“She’s not my sister.”
The quiet of the office was only broken by the ticking of the clock and the gentle scuff of a well-worn tennis shoe against the faux-wood linoleum floor. Mason didn’t want to be here. Why was he here, anyway? The old man behind the desk, looking every bit the benevolent grandparent there to receive his confession, had nothing to offer him. Especially not now since his attendance at these sessions was mandatory.
It had been a mistake. He’d lost his temper. This was the price the courts wanted him to pay, these asinine discussions, but he wasn’t going to be baited.
Silence settled in until the old man shifted. “You’re not warming to the idea that your home with the Carters is a permanent one, then.”
What was he supposed to say to that? He said nothing.
“If you want to spend the remainder of our session in silence, Mason, that’s fine with me. I don’t get much quiet these days.” The old man blinked at him, patient, waiting. He put his clipboard and pencil down on the desk. “I was hoping you’d be more open to discussing the incident.”
The old man didn’t stand a chance. He’d had enough manipulation, every day of his life, to recognize it for what it was. The doctor could dress it up and call it reverse psychology if he wanted, but it was the same thing. He was hoping for the same result.
“There’s nothing to discuss.”
“I’m only trying to understand your motivation, Mason.”
That made two of them.
It had been a mistake. If everyone else would take it for what it was, this would all be over. He’d made a mistake that was all. Just a stupid mistake—he never should have bothered with her. Never should have interfered. Nicole was a stupid kid, too friendly and open. She’d never learned how to keep her mouth shut or how to tell when people meant her harm. For God’s sake, she thought they were teasing, like her parents did. She was so useless. She should’ve been able to get out of that situation by herself, but she hadn’t.
His mistake was doing it for her.
Everyone was going to think he cared now. His adoptive parents weren’t even grounding him for putting those kids in the hospital. They were talking to him about channeling his “protective urges.” He didn’t want to protect their brat.
“I’m trying to understand because, so far, you’ve only expressed negative emotions about Nicole. How she annoys you. How she follows you around.” Dr. Friedrich was reading off a list. Yes—he’d picked up the clipboard and pencil and was flipping the pages, going back through notes from previous sessions. “She doesn’t know how to be quiet. She’s constantly irritating you with her never ending attempts at talking to you…” There were questions hidden within statements.
Mason wasn’t falling for it.
He wasn’t going to be trapped like this. He’d said what he had to say—a mistake. Period.
“You say she’s not your sister, but the fact of the matter is that the Carters are your family now.”
It was a direct attack, calling them that. The adoption process was over and done with. He stayed in their home. He followed their rules. But it wasn’t his home, and he was sick of people insinuating that it was. Dr. Friedrich had switched tactics, asking questions outright instead of couching them in “insights,” and it pissed Mason off. His breath came too short, his chest swelling with the irritation, and his vision narrowed.
“No.” His voice was too low and he knew it. The word came out on a heavy breath, giving too much away, showing too much emotion. He shouldn’t have been displaying emotion. Not in this place. “They aren’t my family.” The word “family” was a curse. “My family is split between prison and the grave, Dr. Friedrich.” Too much emotion, again, too telling...but he couldn’t stop himself.
The words tumbled out. “My mother’s in Heart’s Cemetery and my father is serving time for putting her there. Marie and Paul? They’re not my parents. They never will be. They’re two adults that I’ll live under until I reach the age of majority and move out on my own. They own the home I crash at. They’re not my parents. They will never be my parents.” It had to stop, all the pushing, pushing. The gentle reminders from Marie that he could call her Mom, he could call Paul Dad. He didn’t want to call them Mom and Dad. He didn’t need Dr. Friedrich reminding him every session that the two of them wanted him as their son. If they’d wanted a son so badly, they should have had one of their own. They should have picked one out from the homes that were more like animal shelters. Marie worked closely with those homes. She’d know. She could have chosen any one of those over-eager people pleasers like they wanted him to be. They could have done anything other than adopt him. He’d said so when that infuriating woman had brought it up.
“I’m not trying to tell you how it is you’re supposed to feel, Mason.”
No? Wasn’t he? It sure seemed like he was.
