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“I think so. I guess so? I don’t know.” I start picking at my cuticles.
“Some people have a very physical response to certain stressors,” she says. “Maybe we’re worried about something, or many things, and it can build up before we know it. Shaking, crying, can’t breathe, fast heartbeat. Has this happened to you before?”
“Yes,” I say, thinking about what happened in art class. But I’m not going to tell her that. She knows about what happened in the class where I yelled at the teacher and hit the desk, but not about the presentation. I don’t think, anyway.
I will give some information, but not everything. Just enough, like Charlotte said.
“A lot?”
I avoid her eyes. “Maybe. I guess.”
“For how long?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. I really couldn’t say.”
I pick harder at my nails. Even though I didn’t exactly answer her question, something’s pushing at my brain, some memory, maybe more than one, of other times. I grit my teeth to make it stop. Bite my lip.
“Have your parents ever noticed your anxiety?” Tracy asks. She gets up and goes to a mini-fridge under the window and takes out a bottle of water. She sits back down and hands it to me. I don’t open it, though. I just wrap my hands around it. The coolness feels soothing in my palms. I feel a little calmer.
“Bella?”
“What?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I’m sorry, what did you ask, again?”
“Have your parents ever noticed your anxiety?”
“I don’t know,” I answer slowly. “Maybe? They don’t exactly get along, if you hadn’t noticed.”
“I did notice,” she says softly. “That’s hard on you, I can tell.”
I shrug. “It is what it is. They aren’t bad people. They just have a lot going on.”
“Have you ever told them how anxious you get sometimes? Some parents need to be told when their child needs help.”
I start ripping the paper from the plastic water bottle, the pieces falling onto my jeans. “No, not really. Like I said, they have a lot going on. I don’t want to bother them.”
“Mmm,” she says.
“I don’t know what that sound means,” I say tentatively. “Is that a good sound or a bad sound?”
She laughs lightly. “It’s a sound that means I wonder what it’s like for you at home that you feel like abotherto your own parents. How that’s been for you, growing up like that?”
I drop my eyes to the strips of white paper in my lap.
It feels like shit, that’s what it feels like.
It’s hard to insert yourself into the lives of two people whose sole reason for being seems to make each other as miserable as possible. Even when I got my first period three years ago, it became athing.Some kind of contest, with my mom saying I should use pads because I wasn’t ready for tampons and my dad saying I should use period panties because he’d done research online and that seemed to be the new thing and wow did my mother lose it at that and it wasn’t even because she didn’t like the idea of period panties. I know for a fact she’d looked them up, too, and it was totally her jam—environmentally responsible, comfortable, all that stuff. But she wasn’t expecting him to have done that work on his own, without her. Like he was encroaching on her motherly duties. So she fought him just on principle.Like you’re going to wash them out every night, Dan. You nevereven help with the laundry!In the end, I just went down the street to Laurel’s and she hauled out a box of Tampax and showed me what was what in her crazy bathroom with the framed and autographed album covers she’d shot for Iggy Pop and the Cramps and PJ Harvey.
“Bella?”
I snap my head up. “I don’t remember the question?”
“That’s all right. I think I have my answer.” Her eyes drop to my lap. I’ve ripped the label into a pile of tiny, tiny white bits.
Day Six
