Bond - Jamie Bishop (best fiction novels of all time .txt) 📗

<Jenny Rado was dying. She’d known for about a year. She no longer cared.
There was no cancer eating away a vital organ. No incurable virus. No brain tumor. Jenny was killing herself, slowly but surely.
Since grade school, the pretty blonde girl had been afflicted with OCD. Somehow over the years, she’d developed a germ phobia to go along with the OCD, an irrational fear that somehow, somewhere, a germ lurked that would kill her in a manner more horrible than any she’d ever heard of. More than anything, she feared germs in her food, and eating was an ordeal. Consequently, she ate less and less, reducing her once-healthy body to a skeletal shadow.
Despite her phobia, Jenny had led a remarkably normal life until recently. She’d been happy and popular in high school, and had worked her way through online college classes to a Bachelors degree. She had enough credits accumulated to begin veterinary school; she’d taken what classes she could online, spoken with counselors at the University of Minnesota, and secured excellent letters of recommendation. All that stood between her and her dream of being a vet were the years of hands-on study. Back when life was somewhat normal, it had seemed so close.
About two years back, something in her mind had snapped. All the compulsions, the hand-washing, the obsessing…it was suddenly too much to deal with. She’d smiled and laughed and faked her way through so many years…the crash was inevitable. All the doctors, therapists, psychiatrists and psychologists had talked, prescribed and theorized her condition to death. She’d had high hopes for each new medication, each new treatment method. Over the years those hopes had all been crushed, leaving her with no hope at all. Professionals couldn’t treat her, couldn’t make her better. Wasn’t that as good as a death sentence?
Though she’d lived with roommates since high school, she’d moved back in with her mother when the fear reached an incapacitating point. She used the upstairs rooms as a makeshift apartment, with a bedroom, living room and bath. Her mother had been delighted at first, happy to have her around. She’d thought it was a good way to save more money for college; the idea of Jenny becoming a vet thrilled her.
Now, she was glad to have Jenny home because it meant that she could watch her. Watch and wait for the day she dreaded, the day she called up the stairs and got no response. The day her beautiful, smart, fun-loving daughter would die, robbed of a life so full of promise.
Jenny’s days were filled with books, television, and movies. She lived through the written word and through actors on the screen. They were her only escape. The only times she felt like herself again came while fully absorbed in a book, or while lost in a movie. Somehow the fear fell away during those times. Maybe she was just so absorbed that she didn’t notice it as much. Either way, she could feel the old Jenny, slowly creeping back, trying to push through. Those brief glimpses of normal life were precious, but the sadness and anger always crashed back down a little harder after they were gone, after reality set back in and she looked at what her life had become.
Fearing the germs that Gina carried, Jenny preferred it if her mother didn’t come upstairs. She had her own bathroom, and though there was no way to prepare food, she did have a stash in the closet of ready-to-eat stuff. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten a meal that required preparation. Too much potential for contamination.
Twisted as it was, Gina would often come and sit on the stairs to talk to Jenny. They had always been close, and it broke her heart to see her reduced this way. The few times that Jenny risked coming close enough so that Gina could see her, Gina had been struck numb with fear and disbelief.
In the past, Jenny was the type of girl who hated to leave the house – even on a quick run to the store – without her hair and makeup done. She wasn’t vain; she just preferred to look her best. Gina had been the same way at that age.
Jenny’s hair had been her pride. Long, dark blonde and streaked with champagne highlights, it had fallen nearly to the small of her back in thick, shiny waves. She often straightened it, creating a look that occasionally prompted curious strangers to ask if it was real, or made up of salon extensions.
Now, Jenny’s hair was frizzy and dry from repeated over-washing, constantly pulled back in a ratty, sagging ponytail. She hadn’t been to the salon in well over a year, and her highlights had grown out nearly ten inches. Devoid of makeup, Jenny’s face was drawn, her skin pulled taut against her cheekbones and almost grayish at times from lack of food. She had always been a regular customer at the nail salon, having fun with different color combinations and airbrushed designs. Now the acrylic nails were gone, and her natural nails were bare and brittle. They were ragged, and often, in angry fits of self-hatred, Jenny raked them across her face. Strangely shaped claw marks marred her skin, some healed and scarred, some raw, some scabbed over.
More than anything, it was her daughter’s voice that frightened Gina. Dull and heavy, it spoke volumes more than any of the words she uttered. It was the voice of an old, angry, bitter woman, not a girl with her entire life in front of her. Looking at and speaking to her daughter, Gina often got the feeling that she wasn’t with Jenny at all. Somehow, it seemed, Jenny had been stolen, and another girl dropped in her place. She knew, though, that the truth was even more horrible. It wasn’t Jenny who had been stolen. It was Jenny who had been robbed of her own life.
