Idon’t know when night turns into day. My room is still a fortress, light banished, all cracks concealed. I’m one Elizabethan gown away from being that princess trapped in a forgotten tower. There’s something about the dark space that reeks of smug. It reminds me for the ten-thousandth time that letting my heart direct my head has amounted to an almost total loss of control. Or, in average-teenager terms, I left my room last night, and now Luke is coming by to loan me movies I’m not even sure I want to watch. I make a mental note: this is not a mistake I will make twice. Next time, I stick with the routine.
I grab my duvet, trip downstairs in the same drunken way a Slinky does when it picks up speed, take the last step twice, and crash on to the couch.
I’m not awake, not quite asleep, when there’s a swift, sharp knock at the door and I almost fly through the ceiling. But instead of the usual Who could that be?, my head goes straight to How do I look?
That’s new.
And a little unnerving.
I don’t need a mirror to know I look like I’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards. To know my blue eyes have turned bloodshot and are undoubtedly framed by big, black bags. I feel like I’m wearing a hat, which usually means my hair is so piled up on top of my head, it’s possible a couple of crows are already nesting in it.
My body weighs a ton. Moving is like hurling a lorry across the carpet. I’m sluggish, shoulders hunched, heading towards the window at the sort of pace you might expect from an overweight snail and scoring friction burns on the soles of my feet. I wonder if Luke is persistent. If I don’t answer today, will he come back tomorrow? Will he keep sending notes? What if he starts asking around school about me? What if he thinks I’m horrible, just being rude, ignoring his knock for no good reason? I shudder. This is the least welcome worry, but it’s the biggest and loudest, trickling into my brain and seeking out space like water. I’m not horrible or rude. It’s just complicated.
I tiptoe to the window, take a peek from behind the curtain. I’m hoping I can manipulate my neck to an angle where I can see the porch without putting my face through the glass. Turns out, I don’t need to. There’s a car parked out front. A sleek, silver sports car with a red soft-top roof.
Thank God. It’s not Luke knocking; it’s Dr Reeves.
Wait.
What? I do a double take of the car. I completely forgot she was coming today.
I never forget about therapy.
Never.
This is brand-new too.
And even more unnerving.
The doc knocks again, and I’m forced to abandon reflection. I make a dash for the hall.
‘Norah.’ Dr Reeves startles when I whip open the door. The gust it creates sends her hair into a brown-fire frenzy. I snatch her wrist, pull her inside before any Lukes can jump out to say hi.
‘Morning,’ I say, out of breath and straightening my shirt. The doc’s eyes narrow and her head tilts a little to the left.
‘Everything okay?’ she asks. My eyes home in on her mouth. Or, more specifically, on the clump of hair clinging to her lip gloss.
‘Everything is fine.’ I nod until my neck feels like it might snap. Her lips are a burnt-orange colour. She doesn’t wear this shade at the office. My fingers curl into fists and I pop a knuckle. I really need her to brush that hair away before it finds its way into her mouth.
‘Norah, where’s your head at?’
‘Huh?’ My eyes stay focused on her rogue tresses. Would it be rude to mention it? It probably would be, so I won’t. But there is so much gross stuff lurking in hair, on hair. She might want to know. She must be able to feel it.
‘Norah.’ The doctor snaps her fingers a bunch of times, and I adjust my eyeline to meet her concerned gaze. ‘Where’s your head?’
‘Nowhere.’ My knees turn in, touch, and I feel like I just got busted doing something I shouldn’t. She takes a deep breath and opens her mouth but doesn’t say a word.
Unfortunately for me, Dr Reeves didn’t turn stupid in her sleep. She allows the silence to stretch, questions me with her stare instead.
‘Everywhere,’ I admit. ‘I can’t focus.’ My eye starts to twitch. It tickles until I give it a scratch. Maybe this is it. Maybe this is what a breakdown feels like. ‘And you have some hair stuck to your lip.’
‘Better?’ she asks, swiping it away.
I nod, feeling way more awkward than she ever has, ever will.
‘I’m trying this new stuff,’ she tells me, pressing her lips together and making a schmack sound with her mouth. ‘The colour is Autumn Mist. The consistency is glue. I think the best place for it is in the trash. Anyway . . .’ She smiles softly. ‘I know there is more on your mind than a slight make-up mishap. Spill.’
We make our way into the kitchen, her heels clip-clop-ping across the floor.
She makes a cup of coffee, the instant kind that sits in an unopened jar in the condiment cabinet. Then we both take a seat at the breakfast bar.
It all feels a bit tense, me on one side of the counter, her on the other. The space around us has somehow morphed into the shady interior of a police interrogation room.
‘Talk to me. Talk to me as a friend,’ she urges.
‘There’s this boy,’ I say, voice shaking, words so dense they struggle to slide beyond my lips. The doc raises her eyebrows. Shock. That’s fair. Nobody is more shocked by this development than me.
‘He lives next door. I resolved to avoid him, but our paths kept crossing, and now I’m not so sure I want to . . . avoid him.’
