The Truth About Keeping Secrets(30)
Mom returned and kissed me on the head. ‘All right, baby, you’re good to go. Play nice. Back in an hour.’
I winced in embarrassment as Mom left, the door chiming behind her.
Baby Face glanced at me, then returned his attention to the book. ‘Play nice,’ he deadpanned.
‘You first.’
A woman emerged from the door that led from the waiting room towards whatever other horrors awaited us. She had a worn, kind face, and looked like she’d gotten dressed under the impression that it was 1974 – paisley maxi skirt, long blond hair draped round a cotton shirt. ‘Leo? And you must be Sydney, right? Hello, chickadees, why don’t you come on through?’
Ha. So he had a name.
We trailed behind her like ducklings. ‘You’re a little early but I figured you could come in the office, familiarize yourself with the various sights and smells and auras.’
I rolled my eyes internally.
The office was hardly big enough for the seven chairs it held, all positioned in a circle. This was it? I’d envisioned this being like AA, or something, with twenty people and ample legroom, but this was not like that. Leo followed behind me like we were about to be executed via a swift gunshot to the back of the head. He plopped himself down across the circle from me, much more heavily than necessary, and I lowered my head; I suspected this boy might have been a human bomb and I wasn’t interested in positioning myself inside his blast radius.
Gerry told us to make ourselves at home but I couldn’t because the room was too small and poorly lit and it felt like someone was watching me. Probably Leo. I comforted myself with the thought that Mom was most likely right; Dad would have wanted this.
The next entrants came in a pair, their matching heads of thick, dark hair and wide-set eyes suggesting they were siblings. The boy was older and walked ahead of the younger girl, who was just a wisp, petite and birdlike; she couldn’t have been older than thirteen. She walked with her eyes fixed on her phone, the way she swiped the screen at occasional intervals suggesting she was playing a game. The boy gave me an uncertain, closed-mouth smile, but said nothing.
They were followed by a chubby girl with big eyes and these electric-blue box braids that I wanted to compliment, but it would’ve been awkward, so I didn’t.
‘Hurrah! That’s everyone.’ The woman from before sat down, a notebook in hand, and took a breath, eyeing the lot of us. We all focused on her so as not to have to pretend any more that we weren’t trying to sneak glances of each other. Leo appeared to only be interested in the ceiling tiles. ‘Thank you all for being here, firstly. I met with all of you individually – except you, Sydney – but just to refresh your memory, I’m Gerry.’
Leo wouldn’t stop jiggling his leg up and down.
‘So, this first session is focused mainly on breaking the ice. Don’t worry, we’re not gonna do anything crazy. My philosophy is that, you know, no one is going to get anything out of this experience unless we feel comfortable with each other and free to share. I know, I know, at first glance this stuff might seem boring, but personally, I cannot think of anything more exciting than meeting fellow members of the human race.’ Gerry spoke with her hands, these smooth, fluid movements that were maybe too over the top in normal conversation but here, they were almost hypnotic. She had us introduce ourselves – name, age, who croaked and how, and something she called ‘availability’, on a scale of one to ten. How ‘here’ we were. How willing we were to participate.
The siblings started. Their older brother had overdosed. Jacob confidently rated himself a ‘ten’ in here-ness; Nora, seemingly unsure what to do with herself, refused to speak at all. Jacob mumbled an apology, and draped an arm round her shoulder. ‘She’s a little nervous,’ he said.
The girl with the box braids, Jasmine, laughed nervously when she gave herself an ‘eight’; her grandma had died because she was old.
Then it was me. ‘I’m, uh, Sydney. I’m seventeen. My dad died in a car accident last September.’ It occurred to me that I was the only one who’d said the month, then felt like a freak. I sensed Leo glancing at me, but I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of looking back, because I was pretty sure I hated him, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t really here at all, I was in the car, I was swerving, smashing, stopping, but I lied to remove the attention from myself. ‘And … seven, I guess.’ Negative seven, I thought.
‘Leo. Seventeen. Rather not say about the rest.’ Gerry said that was fine, but then asked him how here he was, and he said, ‘I’m far, far away.’
Wow. That’s really cool, man.
Come on, I wanted to say. We’re all trying our best. Just say who crossed the fucking rainbow bridge.
We spent most of the hour playing a game creatively titled ‘Move’, where Gerry would give a statement and if it was true for us we’d have to get up and go to an empty chair.
Having been told by people since Dad died that they knew how I felt, it was weird to be in a room of other kids who actually did know. Well, at least partly. I wasn’t convinced anyone felt the exact same way I did. That’s the rub about being human, I guess. You have all these tools to express yourself, art and music and poetry and stuff, but no one will ever truly know how you feel unless you somehow manage to create a projection of your brain and play it on to the wall. Even then it might not be as vivid. Even then it might not be as close.