Doctor Z came recommended by my mother’s friend Juana. I think my parents picked her because she was the cheapest: Doctor Z works on a sliding scale—meaning she charges what people can afford to pay. I had my doubts about anybody recommended by Juana, who’s a Cuban American playwright with thirteen dogs and four ex-husbands. She seems like a madwoman to me, but my mother says she’s an artist. Mom says Juana doesn’t worry about what other people think, and that makes her well adjusted.I say, thirteen is too many dogs for good mental health. Five is pretty much the limit. More than five dogs and you forfeit your right to call yourself entirely sane.Even if the dogs are small.My mother drove me to Doctor Z’s office on Thursday afternoon. We were early, and she let me drive around the parking lot since I just got my learner’s permit, but that turned out to be a bad thing to do right before you go in to see your very first shrink and when your entire life is crashing down and you can’t even talk to your best friend about it because she’s half the problem.Here’s why: Your mom will make you insane. You will go so insane the shrink will commit you to a mental hospital the minute she sees you.We were only going like five miles an hour in a circle around the parking lot, but Mom kept doing these sharp intakes of breath like she was at a horror movie.“Roo! That guy is pulling out!”“Uh-huh.”“Do you see him? There, he’s backing up.”“Yeah.”“So stop!”I stopped.“Don’t hit the brake so hard, Roo.”“I didn’t.”“You did. I jerked forward in my seat. But it’s okay, you’re learning. It’s practice. Oh!” she squealed, as I started around the parking lot again. “Be careful! There’s a squirrel!”“I wonder where I get my anxiety,” I said.“What, you mean me?” My mother laughed. “It’s not from me. Your father is much more anxious than I am. You saw, he thought you were suicidal. Watch the turn there, not so sharp.”Doctor Z’s office is in a blank building next to a mall. It’s full of orthodontists and dermatologists and all kinds of -ists I never even heard of, but when you get into her actual office, she’s hung African art on the walls and covered over the beige wall-to-wall with a deep red rug. Doctor Z herself was wearing a poncho. I kid you not, a big, crocheted, patchworky thing, over a long skirt and Birkenstocks. That’s Seattle for you. Psychologists wearing earthy crunchy sandals. She was African American, which surprised me. It shouldn’t have, but our family is white as far back on the family tree as I’ve ever looked, and I guess I picture people white white white unless someone tells me otherwise. Doctor Z wore these red-framed glasses that were too big for her face and gave you the sense that she took her poncho-wearing very seriously.My mother said, “Hi, I’m Elaine Oliver, we spoke on the phone, blah blah Juana, blah blah blah,” and Doctor Z said, “Yes, so nice to meet you, and hello, Ruby, blah blah,” and my mother popped off to the mall next door and left me alone with the shrink.Doctor Z offered me a seat and asked me about the panic attacks.I told her I was having a bad week.“What kind of bad week?” she said, popping a piece of Nicorette gum into her mouth.“Just teenager angst. I’m not shattered or anything.”“Angst about what?”“I broke up with my boyfriend.”“Oh.”“I don’t want to talk about it.”“Okay.”“I just met you.”“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”“I don’t know,” I said. “Nothing. I’m fine.”She didn’t say anything.There was a box of tissues on her coffee table that I found annoying. Like she thought I was going to cry any minute. “Aren’t you going to ask me about my dreams?” I asked, after a minute. “That’s what shrinks do, isn’t it?”Doctor Z laughed. “Sure. I can do that. Are you having any interesting dreams?”“No.”“All right, then.” We sat in silence for a bit. “Tell me something about your family.”This was easy. I have a riff on my family. I spin into it whenever anybody asks me, because my parents are different than most of the people at Tate Prep, the school I’ve been going to since kindergarten. Tate is for rich kids, mainly. Kids whose parents buy them BMWs when they turn sixteen. The dads are plastic surgeons and lawyers and heads of department store chains and big companies. Or they work for Microsoft. The moms are lawyers too—or they do volunteer work and have great hair. Everyone lives in big houses with views and decks and hot tubs (Seattle people love hot tubs), and they take European vacations.My folks are madmen by comparison. They send me to Tate on scholarship because “education is everything,” according to them. We live in a houseboat, which Kim and Cricket and Nora think is fun but which is actually a horror, because I have no privacy (none at all, because the whole house is tiny and built on an open plan, so if I want to be alone I have to go into my microscopic bedroom and shut the