How It Feels to Fly(14)

That’s what I do sometimes. Just to make sure it still works.

“Are you getting settled in all right?” she asks. “Do you need anything?”

“I’m fine.”

You’re not fine. You’re nowhere close to fine—

“Wonderful. I know it can be difficult being away from home, especially in a situation like this. Please know that you can always come to me, Andrew, or Yasmin with concerns.” She writes my name on the top page of her pad in loopy cursive. When she sees me looking, she angles the pad up and away from me. “Before we get started, I wanted to remind you that after dinner, I’ll be collecting everyone’s cell phones.”

She mentioned this at orientation last night. How in order to really dig into our work here, we need to be untethered. Her word, not mine.

“Your mother knows to call the main number if she needs to reach you. You’ll have this afternoon to send any messages you want to friends. Or a significant other.”

That last part is almost a question. She looks at me, raising her eyebrows, and I shake my head. Nope. No significant other. Not anymore.

“Part of the benefit of being here is the isolation,” she goes on, while I try to wipe Marcus’s face from my mind’s eye. “You’ve all been removed from the intense training and competing environments where your anxiety manifests most strongly. Here, you’ll get perspective, as well as a chance to—”

I stop her midscript. “I’m not going to fight you for my phone. Don’t worry.”

She leans forward in her chair. “You won’t feel disconnected from your friends and family?”

Trust a therapist to read too much into every comment. “Like you said, my mom knows how to reach me. And I told my friends I wouldn’t be in touch much, if at all, until I get to my ballet intensive in three weeks.” Only a few people outside my immediate family even know I’m here. Miss Elise. The director of the intensive in Nashville. Bianca. And Marcus—because we only just broke up. I doubt he’s planning to call or write. Everyone else thinks I’m on a road trip out West with my dad. Noncustodial-parent bonding time, complete with limited internet access and bad cell reception. “I’m not that tied to my phone, anyway.”

She makes a note on her pad. Then she looks at me intently. “So tell me, Sam. What do you hope to get out of your stay here?”

I gulp and give her the answer I’ve been rehearsing. “I would like to learn how to stop having panic attacks.”

“We’ll certainly work on coping mechanisms for your anxiety,” Dr. Lancaster says, “and I’m glad you’re open to doing that work. But we also want to tackle your anxiety issues at their source. Can you tell me a little about the circumstances that surround your panic attacks?”

This is the perfect time for me to mention what happened earlier, with Andrew, but I can’t help deflecting. “My mom and I filled out your giant questionnaire a month ago. Don’t you already have a file on me or something?” I don’t mention the fact that I wasn’t entirely honest in that questionnaire. How could I be, with my mom looming over my shoulder?

Dr. Lancaster smiles patiently. “I’d prefer to hear it in your words. Maybe you can describe a recent panic attack. How you felt just before it hit. Where you were, what was going on.”

I think about Andrew’s promise to let me tell Dr. Lancaster in my own way. He put a lot of trust in me by agreeing not to talk about what happened until I did. “There is something. . . .”

Stop. She doesn’t need to know. No one needs to know.

Dr. Lancaster waits.

“Earlier, during the blindfold exercise, I kind of had . . . okay, I did, but it wasn’t that bad, not compared to . . . and Andrew was there, so I was fine, and anyway, it was over fast.” I stare at my hands. They’re shaking. I tuck them under my thighs.

Dr. Lancaster lets the silence stretch out, until every other sound is amplified. The ticking of the clock on the wall. The whirring buzz of her computer. The branch of the tree outside blowing in the breeze and knocking at the window.

After what feels like an eternity, she says, “Sam, are you trying to tell me that you had a panic attack this morning?”

I force myself to nod. And I parrot what I said earlier: “I would like to learn how to stop having panic attacks.”

“What were you doing when it happened this morning?”

“Um. I was blindfolded. Andrew was leading me across the lawn. And he—I stepped in a hole. And it set me off.”

“Set you off?”

“I started thinking about what would happen to me if I got injured. That’s how my mom’s dance career ended, and for me, I’d be done before I even got started. This summer is really important. For my future.”

“And what happened when you thought about all that?”

“I—I couldn’t breathe.”

Dr. Lancaster writes something down. “How were you feeling before you stepped in the hole?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Describe ‘okay.’”

I look at her. “What do you mean?”

“What does ‘okay’ mean to you? What does it feel like?”

“Oh. Um, anxious, but not terrible.”

Her pen scritch-scritch-scritches on her notepad. “Can you tell me why you were feeling anxious during the blindfold exercise?”