Alexandra Kindahl

Professor Theresia Pratiwi

ENGL272—Section 0401

Workshop Story 1

Find Her in the Crowd

I wake up on my twenty-first birthday to Carmen’s voice, reminding me like a too-

cheerful phone alert that today’s the day I’m supposed to kill myself.

Most people have Carmens, I think—someone who told you to just finish your damn peas

so you could get dessert at six, who reminded you to carry the two on a fifth grade math test.

Someone to keep up your high school grades (if you cared about that sort of thing), nag you to go

get your college laundry before someone stole it, plan out—on and off for five years—how

precisely she would kill the both of you. Maybe you never named her, maybe she wasn’t a girl,

maybe she was a kindly old grandmother or an eternal three-year-old, but you had her and she

made you sink or float or both at once.

When I was a kid I used to draw pictures of us playing in my brain—sliding along the

little gray folds and getting stuck sometimes in the fissures, helping each other out. My drawings

of her were vague enough to pass as various real-life friends I kept and lost over the years, and

my mother never questioned the existence of the Carmen I kept mentioning or wondered why I

never invited her over.

“Eti’s making lemon cake,” Carmen’s telling me now, my head stuck in the closet

hunting for a clean shirt. “She uses the flat knife to cut the lemons, so if you want that you’ll

have to wash it. Serrated’s better anyway, though.”

1
 “Plan’s off.” I say it aloud—my throat crackling a little with sleep and morning.

“Rally’s at three and party’s at eight—”

“Rally ends at six. Gives you two hours, and Eti’s got a three-quarters full bottle of

Tylenol in her room if we still wanna hit the party.”

“No thanks. That shit’s bad for your liver.”

“That’s not funny,” she says, voice nails against mine. “You said yourself this was never

a joke.”

--

One year back I sat in the Health Center half a mile from my dorm, right hand clenched

tight against a cloth over my left wrist. Fenton was next to me with an arm over my shoulders,

Carmen in the far corner of the room with a scowl on her face, flipping off all the personnel that

passed her by. My cheeks were red, maybe, my eyes bloodshot—but I never saw myself in a

mirror that afternoon, so I can’t know.

“Can’t believe it’s taking them this long,” Fenton was saying, to me or himself or the air.

“What the fuck are they doing instead?”

I swallowed to tell him, “It’s not that serious of an—”

“Yeah, because you fucked it up,” Carmen interrupted from across the room. “Straight

down, not across. You sharpied your vein, even.”

“You okay?” Fenton asked when I didn’t finish. “You having trouble breathing?”

“No.” I didn’t look up at Carmen. “I’m fine. It just hurts.”

“Fuck, I should’ve brought Tylenol,” he said. “Thought they’d get to you faster. Maybe

we should go to the ER.”

“So they can lock us up?” Carmen asked him. “I don’t think so, asshole.”

2
 “I just wanna wait,” I managed to say. “It’s not gonna be much longer, I don’t think.”

I felt his arm tighten over my shoulders and his lips touch the top of my head a moment,

Carmen rolling her eyes and sliding down the wall to a seat on the floor. Her left wrist was

bleeding too, a red horizontal line splitting a black sharpie squiggle in two. She held it up for me

to see, let it drip onto the ground and splashed in those drops with her other hand, fingers like

children’s rainboots walking through April.

“They’re gonna commit us,” she finally said, voice almost too soft to hear across the

room. “You really fucked up this time. Just completely fucked up.”

I mouthed the words, “I know.”

She fished around in a pocket, pulled out an already threaded needle and started to sew—

through and over, through and over, white thread getting stained orange and then straight red. I

watched her until my eyes glazed over and I didn’t hear anything but all of us breathing into and

out of sync.

--

“Were you on the phone?” Eti asks when I make it into the kitchen with the semblance of

an outfit. “Heard you talking to someone.”

“My mom,” I tell her. “Wanted to make sure I had plans.”

Carmen laughs. “We’re lying to poor little Etienne now? That’s a new low.”

“You’re up early,” I say. “Not that I’m surprised.”

“Had to make you a lemon cake.” Eti punctuates by cracking an egg, then sings, “Lemon

cake, lemon cake, best of all the other cakes. Can you think of any cake that stings your skin this

much?”

3
 Her last note is (purposely) shrieky enough to send me and Carmen’s hands to our

respective ears. I’m grinning before I can think about it.

