AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Is something funny?" Doctor Williams looked at her watch and back to me. One of her eyebrows had gone crooked. "Miss Patel, I need you to focus."
My mind teetered between three worlds. The world where my shrink's stand-up comedienne act was bombing, the other was in her office-where I couldn't stand to be-and the third was that damned roadside-the last place I wanted to be but could not manage to leave.
It was as if her words were a trigger that pulled the lever on a viewfinder, changing the backdrop on me.
"Tell me about that day, that one memory," She urged, her voice sounding as serene as a song.
And just like that, I was back to that place where the driveway met the road. The injustice of that mournful moment returned. My throat swelled. I tasted bile. "No."
"Alright. Let's move on." She casually shuffled some pages of my file. "How is your friend, Avery? Have you been seeing much of her lately?"
I froze. It was so like her to jump from one impossible thing to the next.
The topic of my friendship with Avery was expressly forbidden. Avery had made it very clear after I mentioned her in one of my sessions that I was never to do it again. "Grownups never like me," Avery reasoned, and knowing her the way I did, I knew she was right. The Foster barely liked her, but she was still diplomatic about our friendship. If Doctor Williams ever met with her, that would change.
"Please, don't make me ask. Avery won't come."
Actually, she might but I hadn't asked her. And I couldn't really see how having my best friend talk to my shrink could possibly help anything. But I was running out of excuses.
"What about a boyfriend?"
That last word caught my attention. "What?"
"You're a pretty, seventeen year-old girl. Haven't any boys approached and asked you out on a date?"
I couldn't stop my answering smile. "Nope. No boys. No boyfriend."
Doctor Williams clicked the pen she was holding and looked down at the notepad in her hand, flipping through pages. "Have you been attending your classes?"
"Yes."
"What about anger management?"
"Just went to my last one, so . . . yes," the's' hissed a little too long, matching the recorded cry of a sea bird.
I'd been assigned, so I had to attend. Social workers and guidance counselors working in tandem with my psychiatrist were all very interested in my every move-being that I was a ward of the state and all. Any one of them would call The Foster if I missed a class.
No one ever called to report good news, like progress. Just the bad. Or if they did, I never heard about it. It seemed that people only took time out of their busy lives to rag on me. So I tried my best not to make waves, keeping my proverbial nose clean so I could continue to do what I wanted, namely seeing Jake. My Foster, Deanna, was never comfortable with our age difference, but told me she recognized that she was not my mother and left the final decision up to me.
The only upside to anger management was that they were over.
"Good for you. Before I let you go, I would like an example of how your newly acquired anger management skills were put into practice this past week." She raised her attentive pad and pen, waiting to jot down my every word.
I wanted to smile because, back then it was a joke. At that tender age of seventeen, I had never been legitimately pissed with anyone but my mother. And I figured I was doing pretty well because if I could cope with knowing my mom wanted me dead, then everything else was tolerable.
Even though there was a lot of everything else that kept me on edge, I was only ever sad or peeved. Righteously irritated from time to time, but never angry. Maybe because my first instinct was always to run and hide.
Avery-who knew me better than anyone-once said that she knew, deep inside, I wasn't brave enough to let myself feel the rage. I wanted to roll my eyes when she said that. I mean, hot-headed Avery giving me advice about how to handle anger? The only reason I was assigned to the stupid classes in the first place was because of her.
She'd punched a senior, Shelley Bloom, who gave me a bloody nose for using her gym locker, even though they weren't assigned. I guess Mrs. Ryan, Shelley's softball coach, heard something, because the next thing I knew, I was being suspended. I didn't care; three days vacation from the hell-hole they called school was cake. They sent me home with my assignments and some open-book tests and I was fine. Shelley's eye was black for a week.
I never told anyone Avery was there because she'd been protecting me and the least I could do was keep her secret.
Since Doctor Williams was still waiting for my example-I swear, the woman was never satisfied unless I was filling silence-I decided, on the fly, that I would give her anger management skills something to stew about.
"It was last weekend."
Doctor Williams' eyes were all aglow as I dove into a story all about how it was mine and a made-up best friends' birthday party. "Well, our actual birthdays are only a week apart so we always celebrate together-my foster 'mom', Chanel, was working, as usual."
