Read Holding Still for as Long as Possible for Free Online Page B

opened the bathroom door and exhaled even more slowly, sitting on the fluffy lilac toilet-seat cover. I took off the black pumps. Ripped open the toes of my stockings. Stared ahead and inhaled again. I am an emergency. I am not an emergency . Reason and panic battled it out. I wished
I smoked.
    A bottle of yellow cleanser sat beside the sink. What if I drank it? What. If . I read the label. The entire label. I put the bottle back down on the counter. Put each shoe back on. Every sentence said to completion in my head started with What if. Just go back . Go back to the kitchen. Walk down the hall. Everything is fine. Tap tap tap. I’m acting like a junkie. They’re going to think I’m on drugs. I almost wished I were on drugs. It would explain how I was feeling. Good Will .
    These are your loved ones. These are the people who love you most in the whole world. You have never even so much as slapped anyone across the face. Seeing people in pain is horrifying to you. You are safe. The soft refrain played and I listened to it.
    What makes someone evil? What makes them snap? Good Will. Good Will. What if I just went crazy? What if this was what crazy felt like?
    I walked down the hall pretending to look closely at all the framed Sears portraits on the wall featuring the best of the mullet, the bowl cut, the high-bangs-and-braces combo.
    â€œHilary, you look so pretty. You’ve really lost weight. Toronto agrees with you,” Maria’s mom said, before biting into a dinner roll.
    Bombs. Cracked skulls. Fire. I could light this table on fire, I thought. Tip candles to tender cheeks, slam fist into gravy boat, pick shards out of skin.
    Maria grabbed my hand under the table, squeezed twice in a row and whispered, “Everything’s fine. Just relax.”
    She was the only one who ever noticed my subtle unravelling. She promised me I was not dangerous. “It’s a form of anxiety disorder,” she would explain, highlighting lines in her psychology textbooks with lime green and calming blue. “Obsessive disorder. Repetitive bad thoughts. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.”
    Similar thoughts occurred to me whenever I stood on a high bridge or a balcony. What if I jump? What makes someone jump?! What if I . . . the thought ran around in my brain and didn’t stop until I got back to the ground. In the past I’ve walked twenty blocks to avoid taking the subway, certain I would jump in front of the train. I used to press my palms to the pavement afterwards to stop the spinning, so grateful to be standing where there was nowhere to plummet from.
    â€œBilly, I forgot you started using a nickname. I like it. It’s spunky! I mean, I would think a short form of Hilary would be Hildy or Hilly. But Billy, huh?” Maria’s mom said. “Is it so people will stop asking you about your music career? So you won’t get recognized so much?”
    â€œI just like it. I like girl names that could be boy names,
I guess.”
    Holding up a glass of wine in a toast, Maria’s mom said, “To getting older!”
    Happy. Yes. Tap tap tap. When I was eight years old, I crossed my fingers for good luck for an entire year. My fingers grew curved. My index finger a half moon at the tip. Monster digits. I’ve never been right.
    Good Will. Good Will . I repeated those two words. They were magical prescriptive words, meant to be said in careful combination so as to control the universe of uncertainty. The first time I said them, I was on the road and the tour bus had taken off without me.
    I was presumed to be asleep in my little cot in the back of the bus, pink curtains pulled around me. Uncle Jonny had taken his drunken girlfriend’s word that the little one was back there, when it was really Lou the sound guy and a music journalist from the Edmonton arts weekly. When Jonny’s girlfriend heard make-out sounds she thought it best to leave it alone. Not tell Jonny