GABBY
Later that night Gabby was lying on her bed allegedly reading The Tudors but actually staring at the ceiling and reliving in Technicolor an awkward conversation she’d had with Sophie the week before graduation during which she thought Sophie might have thought, mistakenly, that Gabby was coming onto her, when somebody knocked on her door.
“Hey, bug?” her mom said, easing it open. She wasn’t alone: it was both of Gabby’s parents, which was alarming. The last time the two of them had sat her down together had been when Gabby was in eighth grade, when Grandma Grace had died.
“What’s wrong?” Gabby asked, sitting up and tucking her hair behind her ears, alert. If anything really bad had happened they’d be telling all three of them at once, right? Or—oh, shit, did they somehow know about her meltdown on the train the other day? Had Michelle told them? Had somebody else seen? Gabby’s heart hammered, a fist against a wall.
“No no, nothing’s wrong,” her mom said quickly, holding her hands out as she perched on the edge of Gabby’s mattress; her dad sat down in her desk chair, looking too big for the space. “We just wanted to talk to you for a sec. About how you’ve been feeling.”
“I’m fine,” Gabby said immediately. She stared back at them for a moment, her face carefully, purposefully blank. “What, ’cause I broke up with Ryan? I’m fine.”
“It’s not about Ryan,” her dad said gently. “Unless it is about Ryan, and that’s okay too. But Mommy and I have both noticed that you seem pretty unhappy lately. More anxious and wound up than normal. Maybe a little depressed.”
Oh, Gabby did not want to have this conversation. “I’m doing fine,” she insisted. “Like, am I an anxious person? Of course I’m an anxious person; you know that, you’ve met me before. But I’m fine. I’m handling it.”
“You’ve been spending an awful lot of time up here lately,” her dad pointed out.
“What?” Gabby looked at them with bald denial. “No, I’m doing things. I saw Shay for coffee today, even. I’m functioning.”
Gabby’s mom reached out and took her hand then, squeezed it like Gabby had terminal cancer. “It doesn’t really seem like you are, bug,” she said.
“Can you leave me alone?” Gabby said, and it came out a lot more like begging than she meant for it to. “I’m fine.”
Her dad shook his head. “You’re not, sweetheart.”
To her absolute, abject horror, that was when Gabby started to cry. “So what?” she asked, pulling her hand away from her mother’s, sounding snotty and shrill even to herself. “You want me to go play checkers with Dr. Steiner again and talk to him about how broken my brain is? Or like, go on Prozac and be a zombie all the time?”
“Gabby, hey,” her mom said, looking like she was about to cry herself. “Your brain isn’t broken. Don’t say that, sweetheart.”
“Why not?” Gabby demanded. “It’s what you think, clearly. Is this what you guys talk about all the time behind my back, and Celia and Kristina too? How crazy I am? At least Celia also says it to my face.”
“Nobody thinks you’re crazy, Gabby,” her dad chimed in softly. “And it wouldn’t need to be Dr. Steiner. We could find somebody down in the city near school, somebody you liked.”
“I’m not going to like anybody,” Gabby argued. “I can already tell you that.”
“Maybe not,” her dad agreed. “But I bet we could find somebody who could give you some strategies for coping better, even if they weren’t your best friend. There’s no reason for you to feel like this all the time if you don’t have to.”
“Aunt Liz has been on meds for years,” Gabby’s mom told her. “Do you know that, is that something you know? That she gets anxiety too? So did Grandma Grace. It runs in families. I don’t know why we never talked to you about this before.”
Gabby shrugged, staring at her hands in her lap instead of looking at her parents. Because you’re afraid of me, she didn’t say.
“This is our fault,” her dad said, getting up from the desk chair and sitting beside Gabby and her mom on the bedspread. “We should have pushed you about this stuff a long time ago. We should have taken better care of you.”
“I’m not doing it,” Gabby said, shaking her head stubbornly. “I’m not.”
“We can’t force you,” her mom said, scooping Gabby’s tangled, matted hair up off her shoulders; this time, Gabby didn’t flinch away. “It’s not like when you were little, where we could just pick you up and carry you somewhere you didn’t want to go. You’re a grown-up now; you’re going to college. And you have to be responsible for your own self.”
“I don’t want to,” Gabby said, and started crying all over again. She felt like she could cry forever. She felt like she might never, ever stop. “I’m so scared.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” her dad said, and his voice was so quiet. “We know you are.”