But he won’t recognize me, I tell myself. It’s been too long, too many years, and I don’t have a mark as easily recognizable as his.
The boy sitting opposite me is one I went to elementary school with very briefly. All the kids in our class pretended he had some infectious disease because of the birthmark on his face. Nobody would go near him except for this weird smelly girl with constantly dirty tights that you could always see because she kept taking off her shoes. What are the odds?
I can still feel his stare on me and it makes me fidget in my seat.
Psychopath, I want to say, but instead I curl my legs into the chair underneath me.
“They don’t really read those, you know,” the boy says, giving no indication that he knows we’ve met before.
“Oh?” I raise my eyebrows before turning back to the long list of questions that fill the page. This time, I’m careful not to stare at the birthmark.
I try to focus on the next question, begin to write an answer and then scribble it out.
“I’m telling you.” I hear the magazine flip shut. “There’s no point. Dr. McKenna—you’re with Dr. McKenna, right?—will take the clipboard from you and set it on her desk, never to be looked at again. End of story.”
“Is that so?” I say, instantly annoyed. I bite my tongue and soldier on through the next series of checkboxes, if for no other reason than as a semipolite means to avoid having a conversation in the waiting room of my soon-to-be therapist.
“You’re wasting your time….” He clucks his tongue and raps his fingers across the closed magazine.
I sigh and, relenting, look up. “How do you know?” I ask, this time unable to avoid looking at the raspberried skin. I don’t recall whether he was this annoying back in grade school. Probably that’s why he didn’t have any friends, I muse, making myself feel the tiniest bit better about being a shallow kid some-odd years ago.
He glances down at his lap for a split second and then angles his face slightly away, like he had noticed me noticing. “Well, for one, I’m pretty much an expert in all things psychotherapy. Not to brag, of course. For two, I filled out the entire questionnaire as though I were Count Dracula. Medication: ‘O’ Negative. Allergies: Garlic, the sun, holy water. She never said a word.” He sits back and looks directly at me again. “Same thing at the other place I used to go to. Dr. McKenna’s way better, though. Trust me.”
“Interesting.” I nod. “Or maybe she just didn’t want to give you the satisfaction.” And then I pointedly return to filling out the column of checkboxes.
“Ah, I get it,” he says. “You must have OCD or something. Is that why you’re in here?”
I set the pen down hard on the clipboard. “No,” I say through gritted teeth. “I’m not…obsessive-compulsive. I’m just following instructions.” And I’d like to be left alone, I add silently, although I think my tone more than implies it.
“Okay.” He tosses the magazine in the empty chair beside him. “What are you in for, then?”
“Excuse me?”
“What are you in for? What’s gone so haywire up here to land you in the pristine offices of Garretson, Smith & McKenna, PhD, LPC, CRC?”
I shift my weight in my seat and hug the clipboard tighter. “Well, that’s overly personal,” I say. “Not to mention rude. I don’t even know you.”
“You’re Lake…” He snaps his fingers repeatedly, like he’s trying to conjure up the answer. Then I see him peer down his nose at my scrawled handwriting. I snatch my clipboard and hug it to my chest. He rolls his eyes. “Okay, so I can’t remember the last name. Lake Something-or-Other. Relax, you went to Oceanview Elementary with me.” Busted.
He wears a light checkered shirt unbuttoned over a cotton T-shirt and yellow shorts and he smells, well, kind of amazing. In fact, I find myself wanting to lean in just a touch closer to catch another whiff of—What is that? Aftershave? Cologne?
I’m about to open my mouth when I stop myself. It’s been years. He doesn’t still go by—he can’t still go by—
“Ringo.” He grins and extends his hand out for me to take. Pine trees with a hint of vanilla. Odd combination for a person. “It’s been a while.”
“I—I—I didn’t recognize you.”
It’s not a complete lie. It seems sort of amazing that the boy sitting in front of me is the same one who years ago hardly spoke above a whisper. Actually that’s why he’d been held back a year, so that he was in my grade. No one knew if he was slow or just shy, only that he tolerated Smelly Ellie—Maybe that’s why he’s so intent on the good cologne now? That, and he sat inside every day when it was time for recess.
My gaze moves to the ring around his eye that had reminded me of Spot the Dog. Crap. This is just my luck today, running into someone who I probably more or less ignored, even perhaps rudely, ten years earlier. I had no idea what happened to Ringo after that one year when we shared a classroom. A new school? Homeschooling? I hadn’t cared, but to be fair, I didn’t even keep up with my former best friend, Jenny.
“Really?” He looks at me skeptically. “You see a lot of faces that look like this walking around? Damn,” he says. “And here I thought I was unique.”
I let out a small laugh that sounds more like a hiccup.
“So, see, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way,” he continues, “are you going to tell me what you’re in for?”
“I—I still think—” I begin to protest. Then, I shut my eyes and exhale. “What the hell. I was in a car accident. A few days ago. My best friend and…” My voice rasps over the ridges in my throat. “Um, my boyfriend, and they, well—they both died.”
Ringo strokes his chin. “Yikes. That is rough. Well, how old are you?”
“I’ll be eighteen this month.”
“Shit.”
“Shit,” I agree. “So what are you in for?”
His brow line drops lower. I notice that the birthmark makes his eyes appear uneven, like the ringed one is sitting lower on his face. “I’m not telling you that,” he says. “That question is entirely too personal. And quite frankly, rude. Besides, I hardly even know you.”
My lips part and I’m about to snap at him, when the door on the other side of the waiting room opens and a woman calls my name. “Lake Devereaux?”
Ringo picks up his magazine from the seat beside him and reopens it in his lap.
I stare hard at him but stand up. “That’s me,” I respond to the woman.
“Welcome,” she says in a flight-attendant voice. “We’ll be right back here.”
And when I glance back at Ringo, half expecting him to look at me with a sly grin and eyes that appear crookedly set but aren’t actually, he instead keeps them trained on the pages of the magazine as though that’s what he’d been doing all along.