It was early in January. Jenny woke up sometime near noon; she’d asked her mother to call up the stairs and wake her up earlier, but as usual, she’d begged “five more minutes” and fallen back to sleep. Now the light spilling through the blinds was gray, the near-mute television was showing a soap opera, and there were no sounds of movement from downstairs. Gina had gone to the chiropractor; three times a week she got adjusted, trying to make it easier to move around without pain.
Propping herself on one elbow, Jenny looked around the room. Her eyes were heavy, not with sleep but with dismay. Though the space was clean and neat, it was depressing. Several months ago, in a fit of impotent rage, she’d shredded all the posters on the wall. Many of them were old favorites, images that she planned to frame and hang in a house of her own one day. Now they were gone. The walls were bare.
The curtains were gone as well. She hadn’t ripped them down, but taken them off the wall carefully, suddenly afraid of the dust and germs they harbored. Now they sat in a cardboard box downstairs, taped shut and labeled in her mother’s precise handwriting, in a closet that held all the things that Jenny had deemed too contaminated to remain upstairs.
Gina refused to get rid of it all, refused to accept the idea that her daughter would never recover. To throw away the curtains…and the towels and the throw rug and the other household items that had come home with Jenny when she moved back in…would be to throw away the idea that her daughter was coming back someday. Her real daughter.
Jenny shoved aside the single blanket and sat up. Her entire body ached; she always curled into a tight fetal ball in her sleep, kinking up her neck and back horribly. Now she made a half-hearted attempt at stretching the cramped muscles, but winced and stopped. Instead, she reached into a bedside drawer and swallowed two ibuprofen capsules without water.
She considered opening the window, then decided against it. The tiny amount of light leaking in now hurt her eyes, and the sight of normal people making their way down the sidewalk would only depress her further. Besides that, she was comforted by the barrier the blinds created between her room and the contaminated air outside. She carefully rubbed the sleep out of her eyes with a tissue (never bare fingers) and tossed it in the garbage.
Jenny’s computer was her only contact, besides Gina, with the outside world. She hefted the little laptop onto the bed and turned it on.
She downloaded a lot of movies and music. She started a few downloads, then moved on and checked her email. There was lots of junk, a few coupons and sale offers from stores she used to frequent. That was back when she actually shopped. She deleted the offers and signed out.
Facebook was too depressing. Until a few months prior, she had used the site to talk with the few friends who still bothered with her. Most had taken her complete withdrawal as a signal that she no longer desired their friendship. It wasn’t true, of course. Her craving for social contact was so strong it was almost physical. However, it terrified her, and so it had been added to the long list of things she couldn’t do. Facebook gave her a chance, at least, to communicate with the few people she’d told about her condition, and those few people kept her up to date on what was going on with her old groups of friends.
Recently, though, the lives of her old friends had gotten to be too much. They were living their lives while she was waiting hers out.
Setting the computer on a table, she stood up and quickly made the bed. She slept with only one blanket; one pillow…any more was an invitation for excess dust and germs. Her mother, trying to accommodate, trying to do anything that would ease her daughter’s mind and, hopefully, encourage her to eat more, dutifully washed the single blanket, pillowcase and sheets every three days.
Like most people, Jenny usually woke up having to use the bathroom. For Jenny, however, the routine morning pee was an ordeal. Now, unable to squirm any longer, she walked across the hall.
Grabbing a Clorox wipe from the economy-size container on the floor, she wiped down the seat. Then, with a fresh wipe, she swabbed her own thighs. After fanning them with her hands to dry them, she sat down, content that neither her own body nor the toilet was contaminated.
Washing her hands and drying them on paper towels, then turning off the water using a fresh paper towel, she eyed her makeup and hair supplies. They sat in a large basket near the sink. If she didn’t compulsively clean them every day, they would have been coated with dust from month after month of disuse.
She’d tried several times, back when she’d first moved in with her mother, to do her hair and makeup like she used to. She’d once gotten as far as blowing out her hair, straightening it, and applying foundation before the germ phobia caught up with her. She’d literally leapt backward from the mirror over the sink, horrified at the danger she was putting herself in. All the germs in the liquid foundation…the unknown microbes lurking in the little sponge used to apply it…the germ-attracting film left on her hair by the straightening lotion…it was all