“You still set to come to the rally today?”

She nods. “Time: three post-meridian. Location: the mall. Chance of success: five

hundred percent.”

“Requirements: sunscreen, hypocrisy,” Carmen adds.

“Great. Won’t be able to catch up with you beforehand—”

“Because you’re the extra special speaker, I know, I know.” Another egg. “I’m gonna

make you a sign that says, ‘We heart you five-ever, happy birthday.’ And then it’ll have a

drawing of a brain and you as a stick figure punching the brain.”

I laugh. “It’s ‘Minds over Matter,’ not ‘Us Versus Minds.’”

“I know,” she says. “But I’m gonna join next year and petition you guys to change it to

‘We Kick Mental Illness Right in the Brain!’ With an exclamation point.”

“More like a motto than a club name,” I tell her, grabbing a lemon slice from the cutting

board. “I’ve gotta hit class now, so I’ll see you at three from a distance.”

“There will be a sign. This I promise you.”

--

Two years back I met Fenton in front of my dorm, dressed up as much as my closet

would allow, hair styled by Eti with a curling iron and a song about disulfide bonds. Carmen

was in black yoga pants and a faded t-shirt reading ‘45th annual fundraiser.’

“You look nice,” he said when he saw me, then, “Happy birthday.”

“Time to celebrate two years ‘til you’re dead,” Carmen added. “Maybe the restaurant

will make you a coffin cake, and you can—”

4
 “You okay?” It was Fenton again, his eyes fixed on me.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just…birthdays are…”

“You don’t like your birthday?” he asked.

The sun was down and everything was lamp-lit and starry and secret. To tell him then

would’ve been easy and impossible, to see the look on his face or hear his response unbearable

and a relief. My throat stayed locked up tight.

“Coward,” Carmen said. “Can’t go through with it, can’t commit to not going through

with it.”

“It just…” I finally started, “hasn’t always been the best.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I get that. Mine either.”

“Pretty sure you don’t get it, actually,” Carmen snapped. “You don’t—”

“It’s better now, though,” I told him. “I think it’ll be better from now on.”

--

I catch up with Carmen at the front of the lecture hall after my last class (she likes to lie

on the floor and shout out answers), heading toward the door with her fighting to not get elbowed

in front of me.

“Time to go tell the kiddies how great our club is,” she’s saying. “Minds over Matter

will save your life!”

“You’re gonna shut up during the speech, right?” I ask once we’re outside and free of

eavesdroppers.

She gives me a half-sneer. “What do you think?”

The psych building’s a short walk from the mall, and a blotch of the grass is already

covered in students. Posters with the usual ‘I survived X’ and orange arm bands for self-harm

5
awareness and a chatter that drowns itself out, everyone bustling past each other or standing still

as stones to make the crowd look like one living cell from a bio class video. Eti’s near the front

with the promised sign, her brain drawing much better quality than any of mine have ever been.

I give her a wave while heading for the mini-podium.

“You ready?” Liz asks when I get up the steps.

“As I’ll ever be.” I hold up my speech. “This all the turnout we’re expecting?”

“We should get a couple hundred more,” she tells me. “I’ve done a mic and speakers

check, and non-officers are out in the crowd already.”

“A couple hundred more?”

“Remember the turnout last year? Shouldn’t be much different.”

“Fantastic.”

“You’ll be fine,” she laughs. “Just imagine the audience in hazmat suits, coming to take

you to a quarantine.”

The crowd fills in eventually (with what really looks like a few hundred more), and Liz

introduces herself as Minds over Matter president and me as vice president and today’s speaker.

There’s applause, some screaming (all from Eti), and then more silence than I’d have liked.

Carmen taps the side of the microphone. “Let the lying commence.”

I get through the preliminaries—depression forever and ever, therapy on and off, one

suicide attempt a year ago that landed me in the hospital a few days. Everyone who’s never been

sick thinks it must be near impossible to talk about, but not when you’re a psych major—not

when you’ve clinicalized your life with a DSM checklist and detached yourself from your own

story by telling it a good two hundred times.

6
 “Are we at the part about how you’re so much stronger now?” Carmen is saying, leaning

over the microphone like it’s going to pick up her voice. “I love it when you tell people why life

is worth living. Make sure to do that ‘extra sincere’ face, where you—”

“—Stop.”

