Princess Mia

“Obviously not,” I said. “Since I am sitting here in your office in my pajamas and a duvet.”

“You know, I’d noticed that,” Dr. Knutz said. “But you young girls are always wearing the oddest things, so I just figured it was the new fashion craze, or something.”

I could see right away that this was never going to fly. How could I entrust my innermost emotional thoughts to someone who goes around calling me and my peers “you young girls” and thinks any of us would willingly go outside dressed in Hello Kitty pajamas and a duvet?

“This isn’t going to work for me,” I said to my dad as I got up. “Let’s go.”

“Hang on a second, Mia,” Dad said. “We just got here, okay? Give the man a chance.”

“Dad.” I couldn’t believe this. I mean, if I had to go to therapy, why couldn’t my parents have found me a real therapist, not a COWBOY therapist? “Let’s go. Before he BRANDS me.”

“You got something against ranchers, little lady?” Dr. Knutz wanted to know.

“Um, considering that I’m a vegetarian,” I said. I didn’t mention that I stopped being a vegetarian a week ago. “Yes, yes, I do.”

“You seem awful hetted up,” Dr. Knutz said. I swear he really said hetted and not heated. “For someone who, according to this, says she finds herself not caring about anything at all most of the time.”

He tapped the assessment sheet I’d filled out in his outer office. Sinking back down in my seat, since I could tell this was going to take a while, I said, “Look, Dr., um—” I couldn’t even bring myself to say his name! “I think you should know that I’ve been studying the work of Dr. Carl Jung for some time. I have been struggling to achieve self-actualization for years. I am no stranger to psychology. I happen to know perfectly well what’s wrong with me.”

“Oh, you do,” Dr. Knutz said, looking intrigued. “Enlighten me.”

“I’m just,” I said, “feeling a little down. It’s a normal reaction to something that happened to me last week.”

“Right,” Dr. Knutz said, looking down at a piece of paper on his desk. “You broke up with your boyfriend—Michael, is it?”

“Yes,” I said. “And, okay, maybe it’s a little more complicated than a normal teenager’s breakup, because I’m a princess, and Michael is a genius, and he thinks he has to go off to Japan to build a robotic surgical arm in order to prove to my family that he’s worthy of me, when the truth is, I’m not worthy of him, and I suppose because deep down inside, I know that I completely sabotaged our relationship.

“And, okay, maybe we were doomed from the start, because I scored an INFJ on the Myers-Briggs Jungian personality test we took online last summer, and he scored an ENTJ, and now he just wants to be friends and see other people, which is the last thing I want. But I respect his wishes, and I know that if I ever hope to attain the fruits of self-actualization, I have to spend more time building up the roots of my tree of life, and…and…and, really, that’s it. Except for possible meningitis. Or lassa fever. That’s all that’s wrong with me. I just have to adjust. I’m fine. I’m really fine.”

“You’re fine?” Dr. Knutz said. “You’ve missed almost a week of school even though there’s nothing physically wrong with you—we’ll check on the meningitis of course—and you haven’t changed out of your pajamas in days. But you’re fine.”

“Yes,” I said. Suddenly, I was very close to tears. Also, my heart was beating kind of fast again. “Can I go home now?”

“Why?” Dr. Knutz wanted to know. “So you can crawl back into bed and continue to isolate yourself from friends and loved ones—a classic sign of depression, by the way?”

I just blinked at him. I couldn’t believe he—a perfect stranger, WORSE, a stranger who liked WESTERN THINGS—was talking to me that way. Who did he think he was, anyway—aside from one of the nation’s preeminent experts on adolescent and child psychology?

“So you can continue to drift away from your long-term relationship with your best friend, Lilly,” he said, referring to a note on the pad in his lap, “as well as your other friends, by avoiding school and any other social settings where you might be forced to interact with them?”

I blinked at him some more. I know I was supposed to be the crazy one, but it was hard to believe from this statement that he wasn’t crazy.

Because I was not avoiding school because I might have to see Lilly there, or interact socially with people. That wasn’t it at all. Or why I want to move to Genovia.

“So you can continue to ignore the things you used to love—like instant messaging your friend Tina—and sleep during the day, then stay up all night,” Dr. Knutz went on, “gaining weight through compulsive binge eating when you think no one is looking?”

Wait…how did he know about THAT? HOW DID HE KNOW ABOUT TINA? OR THE GIRL SCOUT COOKIES?

“So you can go on just saying whatever it is you think people want to hear in order to make them go away and leave you alone, and refusing to observe even basic proper hygiene—again, classic examples of adolescent depression?”

I just rolled my eyes. Because everything he was saying was totally ridiculous. I’m not depressed. I’m sad, maybe. Because everything sucks. And I probably do have meningitis, even though everyone seems to be ignoring my symptoms.