Full Ride (23 page)

Now Mr. Court is looking me straight in the eye.

“Whitney is mentally ill,” he says.

I jerk back. I wasn't expecting that.

“What?” I say. I'm having trouble processing this. “But Whitney was so
normal
in high school. No—not normal. Extraordinary.
Incredible.
How does someone go from that to being . . . being . . .”

I barely stop myself from using the word “crazy.” I also have to struggle not to say, “I don't believe you.” I change tacks.

“She was already twenty, right?” I ask. “How could she be one type of person for twenty years and then suddenly become someone totally different?”

I don't have to say “I don't believe you.” The skepticism is thick in my voice. I want to force Mr. Court to admit “Well, it all started because she experimented with psychedelic drugs. . . 
.
” I want there to be a reason.

I want to be able to blame Whitney for what happened to her, just like I blame Daddy for what happened to him.

Mr. Court keeps gazing at me, as steady as an anchor in a storm.

“That's how schizophrenia works,” he says. “Average age of onset for females is twenty-five. It's younger for males—eighteen, I think. And it wasn't exactly sudden. There were signs. She stopped wearing shoes—at best, even with snow on the ground, she might wear flip-flops.” He laughs halfheartedly. “On a college campus, that didn't stand out as much as you'd think. And anyhow, she'd always been a little quirky, always had such a great imagination—”

“Like how she invented the Land of the Two Seas,” I say. I'm
struck with horror:
Did I pull out one of the first signs of her insanity as something that made her great?

Mr. Court looks jolted, as if he'd forgotten I talked to Rachel and Tiffany Congreves.

“Well, yes,” he says. “But then in college she started crossing the line from being quirky and creative and imaginative and fun to . . . just being sick. Having delusions and strange hallucinations and thinking they were real.”

“Telling people their eyes are bleeding,” I say.

Mr. Court nods.

I have yet to do a college visit, but I don't think college is
that
different from high school. If someone started saying crazy things like that in the hallways at DHS, everyone would laugh at first, thinking it was a joke.

And then everybody would start avoiding the person.

How did people treat Whitney, the golden girl, when she went crazy in college?

I can't ask.

“A lot of Whitney's hallucinations have to do with eyes,” Mr. Court is saying. “She usually only sees blood like that when she's worried about someone. When she thinks someone's in pain.”

I shift uncomfortably in my seat. Should I laugh this off, act as though Mr. Court himself is crazy for taking Whitney's hallucination seriously? It's not like I'm going to confess that I have problems of my own. Or admit that, even now, even as we're talking about Whitney's illness, I'm fighting a tide of rage inside me—ridiculous rage, unreasonable rage, rage no normal person would feel.

Am I supposed to say, “You know, I'm really mad Whitney would say that about me. I'm really mad that she's crazy. And . . . I'm really mad that it's not her fault, not anything she did to make
this happen. Because I wanted to be mad at her for ruining her life, like Daddy ruined his. And mine. Don't you know, as long as I could split my anger between her and Daddy, it wasn't so bad?”

I'm
not crazy. Not crazy enough to say that aloud to Whitney's father.

Or anyone else.

“Isn't there medicine she can take?” I ask, trying to shift the focus back to Whitney. I suddenly realize I misunderstood Mr. Court's question about medicine—he
was
talking about a prescription, something Whitney needed. Something she'd forgotten to take? I try to sound meek and mild and only concerned about her. “Isn't there something that could . . .”

I want to say “fix her” but I'm afraid that would sound bad. And I'm afraid it would loosen my iron control, send the fury spiraling out of my mouth.

And then who knows what could happen?

Mr. Court frowns and lets out another heavy sigh.

“It's complicated,” he says. “Lots of people, with medicine, can lead fairly normal lives. Whitney . . . not so much. And the side effects . . . She hates how foggy her brain gets with certain medications. Some of the meds make her look and act crazier than without them.”

The drool,
I think.
The shirt falling off her shoulder.

“She has good days and bad days,” Mr. Court says. “Good and bad months, even good and bad years. Sometimes we can't take care of her at home—that's why we moved down to Cincinnati, to be close to the hospital where she stays.”

“So—no one in Deskins even knows she's sick?” I ask.

Mr. Court winces.

“No, people here know,” he says. “But we've found they have a remarkable degree of . . . well, I know it's meant as loyalty. A lot of the people who remember Whitney growing up, they
refuse to talk to outsiders about her problems now. They think they're protecting her.”

Mrs. Congreves,
I think.
The teachers I interviewed. Maybe even Corey Wisner and the other classmates who set up the reunion page.

I think about what Ashley Stevens said leaving her scholarship interview, about how her cousin had told her all about Whitney. Of course people like her would have known everything right from the start. They had the advantage. They weren't outsiders like me.

“So why don't you just explain everything in the scholarship handouts?” I ask. “So nobody else has to?”

No matter how much I try, I can't keep the bitterness out of my voice. The sense of being left out and deceived.

Mr. Court shakes his head.

“We were surprised this year to find out that Whitney's mental illness
wasn't
mentioned in the scholarship handouts,” he says apologetically. “We had a whole paragraph about it in the information we gave the school way back at the beginning, when we set everything up. Somehow I guess that's been left out every year.”

Ms. Stela making yet another mistake?
I wonder. Then I remember she hasn't been at DHS that long.
So was it some old Deskins person once again trying to “protect” Whitney?

Mr. Court is still talking.

“This is the first year we found some students didn't know all about Whitney,” he says. “We kind of forgot how much Deskins has changed, that there are so many new people whose parents wouldn't even remember.”

Or students who haven't heard gossip about her,
I think. Because I'm pretty sure if people like Ashley Stevens know, there was gossip. Would I have known all about Whitney if I hadn't cut myself off from everyone over the last few weeks?