I say it to her, but the sentence I finish with it is ‘when it comes to talking about mental

illness, we need to—’

Stop.

There’s a hush in the crowd, all the faces I can bear to look at either confused or checking

their phones. Carmen’s laughing a slow, hollow laugh.

“Cat’s out of the bag now,” she says. “You gonna tell them the truth?”

“Because—” I try out, then clear my throat. “Because we talk about fighting mental

illness, beating it.”

Carmen prompts, “But under all that—”

“But under all that,” I draw a breath, “We’re really trying to beat each other.”

--

Three years back I waited until Eti was asleep on the blow-up mattress, crept out of bed

and around the discarded wrapping paper and paper plates stained pink with frosting. Carmen

was already in the doorway to my room.

“Eighteen,” she said. “Are we going out to buy a lottery ticket?”

I followed her down the stairs without responding, her feet silent against the creakier

boards and me fighting not to make noise.

“Or cigarettes,” she continued in the foyer. “Or just a lighter and a can of hairspray.”

7
 “We’re going for a run,” I told her, pulling on my shoes with a hop and lacing them tight.

“No fire.”

“Since when do we go for runs?”

“Exercise is good for you.”

She made a sound like a scoff. “You wanna look nice when you’re dead in three years?”

I didn’t answer, just opened the front door to let both of us out and locked it from the

other side with the lightest click possible. Carmen was barefoot still, her eyes reflecting a little

under the porch light.

“We don’t have to wait,” she said. “Not for college or twenty-one or any shit like that.

We could just start walking.”

“It’s a little warm to die of exposure.”

“Not the only thing out there to die from.”

I looked down the driveway then, to the house across the street with its windows cast

blue by television light, to the water tower in the distance—dogs barking and cars screeching all

the way there, muted by bushes and trees. I could’ve really walked out of my life, walked until I

found my end and Carmen’s with it.

“No,” I told her. “We’re coming back this time.”

--

“We’re trying to win,” Carmen’s saying now. “We’re going for a sickness prize.”

“We talk about mental illnesses to each other sometimes like they’re badges,” I tell the

crowd. “Like we’ve collected them and now we’re showing them off, almost bragging about

them.”

She taps the microphone again. “How it’s been for us.”

8
 “I know that I’ve done that. I know I’ve felt superior for having been sicker than

someone else, and I know a lot of you have felt that too, deep down.” My voice steady,

breathing slow. “And nobody wants to say that we do it, because we know it’s wrong. We know

it’s not a competition, it shouldn’t be.”

A hand on my shoulder—Carmen’s. “Tell the real story.”

“Last year I came to this rally as just a member of Minds over Matter, not an officer,” I

start. “The girl up here where I’m standing now—the girl giving the speech like the one I’m

giving—was a senior and the club president. I was a sophomore in the crowd listening to her.”

“She’d spent three months in one hospital, four in another,” Carmen reminds me.

“And hearing her talk about what she’d gone through made me feel guilty, not

empowered.” I swallow. “I felt like I hadn’t been sick enough, like I couldn’t understand, like I

didn’t deserve to say I’d suffered.”

“Four days later—”

“Four days later—my twentieth birthday—that’s when I tried to kill myself.”

I leave a pause there without even meaning to, Carmen’s hand still on my shoulder, my

eyes fighting simultaneously to look and not to look at Liz’s face.

“Tell them how to change.”

“We have to fix the way we talk to each other about mental illness,” I say. “We can’t

talk about it like we’re bragging. When someone’s telling us about how they’ve suffered, we

have to listen to them and be there for them—not change the topic to ourselves, how much more

we’ve suffered.”

“And?”

9
 “No one is worse for having been sick—everyone deserves love and respect and a chance

to be happy,” I tell them. “But no one is better for having been sicker, either. And we need to be

able to tell the world that we were sick without making people around us sicker.”

“Finish.”

“We don’t need to stop talking about mental illness. We just need to start talking to each

other about it differently.”

Carmen lets go. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Now let’s march.”

Liz slugs me in the shoulder (for changing my speech) and then gives me a hug (for

changing my speech), Carmen standing by with a smirk on her face the whole time as the crowd

starts to move. I float through most of the walk with Eti, her half-sung babble about tonight’s

party only making it partway to my brain. I get high-fives from strangers, a couple of them

staying to talk about how they know what I meant—and I breathe. I breathe.

