My Second Death Read Online Free Page B

didn’t mean, “Okay I will go see the dean.” I can’t go see the dean.
    She doesn’t understand.
    But she’s on the phone already. She glances up and smiles at me. Her mouth is moving, the lips pushing in and out like she’s chewing.
    “Who else leaves me messages?”
    The sound of my voice is loud. It sounds metallic, echoing. I wonder if something is wrong with my ears.
    The secretary ignores me, just holds up one finger and keeps talking.
    After she hangs up the phone she leans forward. Hair falls over her left eye.
    “What was that now?”
    “The dean and my dissertation director,” I say. “Who else? Who else leaves me notes?”
    “No one that I know of,” she says. She smiles at me. Her lips are shiny with semiliquid gloss. She looks fake, painted.
    “Someone else left me a message,” I say. “Was it one of them?” I point to the grad student office door.
    Her little mouth wrinkles around the edges. “As far as I know, Ms. Brandis, the only person leaving you messages all day is the dean. Maybe you should ask
him
.”
    I imagine talking to me feels like licking soap to her. She is not helpful. I think that she would walk a far distance to avoid noticing anything about me, or talking to me. She is not likely to be an observant source of information.
    I turn and walk down the hall toward the stairwell.
    One time — I must have been thirteen or so, down to one psychiatric visit a week — my shrink
du jour
asked me if I ever felt happy, or sorry for someone else, or scared. I told her she was wrong to imply I didn’t feel things. “It’s just that other people feel with their emotions,” I told her. “And I only feel with the nerve ends under my skin.”
    She gave a snort of laughter so hard her glasses slipped down her nose. Then she straightened her glasses and smoothed her hand over her mouth. “That was a good one,” she said. “You got me with that one.”
    But I hadn’t meant to tell a joke. My face felt hot and I wanted to punch her in the mouth.
    In retrospect, I should have explained it better. It’s not that I don’t feel things. It’s that the emotional center in my brain feels like it’s a million galaxies away but the world around me is pressing in on me, hot and sticky and loud, full of bright colors and breathing and textures. By the time I figured out how to explain myself I was seeing a different psychiatrist who didn’t care about feelings, only about dosages and fifty-two minute sessions. In my adolescence I went to more psychologists and psychiatrists than most kids go to football games or sleepovers. I understand the way my mind works better than tax attorneys understand the month of March, but sometimes I wonder if a big part of my problem isn’t just that I never learned the basics that most kids learn at those games and parties. I mean, I figured out how to tell jokes. I just never learned how to laugh at them. Sometimes I think I could have turned out so much closer to normal if I had just been forced to act like a normal kid.
    I thought going to college would help me learn to blend in, find my rhythm, my way through the feelings other people translate as emotions. But it didn’t work out that way.
    As I walk down the hall, snatches of conversation from open office doors drift out. Faculty isolated in small offices with a single windowpane, a few plants, seventeen thousand books, and a rotary telephone that went antique in the ’90s. Someday I will live in one of those offices. It will smell of damp mold and dust and I will leave the door shut.
    The dean’s office is in a red brick building with wide white-painted steps. I climb the steps and go inside, my sneakers squeaking on polished parquet. My footsteps slow. I know it’s illogical, but I am convinced that as soon as I walk in he will see it in my face, the fact that I’ve gone closer to the edge than I’ve been since I was ten. He knows me well enough that he should be able to see it. I almost turn