“You mean I just imagined it? I’m actually the one who’s scared out of my mind?”
Dr. Regan leaned forward intently. She tucked a strand of graying hair behind her ear.
“I suppose that’s possible,” Tessa said slowly. “That’s one of my worst fears, I guess. Walking around some crowded city sidewalk, not knowing if I’m being followed…”
Dr. Regan took the thought journal and flipped it closed. “Excellent. Keep going.”
“It wasn’t just that one time though,” Tessa said, thinking aloud. “Every time he looks straight into the camera, you can see this glimmer of fear.”
“Fear of what?”
“Like he feels haunted by something. Haunted or—” Tessa broke off, searching for the right word. Her eyes slid over the journal cover and landed on one of the baby deer she’d drawn, running for its life. “Hunted, maybe? I don’t know.”
“That’s very interesting, Tessa.”
“Really? It’s interesting?” Tessa couldn’t help but laugh. Interesting. That must be one of those obscure psych terms for when the patient has a total one-track mind.
Every time she sat down to do her mindfulness exercises, she just ended up writing stories about Eric Thorn. Tessa had already filled two whole journals with all the elaborate plots she’d imagined. “It can’t be healthy, right?”
Dr. Regan pulled out a yellow legal pad and recorded a quick note. “You may feel safer exploring your own anxieties by assigning them to someone else. That can be quite useful, actually, as long as you recognize what you’re doing. Try to think how your theories about this celebrity might connect to what happened in June.”
Tessa responded with a choked noise, hugging her knees even tighter. She’d spent the month of June in New Orleans, part of an eight-week creative writing program for teens—or it was supposed to last eight weeks at any rate. Tessa had left the program halfway through and fled back home to the safety of her childhood bedroom. Now the whole summer had nearly come and gone, and she still couldn’t bring herself to talk about why she’d left. “No… You said I didn’t have to…not until I was ready—”
“OK, Tessa.” Dr. Regan raised a calming hand. “Remember your breathing. That’s it.”
Tessa swallowed. The rising anxiety threatened to engulf her, but she focused her mind on her one most trusted distraction. Eric. Eric Thorn. Tessa chanted his name inside her head as she sucked air deep into her lungs. She was supposed to hold her breath for a five count, but she had her own little spin on this particular relaxation technique. Eric one… Eric two… Eric three… Tessa watched her chest slowly rise and fall until the tension in her shoulders ebbed.
“Good, Tessa,” Dr. Regan said. “We can keep the conversation framed on Eric Thorn if that’s where you feel most comfortable.”
“I just don’t understand why I chose him. Why Eric Thorn of all people?”
“You tell me. Why do you think you’ve fixated on him?”
Tessa felt her face heat up. She’d considered herself a fan since his debut album a few years ago, but her fascination lately had reached a whole new level. It went way beyond the stories in her thought journal. Every time she came across a new picture of him, she felt this overwhelming compulsion to save it to her cell phone camera roll. She had more images of Eric Thorn squirreled away than anyone she’d ever known in real life. Here in her bedroom, Tessa had taken down all the other photographs that used to decorate the pale-yellow walls, but she’d left her Eric Thorn concert poster in its place of honor above her bed.
“I don’t know,” Tessa said. “Maybe because he’s hot?” She glanced over her shoulder at the poster, and her eyes lingered on the familiar scene: Eric performing onstage, with an electric guitar slung across the sculpted muscles of his chest. He had his head thrown back, eyes closed, lost in the music…
Dr. Regan peered over the rim of her glasses at Eric’s sweaty torso. “I’m guessing there’s a little more to it than that,” she said. “But let’s leave it as something for you to think about for our next session. Now, what about your desensitization exercises? How did it go this week?”
Tessa bit at her thumbnail, already chewed down to the nub. Her therapist filled the silence as she hesitated.
“Last week, you were able to sit downstairs in the living room with your mom and your boyfriend, Scott, for half an hour.”
“Yeah,” Tessa muttered.
“And your goal for this week was to try touching the front doorknob of the house.”
“That didn’t exactly happen.” Tessa bit down on her cuticle, tearing it with her teeth. She knew that she’d messed up. It had taken her more than a month of therapy just to summon the courage to set foot outside her bedroom door, but the past few days had felt like a huge step backward. “I’ve just been really overwhelmed this week,” she said. “There’s this…thing…happening. It’s stupid.”
Dr. Regan frowned. “What thing?”
“Nothing. It’s just something that happened on Twitter.”
The therapist stopped scribbling notes and looked up. “You’re on Twitter?”
“I’m really sorry,” Tessa said. She hadn’t mentioned her Twitter account before. It hadn’t seemed relevant. She rarely ever tweeted nowadays. But this past week, Twitter had somehow managed to occupy most of her waking thoughts. “I know what you’re going to say. I should probably deactivate so I can focus on my exercises better.”
“No, Tessa. That would only isolate you further.” Dr. Regan jotted furiously as she spoke. “Any kind of social interaction can potentially hold therapeutic value.”
“Really?” Tessa glanced skeptically at her phone, resting on the bedside table in a red leather cell phone case. She’d left it there, facedown, so she wouldn’t be distracted by any new Twitter notifications during the hour-long session.
Dr. Regan nodded. “Our goal is for you to interact with other people in the outside world of course, but social media can serve as a positive first step.”
“OK. Well, that’s pretty much all I did all week, so…”
“Do you have followers? People with whom you interact?”
Tessa laughed. What a question. If anyone had asked her a few days ago, the answer would have been different: a couple hundred followers, who mostly ignored her existence. But when Tessa last checked her account today, the follower count stood at 30K. Tessa still felt a little dizzy, thinking of it. Thirty thousand followers. Thirty thousand sets of eyes watching her every tweet. Her emotions kept swinging back and forth like a pendulum, from terror at the thought of them all to an irrational desire for more. Her fingers itched to check her phone again. How many more had she gained in the time since she and Dr. Regan started talking?
“It’s kind of intense,” she said, as she picked up the phone and glanced down.
Tessa H @TessaHeartsEric
FOLLOWERS:
30.1K
She showed the screen to her therapist.
“Very interesting.” Dr. Regan pressed her pen against her lips, considering. She wrote something else on her pad.
“My account kind of blew up this week.”