THIRTEEN

DESPITE MY HAVING psychologically decompensated in his presence, Davis texted me the next morning before I even got out of bed.

Him: Want to watch a movie tonight? Doesn’t even have to be set in space.

Me: I can’t. Another time maybe. Sorry I freaked out and for the sweating and everything.

Him: You don’t even sweat an un-normal amount.

Me: I definitely do but I don’t want to talk about it.

Him: You really don’t like your body.

Me: True.

Him: I like it. It’s a good body.

I enjoyed being with him more in this nonphysical space, but I also felt the need to board up the windows of my self.

Me: I feel kinda precarious in general, and I can’t really date you. Or date anyone. I’m sorry but I can’t. I like you, but I can’t date you.

Him: We agree on that. Too much work. All people in relationships ever do is talk about their relationship status. It’s like a Ferris wheel.

Me: Huh?

Him: When you’re on a Ferris wheel all anyone ever talks about is being on the Ferris wheel and the view from the Ferris wheel and whether the Ferris wheel is scary and how many more times it will go around. Dating is like that. Nobody who’s doing it ever talks about anything else. I have no interest in dating.

Me: Well, what do you have an interest in?

Him: You.

Me: I don’t know how to respond to that.

Him: You don’t need to. Have a good day, Aza.

Me: You too, Davis.

—

I had an appointment with Dr. Karen Singh the next day after school. I sat on the love seat across from her and looked up at that picture of a man holding a net. I stared at the picture while we talked because the relentlessness of Dr. Singh’s eye contact was a little much for me.

“How have you been?”

“Not great.”

“What’s going on?” she asked. In my peripheral vision, I could see her legs crossed, black short-heeled shoes, her foot tapping in the air.

“There’s this boy,” I said.

“And?”

“I don’t know. He’s cute and smart and I like him, but I’m not getting any better, and I just feel like if this can’t make me happy, then what can?”

“I don’t know. What can?”

I groaned. “That’s such a psychiatrist move.”

“Point taken. A change in personal circumstances, even a positive one, can trigger anxiety. So it wouldn’t be uncommon to feel anxious as you develop a new relationship. Where are you with the intrusive thoughts?”

“Well, yesterday I was making out with him and had to stop everything because I couldn’t stop thinking about how gross it was, so not great.”

“About how gross what was?”

“Just how his tongue has its own particular microbiome and once he sticks his tongue in my mouth his bacteria become part of my microbiome for literally the rest of my life. Like, his tongue will sort of always be in my mouth until I’m dead, and then his tongue microbes will eat my corpse.”

“And that made you want to stop kissing him.”

“Well, yeah,” I said.

“That’s not uncommon. So part of you wanted to be kissing him and another part of you felt the intense worry that comes with being intimate with someone.”

“Right, but I wasn’t worried about intimacy. I was worried about microbial exchange.”

“Well, your worry expressed itself as being about microbial exchange.”

I just groaned at the therapy bullshit. She asked me if I’d taken my Ativan. I told her I hadn’t brought it to Davis’s house. And then she asked me if I was taking the Lexapro every day, and I was, like, not every day. The conversation devolved into her telling me that medication only works if you take it, and that I had to treat my health problem with consistency and care, and me trying to explain that there is something intensely weird and upsetting about the notion that you can only become yourself by ingesting a medication that changes your self.

When the conversation paused for a moment, I asked, “Why’d you put up that picture? Of that guy with the netting?”

“What aren’t you saying? What are you scared to say, Aza?”

I thought about the real question, the one that remained constantly in the background of my consciousness like a ringing in the ears. I was embarrassed of it, but also I felt like saying it might be dangerous somehow. Like how you don’t ever say Voldemort’s name. “I think I might be a fiction,” I said.

“How’s that?”

“Like, you say it’s stressful to have a change in circumstances, right?”

She nodded.

“But what I want to know is, is there a you independent of circumstances? Is there a way-down-deep me who is an actual, real person, the same person if she has money or not, the same person if she has a boyfriend or not, the same if she goes to this school or that school? Or am I only a set of circumstances?”

“I don’t follow how that would make you fictional.”

“I mean, I don’t control my thoughts, so they’re not really mine. I don’t decide if I’m sweating or get cancer or C. diff or whatever, so my body isn’t really mine. I don’t decide any of that—outside forces do. I’m a story they’re telling. I am circumstances.”

She nodded. “Can you apprehend these outside forces?”

“No, I’m not hallucinating,” I said. “It’s . . . like, I’m just not sure that I am, strictly speaking, real.”

Dr. Singh placed her feet on the floor and leaned forward, her hands on her knees. “That’s very interesting,” she said. “Very interesting.” I felt briefly proud to be, for a moment anyway, not not uncommon. “It must be very scary, to feel that your self might not be yours. Almost a kind of . . . imprisonment?”

