Catherine McKenzie - Hidden

I lean forward, confused, trying to make out what I’m seeing, when the phone vibrates again and a black line begins crawling across the screen, eating up the pixels in its way like Pac-Man. It eats and eats until the phone goes dark and cool.

It all happens so quickly that when I’m staring at the black screen, moments later, I can’t help but wonder if I’ve imagined the whole thing.

He caught me at the right moment.

That’s what I always remember thinking of Jeff in the days after we started speaking, emailing, spending time together in the ways that we could. When I was trying to figure out what I was doing. What it was about him, about me, that was pulling us together and holding us in place. Why I let him in.

He caught me at the right moment. That much was clear.

But what I still wasn’t sure of a year later was what made the moment right in the first place?

The MRI shows what Dr. Coast expected it to, a normal, functioning brain with no mistakes in it. When we get the results on Monday, I can tell that Brian’s both relieved and unsatisfied, but I’m only relieved. When he says she’s going to be fine, my heart feels like a too-full balloon that’s been popped. All my anxiety rushes from me in a few, brief seconds, and I collapse in on myself, a shrunken parody of what I once was. But then I take a deep breath, and I look through the glass of Dr. Coast’s office at my bored daughter slumped in a plastic waiting-room chair, who is going to be okay, she is, and my heart starts to expand again, taking a shape that can withstand being batted about.

There isn’t always an explanation for everything, I say to a still-unconvinced Brian, parroting back what he’s told me plenty of times about his own patients. He nods and agrees, but he’ll be spending nights up late surfing the Internet, researching her symptoms. When I’d punched them into WebMD myself, it gave too many possibilities to count, but the first one was something called “vasovagal syncope,” a fancy way of saying that it’s the body’s way of reacting to emotional or physical stress. Dr. Coast’s explanation, which I hoped he’d gotten from somewhere other than WebMD.

When we tell her we’re all done, Zoey seems happy to be done with the tests and anxious to put it behind her. When we get home, she wants to go back to school today, even though the day’s already half over.

“Let’s wait till tomorrow, all right?”

“But I have to, Mom.”

“I’m sure the teachers will let you make up whatever work you’ve missed.”

She chews on the end of her hair.

“What is it, Zo? What can’t wait till tomorrow?”

“The longer I stay away, the bigger deal it’s going to be when I get back. Like, ooh, Zoey was all hiding because of that video. Check out the Freak Fainting Girl.”

Goddamn that little shit who posted the video. He should count himself lucky that Brian’s been too distracted to carry through on his promise to track him down and teach him a lesson.

“But won’t it bring more attention if you show up in the middle of the day? Why not start fresh tomorrow in homeroom, like it’s any other day?”

“It doesn’t work like that. There’s no reset button. Unless some kid decides to shoot up the school, or something…”

“Zoey!”

“I’m just saying.”

“Okay, but it’s already lunchtime. You need to shower and eat, and by the time you do all that the day really will be almost over. Let’s relax this afternoon, take it easy. One more day isn’t going to make a difference.”

“Don’t you have to go to work?” she asks hopefully.

“One more day isn’t going to make a difference there either.”

And if I have my own reasons for avoiding the office, that’s my problem, not hers.

She shrugs, giving in, and clomps up the stairs. I call after her that I’ll make us some lunch, maybe with that bacon we were supposed to eat the other day, but she doesn’t answer.

Brian emerges from his study, telling me he’s had a call from one of his patients, he’s needed, do I mind if he goes? He looks guilty for asking, but I reassure him. Everything’s all right here. I’d like a bit of time alone with Zoey, anyway.

He gets his medical bag and kisses me good-bye, and I go to the kitchen to assemble lunch things. I stop in front of the fridge. My flight itinerary’s tacked to it, held fast by a Cabo San Lucas magnet, right where I left it.

Springfield to Springfield and back again.

Oh, Jeff.

I hear a thump from upstairs, and then another and another.

“Zoey? Zo?”

