What happens over the next few months is like the plot of a children’s movie, the kind where a dog finds its owner in spite of insurmountable odds and prohibitive geography. Through shrewd detective work, Audrey discovers that her camp friend Sarah is my school friend Sarah, and begins passing me notes. They are fat envelopes, decorated with puff paint and star stickers. Inside the first one is a letter, in the kind of fun teen scrawl they use in Saved by the Bell: “HEY YOU SEEM AWESOME! I bet we’d get along. My mom says we would if we could meet. I love shopping, the Felicity soundtrack, oh, and shopping. Here’s a pic of me at the Wailing Wall after my Bat Mitzvah! INSTANT MESSAGE MEEEE.”
I write back an equally effusive note, laboring over which picture to share, before finally settling on a shot of me lounging on my sister’s bunk bed in a vintage crop top that reads super debbie. “I also luuuv the Felicity soundtrack, animals, acting, and DUH SHOPPING! My screen name is LAFEMMELENA.”
I know our correspondence is wrong, and so I tell Robyn, who confirms my belief that this is inappropriate. “It’s too bad,” she says, “because I think you two are very similar. You would probably be good friends.”
When I’m fifteen I stop working with Robyn. I’m ready to stop talking about my problems all the time, I tell her, and she doesn’t fight me. I feel good. My OCD isn’t completely gone, but maybe it never will be. Maybe it’s part of who I am, part of what I have to manage, the challenge of my life. And for now that seems okay.
Our last session is full of laughter, fancy snacks, talk of the future. I admit how much it hurt me when she reacted with disgust to my belly-button ring, and she says she’s sorry she displayed her personal bias. I thank her for having let me bring my cat into a session and for removing said belly-button ring once it became infected, using a pair of pliers, and, most of all, for having guided me toward wellness. For the first time in many years, I have secrets. Thoughts that aren’t suitable for anyone but me.
I miss her the way I missed our loft after we moved in seventh grade: sharply, and then not at all. There is too much unpacking to do.
Within six months, I’m ignoring my homework and skipping class so I can hang out with my pet rabbit Chester Hadley. My parents think I’m depressed, and I think they’re idiots. Because of my medication, I’m sleepy all the time, and I become notorious at school for napping in my hood, snapping to attention the moment a teacher says my name: “I wasn’t sleeping.”
My fascination with Robyn’s daughter has never died, and our lives overlap just enough that I have a sense of where and how she is: I’m told she pierced her own nose at summer camp and is dating a graffiti artist named SEX. Once, our mutual friend puts us on the phone together, and I can barely speak.
“Hey!” she growls.
“It’s you,” I say.
My struggle is deepening, and my father tells me that I am going to see Margaret, a “learning and organization” specialist who I met with a few times years earlier when my parents discovered I had been stuffing all my unfinished homework under my bed for half the school year. I remember her fondly enough, mostly because she offered Chessmen cookies and orange juice before we set to work on my math homework. When I arrive this time, she doesn’t offer any cookies, but she looks just as I’d left her: wavy red bob, creatively draped black dress, and witch boots. More like my mother than Robyn, but with an Australian accent.
Her office is a museum of pleasing curiosities: framed seashells, dried * willows extending from asymmetrical vases, a coffee table decorated with feathers and stray tiles used as coasters. For a few weeks, we sit at her desk and focus on organizing my backpack, which looks like a crack-addicted hoarder with five toddlers took up residence in its front zipper pocket. She shows me how to keep a datebook and label the sections of a binder and check assignments off when I’ve finished them. Margaret is a psychiatrist as well, and I often see sad children or mismatched couples waiting for her after our session, but this isn’t the place to talk about my feelings. We are all about efficiency, neat edges, prioritizing.
But one day I come in, melted down by a recurrence of obsessive thoughts and by the milky, sickening feeling my medication is giving me. I don’t have the will to clean out my binder. I had gotten such satisfaction out of the systems she introduced, the sharp pencils and crisp manila folders. But, in a grand metaphor for my worsening state, I have doodled nonsense on all the once-pristine pages. I lay my head on the desk.
“Do you want to sit on the couch?” Margaret asks.