I nodded.

“There’s a moment,” she said, “near the end of Ulysses when the character Molly Bloom appears to speak directly to the author. She says, ‘O Jamesy let me up out of this.’ You’re imprisoned within a self that doesn’t feel wholly yours, like Molly Bloom. But also, to you that self often feels deeply contaminated.”

I nodded.

“But you give your thoughts too much power, Aza. Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don’t.”

“But your thoughts are you. I think therefore I am, right?”

“No, not really. A fuller formation of Descartes’s philosophy would be Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. ‘I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.’ Descartes wanted to know if you could really know that anything was real, but he believed his ability to doubt reality proved that, while it might not be real, he was. You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.”

—

The moment I got back home, I could feel Mom’s nerves jangling about my visit with Dr. Singh, even though she was trying to be calm and normal. “How was it?” she asked, not looking back at me while grading tests on the couch.

“Good, I guess,” I said.

“I want to apologize again for the way I spoke to Davis yesterday,” she said. “You have every right to be upset with me.”

“I’m not,” I said.

“But I want you to be cautious, Aza. I can tell your anxiety is increasing—from your face to your fingertip.”

I balled up my hand and said, “It’s not him.”

“What is it then?”

“There’s no reason,” I said, and turned on the TV, but she took the remote and muted it.

“You seemed locked inside of your mind, and I can’t know what’s going on in there, and it scares me.” I pressed my thumbnail against my fingertip through the Band-Aid, thinking it would scare her a lot more if she could see what was going on in there.

“I’m fine. Really.”

“But you’re not.”

“Mom, tell me what to say. Seriously. Just . . . tell me what words I can say to make you calm down about it.”

“I don’t want to calm down. I want you to stop being in pain.”

“Well, that’s not how it works, okay? I have to go read for history.”

I stood up, but before I could get to my room, she said, “Speaking of which, Mr. Myers told me today that your essay on the Columbian Exchange was the best he’d seen in all his years of teaching.”

“He’s been teaching like two years,” I said.

“Four, but still,” she said. “You’re going places, Aza Holmes. Big places.”

“Did you ever hear of Amherst?” I asked.

“Where?”

“Amherst. It’s this college in Massachusetts. It’s really good. It’s ranked really high. I think I might want to go there—if I get in.”

Mom started to say something but swallowed it, and then sighed. “We’ll just have to see where the scholarships come from.”

“Or Sarah Lawrence,” I said. “That one seems good, too.”

“Well, remember, Aza, a lot of those schools charge you just to apply, so we have to be selective. The whole process is rigged, from start to finish. They make you pay to find out you can’t afford to go. We need to be realistic, and realistically, you’re going to be close to home, okay? And not only because of money. I don’t think you really want to be halfway across the country from everything you know.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Okay, I get it. You don’t want to talk to your mother. I love you anyway.” She blew me a kiss and at last I escaped to my room.

—

I did have to read for history, but after I finished, I wasn’t tired and I kept thinking about texting Davis.

I knew what I wanted to write, or at least what I was thinking about writing. I couldn’t stop thinking about the text—writing it out, hitting send knowing I couldn’t take it back, the sweaty heart-race of waiting for a reply.

I turned off my light, rolled over onto my side, and shut my eyes, but I couldn’t shake the thought; so I reached over for my phone, clicked it awake, and wrote him. When you said before that you like my body, what did you mean?

I watched the screen for a few seconds, waiting for the . . . of his reply to appear, but it didn’t, so I put the phone back onto the bedside table. My brain was quiet now that I’d done the thing it wanted me to do, and I was nearly asleep when I heard the phone vibrate.

Him: I mean I like it.

Me: What about it?

Him: I like the way your shoulders slope down into your collarbone.

Him: And I like your legs. I like the curve of your calf.

Him: I like your hands. I like your long fingers and the insides of your wrists, the color of the skin there, the veins underneath it.

Me: I like your arms.

Him: They’re skinny.

Me: They feel strong actually. Is this okay?

Him: Very.

Me: So, the curve of my calf? I never noticed it.

Him: It’s nice.

Me: Is that it?

Him: I like your ass. I really really like your ass. Is this okay?

Me: Yes.

Him: I want to start a fan blog about your ass.

Me: Okay that’s a little weird.

Him: I want to write fan fiction in which your amazing butt falls in love with your beautiful eyes.

Me: lol. You are really ruining the moment. You were saying...before...?

Him: That I like your body. I like your stomach and your legs and your hair and I like. Your. Body.

Me: Really?

Him: Really.

Me: What is wrong with me that texting is fun and kissing is scary?

Him: Nothing is wrong with you. Want to come over after school Monday? Watch a movie or something?

I paused for a while before finally writing, Sure.