Motorcycles I've Loved by Lily Brooks-Dalton Page B

didn’t know what to make of the anxious, icy sweat trickling down my neck and behind my knees, didn’t have the vocabulary or the knowledge or the perspective to understand what was happening to me.
    Navigating boarding school as a naïve fourteen-year-old with depression and anxiety nipping at my heels was overwhelming, but when Phineas resurfaced at the end of that first semester, it became torture. All I wanted was to be liked, to make some friends, to not be ridiculed or flunk French, but even those modest goals felt insurmountable. I was sinking on my own, but then losing my brother took me straight to the bottom. First he sent me a box, full of his favorite things: T-shirts, CDs, books—no note, just things. Things I had always coveted—suddenly, I didn’t want them anymore. We hadn’t heard from him in months and I had no idea what this gift meant, but I went ahead and thought the worst. My parents reported a disturbing and irrational phone call from him, and then, after I sent a pleading letter to an address I had for him in Utah, begging him to come home, his sermons began to arrive. I kept them because they were so cruel. I knew I would second-guess myself later, that I would have to go back and reaffirm that he had indeed written that in bold, black ink. Seeing someone else’s beliefs, someone else’s words, in my brother’s handwriting shook me, unsettled me like I had never been unsettled before. Someone else’s words, but undoubtedly his own voice, his own twisted humor and slang and biting logic that I had always trusted implicitly as a child, even when he told me things like my new toy shark would expand and come alive if used in water; or watching
The Wizard of Oz
too many times would make me go blind; or cigarettes tasted like chocolate.
    This time I was older, he was meaner, and I’d already been fooled one too many times. So when he wrote,
“You are a wretched excuse for a human, but you can have forgiveness from God. That is, if you so choose, or should I say, if God so chooses you,”
I had enough of a spine not to get down on my face and repent for my selfish little soul, as he suggested on page 11, but not enough to discard the claim that I was a wretched excuse for a human being. I was already so miserable it fit right in with the rest of my convictions. I internalized the brimstone, declined the salvation.
    I don’t recall many details from that year, though, oddly, I do remember seeking out old prom and bridesmaid dresses at secondhand stores and wearing them with black combat boots, underneath raggedy sweatshirts. I mention the dresses because I can picture them more clearly than the faces of most of my classmates. Something about the colors made me feel better—there was a lavender off-the-shoulder dress, mid-length, with a ribbed corset; a strapless iridescent blue ball gown, layer upon layer of shimmering fabric for a skirt, like shiny flower petals, and a purple silk lining; a spring-green frock with yellow roses embroidered on the collar. I changed my hair a lot—dying it one color, then another; cutting it short, letting it grow, cutting it even shorter, but I could never seem to look in the mirror without wanting to disappear. I kissed a boy for the first time, then a girl, or maybe the other way around, I can’t remember for sure which came first. My mind was expanding so quickly, changing so rapidly, that the moment I thought I knew who I was everything would shift and I would lose track.
    Summer arrived, and that helped. School let out, and gradually I could breathe again. I went back to my childhood home in southern Vermont, where the closest neighbor was a dairy farm a mile away and there were acres and acres of meadow or forest to wander in. The press of scheduled time and crowded assemblies ceased while my imagination took over, led me away from the harsh realities that had been bringing me low. But when my sophomore