Therapy. Again.
It’s my first day off meds, and everything feels fuzzy. The air around me has texture and weight. It presses against my eyelids and pushes my arms and legs down into the sofa. I feel like I’m sinking.
My nose twitches, but the idea of lifting my hand to scratch the itch seems exhausting.
I’m nestled into the corner of the couch, feet tucked beneath me, body curled around a fluffy pillow. I never get this comfortable at therapy, usually opting to perch right on the edge of the couch so that I can leap to my feet as soon as I’m dismissed. But the thought of holding my body upright seems impossible today.
I stare at a crack in the opposite wall instead, wondering what’s beyond the broken space.
“Berkley.”
I blink and drag my attention back to Dr. Andrews. Her face looks annoyed. Annoyed like I’ve said your name at least a dozen times and you keep ignoring me. Mara used to get like that, when she was studying, and it used to annoy me how I could say her name over and over again and she’d never hear me.
I swallow, and the saliva immediately disappears into the roof of my mouth and the backs of my teeth. Everything inside of me is tacky and dry.
“I’m sorry.” I run my tongue along the insides of my cheeks, trying to draw moisture back into my mouth. “What did you say?”
Dr. Andrews presses her lips together. She says, “I asked you several times now if there was anything you wanted to discuss with me today.”
Her expression is benignly interested, like always. She has her head tilted to the side, her eyes wide and eager, her mouth not quite smiling but pleasant. I wonder if they teach that look in shrink school. Or maybe Dr. Andrews practiced it herself, standing in front of her bathroom mirror, trying all the different smiles she could manage.
The thought makes me grin. Poor Dr. Andrews. Playing at being a therapist.
“You’re smiling.” Dr. Andrews leans forward in her seat, the pillows shifting behind her. “What are you thinking about right now?”
I consider telling her that I’m thinking about strangling her with my bare hands. But that would probably get me put back on the big-girl drugs. I move my eyes from the crack in the plaster to the clock above the door.
Time ticks past. Tick. Tick. Tick.
“Shall we talk about your friend? Tayla?”
I shrug with one arm.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Dr. Andrews asks something else, but this time I don’t even register her voice as words. I pull at a loose thread in the pillow, watching the two pieces of fabric slowly separate from one another and thinking that’s exactly how I feel. Like I’m two pieces of fabric stitched together and every second I spend in this place is another second that my threads are being pulled away. My pillow is becoming unraveled.
“That’s fine,” Dr. Andrews says after a few more ticks. She closes her notebook with sudden finality. I lift my eyes without raising my head.
Have I worn her down? Have I won?
“Fine what?” My voice is muffled by the fabric of the pillow.
Dr. Andrews narrows her eyes, the skin at the corners creasing. “If you don’t want to talk, we’ll have to find another way of treating you.” She drums her fingers against the top of the notebook. “Perhaps more medication. You seemed to respond well to that.”
I think of the last few days. Days spent in a drug-fueled fog, drooling on myself, barely strong enough to lift my head or brush my own hair.
“I’ll get the prescription.” Dr. Andrews half rises from her chair.
She’s bluffing. Isn’t she?
“Wait,” I say.
Dr. Andrews pauses, and I can tell from her curled lips that I played right into her hand.
I swallow. My mouth is so dry that my tongue feels like it might split right down the middle. “What do you want me to say?”
Dr. Andrews lowers herself back to her chair. My eyes are closed, so I don’t see her do it, but I hear the shuffling sound of fabric and pillows. “I just want the truth, Berkley. That’s all I’ve ever wanted from you.”
“The truth,” I croak. My voice has no inflection. It sounds like something computer-generated and soulless. “Fine.”
Dr. Andrews isn’t smiling anymore. “Tell me why you feel responsible for Tayla’s suicide.”
I glance down at my lap, thinking about the party. Lights strung up in Mara’s living room. Punch bowl spiked with vodka. Me, Mara, and Harper getting ready in the bathroom, pregaming with a bottle of champagne. We didn’t even invite Tayla to get ready with us. I don’t think any of us expected her to come to the party at all.
Suddenly my hands are clenched, and they’re trembling so badly that my knuckles are crunching against each other, pinching my skin. I unweave my fingers, press them flat against the tops of my thighs, but they don’t stop shaking.
It’s weird. Like my body is experiencing all the emotion I won’t let myself feel.
“Right before she did it, she hooked up with this random guy at a party at our friend Mara’s house,” I say, still staring at my hands. My fingers are tapping now. Erratically jerking against my leg like they contain so much energy that they can’t stay still. “She’d been dating the same guy forever, and it really seemed like they were in love. But we were about to leave for college, and I guess she just . . . freaked out or something. Anyway, she cheated on him.”
I say all of this in a rush, without pausing to breathe or search for a word. The story just . . . slips out, like it’s been there all along, waiting behind my teeth for me to set it free.
I press my hand flat against my leg. “Her boyfriend found out and dumped her. Our other friends stopped talking to her, too.” I think of Mara and Harper turning their backs on Tayla in the cafeteria at school. Dropping their bags in the seat that used to be hers. Pretending they couldn’t hear her when she tried to talk to us. “It was supposed to be, like, a punishment, sort of. It wasn’t my idea to do that or anything, but I played along. We’d been friends since kindergarten, and I just stopped answering her texts. I’d walk past her in the hallway like she wasn’t even there. I think . . . I think that’s the reason she did it. Killed herself, I mean.”
There’s a beat of silence.
“Tell me about the night of your panic episode.”
A tear slips down my cheek, and I brush it away with an angry flick of my hand. “I did some drugs with Harper and Mara, like I told you. Stupid stuff. Molly or whatever. I remember going into the bathroom to fix my lipstick, and when I looked in the mirror it was like . . .”
My voice dies in my throat. I close my eyes. Swallow.
“It was like I was looking at Tayla. Like she was looking out at me, through the mirror. She was mad at me because of what I did. I just sort of . . . snapped after that. Everything kind of . . . went black.”
Dr. Andrews clears her throat. I look up in time to see her press her lips into a thin smile, blinking hard. She seems to struggle to keep the shock and horror from her face.
“That’s good work, Berkley,” she says, and I guess I’ve been underestimating how good of a doctor she is, because her voice is serene, without a hint of the disgust she surely feels. She actually sounds like she believes what’s she’s saying. “You can go back to your room now.”