door and even then my mom can hear every word I say on the telephone), and because the area in Seattle where the houseboats are is completely far from anywhere you’d want to go, and the buses run only once an hour. The other problem with the houseboat is bees. My dad runs an obscure garden tip newsletter and seed catalog from his home office: Container Gardening for the Rare Bloom Lover. The houseboat has a wraparound deck, and on every square inch of that thing are unusual breeds of peonies, miniature roses, lilies, you name it. If it blooms and you can grow it in a tub of dirt in the Pacific Northwest, we’ve got it. Which means we’ve also got bumblebees, all summer long, buzzing around our front door and sneaking in through the window screens whenever they can.My mother won’t set up a bug zapper. She says we’ve got to live in harmony with them. And truthfully, none of us has ever been stung. Mom is a performance artist (and part-time-at-home copy editor, to pay the bills), which means that she does these long monologues about herself and her life and her opinions about public policy and bug zappers. She gets hysterical onstage, yelling into the microphone and doing sound effects.She’s no longer allowed to talk about me in her shows. Not since “Ruby’s First Period” became a major part of a monologue called Elaine Oliver: Feel the Noise! I only found out that my personal bodily fluids were her topic on opening night, when Kim and Nora and I were all sitting in the audience together (we were twelve). I died right there, stopped breathing, turned blue and went into rigor mortis in the middle of the Empty Space Theater’s second row.Dad had a talk with her, and she promised never to mention me onstage again.I’ve gone through this riff a million times. It’s a good way to keep a conversation going, and a good way to prep a friend so she knows she’s not finding any BMWs or flat-screen TVs when she comes over. But it sounded different in the psychologist’s office. Doctor Z kept going “Umm-hmm” and “Oh, aha,” as I was talking, as if she was planning on writing down shrinky-type things as soon as my fifty-minute appointment was up. Stuff like: “Ruby Oliver, obsessed with getting her period, brings it up at first meeting.” Or, “Ruby Oliver, fixated on bumblebees.”“Shows considerable anxiety about having less money than her friends.”“Needs father’s help to stop her mother from embarrassing her.”“First menstrual period, obviously a traumatic episode.”“Thinking about hot tubs and privacy. Therefore, thinking about sex.”Suddenly, the whole riff seemed weirdly revealing.I shut up.Doctor Z and I sat there in silence for twelve minutes. I know, because I watched the clock. I spent the time wondering if someone made that poncho for her, or she made it herself, or she actually bought it at a crafts fair. Then I looked at my low-rise jeans and the frayed edges of the 1950s bowling shirt I was wearing, and wondered if she was thinking mean stuff about my outfit too.Finally, Doctor Z crossed her legs and said, “Why do you think you’re here, Ruby?”“My parents are paranoid.”“Paranoid, how?”“They’re worried I’ll lose my mind and get anorexic or depressed. They figure therapy will head it off.”“Do you think you’ll get anorexic or depressed?”“No.”A pause. “Then why do you think you had those panic attacks?”“Like I told you, it was a bad week.”“And you don’t want to talk about it.”“I’m still in the middle of it,” I said. “Who knows if Jackson and me are really broken up? Because just the other night he kissed me, or maybe I kissed him, and he keeps looking at me, and he came back to this party I had and was all upset about this thing that happened.”“What?”“Just a thing. It’s too hard to explain. And I don’t know why Cricket and Nora have stopped talking to me, but it’s suddenly like we’re not even friends anymore; and I had a fight with Noel, and I don’t know why Cabbie asked me out, or why I’m going. I think he must want something. Oh, and this other guy, Angelo—he’s probably never talking to me again—but then again, maybe he will. Basically, I’ve got no idea what’s going on in my own life. That’s why I can’t talk about it.”I was not going to reach for that annoying box of tissues, no matter what. I took a deep breath so I wouldn’t end up crying. “Maybe it’s not a bad week,” I joked. “Maybe it’s a bad month. But I can’t explain it—until I can explain it—and right now, I can’t.”“Jackson is your boyfriend?” asked Doctor Z.“Was,” I said. “Until two weeks ago. We might get back together.”“And who is Cabbie?”“Just some guy. Shep Cabot. We’re going out tomorrow night.”“And Angelo?”“Just some other guy.”“Noel?”“He’s just a friend.”“That’s a lot of justs,” said Doctor Z. “And a lot of guys.”Before you know it, she had me promising to write up the Boyfriend List. She said it would give us something to talk about next week—and that our time was up.