29
I
n some ways, it wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. The first few days had been intensely weird, people staring at her, the guidance counselor popping up all over the place to see if she was OK, Amanda sort of hyperly nice—as if Lauren were a new girl and Amanda had been assigned the job of making her feel welcome—but now things were kind of normal. She was at school. That was that.
Except for Jeff Shannon. He knew where she’d been, and he knew why: she could tell. The first day, he blushed when he saw her, and then for the next couple days he was obviously pretending
not
to see her when he saw her, and now, every so often, she caught him staring at her from across the terrace at lunch or from his locker before or after class: looking and looking until he saw that she saw him and he quickly looked away.
Today was a Monday, which meant Dr. Lewis after school. She was wearing a top her mom had given her for Christmas and a pair of earrings she’d gotten from Steve and Kelly, very dangly and colorful, sort of like what you saw in magazines.
She ate a spoonful of yogurt. It was raining again, so she and Amanda were eating in the cafeteria, with its pizza smells and crowds of people. “So anyway,” Amanda was saying, “he’s just, like, different. It’s like:
Oh, you’re a girl? That’s cool. We can be friends.
”
“But do you want to be friends?”
“It’s very important to be friends.”
“What?” Lauren said, but then she got it. “Oh—is that your mom?”
“Corinna in a mom moment.” Amanda rolled her eyes and reached for a French fry. “She comes into my room all, ‘I want to save you from making the mistakes I made. Newsflash: you should like the guy’? Like she’s this big expert.”
Lauren nodded, but she’d just seen Jeff Shannon come into the cafeteria, and she kind of lost a little bit of time whenever she saw him—a few seconds actually shrank out of her life. He was with Tyler Moorhouse and Daniel Black: the Three Stooges, Amanda sometimes called them. Jeff’s blue North Face jacket was dripping, but though it had a hood he evidently hadn’t been wearing it—his hair was drenched, and as he stood in the food line, he pulled one arm from his jacket and used his shirtsleeve to dry his face.
“So,” Amanda said, “I go, ‘Newsflash: I’m not taking dating advice from someone who used to think a hard-on was called a hard one.’”
Lauren made herself smile. Jeff grabbed a tray off the stack and reached for silverware. She forced herself to look at Amanda. “So why do you like him? Or how?”
“‘How’?”
This was something Dr. Lewis did, said “how” rather than “why”—she was embarrassed that she’d said it to Amanda. Dr. Lewis wanted her to tell him
how
she felt like a loser, and at first she was like, what’s the difference? She kind of got it now: he wanted to hear
what her thoughts were
when she was feeling awful. The thing was, when she told him it made her cry.
“I just mean, you know, what do you like about him?”
Amanda shrugged. “He’s nice. He doesn’t, you know, goof off all the time. And—yeah.”
He was in their chemistry class, but Lauren didn’t know him, and the whole thing had started while she was away. He was a theater person, of course. Leaving class the other day, totally out of the blue, he’d said, “To pee or not to pee, that is the question,” which might not count as goofing off but was definitely goof-y. Whatever, it was Amanda’s problem.
Jeff came out of the food area, his tray loaded. He was following his friends, and with horror Lauren realized they were heading for the empty table next to hers and Amanda’s.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
Amanda glanced over her shoulder. “What? This is perfect, you can talk to him.”
“No way.”
In a moment Tyler and Daniel were setting down their trays. Jeff had stopped in the middle of the cafeteria, and as Lauren watched he began scanning the noisy room, looking like he was trying really hard to pretend he was alone, to pretend he hadn’t been following his friends until the very moment he’d seen pathetic Lauren Mackay sitting right where they were headed.
“Dude,” Tyler shouted.
The cafeteria was jammed with people and incredibly noisy, but Lauren could tell Jeff was faking that he hadn’t heard.
Tyler and Daniel were both still on their feet, Tyler’s sodden jacket close enough for Lauren to touch. “What’s the matter?” Amanda whispered, but Lauren ignored her.
Daniel yanked out his chair but still didn’t sit. He said, “What the fuck is wrong with him?” His younger brother had been on Joe’s soccer team for years, but Lauren doubted he remembered her. She stared into her yogurt, scraping at the last bit as if she were starving, when in fact she was feeling kind of sick.
