A Danger to Herself and Others(33)

“Why weren’t you paying attention, Hannah?” Lightfoot shifts her weight from one foot to the next. “What had you so distracted that you lost your way?”

What would a normal teenage girl be distracted about?

A normal teenage girl would be sitting on a couch, not a bed, when she had therapy. Then again, maybe a normal teenage girl wouldn’t need therapy. Though plenty of the girls in my school had therapists. Sometimes it was because their parents were getting divorced and were worried about how the kids were adjusting. Or because the pressure to get a perfect score on the SATs made them stop sleeping and they’d started to abuse their Ritalin (or Adderall, or Dexedrine, or Focalin…) prescription. Or maybe they were struggling with depression. Or an eating disorder—not like the E.D. girls here (no one at school was sick enough for inpatient treatment, as far as I know)—but plenty of girls obsessed over their bodies enough that their parents might gently suggest they needed therapy.

Were those girls normal?

“Hannah?” Lightfoot prompts. “Are you still distracted?”

If Lightfoot gets suspicious, she might figure out that Lucy’s gone AWOL.

Stop. I should be worrying about myself, not about Lucy.





twenty-four


Quickly, I say, “I was thinking about the girls at school. My real school, I mean, not summer school. Back home. In the city.”

Dr. Lightfoot nods. Her face softens a little. “What was your old school like?” Lightfoot jerks her chin in Stephen’s direction. He brings in her folding chair. Dr. Lightfoot sits and crosses her legs. I’m not in trouble anymore. Or if I am, Lightfoot is more interested in what I might say than in punishing me.

I have to keep going. Keep her interested.

Lightfoot surely has notes about my school in her thick “Hannah Gold” file. Back in Manhattan, I go to a private all-girls’ school on the Upper East Side. It’s famous (supposedly the school in Gossip Girl was based on us back in the day) but small. There are no more than twenty girls in each classroom and no more than fifty girls in each grade. About half of the students have been there since kindergarten, like I have. Last year, 70 percent of the senior class went to Ivy League universities, and the other 30 percent went to equally prestigious places like Stanford and Duke and Vanderbilt and the University of Chicago.

The school paper printed a list of who was going where like it was big news. Copies of the list were sent home to parents with children in kindergarten through eleventh grade, so they’d have something to look forward to. The list was even sent to alumnae, so they’d know the school hadn’t gone downhill since they graduated.

“I’ve gone to the same school since kindergarten,” I answer finally.

“So it was like home to you?”

“Yeah,” I say, but I’m shaking my head. “I mean, not as much as it was for some of the other girls.”

“And why’s that?”

“A bunch of them knew each other since before kindergarten. They were in the same preschool classes, the same Mommy and Me classes, or whatever.”

“But not you?”

I shake my head again. “My parents didn’t send me to preschool. They took me with them everywhere they went.” By the time I was five, I’d been more places than most fifty-year-olds.

“That must have been nice, knowing your parents wanted you with them instead of leaving you with a babysitter.”

I nod. “Of course it was.” Maybe Dr. Lightfoot had parents who traveled a lot for work, or for pleasure, who had active social lives that didn’t involve their children. (I’m assuming Dr. Lightfoot isn’t an only child. Most people aren’t.) Maybe she always wished her parents would let her be part of their big, exciting, grown-up lives. Maybe she’s jealous of me because my parents did.

“On trips, I always had my own hotel room—”

“Always? Even at five years old?”

“Sure,” I answer with a shrug. Maybe when I was a baby-baby, they had me sleep in a crib in their room. Or sometimes we’d have a two-bedroom suite, so I guess that’s not technically my own room. A lot of the time we were in adjoining rooms, side by side with a door between us. But more than once, the hotel messed up our reservations so that I was down the hall rather than right next door.

“That’s unusual,” Lightfoot suggests.

“How much trouble can a kid get into in a hotel room?” I say it, but it’s my mother’s voice I hear. That’s what she used to say when they left me alone.

“It’s not always about getting into trouble,” Lightfoot says. “Most little kids would be frightened.”

“I wasn’t.”

“It’d be okay if you were. Being left alone would upset most children.”

I shake my head. I wasn’t like most children. “I ate in Michelin-starred restaurants all around the world. That’s better than going to Mommy and Me class, right?”

A Michelin star is the reason I started kindergarten two weeks late. My parents had been on the wait-list for reservations at this new restaurant in Paris for months. When a September date opened up, they booked our trip immediately, even though the tickets and hotel were more expensive than usual because it was such short notice. They didn’t worry that I might fall behind on any important lessons. After all, I was already reading and writing at a second-grade level. (I can practically hear my mother’s voice: Missing a couple weeks of kindergarten won’t hurt.)