“It’s time to decorate,” Eti sings near the end of the walk. “Don’t come back ‘till I’m

done, okay? I want it to be a surprise.”

“There goes Tylenol,” Carmen says. “Unless we stop at CVS.”

“Sure, okay,” I say. “Nothing too fancy, alright?”

“I have six middle names, and all of them are different spellings of ‘fancy.’”

“Got it,” I laugh. “Knock yourself out.”

I’m alone a few minutes after she leaves, Carmen pointing out buildings tall enough to

kill me in the distance, flat roofs to find the edge of. I jump about a foot to hear a different voice

behind me—feel a different hand tapping my shoulder.

“Hey.”

10
 I catch my breath. “Fenton.”

“Caught your speech,” he says. “I didn’t know about any of that.”

“We didn’t tell you,” Carmen snaps.

“Guess I didn’t really talk about it,” I manage to say.

“No, you didn’t. And I just…” He pauses. “I wanted to say sorry for how things went

down with us, you know?”

“Wasn’t your fault.”

“You’re right—it wasn’t,” he says. “But it wasn’t yours either. It just—it wasn’t gonna

work anymore, and I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” I tell him. “You know I wasn’t mad, right? Not at you.”

“Good. Thank god.” He gives what’s maybe a sigh, maybe him clearing his throat.

“Okay.”

I’m laughing somehow—like we’re a bad comedy show. “Okay. Fences mended.”

“Great. In that case…” He’s grinning, starting to laugh too. “This is pretty damn

awkward, but I’m in a tight spot here, and I could use a favor.”

I raise an eyebrow. “What kind?”

“My roommate’s moving in with his boyfriend, and we’re trying to get everything over

there today, but everyone we know on the planet’s got other plans.”

“And you want me?”

“Thought maybe—in the spirit of mended fences—yeah, pretty much. Like I said—tight

spot, no one around. You free?”

“We’re busy,” Carmen tells him. “Do it yourself.”

“Sure,” I say. “I’ve got two hours to kill.”

11
 --

Four years back I blew out seventeen candles on a vanilla-frosted cake, opened a present

from my mother and a couple envelopes of cash from non-nuclear relatives, left the kitchen for

my room with Eti and Carmen following me close behind.

“I got you a present too,” Eti told me as we climbed the stairs. “It’s in your room. You

can tell it apart from the things that were already in your room because it’s got a big orange bow

on it.”

“Mysterious,” I said.

“The mysterious present of mysterious mysteries.”

It was there in my room as promised, a large package tied up with ribbon, waiting on the

bed like it’d been there since the beginning of time. I sat on the floor with it (not asking when

she’d had time to put it there) and moved to unlace the bow, Carmen peering at it from nearby.

“Wait,” Eti said. “I wanna make a speech before you open that.”

I laughed. “A speech?”

“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming here today.” She rose to her feet while

saying it, faced by chance the invisible crowd of Carmen. “I’m here to tell you about a truly

lovely individual, a girl who single-handedly saved me from the awkward friendlessness I faced

as a junior-year new student. Nobody else has ever been quite this welcoming, and as I like to

sing—the world is not always a dark, dark place. Thank you.”

I unwrapped it then to find a beat-up blender box, inside of which was a beat-up shoe

box, inside of which was a beat-up alarm clock box and then a jewelry box containing a tiny,

perfectly-folded paper swan.

“I didn’t want you to be able to guess what it was,” Eti explained.

12
 “You succeeded.” I held the bird up to the light, turning it back and forth. “Thank you.”

“I got you a present too,” Carmen said. “Take a look.”

She was holding a package covered in smiley-face wrapping, ripping the paper away in

one motion to reveal a Wizard of Oz-style hourglass, an index card taped to the front reading ‘4

years.’

“You can put it on your nightstand,” she said. “Wake up to it every morning.”

--

I invite Fenton and company to the party afterwards, but only the former takes me up on

the offer. Eti’s filled the apartment with streamers and balloons by the time we get there,

vegetable trays and pizza boxes and enough alcohol to inebriate a zoo set up across every flat

surface.

“It’s almost time to—” she cuts off singing. “Fenton?”

“Hey, Etienne.” He’s staring at the floor. “Haven’t seen you—”

“In almost a year,” she finishes. “Why are you here?”

