September 11, 2017 | Occasus | Issue 7 | Creative Nonfiction

Trich Questions

1

It was the hundredth day of grade one the day before. I knew this because my class had dropped the hundredth toothpick in the day-counting contraption hung up on the wall. I loved seeing every brightly coloured toothpick organized into ones, tens, and, finally, as of yesterday, hundreds. The ninety-ninth day of class made my throat tighten up and my body ache; my muscles were tense all day, my head killed, and all I could focus on were those four horrible green toothpicks mocking me in the ones pocket. So, on the hundred and first day, I sat at my desk cupping my right cheek in my hand and staring at the denim-blue day-counting contraption. My view was blocked by miniature orange plastic chairs. The kind that had big metal bolts that caught onto you and plucked your hairs out one by one if you slouched down too far. On most normal days, I would contort my right hand supporting my head to pick my nose behind the shield of my prayer book. On that day, though, my nose didn’t pull my pointer finger toward it. Instead, my boogerless pointer finger was insistently pulled with my thumb up to my eyebrow. The right one.
        
After only a couple minutes, the shriek of the bell snapped me out of my daze, forcing my eyes downward, to look at a desk decorated with pencilled petalled flowers, etched fancy superman S’s, and a placemat of short, thick hairs. The hairs looked like fallen flower petals; they danced across the desk with my every exhale. My eyes darted from hair to hair, paying special attention to the ones with round, dark follicles still attached. I looked up and around the classroom. Only three other kids were with me. For the past one-hundred days, at the end of each day I had said goodbye to my teacher and had gone straight to my mom’s car. I did not do this on the hundred and first day. With the same force that drew my pinched fingers to my eyebrow, a voice urged me to stop in the bathroom on my way out. Whether this voice was pleading from my immature bladder or from my apparently mature mind (this is what all the other mothers regularly told my mom) is uncertain, but it was a voice loud enough for me to hear and obey anyway. I had a feeling something was not right. My legs were working fine, so it wasn’t that. All I had for lunch was chicken soup and a chocolate spread sandwich, so it couldn’t be that either. I couldn’t put my finger on it but that may have been because they were still aching and tingling from class.  
        
Three minutes later, I stood with my nose about half an inch away from the bathroom mirror. As I breathed heavily, the mirror rhythmically fogged and defogged in a little circle by my mouth. The smeared boogers framing the mirror didn’t seem to bother me, probably because half of them were actually left there by me. As I stood in front of the mirror examining my face, it also didn’t really bother me that my friends were passing by me, filing out of the bathroom one by one. Less than anything –and this is what really dumbfounds me– I was least bothered by the outer quarter of my right brow bone being bare. Leaning even closer into the mirror, I stretched my right eyebrow out, pulling each side of it with either hand. Without the shield of my brow hairs, my skin was red and warm. I repeatedly pressed two fingers against the patch, leaving two white ovular marks. The coolness of my touch felt nice. I covered and uncovered my ripped-out eyebrow repeatedly in an effort to decide whether it was that noticeable. Maybe I had pulled out a chunk of my brain the last time I went nose-picking, but, somehow, I arrived at the decision that no one, especially not my mother, would notice a big red flag marking an eyebrow which appeared to have a bite taken out of it. With the burn starting to subside, I quietly left the bathroom with my face tilted to the dirty tiled floor. I was not a quiet kid.
        
As I emerged from the grade one doors, I quickly learned that finding your own mom’s silver minivan among an army of other mothers’ silver minivans would always be very difficult. Even so, my daily minivan hunt was a simple grade school riddle compared to figuring out why I had pulled out my eyebrow, why I wasn’t devastated with my new, bold look, and why I wanted to do it again. I finally found my mom’s car and slithered into my speckled navy booster seat behind her.
        
That night I could hear the clinks of fork to plate just a little louder than normal and I knew that my mom was upset. I could always tell when people were upset, I just couldn’t always explain why. It didn’t occur to me that while some mothers are worried about their kids forgetting their lunch boxes at school, it might be a lot more concerning for my mother to find out that the item I left behind was my eyebrow.    

