What if he’d been as depressed as me this past week?

What if, after a week apart, he’d realized how much he misses me, and as much as I was sitting here longing to be in his arms, smelling his neck, Michael was longing to have me in his arms, smelling his neck?

And before I could change my mind, I clicked OPEN….

SKINNERBX: Hey, Mia. It’s me. Well, obviously. Just checking in to see how you’re doing. Lilly tells me you haven’t been in school all week…hope everything is all right. I’m settling in here in Tsukuba. This place is a little nutty—they really do eat noodles for breakfast! But fortunately you can still find egg sandwiches most places. The work is what I expected it to be—hard—but I really think I have a solid chance of actually getting this thing off the ground. Although who knows if I’ll still feel that optimistic after a few more weeks of this.

Did you see they’re supposedly in talks for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel reunion movie? I thought you’d be excited about that.

Well, I have to go…I really hope you’re out of school because you’ve jetted off to somewhere great for princess duty, and not because you’ve come down with something.

Michael

I sat there for a long time with my finger poised to click REPLY. I mean, he’d expressed concern over my health (physical, not mental, but that’s okay. I doubt even Michael would have been able to predict I’d hit rock bottom, self-actualization-wise, and end up in a cowboy psychologist’s office in my Hello Kitty pajamas and a duvet).

Still, that had to mean something, right? That there’s something there? That maybe he still loves me, at least a little? That maybe there’s a chance after all that someday, some way, I might be able to smell his neck again, on a semi-regular basis?

But then…I don’t know. I thought about what he’d said on the phone. About just wanting to be friends. That’s all, I realized, this e-mail was. A friendly note to show he had no hard feelings over the J.P. thing.

HOW COULD HE HAVE NO HARD FEELINGS OVER THAT? HADN’T HE CARED ABOUT ME AT ALL?????

Or had I, in the complete psychotic break I had last week over the Judith Gershner thing, managed to destroy any iota of romantic feeling he ever had for me?

Which is when I moved my mouse from the REPLY button to DELETE. And pressed.

And just like that, his e-mail was gone.

And no way was I writing him back.

Michael may be over me. But I’m not over him. Not yet, anyway.

And I can’t pretend like I am. And I’m not going to do something stupid and undignified like hit REPLY and ask him to take me back.

But the only way I know how not to do that is just not to say anything to him at all.

After I deleted Michael’s e-mail, I checked ihatemiathermopolis.com. There were no new updates, thank God.

Well, why would there be? I haven’t been out of the house all week. Whoever is running the site doesn’t have any new material.

Now Mom’s calling me. She and Dad and Mr. G have ordered pizza from Tre Giovanni. We’re all going to sit down to dinner like a normal family. Just me, my mom, her husband, their kid, and my dad, the prince of Genovia.

Oh, yeah. We’re a normal family, all right.

No wonder I’m in therapy.

Friday, September 17, French

Oh my God. It is so…surreal, being here.

I think Dr. K was wrong, and I do need drugs. Because I just don’t see how else I’m going to cope. I know he said it’s good to do one thing every day that scares you—thanks for that, by the way, Eleanor Roosevelt, thanks a lot—but this is like NINE MILLION THINGS all at once.

And, yeah, okay, I don’t know why SCHOOL should be so scary. I was never scared of school before. At least, not this much.

But there’s so much more to it than just school. There’s having to TALK to people. There’s having to act NORMAL. When I know I’m NOT normal.

And, okay, the truth is, I’ve never been normal. But I am more NOT normal than ever. I have lost my support system—the ONE thing I have been able to count on for the past two years to keep me sane in this sea of complete insanity—Michael.

And now, just like that, he’s gone—completely ripped from my life—and I’m just supposed to go on like nothing’s happened? Yeah. Right.

And I have to be here, in this—let’s face it—nuthouse, with all these people who are WAY CRAZIER THAN I AM (they just won’t admit there’s anything wrong with them—unlike me) with absolutely no one to look forward to going home to and saying, “Oh my God, you would not believe what so-and-so did today.”

Seriously, that is just cruel.

But I guess it’s what I deserve. I mean, it isn’t as if I didn’t bring all this upon myself with my own stupidity.

At least I haven’t been forced to suffer the onslaught of a full day of this place. I got to spend my morning waiting around Dr. Fung’s office to get my blood drawn. And since I’d had to fast since midnight the night before, in order for my blood work not to get messed up, I was practically STARVING. I mean, it was bad enough I had to get out of bed, shower, and get dressed.

But I didn’t even get breakfast!

Worse, even though my belly was totally empty, I couldn’t…well, for some reason my uniform skirt wouldn’t close. I mean, it would zip—mostly—but I couldn’t get the button to go through the slot, because there was all this SKIN in the way. I finally had to use a safety pin to keep my skirt on.