Carmen laughs from across the room. “I was gonna ask the same question.”

“I invited him,” I tell Eti and Carmen. “More the merrier.”

“Right.” Eti bites her lip a moment. “He’s gonna be helping me finish set-up, then.”

Fenton nods. “Definitely.”

“Me too,” I say. “I can—”

“Not you,” she interrupts. “It’s your birthday. Birthday, birthday, better than tax day.

Everybody pays for you and not the other way! You get the idea.”

“Got it. I’ll get out of the way, then.”

13
 “Go relax,” she says, then to Fenton: “And you’re gonna start by moving the dining table

to the other side of the room.”

I follow Carmen away from them, ending up in Eti’s bedroom instead of my own—the

A/C humming in the corner, superhero faces half-glaring at me from posters on the walls.

I wait. Stand. Listen.

I hear the front door open into the other room after a couple minutes, voices of Liz and

what sounds like the entire membership of Minds over Matter floating through the apartment.

Eti’s singing, Fenton’s laughing, Carmen’s watching me.

“Hurry up.”

The Tylenol is on Eti’s dresser like I remembered, tucked in between red nail polish and

a Swiss Army knife. I lift it—weightless and heavier than I’d thought—unscrew the child safety

cap, catch a glimpse of orange, replace the lid.

“Well?” Carmen asks.

“Not now,” I tell her. “Later.”

--

Five years back I sat on the floor of my room, leaning against my bed next to Carmen.

She’d painted her fingernails and toenails black, started tracing the veins across her hands and up

her arms with the polish—strokes thick and sure and drying in place. My eyes were still wet,

lips chewed bloody.

“It’s just sixteen,” she said eventually. “You’re really gonna give me some teen movie

crap story about not having any friends?”

I swallowed. “It’s my fault.”

“That you’ve screwed up every friendship you’ve had? Yeah.”

14
 “You don’t—”

“School, too,” she interrupted. “I’m the only reason we got an A in precalc last quarter,

and—”

“Shut up.” The words were an instinct and so were the next ones: “I can’t do this

anymore.”

There was a pause, then, “Do what?”

“This. Any of this.”

“You wanna kill us?”

The words felt cold on my ears. “I don’t know. Not now, maybe…but if I’m seventeen

or eighteen and still…”

“Twenty-one’s good,” she laughed. “Don’t want to be one of those teenage girl clichés,

with the—”

“This isn’t a joke,” I snapped. “It never was.”

She looked at me a long moment, screwed the cap back onto the nail polish, sighed. “If

you wanna make this serious, then do it. Get a plan.”

I bit my lip again and tasted blood. “Twenty-one?”

“I’ll check in on our birthdays, tell you if you’re still fucking up.”

“And if I fix things?”

“No one has to die.”

I took two breaths—both fast, uneven—then, “Okay.”

“Up to you now, then,” she told me, holding out her hand to shake. “Five years to make

it right.”

The polish was slimy against my skin. “Five years.”

15
 --

“We’re running out of time.”

I hear her say it when I’m halfway through a beer, halfway through a conversation,

halfway through the night. She’s next to me—right hand curled around her left wrist, covering

the scar I gave her a year ago today.

“You shouldn’t have brought it to your room if you weren’t gonna use it,” she says.

I excuse myself from the cluster of friends, set my beer down on an out-of-the-way part

of the counter, slip between guests down the hall to my room with Carmen a foot behind.

I turn the handle, make sure it’s empty, tell her, “Give me a couple minutes.”

She raises an eyebrow. “What, like go have some lemon cake?”

“Exactly.”

I shut the door then—lock it with Carmen on the other side—but she doesn’t float

through with a sarcastic snap like usual. I’m alone. The Tylenol climbs out of the bottle or

maybe I pour it across the desk—I think I pour it. I make a circle with it, then two eyes, then a

smiling mouth, then a clump again in the bottom of the bottle with the lid on tight.

I breathe.

In the bottom drawer of my desk I find a sheet of orange cardstock, folding it in half and

pressing down the crease with the back of my stapler. I snake stringed balloons up the front,

litter squares of confetti between them, sticker the paper with gold and silver stars. On the inside

I write clear, straight letters with a black sharpie:

Happy 21st Birthday, Carmen. Love you.

And I go out to find her in the crowd.

16