“Jeff!” Tyler shouted.
Amanda was staring straight at Lauren. She didn’t know about the day, the last day, when Lauren had spoken to Jeff and he had smirked. Only Dr. Lewis knew. And Jeff himself, of course.
Tyler left his tray and headed for the middle of the room, and now Jeff took off, striding in the direction of the side exit, aiming for an empty table by the window. He managed to sit before Tyler reached him. Lauren’s heart was racing. They spoke for a moment, and then Tyler headed back alone. She didn’t want to hear what he would say to Daniel—yet she did. She reached for her backpack, unzipped it, pretended to look for something.
“What the fuck?” Daniel said as Tyler arrived at the table.
“He’s an asshole.” Tyler sat down and began to eat. Daniel was halfway through his burger, and they chewed in silence, picked up their sodas at the same moment, put them down, and ate again. Amanda had an obnoxious consoling look on her face, but Lauren ignored her. She watched Jeff’s friends out of the corner of her eye. Tyler ate like a machine: bite, chew, chew; bite, chew, chew. He kept his eyes on his plate, even when he drank—he’d pick up his cup, sip hard, put it back down, bite into his burger again. Daniel was more restless—he’d look up and drum his fingers on the table every now and then, glance around the room, scratch his neck. Guys were weird—it was like the two of them weren’t even at the same table. Why did they even want Jeff there?
“So,” Amanda said. “Do you want to get going?”
“Hang on.” Lauren picked up her water bottle and drained it. She looked across the room at Jeff’s table, and there he was, head bent low, spoon going to his mouth over and over again, as if he had soup or something. The navy bean had looked disgusting—she hoped he didn’t have that.
She stood and got into her jacket, then hefted her backpack onto her shoulder. At the next table, Daniel burped loudly.
“Dude,” Tyler said, and then he went back to his lunch.
Dr. Lewis shared a tiny waiting room with three other therapists—just a couch and two chairs in what felt like a closet. Lauren was glad no one else was ever around. As she sat waiting for the door sounds that would tell her his current patient was leaving his office and then departing through what she’d learned was called the privacy exit, she thought that she’d never seen Jeff looking scared before, the way he had at lunch. She felt almost sorry for him, though he was the last person in the world anyone should feel sorry for. He was whatever the opposite of a loser was. Not a winner, that was too one-time. A king?
A jack of diamonds.
She heard Dr. Lewis’s office door open. The person before her was a man; sometimes she heard him say goodbye, but not today. The door closed, and then the privacy exit opened and closed. Lauren picked up a magazine, then put it down again. Dr. Lewis had five minutes now, and she always wondered what he did. Listened to messages, returned phone calls? Or would he take off his shoes and lie down for a bit?
She pulled up her sleeve and looked at her scars. They were much lighter now, pink. She stroked them one by one and thought what she always thought: Jeff Shannon, school, how ugly she was, what a loser. The scars felt slightly softer than her regular skin, like short lengths of kitchen string laid on a piece of paper.
All at once she remembered her earrings, and her stomach tipped. Did she have time to get them off? They were kind of flashy; she didn’t want Dr. Lewis thinking she’d dressed up for him. She pulled the backing off one, slid the post out of her ear, and then, fingers shaking, replaced the backing on the post and dropped the earring into her coat pocket. Was it safe there with her keys? She didn’t have time to reconsider. She took off the other one, and it tapped onto the first just as the light next to Dr. Lewis’s name went off. A moment later, he opened the door. He was wearing his purple-and-brown plaid shirt, the shirt she wished he’d throw away, and he smiled and said, “Hi, Lauren.”
She had to pass close by him to get into his office. As always, she breathed in for his soap smell—which, as on most Mondays, was not as strong as it usually was on Thursdays, her theory being that he showered later in the day on Thursdays, maybe after going home at lunch to screw his wife.
In his office she took off her coat and sat in the leather chair. He came in after her, closed the door, and sat in the chair opposite.
“So,” he said.
