3

My whole first week is like that. People coming up to me. Asking me polite questions. Then avoiding me like the plague. It’s excruciating.

Stewart calls from Spring Meadow, but he can only talk for ten minutes. Somehow we can’t seem to keep the conversation going. It’s still nice. But also weirdly frustrating.

On Friday night my mother drives me to a Teens at Risk support group Dr. Bernstein runs. There’s, like, eight of us. We go around the room and talk about our “issues.” These are mostly rich girls from my neighborhood. It’s not that their problems aren’t real. It’s just so tedious the way they talk about them. It’s all therapy-speak and my wants and my needs and me, me, me.

At least the people at rehab were funny. At least Vern always had good dirty jokes.

Halfway through, I can’t stand it anymore and I bail. I go outside and sit on the cement steps in the cold. The social worker woman comes out and tries to talk to me, and I’m like: “I’m fine, really I am. I just can’t deal with this right now.”

So she goes back inside and I put my head down on my knees and I ask God to just kill me, I can’t take this. I can’t live like this. School is impossible. I have a semester’s worth of homework to make up. I have no friends. I have nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to talk to.

No wonder Vern gets drunk every year.