On a recent Thursday, in Portland, Oregon, McCaleb Nesseler-Cass got out of bed five minutes before his ten o’clock check-in at Central Catholic High School. “It doesn’t compare to real school,” he said of the online version. He went back to sleep. After lunch, he headed to the basement to lift weights. “Self-care,” he said. “I’ve got my weights. I’ve got my video games. And sanitizing carts at Trader Joe’s,” where he works on the weekends. (“Makes people feel better.”) After an hour of reading about “the five pillars of Islam,” and a couple playing Super Smash Bros., he got into his Toyota Sienna, cranked up “Althea”—Grateful Dead, 1980—and drove to an office where he volunteers at YouthLine, a crisis line for teens.
“It’s not for school or anything,” McCaleb, who is eighteen, said. “Men, especially, hide their feelings. I just try to support them.” He wore a tie-dyed Dead T-shirt, jeans, and skater shoes, on which he’d scrawled, “People who do this suck.” Irony. He arrived at the office, where seven other teen-age volunteers—all girls—were seated and masked at their spaced-out desks. A supervisor pointed a thermometer gun at McCaleb’s forehead. “You’re good,” she said. McCaleb masked up and said hi to a schoolmate named Maddi, who was wearing knee-high boots and had pasted rhinestones around her eyes.
In March, YouthLine received nearly twenty-two hundred messages and calls, compared with around fourteen hundred twelve months earlier. The virus has necessitated a larger room. “More space is dope,” McCaleb said. The air was thick with the scent of hand sanitizer and the sound of typing. Also, Beyoncé.
After wiping down his desk, McCaleb checked the messages on his computer. “This person is a preteen,” he said, examining the first one. “They’re having trouble with their gender identity.” He added, “They’re really scared to tell their parents while quarantined.” McCaleb typed a response. “They asked me how old I am,” he said—a question that the volunteers frequently get from callers. “I said I’m in high school. I didn’t want to say I’m eighteen—that could be kind of imposing.” (Later, he gently told another caller, “I’m not an adult,” but the caller didn’t believe him, and hung up.) McCaleb turned to schoolwork while he waited for another message to ping. “I have this A.P. Bio video lecture on DNA,” he said. “Which is annoying.”
Maddi said, “When I was here last week, I had two contacts talk about the virus pretty much the whole time.” They felt trapped. Maddi, who lives in an apartment with her mother, related—to a point. “One was talking about how it was making them feel even more suicidal,” she said. “They were into writing, so I said it would be really fun to write letters to friends or family.” The idea seemed to take.
To Maddi’s left, Sophie, seventeen, who wore a baggy sweatshirt, played Animal Crossing on her Nintendo Switch between calls. “You live on a little island with all these animals,” she said of the game. “You, like, fish and catch bugs. It’s really cute and stress-relieving.” She talked about recent chats. “I’ve gotten abusive situations,” she said. “Now they can’t get out and go to school and escape that. They ask, ‘How long is this gonna be?’ ”
Nearby, Beth, another seventeen-year-old, wearing an olive crop top, responded to a new message. “Are you in crisis now?” she typed. “This is the crisis line.” The person, who was nine, had tried to snuggle a pet mouse during an anxious moment in quarantine, and had inadvertently choked the animal. “They’re suicidal,” Beth told Morgan, a middle-aged woman supervising the group.
“You’re amazing and wonderful,” Morgan replied, “but I’m going to take that.” After a moment, Morgan ascertained that the creature had survived. “It’s sleeping now in its cage,” she said.
A veteran volunteer across the room ended a call. “It’s so wild how some people just don’t have boundaries,” she said to the others, sighing. She took another call, this time recommending a hot bath or shower. “The other thing I’d maybe recommend,” she continued, “is an app called Calm Harm, which can sometimes help when you’re having really intense self-harm urges.”
Beth took another call. It lasted awhile. A seventeen-year-old had gone to her doctor to get tested for the virus and learned she was pregnant. “Awful timing,” Beth said to the caller, after calming her down.
McCaleb’s last chat was with a teen-ager whose sibling had recently died by suicide. “Their parents aren’t very responsive,” he said. “Like, a pat on the back and ‘You’re good.’ ” He shook his head. “Virus or no virus, it’s just hard.” He listened to “Althea” again on the drive home. The name, he later learned, means “healer.” ♦
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