No, my friends didn't know either,
I think, remembering the lunch where everybody else, like me, assumed Whitney was dead. All my friends are Deskins transplants like me.

This thought comforts me enough that I can tamp down my anger and sense of betrayal and say, almost graciously, “That's okay. It's not your fault the school didn't tell us everything.”

I'm shifting to an almost-normal thought process:
Does this mess up anything about my essay? Could we possibly just go on with the interview like normal now?

But Mr. Court won't let the subject drop.

“No, it's not okay,” he says. “This makes it seem like we were trying to hide Whitney's illness—like we're ashamed or something—and we're not. And anyway, we don't want people to be upset about the early deadlines. We want them to understand.”

I squint at him, confused once again. What do deadlines have to do with anything?

“You know how our contest starts and ends earlier than the other local scholarships?” Mr. Court asks. “It's because Whitney usually does really well in the fall, and this way she can help pick the winner.”

What I saw was Whitney doing well?

Maybe I telegraph that question with my eyes, because Mr. Court says defensively, “She was perfectly fine during the other interviews. It's just, she was so worried about you . . .”

I'm back to squirming again. I jump in with another question.

“Why do you even do the scholarship program?” I ask. It's the closest I can come to what I really want to know: Why parade your crazy daughter around when she's drooling and half-undressed? Why make it likely that people like me will find old articles about her being stopped by the police and judge her for things that weren't her fault? Why force Whitney's old friends to relive the
past and put them on the spot, deciding every year what they should or shouldn't say? Why not be like everyone else in Old Deskins and keep the secret from all outsiders?

“Whitney loves the scholarship program,” Mr. Court says, and now he's sitting up straight, as if he's cast off the worries that were weighing him down. It's as if, regardless of Whitney, he's so anchored, nothing can faze him. Or maybe the scholarship program is part of his anchor. “She loves helping kids go to their dream schools. She always felt so lucky that she could go to Kenyon, like she wanted. A lot of her friends were limited financially, and she always felt bad about that, always thought choosing colleges made it way too important whether someone was rich or poor . . .”

“But you didn't ask for financial statements,” I say, and I barely manage to sound curious, not surly. I didn't miss something I was supposed to fill out, did I?

“We don't want to duplicate the financial aid kids would get anyway,” Mr. Court says. “Sometimes we do ask the counselors which kids are longing to go to a school that's out of their reach.”

So it's good I told Ms. Stela I want to go to Vanderbilt,
I think. Focusing on Vanderbilt helps me tighten the control on my emotions. They're layered now, worry and anxiety and resentment, and then, down below, the fury that's been there from the start.

I tamp the fury down deeper and try to figure out how to weave Vanderbilt into the conversation, how to make it clear that I'm exactly the kid he's describing.

But Mr. Court is still talking.

“Anyhow, we can usually find everything we want to know from the essays kids write about Whitney's graduating class,” Mr. Court says. “It's in who they pick to write about, what they pick out from that person's life. And Whitney loves to read those essays, loves remembering how her friends used to be.
She and her classmates had such a special experience in high school—we wanted other Deskins classes to know what that was like, and get ideas for making their own senior year special. We—and Whitney—want her life to be about more than just the schizophrenia, more than just focusing on herself and her own problems.”

I'm back to struggling for control over my fury:
So did I screw up completely by picking Whitney herself as my subject?

Maybe I did. Mr. Court is grimacing now.

“We probably shouldn't have let her read your essay,” Mr. Court says. “I think it was too much for her.”

The rage I've been holding at bay surges past my control.

“Just because the whole essay's about her?” I ask, and my voice is stingingly bitter. There's no hiding it now. “Because I didn't know what really happened, or that she would be a scholarship judge, or that it would hurt her to be reminded of how
she
used to be? Why didn't you just say no one's allowed to write about Whitney?”

I want to explode: “It's not fair! I never had a chance at this scholarship, did I? Why'd you say I'm a finalist? I bet I'm not even a real finalist—you probably just wanted to shock me by introducing me to Whitney and then lecture me about what a loser I am for researching Whitney for a whole month and never even knowing she was crazy.”

It's not like I'm so disciplined, I can hold all that anger back. It's not my self-control that keeps me from screaming, “That's not fair!” It's the expression on Mr. Court's face.

He's squinting at me, his brow furrowed, his eyes glazed with confusion.

“Your whole essay wasn't about Whitney,” he says. He shakes his head. “I mean, sure, you mentioned her, but—”

“Every single word I wrote in that essay was about Whitney!” I
insist. I am still drowning in fury, but this is my
scholarship
interview, this is the fifteen minutes that can determine the rest of my life. I can still grasp for something reasonable, something to save me. “You must have confused my essay with somebody else's.”

The furrow in Mr. Court's brow deepens, but he reaches down into a briefcase beside his chair and pulls out three stapled-together papers. He drops them in front of me.

“This is what you turned in,” he says.

I look down, and those are my words on this paper. But it isn't my essay about Whitney and the Congreves girls, about their magical times in the Land of the Two Seas.

What lies before me—what I turned in, what all the Courts read—is my furious rant about how much I hate Daddy.

“Nooo,” I moan.

In a flash I see what happened. I was so mad at Mom the night I turned in my scholarship application by e-mail. I was half-blinded by rage. And my rant at Daddy, labeled “Whitney Court Scholarship Essay,” would have been right below the actual “Whitney Court Scholarship Application Essay” in my computer files. I must have clicked on the wrong label.

I have to fix this.

“I made a stupid mistake,” I say, and attempt what should be a tinkling laugh, a charming effort to poke fun at myself.