that would calm me down.
    I hadn’t always been this open, or even open at all, to the idea of medication. The idea that a pill could control my moods, my instincts, and what went on in my mind used to be terrifying. Topamax was my first prescription, and the only one I’d consistently stuck with. The dose, however, had increased steadily throughout the years. I remember the terror, standing in front of the pharmacy counter at Rite Aid, waiting for the pharmacist to fill my first prescription. Mom was next to me, credit card in hand, waiting to pay. I stuffed the little white paper bag into my backpack, nervous that I might run into someone I knew, and that they might wonder why I had a bag from the pharmacy.
    That night, after I had brushed my teeth, washed my face, and changed into my pajamas, I went into the bathroom and placed the bright orange medicine bottle on the counter in front of me. “You’re going to take half apill tonight, okay? Just half a pill each day,” I remembered Sara Elder saying. Carefully uncapping the bottle, I stared down at the round, white pills. I had never swallowed a pill before. When I got sick, my parents still bought the chewable or drinkable versions of medicine. At that time, Jack and I still shared a bottle of gummy vitamins. What if—what if this pill got stuck in my throat, and I couldn’t figure out how to swallow it? And if I did manage to swallow it without choking, it was going to change the way my brain functioned?!
    Skip GO and collect two hundred bucks—I was officially freaked out.
    As carefully as I could, I removed one pill from the bottle. It was small and felt chalky between my fingertips. Sara Elder had said to break it in half, and it had sounded easy then, but once I was home I wasn’t so sure. There were no dotted lines on the pill, no directions on the bottle; how would I be able to tell if I had successfully broken the little white pill into equal halves? And what if I swallowed