The words didn’t leave Mason’s lips. He was forcing himself into calm. The last sign was his irritated breath. He let that be his only response. He brought himself under control. He had to. There was no other choice if he had to sit here, answering questions like this. He’d said enough in that short outburst that it made up for several months of nearly silent sessions. Another mistake. It would only make Dr. Friedrich keep pushing, make him think he was making progress.
It would have been a fun game, in any other circumstance, but not this. Not with everyone trying to “help” him. Not with everyone telling him that Marie and Paul were his best shot. They were better than the foster homes and the group homes. They were better than the adoption centers. They’d do until he turned eighteen. That was true enough. He wasn’t trying to screw it up by doing something stupid, like toying with all of them. He had enough entertainment.
Dr. Friedrich broke the silence, yet again. “In all of that expression, you didn’t mention Nicole once,” he commented.
So? Was he supposed to? Did it matter? She was inferior. A thorn in his side. Nonexistent, other than her pestering. After he left, she would disappear from his life.
The doctor continued, “Does that mean you’re more inclined to consider her a family member? Am I off the mark in surmising that you might have been experiencing some familial connection with her that drove you to protect her yesterday?”
Mason snorted, the noise derisive and loud in the quiet office. Familial. It kept coming back to that. Dr. Friedrich raised his eyebrows. Familiar urges. Protective urges. They all wanted to sum him up so nicely.
“She’s. Is. Not. My. Sister.” He enunciated every word with an icy precision, sharp enough to bite off his tongue. He had no siblings. His father had assured him that every other possible sibling had ended in blood before it could be born. Nicole wasn’t his sister. She wasn’t kind of his sister. She wasn’t even…
“I don’t know why I did it.” His control fell away under a surge of anger, hotter than any before. Admitting this truth was harder than being pulled off those boys had been. It’d been excruciating, confessing such a thing, trying to rein in his thoughts and ward off the words that were threatening to pour from his throat. “She’s fucking stupid.” His voice was still frozen, still razor sharp. He stopped dragging the toe of his shoe across the floor and he shifted it so he could press down into the flooring instead. He bounced his knee too fast, fingers balling into a fist on top of it, head shaking as if he could dismiss his own thoughts from his brain by sheer force of will.
“No one taught her anything. She’s so dumb. She talks to strangers. She follows me around as if she can convince me to talk to her by being nice enough.” He wouldn’t—not ever. It didn’t matter how many times she sat outside the door to his room after he’d been expelled, sent upstairs to “think about his actions.” “She shouldn’t be so nice to people. She should know that people are only out to hurt her.” No one liked it. No one wanted that outside of the movies her stupid family liked to watch. “She shouldn’t have been talking to those assholes in the first place. They’ve never been nice to her before.” He didn’t walk to the bus stop with her every day, but he still knew that.
She’d always come home complaining. They’d pulled her hair again. They’d called her an ugly duckling. Paul had complained to the school board, the bus driver, the other parents…A problem that could never be solved. Nicole was supposed to walk several yards back if she saw those boys. She knew it, but she’d fallen for their charade of benevolence and apology anyway.
“Doesn’t she know her stupid doe eyes are going to get her killed?”
That was what happened to girls like that. Too trusting. Too accepting. They wound up with people like his father, or left on the side of the roadway. They wound up on the ten o’clock news with everyone who had every loved them mourning in the background, with nobody smart enough to call attention to the absurdity of their innocence.
The desk in front of him jiggled from the force of his leg bouncing, even without his foot touching it, and Dr. Friedrich tried to cut in. He was talking too fast. Talking too loud. Getting worked up over his own thoughts even more than the things he was saying out loud. The doctor wasn’t encouraging him to keep talking, but the dam had finally burst under the pressure and he couldn’t seize control of the situation any more than he’d been able to stop himself from intervening the morning before.
“They kept teasing her. Passing it off as a joke, and her stupid little ass laughed and bought it. She went with it. She walked with them. She fucking knew better.” Vitriol spilled from his lips, his gaze flying to the clock and the relentless tick of its hands. “She didn’t do anything to set them off. She was just there.” One minute she’d been laughing and the next they were shoving at her backpack to make her stumble. “They started pushing her…” The little dumbass had almost started crying then and there, asking them to stop, saying please like she wasn’t being assaulted by a group of kids with three years and a foot on her. “They kept pushing and trying to make her cry, and then that one...he hit her.”
