An Answer: Where Do You Go?

She is quiet, about five-foot-seven, detached, genuine, and especially polite. She lives with her dad in Endwell, or with her mom in the trailer park.

This is how Mallory thinks of herself. Warily the girl with the blond hair sits upon the sofa; carefully the girl with the glasses considers the few numbers in her phone. Whether she can trust Sarah. If Marcus has changed. For every error in judgement upsets everyone, and every lapse in reason wreaks havoc with everything for days. No antidepressants, no painkillers, no pot, no beer, no liquor, no cigarettes, nothing that truly excites, revives, or rests her. Only the Internet and a little anonymous conversation, voices without inflection, asexual, in acronyms with their melted meanings she speaks (as a girl speaks who for years has been beaten and abused sexually and believes suddenly that she has found someone she can trust).

Down the hall into the little, narrow, sparsely furnished bedroom, where drawings, sketches, etchings, and water colors are piled upon her dresser, her desk. The bed made, a sheet covering the window, over in a corner folded neatly upon a chair her cheerleading uniform, and beneath the chair her white tennis sneakers, one sneaker set beside the other, the toes smudged with dirt. Beside the door is her backpack.

Otherwise only the artwork, and beneath her bed the tubes and the bottles and the containers and the sprays and the sandwich bags which she uses against the headaches; against the swirling nausea; against cramps in her abdomen; against the nosebleeds; against it all. A terrifying arsenal of aerosol and cement, yet the only assistance against the ringing silence of this empty room in which she never rests. In boxer shorts and a t-shirt, her face flushed, her glasses pressed close to the paper, with one leg pulled beneath her carefully she draws, she draws what she has drawn before: Waves. Giant, fantastic waves her tired eyes can scarcely admire. For hours she sits like this and draws as her eyes burn.

This is the framework; this doesn't change. But her drawings reveal another dimension, for at times they are beautiful and mysterious. Yet the clue to her drawings is that they come from the mind of a very unhappy girl. Often they are really less drawings than manic manifestations of the conversations she holds with herself. Now a yet yawning gulf, now a sullen white surf beat against its sides so violently that sequelae is not too severe a conclusion for - me - her counselors to draw, and yet the feeling of her own inadequacy, evident even in her earliest work, is unclear even to those who wish to see. Convinced that those surrounding her have no idea who she is, and invariably acceptant of her hateful and misguided peers, she feels often and acutely the hurt that those who should understand her know her no better than casual acquaintances. People she might pass on the street.

Mallory is not remarkable, nor is she especially noticed. Like a second Andrea Yates, she is given a stare at once vacant and wild, as if opening upon some frightful and unknown dimension, and unwittingly the image conjured is that of the single mother, the pregnant teen walking full term down the hallway, her belly making full the wide expanse of her red hooded sweatshirt. It is thus that her teachers feel no choice but to portray her, a modern-day martyr, a Pandora exposed, hoping thereby to subject this quiet child to no more scrutiny than necessary from children absent from faith, devoid of religion, who, disturbed by years of television and endless hours of Internet, are incapable of perceiving pathos unless it is produced and packaged as a show, a commercial, something to be consumed.

But sadness is not subjective. The true likeness of Mallory is not as simple anyone would have us believe.