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Chapter Four
Ryan
The first time Savannah had a panic attack, we were walking home from the middle school.
She’d worked herself up into a full frenzy before school even ended, all over a bad test score, and the normally fifteen minute walk home took nearly thirty minutes. I didn’t know what the right thing to do was, but I attempted breathing with her.
She would calm down, we’d walk a little further, and she’d be in a full-blown panic attack all over again.
It would be another year before I learned that her mom was borderline mentally abusive and even when I figured it out, it was just that—I figured it out.
Savannah didn’t tell me outright, but I pieced the puzzle together.
When her parents divorced, I knew that Savannah blamed herself.
That time, I knew because she did tell me.
If only she were smarter.
If only she didn’t get so nervous that the words got mixed up.
If only...
I grew up with incredibly supportive parents, so I had no idea how her mom could be the way she was. Even now, years later, I knew Savannah spoke with her mom rarely, and saw her even less.
What I gathered though, was her mom didn’t handle her anxiety attacks well, which was a sick sort of puzzle in itself.
Savannah had anxiety attacks because of fears she wasn’t good enough. Fears of disappointing her mom. But regardless, her mom was seemingly disappointed in her, which only brought on bigger anxiety attacks.
Something I was sure her mom had no clue of—but she would have if she’d taken the time to actually look at her daughter—was that there were different levels to the attacks.
First, there was the quiet.
Savannah could be smiling and joking one minute, and then just...
Go quiet.
Out of nowhere.
And typically, people didn’t notice because the conversation changed, or the commercial switched to the show, or someone else came and took the person’s attention away from her.
Then, there was the fidgeting. She’d hold her hands in front of her, pinching the skin between her index finger and thumb, or fold her fingers together and squeeze.
After that, her breathing would pick up. Every now and then, you could hear her trying to calm herself by taking a single deep breath, but if that didn’t work, the tears were next.
I hated when it got to the tears.
So, to try to stay away from the tears, I always went with comedy—and even if she really hadn’t been throwing the bananas around this time, the comment made her stop and look.
It made her stop and think.
Stop and breathe.
But while I got her to that point, where she was breathing, I also knew it was never that easy. Never that quick to stop.
Whatever train her thoughts were on always found another turn, and she worked herself up all over again.
So if comedy didn’t stop the runaway train, I held her, and having her here in my arms was never a hardship. I’d do anything to get her out of the current spiral her mind was on.
