I have a homeless friend.
Her name is Amelia. It isn’t really. That doesn’t matter.
She used to live in her car and now she doesn’t because it isn’t her car anymore. She used to drive places to meet me, but now I just walk to her.
She slept on my couch once. She gets mad at me now, even for offering, and madder than that when I told her yesterday “But you don’t have to be homeless.” I think that was the maddest anyone has ever been at me besides my dad at least, but she wasn’t even shouting. She just made me say that sentence over and over and over again and she kept picking at each bit of it like a cuticle until finally she had me saying what she wanted me to hear myself saying which was “You shouldn’t be homeless because I know you.”
I knew her before she was homeless, and I knew her before she could drive, before her car was her car, and that’s sort of funny, isn’t it? I knew her when her car wasn’t her car, and then I knew her while her car was her car, and now I know her when her car isn’t her car anymore. It’s sort of funny, all the different ways you can divide up a life. Isn’t it?
I knew her while her parents were still alive, and that means something too. I knew her when everything was safe and easy and there was nothing to think about or worry about besides my dad at least, but she didn’t have to worry about that. We met in the second grade. She could never sit still, but her eyes were always locked up on the board.
I knew her before I got diagnosed. I knew her before I knew me. That one’s definitely funny, not just sort of.
Actually, now that I’m really thinking about it, that all came kind of close together: I think she came to school for the first time maybe a week before Dr. Natz started prescribing methylphenidate, thirty-five milligrams. Take one tablet by mouth every day in the morning. Drug may impair ability to operate a vehicle, vessel or machine, may cause dizziness, do not chew or crush before swallowing, take or use this exactly as directed.
Do not skip doses or discontinue.
“Do not skip doses or discontinue.” He read that part out loud to me. “That means you have to take it every day. You can’t miss days, alright? You can’t take days off.”
“Don’t worry,” said my mom, next to me. “We’ll make sure.”
So the next morning at breakfast, there was the pill, right next to my eggs in a tiny cup – one of those tiny pill-cups, you know? My mom watched me put it in my mouth, down it with some water.
“Just like that, every day, okay?”
Nothing happened. I didn’t know what was supposed to happen, so no placebo, even. There was a pill, and now there wasn’t a pill. Off I went to school.
And there was Amelia. She sat across from me in Social Studies, and that was the class I really couldn’t pay attention in, that’s where I was a problem. Was I paying attention now? I don’t know. I can’t remember things like that, I can’t remember being distracted because I wasn’t distracted, I was just focused on other things. I was looking at her hair.
I think about it a lot, the way people look at each other before hormones and puberty and on and on and on–. Do you ever think about that? I think about that all the time. I knew that she was a girl and I was a guy, and I knew that that made her icky, and that was it – that was all it was. I knew that her hair was interesting. It was different from my hair, and it was different from how her hair had looked yesterday, and she hadn’t even been here at all last week. She was new and interesting. She couldn’t sit still, but her eyes were locked up on the board. I couldn’t sit still, and my eyes were locked on her hair.
The next morning, my mom watched me take the pill again, and the morning after that, she didn’t, so I put it in my pocket, and I stopped on the stone stairs down from the front door to the curb where she was waiting in the station-wagon, and I took the pill from my pocket and I buried it there.
I don’t know why.
Do not skip doses or discontinue. Bullshit.
Amelia and I had been sitting in her tent in the woods behind our old elementary school yesterday when I’d told her that she didn’t have to be homeless, and after she was finally done being mad at me, she’d asked if I had any of my pills on me.
“Which ones?” I asked her back. “Methylphenidate or lamotrigine? Two-hundred milligrams, take one tablet by mouth daily, may cause drowsiness and dizziness, may have a bitter taste if chewed or crushed, swallow whole, may cause blurred vision, tell your doctor if you experience mood changes, sadness, depression or fear.”
“Mood changes?” she tilted her head. “Aren’t you supposed to have mood changes? Wasn’t your mood the problem? Weren’t you trying to change it?”
“I’m not a pharmacist,” I shrugged.
“Keep the lamotrigine. Do you have any of the methylphenidate?”
“What for?”
“The neurons of my central nervous system are performing an excess reuptake of dopamine and norepinephrine, resulting in underfiring, especially pronounced in my prefrontal cortex, which in turn results in reduced attentional capacity and executive functioning, task management, et cetera.”
I frowned. “What does that mean?”
“No clue. That’s just what it is, straight off the wikipedia page.”
None of it sounded very fun, certainly. “How long has that been happening to you?”
“Since the first grade, I think.”
I unzipped my backpack and fished out my pills – the methylphenidate, not the lamotrigine – passed one over to her. “Go for it.”
“Thanks.”
I read aloud the part about it being in violation of federal law for me to be giving it to her while she dry-swallowed, and then I asked her if she felt anything, if anything was happening. Nothing was happening.
“What’s supposed to be happening?”