My face feels how Botox abuse looks. ‘I might be in a little over my head.’ I abandon my chair, stand up, and start pacing, which usually helps me think, but today it’s just making me dizzy. I grab the hem of my shirt, search for a loose thread, and pull at it.
‘Norah, we’re just talking right now. Who knows, I may even be able to help you figure this out. At least let me try.’
It’s like smashing down a dam, opening floodgates, dropping a flame into a box of fireworks. My mouth opens and the words keep on coming.
‘It’s my fault. I watched him a couple of times and he saw. And then the groceries got left on the porch, but Helping Hands was closed, and so he passed them to me. So he must be nice, right? And then he wrote me some letters. Not love letters; stupid stuff. He’s funny. And I lied about going to the same school as him. And about having a cold.’ Imagine Hamlet sauntering about the stage, hand to heart, delivering an epic monologue. That’s about where I’m at right now.
Dr Reeves just lets me talk, doesn’t even attempt to slow me down or stop me. She does this thing where she pushes a thumb up under her chin and strokes an invisible goatee with a hooked finger.
At first, I thought it signalled her tuning out my incessant ramblings, but then she explained that she was taking mental notes. She says she doesn’t like to interrupt my stream of panic because she knows my mouth is directly quoting my mind and she wants to hear exactly what is going on inside my head. I think she’s brave.
‘I can’t tell Luke why I lied. Can I? How can I be his friend? I’m afraid he’ll laugh at me. He came over to talk to me about France.’ Dr Reeves always smiles broadly when I mention France. ‘I couldn’t tell him I can’t go there. But when he talks, he doesn’t think about the things that are wrong with me because he doesn’t know. Which is bad, but I like it. I think I’m his friend. I think we’re friends. And then he goes and invites me to this party. Obviously I can’t go to that either, but not that obvious because I think something inside me wants to go to the party.’ I slap a hand down over my heart and clutch at the skin because that’s where I’m hurting right now. ‘I’m curious. And not just curious because my mind is trying to compute the millions of ways everything could go wrong. This is different. Persuasive. Powerful. It convinces me to leave my room. My room. My fortress. It talks me into getting closer to the music. And then he’s at my door. Luke is. He writes me more notes. And suddenly he wants to come by today. He seems interested. So why does he leave when Queen Amy wants to talk to him? She’s everything, and she’s not hiding, so it makes sense that he would want to talk to her. She is probably normal. I’m so afraid he’ll mock me.’
And then silence. Eardrums everywhere rejoice.
I’m shaking. I don’t cry, but I want to. Instead, I take a breath, suck all the air right out of the room and fill my depleted lungs with it. It feels good. Cold, the same way eucalyptus does when you inhale it deep. And freeing, like my entire torso has been wrapped in a bandage that has suddenly unravelled.
‘I’ve spent all night losing my mind. Can you please help me?’
‘Of course, but first, let’s get you something to drink,’ she says, clip-clopping over to the fridge.
I watch pearls of condensation roll down my glass of orange juice as Dr Reeves takes a sip of her coffee. If it tastes bad, I can’t tell. Beyond the slurping sounds, I can hear the wheels of her mind turning. I can’t look up and meet her eyes because I feel all kinds of naked right now.
‘You remember when we talked about neural pathways?’ She draws on the table with her fingertip. A tree with squiggly roots sprouting off in all different directions.
‘About how the brain learns and how it ties instances together so those things then become associated?’ It’s no coincidence that she’s still drawing roots on the tree that I’m pretty confident we can now label Norah’s Brain.
I nod. I remember this conversation. I remember breaking out in hives after hearing the conclusion. It’s about changing the way I think. Which sounds so simple, but whether I like to admit it or not, anxiety has become my best friend. It’s a crutch that helps me hobble through life. It’s the brassy bitch at school that I don’t like, but being her BFF makes me popular. Or the school bully that I don’t really want to be around, but being his friend means I don’t get beaten up. I don’t know how to be safe without it. We’re buddies. It’s like they say: keep your friends close, your enemies closer.
‘We said we were going to try and change those pathways, right? Norah, the thing about cognitive therapy is, it relies on repetition. It would be fair to say that we can’t create these new pathways, these new associations, if we’re still clinging to the ideas that created the old ones, right?’
Of course she’s right. Her brain’s so big it’s a wonder she can fit through doors that aren’t double.
With two fingers, she starts rubbing away at the table-top, erasing some of the roots. ‘When we talked about how people perceive us, what was it we concluded?’
‘I don’t remember.’ I find a patch of skin on the back of my hand, start scratching, break flesh and feel blood, sticky, collecting under my thumbnail, but it doesn’t hurt. I’m numb.
‘Take a deep breath for me,’ Dr Reeves says.
She wants me to draw a parallel between myself and a story she once told me about a chick we’ve aptly named Perception Girl.
