“Not that. New York.”
The look on her face was so full of pity and guilt I could barely stand it. “We can’t go to New York.”
“No. We can. You didn’t even ask me.”
“Can you dance right now, Ari? Show me.” I didn’t move from my position on the floor. Jess nodded. “Rowena said she hasn’t seen you since you fell in class. Right after Win died.”
Jess wasn’t mad at me. She didn’t scream or sound disappointed. Maybe she expected me to be a failure, to suddenly stop doing the one thing I’ve ever been any good at. I sat up completely and curled my arms around my knees as best I could. “I’ll be able to dance soon.”
Jess didn’t say anything, just looked at me with that horrible, unnatural pity. She reached for my bad wrist and held it; pain thumped along with my heartbeat.
“I’m so sorry I did this to you,” she said, and brushed the wrist with her thumb. “Your old spell. It’s okay to hurt sometimes. It’s okay to have bad memories.”
I pulled my wrist out of her grasp and winced as the pain shot to my elbow. “Stop it. You did the right thing.”
She only shook her head. “Maybe if I hadn’t done that, you wouldn’t have felt like you had to forget Win.”
“That’s not important. New York is important.” I didn’t agree with Jess that this was all her fault, and that she should’ve known better or any of that crap. The Win spell was a huge, ugly mistake—but it was my mistake. Not hers. Her mistake would be keeping us from moving. “We have to go to New York.”
“Dr. Pitts is expecting you.”
“Jess, no. You’re overreacting. We’re going to New York. Tell me we’re going to New York.”
“I’ll take you to Dr. Pitts first. Then we can talk.”
I didn’t want to talk to anyone—not her, as strange and sad and wrong as she was being, and certainly not Dr. Pitts. But I followed her out to the car anyway.
Jess wasn’t mad at me like Markos or disappointed like Diana. So why did her pity and love feel like such a burden?
After I explained what I had done, Dr. Pitts sat back in her chair, staring at the wall behind my head. We didn’t talk for a long moment. And in the end, I was the one to break it. “So you can see why all your attempts to get me to grieve properly might not have worked. But, hey, maybe that’s a good thing. You don’t have to blame yourself for not fixing me. It wasn’t your fault.”
She shook her head, wearing her sympathy on her face like stage makeup. I couldn’t take it. I preferred when she was needling me into shouting at her. “Ari, we don’t ‘fix’ people in therapy.”
“I was joking.”
“I don’t think you were. That type of attitude—that pain can be fixed—could be what made you go to a hekamist instead of dealing with your feelings.”
“Pain can be fixed. I’m sure you take Tylenol, Dr. Pitts.”
“You really believe that a spell to give yourself brain damage is the same as a Tylenol?”
I ignored the “brain damage” dig. “I’m only saying, I don’t think it’s a matter of whether or not I believe in something. It’s true. Take a pill, no more headache. I took a spell, no more grief. I don’t know if it’s right, but I know that it worked.”
“You call not being able to dance working?”
“I’ll dance again.” I placed my bad wrist against my heart. Echo’s spell. She promised. Any day now. Must be patient.
And still Dr. Pitts exuded a noxious cloud of fake sympathy. Sickening. I don’t know how she didn’t throw up from it. “How?” she asked.
“I just—I will.”
She shook her head. “You don’t get to choose to escape something like this, Ari. You can’t swallow and push through it. There are always consequences.”
“Like having to sit here with you.”
Her sympathetic face twitched. If I had to be in this room, I resolved to make an enemy of her. Enemies don’t try to figure you out. Enemies leave you alone.
“Look, I don’t know what Jess hoped to accomplish by making me come here. I know that this whole thing is totally messed up. I will apologize to Jess, and to Diana, and to Kay, and even to Markos and everyone else in town if you make me. Okay?”
Dr. Pitts just looked at me. Maybe I should’ve offered to apologize to her, too.
“Let’s talk about your parents.”
“Why?”
“They died, too.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“You don’t remember the fire. But you still might feel that the world is random and dangerous.”
“What, so, you think because my parents died in an accident I’m more likely to try to control my life in any way I can? Very astute. I’ll be thinking about that while staring up at the three a.m. sky wondering if there’s a heaven.”
“Have you noticed you often use sarcasm to change the subject?”
I shrugged. “Whatever works.”
Dr. Pitts shook her head. “It doesn’t work. One day you’ll be alone with yourself and you’ll have to face the truth.”
“What truth?”