Now there’s a crash, and more thumps. Something being pulled over, something being thrown. I take the stairs two at a time and find Zoey in her room on the floor surrounded by a tipped-over bookshelf, binders and notebooks, all full of her writing. Zoey’s room has always been a reflection of her pinwheel mind, but never like this.

“Zoey?”

She looks up at me like she doesn’t know how she came to be in the middle of this hurricane. Her face is wet with tears.

“Are you all right? What is it? Why did you…?” My eyes dart around the room and come to rest on her flickering laptop. A video’s playing, the video of Zoey stepping up to the mike, going pale, falling to the floor, and then up again as it happens all over again. And now I understand. Although Ethan told her about the video, we’ve kept her from watching it, which was easy to do these last couple of days. I should’ve known she’d make a beeline for it the moment she was alone.

I maneuver around her things till I get to the laptop and shut the lid. “You shouldn’t watch that.”

“Ha! Too late.”

I sit down on the edge of her bed, still unmade from the day she left for the competition.

“It’ll blow over, Zo—”

“I want to throw this stuff away.”

“No, Zoey. No.”

“Yes. I don’t need it anymore. I’m not going—”

“Honey, please. You don’t have to do the competitions anymore if you don’t want to, but trust me. You don’t want to throw this stuff away. It’s a part of you. And you’ll regret it if it’s gone.”

She pulls her knees up to her chest. She looks so thin.

“Have you not been eating, Zo? Is that what this all is?”

“No, it’s not, I promise.”

“Because it’s normal, you know. Lots of young girls—”

“Mmooomm, I’m not some stupid ana girl, okay? That’s so dumb.”

“Then what?”

She looks down at the floor. One of her earliest notebooks is open in front of her, from when she was maybe six or seven. Her green period, we called it, because so many of her poems were about grass and trees and the soil they suck up through their roots.

“You’re going to think it’s stupid.”

“I could never think that.”

She hesitates, a few tears still falling, wetting the slightly yellowed pages.

“It was the people.”

“The people in the audience?”

“In the cameras. All those faces I couldn’t see…” She shudders.

“Will you tell me?”

“If you mess up where you can see the people, you can make it all right again, because of that connection? Like, when I’m up there, in the lights, onstage, I can feel the people in the room. Especially when I’m speaking. There’s this, I dunno, link, between me and them, and I can make them feel things. What I want them to feel. Like magic.”

“Is that why you love it?”

She nods.

“What was different this time?”

“I don’t know, but I could tell, when I saw the cameras on either side of the stage with their red lights blinking, that something was wrong. And I was right. In the earlier round, the semis, it was awful.”

“But Dad said you did well. You scored the highest score.”

“Maybe, but it didn’t feel good. It felt like…you know how when you go into a room that you’ve lived in and everything’s packed away and it’s all echoey?”

I thought about it. “Like at Grandpa’s house, you mean?”

When my father died a few years ago, we’d all gone to the house I grew up in to pack everything away. As we were leaving, Zoey’s hand slipped from mine and she ran from room to room, shouting her name at herself as it bounced off the empty walls. When we got in the car to drive home, she was quiet. Sad. Grandpa was really gone, she said when we pressed her. The house had told her.

“Yeah, like that. Only, it felt like that in my heart. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. And when it was my turn in the finals, I looked into the camera and it was so black in there, I couldn’t see anything but me. A tiny little me. And that’s the last thing I remember.”

“So it was a kind of stage fright?”

“I guess.”

“But, if that’s what caused it, then what happened when you were on the phone with Ethan?”

She flushes. “Don’t be mad, okay?”

“I won’t.”

“I kind of…freaked out when he told me the video was online, and I tripped on the sideboard and hit my head. I was so embarrassed, but when I was lying there on the floor and you and Dad thought I’d fainted again, I thought…I thought that if I had fainted again, when the cameras weren’t there, then I could say it was some medical thing, like low blood sugar or something, and Ethan and everyone wouldn’t have to know the truth. No one would know it was because I was scared.”

This truth pulls me from the bed to the floor, the precious notebooks be damned. I take her into my arms, holding her close, holding her up.