‘It’s not the same,’ I tell her, shaking my head. I can hear Luke laughing as I try to explain to him why I can’t venture beyond the front door. Why I count. Why I wash my hands a hundred times a day. Why I go days without eating and sleeping. Why I haven’t spoken to another teenager in almost four years.
‘What’s not the same?’ Dr Reeves pushes.
‘About the girl.’
‘What girl?’ She’s trying to pull words from my mouth and I’ve run out of ways to stall.
‘The perception girl!’ I yell. ‘The one that doesn’t get laughed at.’ Perception Girl’s job is to help me see what other people see when they look at me.
‘Remind me. Why doesn’t she get laughed at?’ Dr Reeves says, setting her cup down on the place mat. Except she doesn’t get it central and I can see it tilting. It agitates me. I don’t ask, just reach across the table and set the damn thing straight.
‘Because she’s sick. And people don’t laugh at sick people,’ I tell her through clenched teeth.
‘And what are you?’
‘I’m sick!’ I shout. But not because I’m angry. It’s like I’m trying to make myself listen. No, not listen, hear. The same way a sergeant drills instructions into the heads of his platoon.
Or maybe I am angry. Angry that my mind can function so proficiently on one thing and remain completely obtuse on the next.
‘Norah, listen to me. The general population doesn’t want to laugh at a seventeen-year-old girl whose life is being held hostage by her brain. As a rule, people don’t laugh at those who are suffering. And Norah, you are suffering.’
‘How can I expect people to empathize with a sickness they can’t see?’ Tears sting my eyes.
‘You don’t expect anything. You talk, you teach.’
I shake my head, pull back my chair, ready to sit down, but decide I’d rather stay standing. More control. That’s what I need. Somehow, height gives me this feeling like I have an advantage.
Dr Reeves draws new roots on our invisible tabletop tree. There aren’t quite as many now, and they’re not so squiggly, not nearly as erratic. I want to believe her; I want to be able to hear Luke understanding as easily as I hear him laughing.
‘I’m afraid,’ I confess in a whisper. I’m always afraid, but I don’t usually admit it out loud.
‘It’s a huge thing,’ she tells me. ‘That’s why you fight this therapy so much. Your brain is freaking out because it knows that to create new paths and form different ideas, you have to lend yourself a little to the unknown.’
God. I wish she was more like the Jar Jar Binks of therapy and less like the Yoda.
‘Okay.’ I sit down. ‘What if . . .’ My words are muffled by a mouthful of shirt collar. What I really want to do is pull the whole thing over my head and disappear, but I don’t. ‘What if he is a part of the asshole percentage and does laugh at me?’
Dr Reeves picks up her cup, cradles it, and smiles. ‘I think you’ve answered your own question.’ She sits back a little in her chair. ‘I met a woman at a conference once. She told us this story about her daughter who was desperate to date this guy on the football team. He rejected her because he said she was too ugly. Two years later, she met a boy at college, and after she got her law degree, they married, had three children, and now live a happy little life in the suburbs. What’s the point of this story?’
‘Effect and outcome.’
‘Exactly. We can assume the best, but we can’t choose how people perceive us. We can, however, choose how those views affect us.’
I stare at the tree on the table, realize I’m a hypocrite. I’ve judged Luke before he’s even had a chance to judge me. And then it happens. He knocks, the sound echoing around my house.
‘You have more control over this than you think, than your pathways are allowing you to believe.’ The doc stands. ‘And you’re assuming you have to offload your life story right now, but you don’t. You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to. You do a lot of things in your free time with books and movies and music and language. Invite him in, talk about anything else.’
‘But what if I have to fix his leaning coffee cup? Or what if he starts biting dirty fingernails and my stomach does that swirling thing? He’s going to know I’m a freak.’
Dr Reeves shoots me a look that feels a lot like a slap across the face. ‘I thought we banned that word.’
‘I revived it.’
‘Well, I’m killing it. For good this time. Just . . . be yourself.’
‘That’s horrible advice.’
She laughs as Luke knocks a second time.
‘I’ll be right there!’ I turn my hand into a megaphone and bellow down the hall.
‘You know what I hate?’ Dr Reeves asks, glancing at her reflection in the fridge door. With her index finger she strokes the bridge of her nose, flicks the end a few times, then crinkles it up. ‘I hate my nose. It’s huge. Takes up eighty-five per cent of my face. It’s bulbous and I wish I had the guts to get it fixed.’
‘What?’ I try but fail to see the problem. Her nose is small and cute, maybe even a little bit button. ‘No, it’s not.’
‘Aha.’ She points at me; her mouth opens and a gotcha expression pulls at her features. ‘You can’t always look at yourself subjectively. You need to remember that. Trust me when I say just be yourself.’ She walks over to me, exhibits an extreme amount of caution before resting a soft hand on my shoulder. ‘And don’t forget, that number for my cell is still good, any time. Okay?’
As I nod, Luke raps on the door again. I just stand there, staring past the table, over a vase of pink peonies and down the hall, which I swear has doubled in length.
‘You might want to get that,’ Dr Reeves whispers as she leaves out the back.