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have extras in my kit,” her friend chimed in. “With glue.”
    “You think they sell those trucker pills at the gas station, NO-DOZ?” a third member of her contingent asked. “I fucking love those.”
    “I have cramps,” said the fourth bottle blonde. “You think they got Midol?”
    And because the four most popular girls in the junior class were now also falling apart, it was okay to delay the beach in order to go to the bathroom.
    The driver brought us to a filling station and parked in the sun-baked lot. Mr. D’Angelo helped me disembark, and Leann put her arm around me and walked me to the bathroom. The other girls rushed ahead of us and were done with their hand-washing by the time we reached the door. They commenced nail triage in the shade of a nearby tree.
    “You go first,” I told Leann. We were bonding, a little, but we were nowhere near the zone that allows one person to comfortably withstand the sound and smell of another’s assplosion within the confines of a tiny restroom. Come to think of it, I don’t know if I’ve ever reached that zone with any human other than my mother, and I was a baby then so I don’t retain the heinous memory.
    “No, you,” Leann said. She smiled conspiratorially at me. “I don’t really need to wash my hands,” she whispered, and patted me on the shoulder. Gratefully, I lunged into the bathroom, locked the door, and let it all out.
    There was an enormous initial feeling of relief. I felt weak and light-headed, but my intestinal system was mercifully at peace. Anxiety is wonderfully chameleonic. It can disguise itself as any number of maladies: insomnia, indigestion, fatigue, physical pain, or even addictions of every imaginable sort. And once you treat the insomnia or the addiction or whatever physical manifestation the anxiety has thrown up as a smokescreen, you are left with the beastie who started it all. Most of us do not want to face down the ugly, pathetic little demon that we’ve unwittingly allowed to run our lives. Most of us would rather talk to our doctors about irritable bowel syndrome, or complain to our chiropractors about knots in our back, or stay home from work because we’re just “too tired” to go in that day. These symptoms are very real, but they all spring from one nasty little source that must be addressed. Otherwise, getting rid of one bothersome ailment just leaves room for something equally or more awful to pop up in its stead.
    On that day in Sicily, with the specter of a beautiful, burning boy floating in the back of my mind and a high school arch-nemesis repairing her nails a few yards away, I hadn’t the slightest idea of how to confront the real culprit behind my embarrassing tummy trouble. I didn’t know how to talk back to the voice that had babbled terrible, inscrutable words within my head before the pain in my lower half drowned it out. And so, after I did all the things you’re supposed to do in the restroom and rose from the toilet, the voice came back. It was louder and more distinct.
    “You piece of shit,” it hissed. “You fucking loser.”
    I turned on the sink and washed my hands, hoping the sound of the water would drown it out. The trouble with screeching internal voices is that they’ve bypassed the whole auditory system and actually emanate from within your brain. Throwing up aural roadblocks doesn’t help. The harsh noise is already inside you.
    I raised my hand to open the latch to the bathroom door.
    “You can’t go out there,” the voice snapped. “Everything will hurt again. You can’t go out there. It’ll be worse than before. You have to stay here. You have to stay right here. You’ll never make it anywhere. Why did you think you could come here? You’re broken, and everybody knows it. You’ll never see home again. You’re going to die in here.”
    People with mental illness are privy to very special knowledge that the rest of the population—poor, average souls that they are—never gets