Blow Up Glow Up

Sophia and Meredith were more than roommates; they were a unit. Meredith knew it. Sophia knew it. One could not exist without the other. Sophia propped Meredith up, suffered the rants and tirades of her insecurity, and bore the brunt of unending monologues of how she continually fell short. Sophia, the deepest of empaths, felt compelled to exist to lighten Meredith's load. Outside of the two of them and Sophia's mother and sister, no one else was aware of, much less understood their symbiotic relationship.

Each morning, Sophia rushed to her desk to find the perfect affirmation for Meredith to read before starting her day. Sophia was riddled with anxiety as she tried to keep her roommate from completely falling apart and needing to leave college. Sophia's fingernails were gnawed to the quick, framed by raggedy cuticles. Before starting college, Sophia's nails had been neat, square-shaped, always polished. She and her mother and younger sister made time during her high school years to have a monthly manicure together to unwind and enjoy each other's company. Since leaving the cocoon of home, Sophia's manicure schedule evaporated, but she developed a habit of scheduling manicures, pedicures, or massages for Meredith. Sophia explained to her sister, "I'm afraid if she doesn't have these little appointments to look forward to, she's absolutely going to blow up at some point. She has very low self-esteem. You should see how she cries all the time. It's not good. But when I give her the little appointment cards, her face just lights up. She glows."

Sophia's sister and mother were not fans of Meredith, but somehow in the three months since Sophia's departure for college, Meredith's occupation of center stage in Sophia's life seemed an immutable fact. "Honey, I'm not telling you who you can or can't be friends with, but Meredith is very needy, and I think she's a taker, not a giver. Don't be a doormat." Sophia didn't feel like a doormat. She felt she was doing what needed to be done.

If Meredith's internal workings were a disaster, her exterior was perfection. She came from a large high school, was cheer captain, homecoming and prom queen, and graduated in the top 5% of her class. She was average height, slender, with long, thick blonde hair. She mixed her own shampoo to ensure her mane shone like spun silk floating over her tanned shoulders. Her eyelashes were impossibly long, framing dark eyes. The only thing average about Meredith was her height.

Sophia, on the other hand, was tall, lithe, from California, and a varsity beach volleyball player. Her hair was brown, not a deep, rich chestnut—just a mousey brown. She didn't tan and maintained a fair complexion year-round. Her eyes were hazel and tended to reflect whatever color she was wearing. Aside from her height, physically, everything about Sophia was average. Sophia maintained that looking average was an advantage. She flew under the radar most of the time. Where she was a force to be reckoned with, however, was her intellect. She graduated first in her class of 1,253 students.

Sophia woke one Wednesday morning to Meredith pacing around their dorm room. Meredith pulled at the ends of her hair, decompensating before Sophia's eyes. It was nothing new.

"Sophia, I have nothing to wear. Everything looks atrocious on me. I'm not in the right mental space for my sociology exam." Sophia found that apparel and grooming, for Meredith correlated to mental performance. She found, actually, in Meredith's opinion, apparel and grooming counted for almost everything. There was so much distress, and Sophia's go-to strategy was putting Meredith into another frame of mind entirely, taking her to another place.

Sophia, the tall lanky girl who stayed in the background brought something very special to the table. She had a mother who was a psychiatrist and hypnotherapist. Sophia, majoring in psychology, had the good fortune to have spent a summer in Asia and Europe with her family two years previously while her mother was performing research for a scholarly article. The whole family went through the same training, learning the tenets and practices of hypnotherapy. Sophia began college with enough credits and AP classes to stand as a junior during her first year. Her plan was to go into the school's direct admit medical school program after finishing all of her pre-med pre-requisites.

Sophia took a 400 level psychology capstone class during her first semester and decided to make Meredith her capstone project. She kept notes of her observations just as she had when she experimented on mice. Humans were different than mice, but Sophia's empathetic nature drove her to wanting to help Meredith. It was, seemingly, the perfect storm. Sophia hypothesized, with subtle brain training, Meredith could overcome her preoccupation with her insecurities and could become confident and self-reliant.