“You don’t really get that until the second pill, I think,” I explained. “You start to worry about things. And worrying about things makes you do things. You do lots of things, you get them all done. And then on the third day, you bury your pill in the front yard instead, but you don’t stop worrying, so after that, you go back to taking it every day because you might as well, right?”
“Right,” she said.
Two days after I buried the pill, something was starting to nudge its way up through the soil.
Like a fingertip. That was what I thought the first instant I saw it, I remember. On my way down the stone stairs, towards my mom in the car waiting below, I glanced towards the spot where I’d buried my Concerta two days before, and I stopped in place and thought A fingertip, and I only stopped just barely long enough to think that before I started down the stairs again, I didn’t want my mom to have to shout up at me to hurry.
“Let’s go to the library,” said Amelia. She shouted it across the room to me during second grade Social Studies class. Or no, no, she was just saying it to me, normally, in her tent, and it was, what? – nineteen years later? Something like that, give or take. “You have homework, right? And I feel like reading something.”
“Okay,” I answered. “We can go to the library.”
Amelia and I had never really been close friends in school. We didn’t become close friends until she was homeless, and that’s another thing that means something, but for the life of me I don’t know the fuck what.
I got home the day after worrying a lot so I’d pay attention in Social Studies class and not notice Amelia at all and there was the fingertip, still nudged up through the soil. I paused on my way up the stairs, gave myself a good look at it this time. I tried to learn everything I could, just staring. It was green, pale green – a sprout? It was a plant, absolutely it was, not a fingertip. What kind of plant was it? How could I possibly know? I couldn’t possibly know.
The garden was my dad’s. Always his and only his. It was his favorite thing because it was the only thing in his life he could control perfectly, besides me at least. He didn’t see the sprout. He should have noticed it–. The garden was always his and only his and he knew every last inch of the dirt and the roots and the fallen leaves, and a sprout that wasn’t his sprout? He should have plucked it away just like that because the garden was the only thing in his life he could perfectly control. But every day, the sprout nudged out a little further, grew a little taller. Soon, a stem. Soon, leaves. Soon, buds, one on this side, one on that side. They never blossomed.
“Why weren’t you ever diagnosed?” I asked yesterday, in the library. Amelia was sat down at a table with me in the corner of the non-fiction section with a book on the deposition of Mohammed Mosaddegh.
“I don’t know,” she shrugged yesterday. “Maybe the doctors thought I was less likely to have it so they were less likely to look for it, or maybe they thought surely it must have been something else because it’s much rarer in girls, right? Maybe I was doing too much to try and fight it, not look dumb or whatever, so no one figured it out. Never came up.”
She was scowling, squinting at the book.
“What does this mean? What the fuck are they talking about?”
“Read it to me?”
“’The subversion and overthrow of the democratically-elected Mosaddegh – perhaps the inciting event of the post-colonialist (or, we might say, neo-colonialist) wave still washing over the world from the West – despite being covertly executed by the United States and Great Britain, was in no way obscure to the people of Iran, who knew that Europe and the New World had interceded, and would continue to intercede, in their self-determination. And for what? To undercut the nascent nationalization of Iran’s not inconsiderable oil and gas production, a process which would have dramatically shifted the bargaining power – to the degree that anything can be called a bargain – between Iran and the West.’”
I thought carefully for a moment. “America and England got rid of Mohammed Mosaddegh because he wanted his government to take control of all the oil and gas and make it more expensive for other countries to buy. It was supposed to be a secret, but all the people in Iran knew that it was America and England who did it.”
“Well why the fuck didn’t they just say that?” She was properly angry, I think. Not quite as angry as she’d been at me before, but angry.
“I don’t know, they want to sound smart… or they want to make you feel dumb.”
Amelia sighed. “Whatever.” She didn’t like being angry like this, she wanted to talk about something else. “Do you think anyone in charge actually thought communism was evil?”
“That’s a good question.” I had no idea. And it wasn’t enough of a something else to talk about, either; Amelia shifted the subject again.
“What are you working on?”
“I’m putting together a powerpoint presentation on this essayist, Pamela Smith, and there’s this one essay by her, right? ‘Povertodynamics and Neurodifficiency: How Attentional Exigency Contributes to Involuntarily Adomecilic Lifestyles’. I want to include it in the slide about her publication list, but I can’t for the life of me seem to find when it came out.”
“Have you tried Googling it?”
“I was just about to.” And then I did. And then – “Huh.”
Amelia glanced at my screen, saw what I was huh-ing about. She laughed. “That’s kind of funny.”
It was funny, kind of, yet another one of those funny things, there are so many funny things. “You know, I’ve actually never run into something like this before.”
“Really? You haven’t?” Amelia seemed legitimately surprised. “You gonna copy it?”
I shook my head. “Somehow, I think just presenting the powerpoint from one of last year’s students is against the code of conduct.”