The inside of his palm ached from the force of his fingernails pressing into the skin, but he couldn’t stop, couldn’t even focus on the pain behind a faint buzz in the back of his head. “He hit her. She didn’t fight back. Why wouldn’t she fight back? She just took it, took the pushing. She didn’t even try to block his fist!” Nicole had stood there, crying, holding her hand over the spot on her cheek that the asshole had managed to hit. He wasn’t strong, or skilled, but he was bigger, and his target was unlucky and weak. “Her dumb ass is going to land herself in the grave, just like my mother, because she wouldn’t do a damned thing.” She took the beating handed to her.
It felt like he was back there, yesterday, and it was overlaid with all the images burned into his mind, all the times his father had stood over his mother, just like that, wearing the same sick, twisted smile. Enjoying the damage, he’d done. Relishing his mother’s tears on that boy’s face. She wouldn’t do a damned thing. “I had to step in.” He’d had no choice. Not with her crying like that. He wasn’t supposed to care, didn’t want to care, but he did. He couldn’t admit it, not even to himself, much less Dr. Friedrich, who was scribbling to keep up. He was only trying to get inside Mason’s head and pull all of his secrets out.
“I don’t know,” he said with a sigh. The anger subsided into a frustration. He lifted a hand and ran it through his curly mass of hair, digging his fingers into his scalp as if that would calm the riot in his brain. “I don’t know. I had to. She didn’t deserve that. She’s annoying, but she didn’t deserve that.” She couldn’t shut up. It was true. “She’s easier to deal with than most people.” Even with the incessant chattering. It was better than her mother’s and better than Paul’s companionable silences. “They call her ugly because they know she’s pretty and they don’t want to admit it.” Just like him. It was what the damaged did. Those assholes might not have been him. He didn’t want them classified in the same group. But…
“She’s not as dumb as she acts. She doesn’t know any better.” She couldn’t shut herself up. She didn’t lift a hand to defend herself when that brat had gone to punch her. “She could be really smart.” She was really smart, but he wasn’t about to say that out loud. He didn’t want to be speaking at all. But he was trapped. If he didn’t try to backtrack, to somehow justify his actions now that he’d said all that, then Dr. Friedrich was going to know something was wrong. He was going to know what burned behind his eyes when he looked at Nicole. He’d know Mason was waiting—waiting for everyone to realize that he was too dangerous to have in that house.
It was too dangerous for Nicole.
He tried to slow his leg, to unclench his fist. One finger at a time. He flipped his hand over and let it rest on his knee, palm pressed into the rough denim, holding himself in place. “It was a mistake.” He repeated it again, his voice slipping into a monotone. He let the anger slip away from his face, let the mask come down and cover his feelings again. Every muscle ticked back into its appointed place. The door closed.
“I don’t think this was a mistake, Mason.” Dr. Friedrich took his chance. “I don’t think that if the situation were to occur again, even after this, that you would make a different choice.”
What was that supposed to mean? Did he think Mason couldn’t control himself? He could. He knew how to hold back his temper. He’d only had a momentary lapse. He said nothing, blinking blankly back at Dr. Friedrich. The doctor put the clipboard down and leaned forward, as if he was about to confide in him rather than lecture him.
“You responded rashly because you care about her. You’re growing to care about her. I won’t call her your sister again if it disturbs you, but the next step is to examine why that would cause you so much discomfort. We need to unpack why you’re so averse to admitting that you don’t hate her as much as you thought you would.”
He would not call her his sister. He would not discuss this. He had no more to say. He said nothing.
“I can see we’ve hit a wall.” Dr. Friedrich leaned back, folding his hands on top of the desk. “Consider these things on your own until our next session.”
Mason stood up.
“Mason—”
He looked down at the doctor.
“I’m not here to judge you. I’m not here for the Carters, or to help you conform to what it is you think they want you to be. I’m here to help you control yourself and your actions. I’m here to help you understand them. I’m at outlet for you to vent your frustrations. We can talk. Nobody wants incidents like yesterday to happen again.” He tapped his fingers on the wood surface of the desk. “Let those emotions out before they overwhelm you.”