Sophia maintained her position as Meredith's sidekick, and she knew there would come a time when Meredith would realize she had no use for Sophia. Truth be told, Sophia counted down the days until Meredith didn't need her. Until then, she put the affirmations on Meredith's desk, in her backpack, her textbooks, and her notebooks. She waited for the day Meredith would say she didn't need the notes anymore and maybe even found them creepy. Until then, though, Meredith walked all over Sophia and her perceived empathy and kindness. Sophia, too, ran herself ragged with planning, refining, redefining, and reworking her experiment. In the darkest hours of the night, Sophia was awake, typing in the darkness punctuated by the light of her laptop screen, making sure she had all the documentation to back up all her decisions and actions. With her fair skin, she seemed like a wraith looming over the small machine on her desk.

One of the unknowns to Sophia was whether or not she would like the person Meredith would be when she kicked aside her insecurities. Once past all the garbage holding her back, would Meredith be someone Sophia would choose to be around? Would Sophia be someone Meredith would choose to be around?

As the semester progressed, Meredith closed Sophia's laptop. She sat down on her bed, and kept her hand on Sophia's laptop. In a serious tone, Meredith held herself still, steeling herself for what she felt Sophia needed to hear. "Sophia, I'm worried about you. I noticed there was a lot of brown hair in the tub drain. Are you all right?"

Sophia touched the side of her hair, then groped for the back of her head, gripping her ponytail. It had grown much thinner. "I think so. I have so much on my plate right now. I have that capstone project, and it turns out it's taking all of my time."

"Can you talk to your professor? Can you maybe postpone your project until next semester? You just seem like a nervous wreck." Meredith pulled Sophia from her desk chair and led her to their bathroom. When they were standing in front of the mirror, she gently took the elastic from Sophia's hair and began to brush it. "Will you let me shampoo your hair with my shampoo? You'll be happy with how your hair feels afterward." Meredith gave Sophia a concerned smile that reached her eyes.

Sophia nodded and remained silent. None of her friends from high school ever took notice when she was stressed, and then she thought about whether her friends from high schools were truly friends. They may have all been projects just like Meredith. However, Sophia was surprised by Meredith's observation and ached for her notebook to document this turn of events. She had stacks of notebooks she was keeping in a locker in the science building. She had grown nervous that Meredith would be angry if she chanced upon and read any of the entries Sophia had committed to her journals. In the moment, there was nothing Sophia could do. She would have her hair shampooed, then enter the documentation on her computer later.

In the morning, Sophia found an affirmation on her desk, neatly printed in Meredith's characteristic handwriting. It wasn't anything profound or of historical significance, but simply said, "You got this. If you don't, I've got your back." Sophia knew in that moment her project was complete, and she seemed to like the result. She liked her roommate as a person, and she felt guilty for treating her without her permission.

Between classes, Sophia called her mother.

"Mom, I think I cured Meredith. I also think what I did was unethical."

"Oh?" Her mother sounded skeptical. She met Meredith on move-in day and only knew what Sophia related on phone calls.

"Yeah. She noticed how stressed out I am. She noticed I'm losing hair. She put a note on my desk this morning."

"Honey. What's going on? You're losing your hair? Are you taking on too much? You're only 18. Your job isn't to save everyone in your orbit."

"But what if I could save everyone in my orbit? What if I could make everyone better?"

Sophia's mother breathed audibly and sighed.

"What if saving everyone destroys you? Who saves them then? Who saves you? I'm canceling the rest of my patients and flying out there. We're spending the weekend together. You need a course correction. Before you start projecting how my patients are going to suffer, I'm going to tell you something. You, your sister, and your father are far more important to me than my patients. You three are everything. And here's something else, sweetheart. If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of anyone else."

***

"Meredith, do you have some time to talk? I need to tell you something. You may not like it." Sophia picked at her cuticles. They were red and ragged, and a couple began to bleed. She sucked the blood off her fingers.

"Sure. What's up?" Meredith stopped folding her laundry before taking in Sophia. College had seemed to wither her roommate over the months, and Meredith had stopped in the Student Services office earlier in the day to let one of the counselors know she was worried about Sophia.

"I'm afraid I haven't been a good roommate." Sophia looked down, not daring to meet Meredith's eyes.