He smiled at her, and she looked out the window: at the bare trees and at the rain streaming down the glass. She hated this—hated it. She had no idea what to say. They had even discussed it once, how it was so hard, but that had been really embarrassing in and of itself. Last Thursday, in the morning before she left for school, she had written down some things to talk about with him, but once she was sitting here, feeling his eyes on her, it turned out that the idea of taking the little piece of paper out of her pocket and referring to it in front of him was far worse than miserably racking her brain as usual, and so the piece of paper stayed where it was. Later, at home, she flushed it down the toilet, too embarrassed even to read it again.
“How are you feeling?” he said, shifting a little in his chair and crossing his legs. When he asked questions he always had this concerned you-can-tell-me-anything look on his face, and he had it now.
“OK.”
“Where would you like to start today?”
Behind him was a charcoal drawing of an old city street with some kids playing in front of an open fire hydrant. Sometimes, when she squinched her eyes, the arrangement of shapes looked a little like the face of a small, scared animal. Then she unsquinched and wondered how she’d seen anything but the street scene. She said, “Amanda has a new boyfriend. She was bragging about it all through lunch today.”
He waited. After a while he said, “Can you tell me more?”
She felt a giggle rising inside her, and she fought to keep it down. In the hospital, Abby had told her about a therapist she’d seen for a while who had a Magic 8 Ball in her waiting room, but instead of stuff like “It is very likely” or “I don’t think so,” it had responses like “How did that make you feel?” and “Can you tell me more?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “His name is Noah.”
Dr. Lewis made a steeple with his forefingers. “Two by two.”
“What?”
“Noah made me think of Noah’s ark.”
Lauren considered this. “It’s been raining a lot.”
“It has.”
She thought of Jeff coming into the cafeteria, dripping wet. Then, for some reason, of her dad at dinner last night, complaining about the rain like he was really angry, and how her mom acted like there was something wrong with him, minding the rain so much.
“He’s avoiding me,” she said.
“Jeff?”
She nodded. Dr. Lewis shifted again and recrossed his legs. He kept his eyes on her.
“His friends sat near me and Amanda at lunch today, and, you know, instead of sitting with them he went to this totally different part of the cafeteria.”
“And you felt that was because he saw you.”
“It
was
because he saw me! It was completely obvious!”
Dr. Lewis sat still for a while. At last he said, “It sounds like a hard moment for you,” and she didn’t like how she was starting to feel, kind of shaky. “It’s very painful for you,” he went on, “to think he might be avoiding you,” and to her fury she felt an approach of tears. In a moment she was weeping into her hands. He stayed silent. He always did this: made her cry and then just let her cry.
“I would bet,” he said once she’d calmed a little, “that Amanda talking about her new boyfriend made the feelings about Jeff harder to tolerate.”
“Duh,” she said. And then, confused, “Wait—Why?”
“Any ideas?”
She thought about it: Amanda talking about duder—Noah—and Jeff not coming anywhere near her. She pulled up her sleeve and looked at her scars. “They don’t hurt at all anymore.”
“How is that for you?”
“It’s just a fact.”
“It’s a fact, true, but you might have feelings about it.”
Actually, she did: she wished they still hurt. Sometimes she pressed on them to try to recover the way they’d felt as they were healing—so open, so raw. But she couldn’t tell him that—he’d say something weird about it. When she told him once that she was afraid of people seeing the scars, he said maybe that was also what she
wanted,
for people to see them.
Maybe the cutting was a way of showing the world how much pain you’re in. A way of making it visible.
Blech.
She reached for a Kleenex and folded it in half, then in half again.
“I have some ideas about why today might have been hard for you,” he said.
“What?”
“If Amanda has a boyfriend, then she has something you want and don’t have, so you might be having some pretty painful competitive feelings. In addition, you might worry that you won’t see her as much anymore now that she’s dating Noah.”
“She isn’t
dating
him.”
“Oh. What would you call it? I don’t know what you’d call it.”
“She isn’t
anythinging
him. She just likes him, and he likes her back. I—I lied earlier.”
“You lied.”
“I said she has a new boyfriend, but she doesn’t really. Not yet, anyway. I lied.”
“Imagining things can make them feel true.”
“No, I lied.”
“I see.”