With two fingers, she starts rubbing away at the tabletop, erasing some of the roots. ‘When we talked about how people perceive us, what was it we concluded?’
‘I don’t remember.’ I find a patch of skin on the back of my hand, start scratching, break flesh and feel blood, sticky, collecting under my thumbnail, but it doesn’t hurt. I’m numb.
‘Take a deep breath for me,’ Dr Reeves says.
She wants me to draw a parallel between myself and a story she once told me about a chick we’ve aptly named Perception Girl.
‘It’s not the same,’ I tell her, shaking my head. I can hear Luke laughing as I try to explain to him why I can’t venture beyond the front door. Why I count. Why I wash my hands a hundred times a day. Why I go days without eating and sleeping. Why I haven’t spoken to another teenager in almost four years.
‘What’s not the same?’ Dr Reeves pushes.
‘About the girl.’
‘What girl?’ She’s trying to pull words from my mouth and I’ve run out of ways to stall.
‘The perception girl!’ I yell. ‘The one that doesn’t get laughed at.’ Perception Girl’s job is to help me see what other people see when they look at me.
‘Remind me. Why doesn’t she get laughed at?’ Dr Reeves says, setting her cup down on the place mat. Except she doesn’t get it central and I can see it tilting. It agitates me. I don’t ask, just reach across the table and set the damn thing straight.
‘Because she’s sick. And people don’t laugh at sick people,’ I tell her through clenched teeth.
‘And what are you?’
‘I’m sick!’ I shout. But not because I’m angry. It’s like I’m trying to make myself listen. No, not listen, hear. The same way a sergeant drills instructions into the heads of his platoon.
Or maybe I am angry. Angry that my mind can function so proficiently on one thing and remain completely obtuse on the next.
‘Norah, listen to me. The general population doesn’t want to laugh at a seventeen-year-old girl whose life is being held hostage by her brain. As a rule, people don’t laugh at those who are suffering. And Norah, you are suffering.’
‘How can I expect people to empathize with a sickness they can’t see?’ Tears sting my eyes.
‘You don’t expect anything. You talk, you teach.’
I shake my head, pull back my chair, ready to sit down, but decide I’d rather stay standing. More control. That’s what I need. Somehow, height gives me this feeling like I have an advantage.
Dr Reeves draws new roots on our invisible tabletop tree. There aren’t quite as many now, and they’re not so squiggly, not nearly as erratic. I want to believe her; I want to be able to hear Luke understanding as easily as I hear him laughing.
‘I’m afraid,’ I confess in a whisper. I’m always afraid, but I don’t usually admit it out loud.
‘It’s a huge thing,’ she tells me. ‘That’s why you fight this therapy so much. Your brain is freaking out because it knows that to create new paths and form different ideas, you have to lend yourself a little to the unknown.’
God. I wish she was more like the Jar Jar Binks of therapy and less like the Yoda.
‘Okay.’ I sit down. ‘What if . . .’ My words are muffled by a mouthful of shirt collar. What I really want to do is pull the whole thing over my head and disappear, but I don’t. ‘What if he is a part of the asshole percentage and does laugh at me?’
Dr Reeves picks up her cup, cradles it, and smiles. ‘I think you’ve answered your own question.’ She sits back a little in her chair. ‘I met a woman at a conference once. She told us this story about her daughter who was desperate to date this guy on the football team. He rejected her because he said she was too ugly. Two years later, she met a boy at college, and after she got her law degree, they married, had three children, and now live a happy little life in the suburbs. What’s the point of this story?’
‘Effect and outcome.’
‘Exactly. We can assume the best, but we can’t choose how people perceive us. We can, however, choose how those views affect us.’
I stare at the tree on the table, realize I’m a hypocrite. I’ve judged Luke before he’s even had a chance to judge me. And then it happens. He knocks, the sound echoing around my house.
‘You have more control over this than you think, than your pathways are allowing you to believe.’ The doc stands. ‘And you’re assuming you have to offload your life story right now, but you don’t. You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to. You do a lot of things in your free time with books and movies and music and language. Invite him in, talk about anything else.’
‘But what if I have to fix his leaning coffee cup? Or what if he starts biting dirty fingernails and my stomach does that swirling thing? He’s going to know I’m a freak.’
Dr Reeves shoots me a look that feels a lot like a slap across the face. ‘I thought we banned that word.’
‘I revived it.’
‘Well, I’m killing it. For good this time. Just . . . be yourself.’
‘That’s horrible advice.’
She laughs as Luke knocks a second time.