Now, I could think that I was feeling love, fear, anger, joy, or whatever, but my brain wouldn’t transform those feelings into expressions and gestures. I’d lost the connection.
Adjusting my seat on Dr. Pitts’ couch, I struggled to keep my face neutral, as if I chose to flail on her couch for no reason.
It occurred to me that if I didn’t find a way to stop Echo from telling, I wouldn’t have to go to therapy anymore, because Echo would spill the beans and Dr. Pitts wouldn’t expect me to be grief-stricken and tortured over Win anymore. That would be nice. But that would perhaps be the only nice thing.
“What’s the point?” I asked. I meant what’s the point of making me angry, but Dr. Pitts didn’t hear it that way.
“The point is that there will always be grief, disappointments, tragedy. The point is that you have to learn to deal with them, so they don’t derail your life. The point is letting go of fear. You refuse to talk about your parents. You’ve managed to tell me practically nothing about Win. But I drive by the spot on the road where he crashed and there are notes, signs, remembrances. What’s the difference between all those people and you?”
“They didn’t know him. Not really.”
“But you did. I don’t want you to go to leave a teddy bear in the pile, but I want you to think about why all those people chose to honor Win like that. They could’ve left the road alone, but they didn’t. They were compelled to mark the spot.”
They wanted to remember him, of course. That was what she was getting at. As much as she drove me crazy, sometimes I left her office convinced. Only it wasn’t stubbornness or fear keeping me from being a model patient, it was Old Ari, screwing things up yet again.
Back in my car after the session ended, I asked myself again what the point was. Unless I discovered another surprise stash of money, it was all moot. All the lying, the sneaking off to “ballet,” the practiced sad face, Dr. Pitts’s questions, all of it—pointless.
Old Ari stole from her dead boyfriend, and now I was the one who had to pay it back. It was my offering to Win’s roadside memorial. I couldn’t feel grief, so I gave the money instead.
I started the car, but instead of driving to the Sweet Shoppe, where my shift began at noon, I drove to Waters Hardware to talk to Markos Waters.
Wednesday was the first day in a long time that I didn’t wake up scowling. It wasn’t like there were suddenly birds tweeting and grass growing and love transforming my heart or any of that garbage. I just felt . . . better. For the first time since Win died. Like instead of being buried alive in shit, I was suspended weightless in some nicer substance. It was easier to breathe.
I’d seen Diana every day since the bonfire. I didn’t even care that she probably thought I was in love with her. She never said anything weird about it. I could call her or show up at her house because it felt right, and was what I wanted to do.
I still hadn’t tried to get anywhere with her, though I thought about it sometimes. I considered leaning over and kissing her in the middle of a sentence, or touching under her shirt while we were watching TV. I could’ve done it. She never gave me any sign that she wouldn’t be totally into it. But the fact that I could do it kept the idea banked, ready to use should I ever really need it.
It wasn’t like with some girls who made you look at them and expected you to want them and who were only listening because they thought that’s what you wanted. Diana listened because she wanted to hear what I said. She let things surprise her, instead of greeting each new moment with a sneer.
In the past, I’d only ever seen her as Ari’s shadow. She sat sit silently next to Ari at lunch, or faded away when Win and I would pick up Ari at her locker. She wasn’t funny like Ari, or confident, and that made it seem like she had nothing going on. At least nothing that would be worth seeking out.
But she seemed different now. It was like she said: with Ari otherwise occupied, she had to do something. Be someone. She still wasn’t particularly funny or confident, not when compared to Ari or other girls. But it turns out there are lots of other things you can be besides funny and confident. Like . . . compassionate, I guess is the social-worker word for it. Thoughtful not as in “nice” but as in thought-ful, full of thoughts. Nonlobotomized.
When I was around her, I didn’t have to be together and cool and Waters-ish and okay. And because there was no expectation to be happy, I managed to feel better anyway.
So Wednesday I felt as good as it was possible for a nonlobotomized person to feel—not that my family noticed. They crowded around the kitchen table for breakfast like they always did, despite the fact that Brian and Dev didn’t even live there anymore.
“Sweep up the wood shop today, all right, Markos?” my mom asked. She had her big accounting ledger out and was erasing something furiously. We’d all tried to convince her to computerize her accounts, but she clung to the ledger, wouldn’t let any of the rest of us touch it.