Corn Syrup too. The bell rang and her eyes got huge.
She looked around for Beth and started to race off. And then she hesitated, just for a second, like we were going to keep talking.
She bolted, of course, but I was surprised she’d stopped for even that moment.
51
S I X
TODAY WAS A LAURIE DAY TOO—as if I hadn’t dealt with enough crap with Caro and lunch already. I’d hoped to miss school to see Laurie, but naturally she has afternoon hours for her “teen” patients. Lucky, lucky me.
Mom, thankfully, had to do some grocery shopping and just dropped me off. I wasn’t up for a discussion about
“how things are going” with her while I was stuck in the waiting room.
Eventually, I guess Laurie must have somehow known I’d looked through all the magazines twice and was con-templating bolting and had me called back.
She started off normally enough—for her, anyway, with the “How are you feeling?” questions and all that crap.
But then she said, “Today I want to talk about Julia.”
52
“Okay, well, it’s been ninety days today,” I said, because telling Laurie to shut the hell up doesn’t work.
I’ve tried it.
“No,” she said. “I mean, tell me about her.”
“Well, the accident—”
“No, before that. When did you fi rst meet?”
“She moved here when she was twelve.”
Laurie was silent. She does that sometimes. I can never tell if it’s because I’ve said something wrong or because she’s thinking. Either way, I always end up babbling.
“I was eleven.” See? Babbling. Does Laurie really care when I met Julia? Highly doubtful.
“What did Julia think about your drinking?” And once again, I was right. She’d gone right for the drinking. So predictable.
I stared at her, annoyed. She stared right back.
“Well, if it hadn’t been for . . . if it hadn’t been for that night, for me, she never would have—”
“Let’s not talk about that right now,” Laurie said. “You drank before the accident, right?”
“Yes.”
“A lot?”
I shrugged. It wasn’t like we hadn’t talked about this before.
53
But she kept quiet again, so I finally said, “Yeah, a lot.”
“When did you drink?”
“Before parties, at parties. Weekend stuff. Last year, though, I drank at school sometimes.”
“Why parties? Why sometimes at school?”
I made a face at her because, really, how stupid could she be? Even I know I drank because it made me feel okay about having weird red hair and being so tall. It also made me less nervous about acting like an idiot in front of other people, and parties and school were times when I desperately didn’t want to seem stupid. Drinking made me feel so much better about—well, everything.
“Amy, I know we’ve covered this before, but I think we should talk about it again. Let me ask another question,” Laurie said, as if I could stop her. “What sort of things did you do to keep your parents from noticing you took alcohol from them?”
“My parents don’t drink.” I knew she had all this in her little file or chart or whatever. My first week at Pinewood I talked and talked and talked about all this crap, and she was in the room when I did. (And she had her damn pen.)
Laurie didn’t say anything, though, just gave me her interested look (You’d think they’d learn more than one 54
expression in shrink school), so I sighed and recited what we both already knew.
“My mom had a cousin who died from alcohol poison-ing when he was twenty-two. My dad’s aunt was an alcoholic. Why don’t you just say you want me to ask them about my dead drunk relatives?”
“Right now, I really would like to focus on you. How did you drink?”
I rolled my eyes and opened my mouth, holding up a pretend bottle.
She clicked her pen twice. I hate that damn thing.
“Julia would swipe stuff from her mom or fi nd someone who’d buy for us.”
“So she drank too?”
“Sure, if there was nothing else around.”
“And if there was?”
“If there was what?”
“If there was something else around?”
“Then she’d do that.”
“I see,” Laurie said, and the minute she did I knew where she was going and it pissed me the hell off.
“Julia didn’t like how much I drank, you know. Like, if I’d puke she’d say I should think about cutting back, and that it was stupid to drink when I could just do 55
something that wouldn’t make me totally sick like drop aci . . . um. Anyway, she had to look out for me. And she did. But I—I didn’t do a very good job of looking out for her.”
She nodded. “For next time, I want you to think about talking about Julia. Not about the accident. Just about her. What she was like. How you met, the kind of things you did together. Would you be willing to do that?”
“I guess.”
After that we talked about the usual stuff we do when Laurie says we’re “wrapping up”—do I want to drink, what do I do when I want to drink, a review of my “coping skills,” blah blah blah. I swear I could tell Laurie I’d just murdered someone and she’d still make me review what I’ve “learned.”
Here’s the thing about that: how often I want to drink doesn’t seem to be a big deal to her. How can it not be?
Look at what I did, at what my drinking cost . . . how can I even think about it at all?
But I do.
I also told her a little about lunch. I don’t know why, because she said she thought I should try to “strike up a conversation” with Corn Syrup. Yeah, okay, great idea.
56
Laurie really doesn’t get how high school works, but that’s how adults are. They think school is so easy and life there is so great. I’d like to see them go back.
Laurie wouldn’t last a day.
57
99 days
Well, J, it’s Friday night. Are you ready to hear my exciting plans?
My parents have asked me to join them while they watch some special on the History Channel. So I’m here in the living room, lying on the floor and working on homework. You know, I haven’t actually done homework in ages. You and I had, what, two study halls last year? I don’t remember ever opening a book in either of them. I remember you painting your fi ngernails and mine. I remember talking about Kevin and your mom and my parents. I remember making plans for after school, for the weekend. It was so great when your mom gave you a car (even with the lecture about how much she sacrificed for you) and we didn’t have to take the bus everywhere.
58
Remember when we decided what we were going to do once we were done with high school? We’d bailed on lunch to smoke in the third-floor bathroom, and I drank a ton of those little bottles you kept in your locker because Mom and Dad had actually fought that morning and it was all horrible silence until Mom started to cry. Then Dad put his arms around her and it was like I wasn’t even there even though we were all in the kitchen, and worse than the rare fight was the all-too-regular sight of them so wrapped up in each other that they forgot I was there.
We decided the day after we graduated we were going to move to Millertown—out of Lawrenceville, fi nally! —
and get an apartment. You were going to help out with Kevin’s band, and I was . . . whoa. Déjà vu.
It’s . . . J, it’s so strong I feel almost sick. Have you ever felt memory like this? It’s like I’m there with you smiling and waving at me, your fingernails painted pink and red and blue and green. I might have been drunk then, fl oat-ing through life, but it was real. I was real. You were real.
This crap—lying on the floor, this stupid homework, all of it—it feels like nothing. It is nothing.