Cheyenne Dowdell “Surreal Sunset” (artwork

Ridgeline Review

But I just couldn’t fix this book no matter how hard I tried. The way Fannie Flagg had been so nonchalant about Ruth falling in love with Idgie in Alabama during the 1930s was unmatched and no matter how badly I wanted to write it differently, my version of Ruth always died and this version of Idgie was always alone by the end.

I tried to sit near Jodie one more time, out on the porch. Not next to her. I was on a different couch maybe ten feet from where she sat. Still, just as soon as I sat down, she stood and rushed to the other end of the porch, where she laid down furiously. And at mealtime, when her name had been placed next to mine, she picked up her plate and name tag, moved to the other end of the table, and aggressively avoided eye contact as though she found it difficult to look away. What a change in pace from the first time she laid eyes on me.

Things got better when she left. She moved up to the third house, where you go when you’re nearly ready to be released. I could breathe again knowing that she wasn’t there, no longer having to make sure that I sat as far away as possible from her. Especially when far away never seemed to be quite enough.

I never moved on to the third house – I never was good enough for that. Practically everyone had cycled through treatment and I had stayed stagnant in that second house until I had reached a point where I was begging to go back home. I didn’t care if I was never good enough or if I relapsed or if I never saw another summer. I wanted a Diet Coke. I wanted to have control over my life again.

Toward the end of summer, my very last week, everyone at the hospital knew that there was a spare bed in my room. One of my roommates had gone home against medical advice. And Jodie walked back through the door of that second house, her arm wrapped up in long white bandages, a nurse carrying a laundry basket full of her things.

“Isn’t that girl from the next house?” the girl on the couch next to me muttered into my ear. “She must have done something. Do you know her?”

“Sure,” I muttered back, studying the blank recovery journal in my hands as a movie played on the TV.

Jodie sat behind a couch across the room from us and cried for what must have been half an hour. There was no sort of privacy in treatment, so this was the closest she could get. We were trying to watch a movie – a Western

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