A Flicker in the Dark(2)

“It’s a release,” she says. “It helps me calm down.”

I nod, trying to ignore the itch in my throat. It’s getting worse. Maybe it’s dust, I tell myself—it is dusty in here. I glance over to the windowsill, the bookshelf, the diplomas framed on my wall, all of them sporting a fine layer of gray, glinting in the sunlight.

Focus, Chloe.

I turn back toward the girl.

“And why do you think that is, Lacey?”

“I just told you. I don’t know.”

“If you had to speculate.”

She sighs, glances to the side, and stares intently at nothing in particular. She’s avoiding eye contact. The tears are coming shortly.

“I mean, it probably has something to do with my dad,” she says, her lower lip trembling slightly. She pushes her blonde hair back from her forehead. “With him leaving and everything.”

“When did your dad leave?”

“Two years ago,” she says. As if on cue, a single tear erupts from her tear duct and glides down her freckled cheek. She wipes it angrily. “He didn’t even say goodbye. He didn’t even give us a fucking reason why. He just left.”

I nod, scribbling more notes.

“Do you think it’s fair to say that you’re still pretty angry with your dad over him leaving you like that?”

Her lip trembles again.

“And since he didn’t say goodbye, you weren’t able to tell him how his actions made you feel?”

She nods at the bookshelf in the corner, still avoiding me.

“Yeah,” she says. “I guess that’s fair.”

“Are you angry with anyone else?”

“My mom, I guess. I don’t really know why. I always figured that she drove him away.”

“Okay,” I say. “Anybody else?”

She’s quiet, her fingernail picking at a chunk of raised skin.

“Myself,” she whispers, not bothering to wipe the puddle of tears pooling in the corners of her eyes. “For not being good enough to make him want to stay.”

“It’s okay to be angry,” I say. “We’re all angry. And now that you’re comfortable verbalizing why you’re angry, we can work together to help you manage it a little better. To help you manage it in a way that doesn’t hurt you. Does that sound like a plan?”

“It’s so fucking stupid,” she mutters.

“What is?”

“Everything. Him, this. Being here.”

“What about being here is stupid, Lacey?”

“I shouldn’t have to be here.”

She’s shouting now. I lean back, casually, and lace my fingers together. I let her yell.

“Yeah, I’m angry,” she says. “So what? My dad fucking left me. He left me. Do you know what that feels like? Do you know what it feels like being a kid without a dad? Going to school and having everyone look at you? Talk about you behind your back?”

“I actually do,” I say. “I do know what that’s like. It’s not fun.”

She’s quiet now, her hands shaking in her lap, the pads of her thumb and pointer finger rubbing the cross on her bracelet. Up and down, up and down.

“Did your dad leave you, too?”

“Something like that.”

“How old were you?”

“Twelve,” I say.

She nods. “I’m fifteen.”

“My brother was fifteen.”

“So you get it, then?”

This time, I nod, smile. Establishing trust—the hardest part.

“I get it,” I say, leaning forward again, closing the distance between us. She turns toward me now, her tear-soaked eyes boring into mine, pleading. “I totally get it.”





CHAPTER TWO




My industry thrives on clichés—I know it does. But there’s a reason clichés exist.

It’s because they’re true.

A fifteen-year-old girl taking a razor to her skin probably has something to do with feelings of inadequacy, of needing to feel physical pain to drown out the emotional pain burning inside her. An eighteen-year-old boy with anger management issues definitely has something to do with an unresolved parental dispute, feelings of abandonment, needing to prove himself. Needing to seem strong when inside, he’s breaking. A twenty-year-old college junior getting drunk and sleeping with every boy who buys her a two-dollar vodka tonic, then crying about it in the morning, reeks of low self-esteem, a yearning for attention because she had to fight for it at home. An inner conflict between the person she is and the person she thinks everyone wants her to be.

Daddy issues. Only child syndrome. A product of divorce.

They’re clichés, but they’re true. And it’s okay for me to say that, because I’m a cliché, too.

I glance down at my smartwatch, the recording from today’s session blinking on the screen: 1:01:52. I tap Send to iPhone and watch the little timer fill from gray to green as the file shoots over to my phone, then simultaneously syncs to my laptop. Technology. When I was a girl, I remember each doctor grabbing my file, thumbing through page after page as I sat in some variation of the same weathered recliner, eying their file cabinets full of other people’s problems. Full of people like me. Somehow, it made me feel less lonely, more normal. Those four-drawer metal lockboxes symbolized the possibility of me somehow being able to express my pain one day—verbalize it, scream about it, cry about it—then when the sixty-minute timer ticked down to zero, we could simply flip the folder closed and put it back in the drawer, locking it tight and forgetting about its contents until another day.