2

On my first visit to her office, the distinct smell of green lollipops and Purell calmed my thinking. I sat forward in my leather chair with hands cradling my chin, paying attention to the way her lips moved as she spoke softly. I liked the way the light blue walls looked with the chocolate wood furniture and how sleepy I felt in my spot. She raised her eyebrows at my hands pressed a little too close to my newly grown-in brows as if to say, “Remember what we spoke about.” I took her cue and slid my hands under my thighs, trapping them beneath my bodyweight. After completing a breathing exercise, my hand crept back up to my face. She pushed a glass bowl piled with candies toward me. Breathing from my stomach and not my shoulders, I brought my pointer finger and thumb together and methodically plucked out all the brown Tootsie Rolls. I liked the uniformity of the wrappers; nothing stood out nor pleaded to be removed from the rest of the pile. Together, she and I folded the empty wrappers strategically to make chains of brown, red and white waxy paper. I realize now that this was to keep my fingers busy without holding them hostage beneath my legs. As she kept talking and asking me questions, I stretched and compressed the accordion-like distraction to the tune of her voice. The smooth feeling of wax occasionally interrupted by the brush of the wrappers’ thin edges along the pads of my fingers was exhilarating.
        
“Noa,” she sang, pulling my attention back up to meet her.
        
I replied with a closed-mouth smile. She went on to talk, assuming that I was then listening.
“We’re going to be working together, you, me, and your mom, to help you control your urges. This is not something that is curable, you know,” she continued in a soft voice.

“This is a process. We will try many things and keep trying until we find a way to control your urges,” she said optimistically before losing my attention once again.  

When I heard her suggest that I start bringing silly putty to class, I set the Tootsie Roll chain down and stared at her, without a response, not even a closed mouth smile. In grade five, silly putty would have been a lot more inconspicuous than a chain of systematically folded candy wrappers, but a conversation starter nonetheless. A conversation that I would give anything never to have.
        
Why did I end up at the psychologist’s office? Apparently, I pulled my eyelashes out, too. The silly putty that Dr. Mendlowitz handed to me came neatly packaged, along with a diagnosis, in a pink plastic egg. This answer to my five year old question, gifted to me in the form of soon-to-be grey, smelly putty, was called trichotillomania and I struggled with the name nearly as much as I struggled with keeping it a secret. As I squeezed the putty in my hands, I played with the idea of my new diagnosis. Dr. Mendlowitz, my mom, and I nicknamed it Trich, like the magic kind. The more I thought about Trich, the more I wanted to pull out a hair. Or pick my nose. Or peel layers off my nails. I quickly opted to pop an attractive air bubble in the middle of my putty. “Should we be telling her teachers?” my mom asked Dr. Mendlowitz. 
        
My teachers struggled to make eye contact with me the next day; when they did look at me, it was with a glazed, sad look. I remember my favourite teacher’s confused reaction. It’s not that she thought differently of me, it’s that she became unsure of every interaction we had. Would she offend me? Would she trigger a catastrophic mental breakdown in the middle of her classroom? These were things that my teacher, who I thought knew everything, did not know. I could tell she couldn’t understand how a smart and mature girl could be unable to control her impulses. I couldn’t understand it either, but at least I didn’t feel bad for myself all day. Instead of making her uncomfortable with my conversation, I just followed the dangle of her earrings, trying to ignore the shiny blonde hairs tangled around the hoops. As I stretched and folded my putty under the desk, I pretended my teachers didn’t know about my Trich. It didn’t bother me that I had a disorder. At that point, I was not bald, and by my understanding of it, my Trich was caught early enough to prevent it from spreading to my scalp. Spreading, like a disease. As I stretched and folded my putty again, I felt the morsels of dirt already embedded in it. I squeezed the putty again, my head beginning to shake, and I felt myself holding my breath. As if echoed by my exhale, the recess bell rang. I slipped the pink egg into my pocket, concealing my Trich inside, on the second day of my knowing.

NOA RAPAPORT is a first-year student beginning an Honours Specialization in Political Science with a Minor in Philosophy. Although she is happy to write in any style – except, of course, essay style – her passion lies in writing creative nonfiction and short fiction pieces, where she draws inspiration from her own and others’ lives.