"What do you mean?" Meredith couldn't have found a better roommate. Sophia was a dream. Meredith knew she wouldn't have made it past mid-terms without Sophia, without her encouragement, support, and friendship.

"You know my capstone project? We're supposed to be conducting a psychological experiment. I designed a project using hypnotherapy."

Meredith's eyes grew wide. "Wait. You know how to do hypnotherapy? Why didn't you tell me? I totally want to lose weight. That's so cool. I had no idea you knew how to do that."

"Well, remember how you couldn't get out of bed during the first week of school? Remember how you were freaking out that everyone was looking at you?" Sophia looked up, trying to meet Meredith's look of wonder.

Meredith nodded.

"Remember how you couldn't go to the dining room because you didn't want people looking at what was on your plate and judging you? Or what about the time when I had to do your laundry because you couldn't go out of our room in something that wasn't fresh? Or what about the bad hair day after your haircut during the first month of school? You didn't leave our room for three days?"

Meredith had the decency to look abashed. "That was pretty bad, wasn't it? But you've helped me by just being so supportive and encouraging all the time."

Sophia gave a groan and a sigh. "What if I told you I used hypnosis on you to get past all of that? What if I said you never had a choice—I did these things without your permission. What would you do if you knew you were my capstone project, that I had several notebooks full of observations?"

Meredith stood up straight, hands on her hips. Her face turned red. She took her room key from the desk, and left the room.

Sophia sent a text to her mother: I told her. She just left. I don't know what's next.

***

Meredith's life seemed charmed. She was the girl everyone wanted to be. She cheered, was popular, smart, nice, kind, and beautiful. What no one knew, though, was she had spent all of high school on a cocktail of psychotropics. Her pediatrician and psychiatrist worked in concert and in vain to find a way to even her out, to find a way to ready her mentally for college. She had all the tools to be a phenomenal student, but her mental health was an obstacle. The shampoo Meredith concocted gave her a reason to feel proud of her hair. She quit pulling her hair out of her head, and the bald patches resolved with time. Her doctors were worried she would regress when she left home, but Meredith and her family felt strongly about her needing to spread her wings and fly on her own.

She predictably back slid. When Sophia enumerated what the beginning of the semester looked like, Meredith knew things had gone sideways almost as soon as she left home. She thought, though, she would find some kind of homeostasis between her academics, personal life, and mental health. She didn't know how horribly obvious and dire her situation was and how quickly it had devolved.

There was betrayal. She hadn't asked for help. She simply thought her roommate was being kind. She thought she was simply crawling out of her cave in response to Sophia's encouragement. She didn't know Sophia was running rampant through her brain. She pictured Sophia in a banquet hall full of overturned chairs, and Sophia was the only one there with a clock counting down the time for her to get all the chairs back into position. Meredith realized her brain was the banquet hall. If not Sophia, then who would return the chairs to the right position? She didn't ask for help, and Sophia didn't make an offer of help for her to weigh out the pros and cons. She could complain to the dean of students, and probably Sophia would be kicked out of school for ethics violations.

At the end of the day, though, Sophia had made Meredith better; and by the looks of things, Meredith had made Sophia worse. They both knew it.

Meredith went back to their room. Sophia sat on the floor, hugging her knees, resting her chin on top. Her eyes were red.

"Meredith, I am so sorry. You have to know how sorry I am."

Meredith nodded, accepting the apology.

"I was very angry. I feel violated, My mind is not a playground for you to mess around in. By the same token, I needed help I didn't know I needed, and you did help me. What you did, though, how you did it…it was wrong. I'm looking at you now, and you're a mess…from the guilt, I imagine. I'm not turning you in. I think you've managed to punish yourself. You came clean, and you didn't have to do that. I mean, I had no idea you had treated me or hypnotized me or whatever. But you didn't ask, and I didn't consent. And I find that very scary. You could have done anything to my brain, and it's not cool."

"I'm so sorry. You're totally right. I don't blame you for being angry. I just wanted to help."

Meredith squatted to eye level with Sophia. Meredith remained silent for nearly 30 seconds, simply looking at and into Sophia's eyes. Meredith's dark gaze seemed a sword to Sophia's heart. Meredith poked Sophia in the shoulder and in a cold, quiet voice, she asked the question.

"Then why did you make me into your class project?"