I HATE the Gratitude List. I hate Linda’s office. I hate Linda.
Days like today I wish the pills had worked so I wouldn’t be stuck sitting here in this stupid office, talking about the stupid Gratitude List with my stupid therapist.
“I’m sure the last few days haven’t been easy for you, with this being all over the news,” Linda says. “How are you feeling?”
If I were feeling good, would I be forced to come here to see you, Shrink Lady?
“Okay, I guess.”
I don’t want to talk to her today. I don’t want to be in her faux homey room with all the well-worn toys that are supposed to fool messed-up kids into thinking that they’re not being therapized.
But therapists don’t get paid big bucks to give up easily.
“How have things been at home?”
“What, since Dad got cited for disturbing the peace in his pajamas and they had video footage of him on the news? Oh, Mom’s thrilled about that,” I tell her, trying not to sound too bitterly sarcastic because that just convinces her that I’m still messed up and I need even more time in therapy. “It’s done wonders for her election campaign.”
“So your parents are fighting?”
I should have kept my mouth shut. Every time I open my mouth I inadvertently give her more clues about “what is wrong with Lara.”
“Parents fight. There’s nothing abnormal about that.”
She stops writing on her notepad. It worries me when she scribbles notes about the stuff that comes out of my mouth. I’m always wondering what it was I said that was so padworthy.
“Have they been fighting more than they normally do?”
“I guess,” I admit. “Just another thing that’s my fault.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because all the stuff they fight about … none of it would have happened if I hadn’t been stupid enough to talk to Christian. You know … if I wasn’t idiot enough to believe that someone that hot could like someone like me.”
The therapist is scribbling again.
“Lara, can you tell me … what did Christian give you?” Linda asks.
What part of he didn’t even exist doesn’t she understand?
“He didn’t give me anything,” I say. “He was Bree and her mom doing this for whatever messed-up reason they had for doing it. Giving me presents definitely wasn’t one of them.”
Linda takes a deep breath and leans back in her chair. I get the feeling that today, at least, I’m annoying her as much as she annoys me. Yay! We’re even!
“I’m not talking about presents, Lara. I’m asking you to think about what you got from those chats emotionally,” she says. “It must have been something, or you wouldn’t have kept chatting with him over a period of weeks.” She leans forward again, and the tight grip of her fingers around the pen betrays her frustration with me. “So you must have gotten something from your interactions — even if he did turn out to be a fictional friend.”
“We talked about stuff,” I say.
“Like what?” she asks. “What kind of ‘stuff’?”
“I don’t know. School. Our families … Although I guess he … I mean Bree, was lying about his, like everything else, because the people he was describing weren’t the Connorses.”
“What was it about Christian that made you feel so attached to him?”
It’s too humiliating to admit, even to just her and these four walls, that I couldn’t believe such a hot guy was interested in me. That was just what made me do something I knew I wasn’t supposed to do — friending someone I didn’t know in real life in the first place. But his looks weren’t what made me feel close to him.
“It was how he listened to me,” I tell her. “He made me feel …”
I miss him.
Without warning, the realization hits me. It’s like a piece of me cracks, and then I’m sobbing. Deep, shuddering sobs that rack my body so hard it hurts my chest. She’s taken her shrinky flashlight and pointed it into the dark corners of my mind, shining a light on the last thing in the world I wanted to think or talk about. By making me even consider for a moment how much I miss Christian, she’s opened the floodgates on all the pain I’ve been trying with every ounce of my being not to feel.
And I hate her even more for doing it.
She gets up from her chair and hands me the box of tissues, even though they’re on the table right next to me. I take one, and then another and then another. Are there enough tissues in that box, in the entire universe, to soak up all the pain I have inside?
Linda is back in her chair, with pen and notepad good to go, waiting for my sobs to slow to sniffles. When I’ve blown my nose into the eleventh tissue, she says, “That brought up some strong emotions. What are you feeling right now?”
I use tissue number twelve to wipe the mascara from under my eyes, which I’m sure are raccoon-like from all the tears. It also gives me a reason to delay answering the question I’ve grown to hate in all its variations — What are you feeling? How are you feeling? Are you feeling okay?
“I feel s-sad,” I sniff.
“Why?”
I should have known she wouldn’t let it go at that.
“Because …”
I hesitate. How do I admit I miss a person who never really existed? That’s going to make me sound even crazier than everyone already thinks I am.
“You probably won’t understand.”
“Try me,” she says.
It’s hard to know who I can trust anymore. I’m afraid to trust anyone. But I figure she’s bound by doctor-patient confidentiality and the truth is, there’s no one else I can really talk to about Christian.
“I know this is going to sound crazy, because he wasn’t even a real person, but … I miss Christian. I miss him a lot.”
I swallow, willing myself not to start crying again. “And when I feel that … when I’m alone in my bedroom crying because I miss him and I feel so lonely, I know I’m the stupidest girl who ever existed,” I tell her. “Because he was Bree. Or her mom. And none of the nice things they made him say were even true.”
“Feelings just are, Lara,” she says. “It doesn’t do you any good to judge yourself for having them.”
“But how can you miss a fake person?” I argue.
“It’s not the person you miss,” she says. “It’s what he gave you emotionally.”
I start ripping the tissue into little pieces in my lap as I consider what she’s said.
“What do you miss the most about your chats? How did chatting with him make you feel?”
And then I can’t stop the tears again, as I’m once again hit with the emptiness and the loss.
“He … made … me … feel … special,” I sob. “Like … I was actually … worth something.”
She lets me cry without probing further, and I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful that I’m allowed to experience these feelings without her making me analyze them anymore. Because right now I’m exhausted just from having them.
“Lara,” she says, and her voice is softer and gentler than it has ever been before. “You are worth something. Maybe we need to work on you owning that before you get into more relationships.”
I shake my head. “How do I own something I can’t see?”
“That’s what we’re going to work on,” she says. “Helping you to see your strengths.”
I think it’s a useless exercise because I don’t have any strengths, but she sounds so confident about the possibility of it happening that I feel a tiny whiff of hope, as faint as the breeze from a butterfly wing.
Even that is a step up from the utter despair I’ve felt ever since Christian told me the world would be better off without me in it. Is this progress?