Page 77 of Down Beat
For some reason knowing that makes me like her more.
“But aside from that, I resisted doing the whole ‘learning who you are through the media’s eyes’ thing. I didn’t want other people’s opinions, the dirty laundry stories they love using to cut people down, to taint my own assessment of you. I like to learn about people for myself and give them the benefit of the doubt.”
“But?” I ask, unsure where she’s headed with this.
“But,” she says with a sigh, “I need you to tell me what the headlines about your suicide attempts referred to.”
Fuck it. I really wanted to avoid this with her. Not always. Just now, and then however long I could drag it out after that.
“If you want me to help lift you up, Rey, you have to show me where you’re coming from.”
Christ. Why does this have to be so hard? Like she said, it’s all in the media if she wanted to look it up. But it’s not. What the media know and what I know are like the PG version versus the all access pass.
“Why do they worry about you so much?” she asks carefully, brow pinched.
My phone interrupts the moment with its barrage of notifications. I set it aside, figuring if they’ve waited twelve hours, they can wait a bit longer. Besides, Café Girl probably confirmed where I am.
“The media only know about what I’ve done since I started recording.”
Tabby’s gentle exhalation is as loaded a response as I expected.
“I first tried to end things when I was fifteen. Toby stopped me.”
She settles in, folding her legs before her.
I reach out and trace my fingertip along the side of her hand, somehow disbelieving that this patient, beautiful creature is real. I don’t tell people about this stuff because it hurts to. Mostly because I’m ashamed. I read the statistics; I know how many mentally affected people there are. One in four, or something like that?
Still. I don’t like being weak. I hate that the failures are all based around my lack of control. I know what’s wrong with me, and I understand how it works, so why can’t I stop it? Why do I feel like a spectator to my own carnage-filled train wreck some days?
“You can trust me, Rey. I’m not here to judge.” Her words are a quiet comfort, encouraging. “I only want to understand.”
Do it. If not her, then who? Worse comes to worst, I walk away and get the lawyers to pay her a fuckload to sign a NDA. Not as though that hasn’t happened already. Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad.
“I had rounds of counseling after that first attempt.” I withdraw my hand. It feels filthy to touch something so pure when I’m so dirty. “They helped get me level enough that I wasn’t a risk, so to speak. After a while, my family stopped asking so many questions, stopped monitoring me so close. They thought I’d beaten my demons when I got a recording contract. I’d made it, you know? So everything should have been peachy.” I plaster on a fake smile, waving my hands beside my head to mimic how pleased everyone was. “Thing is, you never beat them—your demons. They play nice for a while, that’s all.”
“What changed?” She tucks her legs to her chest, pizza flyer and phone still in her hand as she hugs them.
“Pressure. Suddenly I wasn’t on my own timeline anymore. I had people to keep happy, things I had to do before I could take care of myself. I drank a lot. That’s how I tried the second time; the one you would have read about.”
Tabby’s brow pinches further.
“We’d come off putting together our first album. The lyrics are pretty deep in that one. I thought it was a good thing, getting all that pain out through my art, you know? But it backfired. It just held all that misery up in front of my face day after day until I couldn’t face singing the songs one more time, until I wanted to avoid any chance of hearing them ever again.”
“What did you do?”
I spin my phone on the carpet, ashamed to even admit it. “Got drunk and tried to base jump from our fucking hotel balcony.”
She swallows hard. “What stopped you?”
I can’t look at her. See how this makes her feel. Not when I know how I felt at the time was twenty times worse. “My drunk ass fell the wrong way and I cracked my head on the railing. Kris dragged me inside that time. He doesn’t say anything about it, but he holds on to that grudge. I see it.”
“But that’s not the end of it?” She lifts her hand to wipe away a stray tear, yet her face remains impassive. She’s determined to hear me out.
“I can’t keep telling you this, kitty.”
“You have to.”
“Why?”