It wasn’t just me. Ada saw her too.
“You saw her!” I exclaimed.
She shook her head ever so slightly then turned to face mom. “It was nothing. Someone bumped into me.”
“No,” I cried out, grabbing Ada by the shoulders. “It wasn’t someone, it was her! You saw her too! Creepy Clown Lady!”
“Creepy Clown what?” my mother asked, perplexed.
Then she grunted and threw her hands up in the air. “Forget it, I don’t want to know.”
She started walking down the hal and Ada quickly trailed after her, ripping herself out of my hands and avoiding my eyes.
I turned a final time to see Pippa standing at the end of the hal , watching us go.
I forced my thoughts at her with al my strength.
Is that it? I asked. You don’t even stop to say hello?
Don’t take the pills, was her brief answer. Don’t let her trick you. She tricked me.
I was taken aback. I wished I could see her expression clearly at that distance.
Pills? Who tricked you?
“Perry!” my mother cal ed.
I crooked my head to face her. “I’m coming.”
She crossed her arms. “No, now.”
I nodded absently, then looked back at Pippa. The hal was empty.
I sighed, frustrated and suddenly angry again, and scurried down the hal after my mother and entered Doctor Freedman’s office.
Nothing had changed.
There was stil Bethany, the white-haired receptionist who sat on the other side of a frosted pane of sliding glass.
The waiting room was windowless and suffocating with only two magazines and one Reader’s Digest, al from the late nineties. There were a few other people waiting for other doctors, looking blankly at each other, at the wal s, at the floor.
We didn’t wait long. Doctor Freedman appeared outside his door.
He had a beard now, but other than that he looked the same, down to the blasé expression on his face.
“Perry,” he said with false warmth. “Come on in.”
I got up and was surprised to see my mother rise too.
“Thank you for seeing her on such short notice,” my mother said in a sickly sweet voice.
I shot her a look. “Where are you going?”
“I’d like to come in.”
Over my dead body, I thought. I looked at the doctor. He gave my mom a gentle smile.
“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Palomino,” he said. “I’l need to see Perry alone.”
I gave my mother a triumphant look, finding only smal victories, and went over to join the doctor.
His office looked the same. The same window that looked out onto the same maple trees that were bare and wet with late winter. I sat down on the couch like it was second nature. It had changed. The cushions were firmer.
Or maybe my ass wasn’t built like a hippo’s anymore.
“You’ve lost a lot of weight, Perry,” he said, pointing his pen at me. I briefly wondered if he could hear my thoughts.
No, but it was his job to read me. “Since I last saw you, of course.”
“Yeah,” I said, not feeling like elaborating.
“No more blue hair, either.”
“Nope.”
“I’ve watched your show, you know.”
I grimaced involuntarily.
“It was interesting,” he continued, already scrawling shit down on his stupid notepad. “I understand you’re no longer doing it.”
“Yup.”
“Good. I don’t think that’s the best profession for someone like you.”
I nearly laughed at the word profession, then realized he was making fun of me.
“It had its moments,” I said dryly.
He made an agreeable little sound, almost like a sigh.
Then he crossed his legs and leaned forward on them, his ful attention on me.
“Your mother explained what has been happening to you. I’d like to hear your story.”
I was getting real y bored of rehashing the past few weeks. I took a deep breath and dove into it, trying not to get bogged down in too much detail. But I told him everything. He already thought I was crazy by nature, so what did it matter? I never cared what he thought anyway.
He listened, nodded, scribbled, rinsed, repeated.
“And what of this man who broke your heart?” he asked when I concluded with the incident on the roof last night and the time skips in the morning.
“What?” Why was he asking about that? Didn’t he just hear what I said? Demons on the roof!
“Your mom had said something about you being upset over a man. That you were in love with him.”
“What the hel does that have to do with anything?”
He didn’t say anything. He just nodded to himself and made an “mmhmm” noise.
“That was a long time ago. Last year.”
“It takes time to heal, Perry.”
“I am healed.”