“Well, obviously… but at least get the publication date, though.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
There was something so strange about it. I don’t know. I went clicking through the slides one-by-one, and they weren’t exactly like my slides, but they had all the same things on them. All the same facts, just in a different order.
It tied up a queer knot in my head. “…why am I doing this?”
“Why are you reading this powerpoint?”
“Why am I making my own powerpoint? Why am I doing that? What am I making that doesn’t already exist?”
“There, that one is the article, right? Published in 2015 – perfect!” What the hell did Amelia even care about my assignment anyways? “There’s an excerpt, too, does yours have an excerpt?”
“Is that supposed to make me self-conscious or something?”
“‘When addressing what is often pejoratively referred to as ‘vagrancy’, scholars frequently and perhaps even deliberately fail to consider the role of attentional limitations and general executive dysfunction, and how these neural symptoms adversely affect sufferers’ socioeconomic mobility. In particular, what is also often ignored are the disproportionate difficulties faced by those simultaneously experiencing subtle medical misogynies – specifically psychiatric misogynies – and the aforementioned attentional issues. More often than not, symptoms in women go unaddressed until much later in life, at which point the ramifications have already been critically destructive to both their status and self-directed well-being’.”
More hostile architecture.
“And what the fuck is she talking about?”
Silence…
…silence.
“…She’s talking about you.”
You should have seen her face, my god.
She didn’t say anything more than a murmur all the way until I dropped her back at the school.
“Good night,” she said.
“Good night,” I said.
I walked on by myself until I reached the corner that turned towards my house, and I followed my feet down the road, and I oozed up the stone steps towards my front door, and then I stopped because there was the plant that I had planted.
I’d forgotten about it. I’ve forgotten about a lot of things, and I’ve forgotten about forgetting about them until I remember, and sometimes I laugh about it and usually I don’t. But there it was. I wasn’t laughing – not yet.
It had been nineteen years, give-or-take.
The last time I’d even noticed the bush I’d been the same height as the railing and pale and rib-thin, but the circles under my eyes hadn’t been nearly so deep. Nineteen years, and now I was looking at it and I was seeing it again, and it was taller than the railing or me, flowering. It had never flowered before, I don’t think, but it was flowering now. It wasn’t possible, really, that it had flowered before without me looking at it and seeing it. My dad had never seen it at all. He couldn’t see it.
He never would have allowed it to be like this, to exist like this here, if he’d seen it. Leaves and stems and flowers every which way, a madness of flowers, dozens of flowers, and every single one of them was a slightly different powerpoint about Pamela Smith.
I stood and stared at it, and I thought about it, and then I reached out and plucked one of the flowers made by someone named “Doug”. I pressed it between my palms like book-pages, until it was flat. I slipped it into an envelope made of static and information and I blew it like a dandelion out into the air with the subject-line: “Presentation for next week”.
I don’t know why I did that. I’d already finished my own powerpoint which was perfectly fine, and it said all the same things Doug’s did, just in a different order. I don’t know why I did that.
Maybe it was an ADHD thing. There are lots of those.
Fifteen seconds later, I was sick, in my stomach and in the back of my mouth. I don’t know why I did that. It was a stupid decision to do that. My professor is going to fail me. He’s going to fail me on this project and he’s going to report me to the department and they’re going to convene a panel and they’re going to have to decide what to do with me and– and– and– my lungs were heaving, you know?– you know, that way they do. I was getting dizzy, and I think I was going to throw up but I didn’t and I wish I had because maybe I would have felt a little better afterwards.
I couldn’t go the rest of the way up the stairs. I couldn’t go home tonight. Nevermind that nobody was home besides my dad at least. I didn’t want to see him, I didn’t want him to see me, he was too many people all by himself and he knew me too well and he always tries to talk to me every time I walk past him and there was no way to get up to my room without walking past him on the couch, and he would see right away that something was wrong, he always notices things like that.
I turned around and followed my feet back down the road, around the corner, back to the school and the woods behind it, back to Amelia’s tent by the tall rocks. I stood right outside it, stared through the phone-lit nylon.
“Hey, Amelia.” I must have scared the absolute fuck out of her, I think, and I was already apologizing for it over and over before she’d even opened the flap.
“What is it?”
“I’m not feeling very good tonight. Do you mind if I sleep here?”
She stared at me with her soft eyes, and she answered as softly and kindly as she could, because we were friends and she didn’t want us not to be. “Yes. I do.”
*
Matt Cantor is a surrealist from Boston, Massachusetts. He has been lucky to work with extraordinary filmmakers, musicians and artists, and he’d be nowhere at all, of course, without his dog. It all comes from them, and he hopes someday it comes back to them. He was the winner of the 2021 Shelley A. Marshall Fiction Prize, and his work has been featured in Fleas on the Dog, Teleport Magazine, The Other Folk, Once Upon A Crocodile, Funemployment, and Thieving Magpie.
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