I shrug, the walls I’ve put up starting to chip away. ‘Maybe.’
She appears lost. ‘Maybe?’
‘It’s complicated.’
She nods like she understands, but how could she when I haven’t told her anything. ‘What about friends?’
I fold my arms across my chest. ‘I might have a few of those.’ Maybe.
She mulls over my answer then picks up a pen and grabs a notebook from her drawer. ‘And what about family?’ She starts to write something down.
‘Dead.’ The walls crash down. ‘I’m a foster kid.’
I catch her hesitating, but she quickly recovers. ‘Are you close with any of them?’
I almost laugh. Not by choice, I want to say. Because one won’t leave me alone. ‘Again, no. Adults really aren’t a fan of this.’
She glances up at me. ‘Of what?’
I point at myself. ‘Of a girl that scares the shit out of them.’
She writes one more thing down, then sets the pen and paper aside and focuses on me again. ‘Why do you think everyone’s afraid of you?’
‘Because that’s what they say.’ I’m uncomfortable, my inner demons and addiction clawing to come out and regain control over the situation the only way I know how. ‘I don’t blame them either. It’s creepy what I did.’
She considers what I said for the longest time. ‘You know, regardless of what you think, you’re reaction wasn’t odd.’
I snort a disdainful laugh. ‘I just sat there in the house with their bodies for almost a day. Even I think I’m creepy.’
‘Maybe that’s the problem then,’ she says, reaching for a tin of mints on her desk.
I feel oddly on display for her, like I’m sitting in a glass case and she can see every part of me, inside and out and there’s nowhere to hide. It’s not the most settling feeling and I can’t figure out a way around it. ‘What is? Me being creepy?’
‘No, how you think that about herself.’ She pops a mint into her mouth and closes the tin. ‘Sometimes we hear people say stuff about us so frequently that we start to believe it ourselves, even if it’s not true.’
‘No, it’s true.’ My voice is tight, unable to accept what she’s saying.
She sets the tin aside. ‘We’ll see,’ she says, then picks up her pen and jots something else down. ‘I’d like to see you next week, if that’s okay. Same time and day?’
I want to tell her no, be a bitch so I don’t have to come back and let her analyze my mind, but I find myself muttering okay, then I take the card she offers me before bolting the hell out of that office before she can say anything else.
The more I walk, the more I replay what she said about the problem. That I believe everything everyone’s told me. The more I think about it, the more it pisses me off, like I’m that weak-minded that I just believe what everyone told me. And that’s the thing. There’s only so many times you can get told how unwanted you are, before you start believing it’s true.
I hurry across the busy campus, yellow and brown leaves crunching under my boots as I stomp across the lawn, telling myself I’m not going back even though I agreed. I have a feeling that the next visit is going to go much deeper than our short preliminary appointment and Lana makes me too uneasy, probably because she cuts straight through the bullshit. I can tell I’m not going to be able to be the hardcore Violet with her and just fake smile through everything. I’m going to end up being the unstable one that cries in the privacy of her own bathroom because she so desperately wants to risk her life to turn off the pain, but made a promise to the only person she cares about that she would try not to do that anymore.
And I don’t want to be here.
But really, I do, otherwise I’d have given up already.
Grunting in frustration at myself, I turn down the sidewalk for the Humanities building to go to class. I started going yesterday and am continuing today, which feels like a step in the right direction, whatever that direction may be. I spot a news van on my way there, so I take the long way, going behind the building where there’s a wall of trees blocking their view of me. The media has this fascination with me dating Luke, the son of the women who’s being charged with involvement in my parents’ murders. There have been reporters showing up at the University and at my home. I usually give them my best go-fuck-yourself attitude, but what I really want to say is: how the hell can I answer your question about what’s going on with me, when I can’t even figure that out for myself.
Yes, I like Luke.
To the point that it’s actually starting to hurt when he’s gone.
And my heart leaps when he’s near.
But there’s also this pain.
This pain linked with the idea of losing him.
But I want to be the person I know I can be when I’m with him. A new person maybe.
I think a lot, honestly.
Maybe it’s because I have one less thing to think about. All that time spent thinking about Mira and now I don’t have to worry about her anymore. So much time now to think about what I want.
What do I want?
I just want to be happy.
But happiness isn’t something that comes easy to me and I think I’m going to have to learn how to let it in. But do I let something in that I’m not sure I’ve ever had?
Later that day, my mind is teeter-tottering somewhere between bored as hell and bummed out. I have countless assignments scattered around me on the bed, some make-up assignments a few of my Professors who were kind enough to give me because of my ‘condition’. As if having my parents’ murder case plastered all over the place and a constant herd of reporters trying to get some insight into my head is the same as having an illness. Still, I’m glad I’m getting a second chance, although I did have to drop two classes, but it’s my own stupid fault.
That’s not what’s making me bummed out, though. I took the box out again today, the one with my parents’ stuff, for reasons that are unknown – maybe it was therapy or this dire need to torture myself. I did manage to flip through a few pages of the notebook and discovered that that’s all it was. I guess my mother was trying to start a diary but stopped doing so a few days later, because she died.
I ended up throwing the box under the bed, hearing the contents spill, but not daring to clean them up. Out of sight, out of mind. That’s what I keep telling myself. Then I buried myself into my homework, trying to use it as a healthy distraction instead of what I really want to do, which is wander up to the roof, or maybe knock back something strong and numbing.