A Danger to Herself and Others(38)

“Before what?”

“Before I came here.” Before Agnes’s fall.

Dr. Lightfoot cocks her head to the side, considering.

“Jonah Wyatt. He was in the summer program with…Agnes and me.” The two syllables of Agnes’s name feel heavy in my mouth.

“Did he know Agnes?”

When will Lightfoot stop pretending she doesn’t know exactly who Jonah is? I sigh, looking at the ceiling. “Yeah, he knew her.”

In the biblical sense, probably. Though I never knew for sure. I didn’t ask, because it wouldn’t have mattered either way. What mattered was how he held her hand. How he slept in her bed most nights, resting his fingers on her hip bone. The stuff he did with her that he couldn’t do with me.

I imagine Dr. Lightfoot’s brain working out the details. The wrong details, by the way. She probably thinks I only wanted Jonah because Agnes had him.

“Just so you know, I liked him before he got involved with Agnes. I liked him as soon as we met.” I hate the way my voice sounds more childish with every word. I sound like a little girl protesting, rambling, trying to cover her tracks. “I met him before Agnes met him.”

She can’t take the cafeteria away from me. Next thing I know, it’ll be no showers. And definitely not the grounds privileges Lightfoot teased me with days ago.

“Hannah, I’m afraid I’m not quite following.”

I take my eyes off the ceiling and look at Lightfoot’s face. My psychiatrist looks genuinely confused.

Maybe she really doesn’t know about Jonah.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember Agnes telling her parents about him in all the phone calls I overheard. Maybe they wouldn’t have approved of her having a boyfriend. Maybe they were the kind of parents who didn’t let their daughter date, who wanted her to focus on her responsibilities at home and at school. Maybe they thought Agnes was still their sweet, little girl who’d never been kissed.

No wonder they didn’t like me. The girl from the big city. The bad influence.

Well, it’s time they knew the truth about Agnes. She fell for Jonah all on her own. I had nothing to do with it. It was the last thing I wanted.

“Jonah was Agnes’s boyfriend. They were together all summer.”

Lightfoot blinks, crossing and uncrossing her legs again. (Female praying mantises eat their mates. Just saying.) “I thought Agnes’s boyfriend’s name was Matt.”

I shake my head. “No, Jonah.” I try to imagine someone mistaking Jonah’s name for Matt. Matt sounds like a boy with blond hair and blue eyes, the sort who plays football and wears and letterman jacket. Nothing like Jonah with his tawny hair and hazel fox-eyes, who spends his weekends hiking in the woods and shuns team sports.

“But,” Lightfoot continues, “how could you have met him? Matt lived back in North Dakota. He didn’t come out west to visit until Agnes was in the hospital.”

Agnes had a boyfriend back home? Another boyfriend?

I can’t let Lightfoot see that I didn’t know about Matt. Can’t let her see there were secrets Agnes didn’t tell me. Lightfoot will use it against me: She’ll think Agnes and I weren’t as close as I said we were. That weren’t really best friends. That Agnes didn’t trust me with her deepest, darkest secrets, like the fact that she was cheating on her boyfriend with Jonah.

Lightfoot will think I’ve been lying.

My whole defense rests on the fact that Agnes and I were best friends. That Agnes loved me.

Trusted me.

Wasn’t at all frightened of me.

Lightfoot adds, “Apparently, Matt and Agnes were inseparable back home. They’d been together since seventh grade.”

Were they joined at the hip too?

Actually, this is all starting to make sense. I just need to put the pieces together:

Obviously, Matt was the guy she’d started dating prepuberty. The guy who’d never leave North Dakota, the guy her parents wanted her to marry, the guy who would knock her up and lock her down.

You can’t imagine how trapped you feel. Your whole life is waiting to get out. Not knowing if you ever will.

I told Agnes she’d get out. Girls like you don’t stay in one place for the rest of their lives.

When you say it, I actually believe it.

She’d probably wanted to end it with Matt for years. She just didn’t have the courage to acknowledge it until she met me.

Then she cheated on him with Jonah, who was nothing like Matt. And of course, she couldn’t tell her parents. They never would have approved.

And all this time I thought Jonah and I were the cheaters, the liars, the ones who were sneaking around.

I look squarely at Lightfoot. “Jonah was in the summer program with us. His room was down the hall from ours. Jonah Wyatt.”

The doctor nods. She doesn’t say so, but I know she’s planning to look into it. She’ll look Jonah up. Call him. Call his parents. Get to the bottom of this.

That may be true, she said, like the truth was beside the point. Well, who’s the liar now?

Stephen clears his throat from his position in the doorway.

“Time’s up.” I nod at Lightfoot’s bodyguard. I wonder whose idea it was that he accompany her from one patient’s room to the next. Does the hospital insist on his presence, insurance after some kind of incident? Or maybe Lightfoot asked for him because she’s scared of her patients. Maybe when she went to medical school, she thought she’d end up working with patients whose parents and teachers sent them to therapy for issues like their parents’ divorce or the stress of getting into an Ivy League college—nice, smart girls, easy cases. Maybe Lightfoot thought she’d have an office with wood paneling and built-in bookshelves and that her patients would be the kind of girls who didn’t require security guards. Good troubled girls, not bad troubled girls.