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AFTER SCHOOL ONThursday, Evan takes a fifteen-minute detour so he can drop me off at the counseling clinic, A Better Tomorrow, just in time for my 3:00 p.m. appointment.
A Better Tomorrow is housed in one of those tall, concrete buildings that have different offices on each floor. Julia's office is on the sixteenth floor, where you can see almost the entire city and lines of cars stuck in traffic on the highway.
There's a desk in the back of the room with half a dozen framed pictures—Julia and her husband on their wedding day, some school photos of her kid, and of course her honorable certificates and awards. Behind the desk is a bulletin board where she pins a new, vaguely inspirational quote every couple of weeks. It currently reads:
Dreams don't work unless you do!
"So," Julia starts, after I've poured myself a cup of water and sunk into her couch. "How are we feeling today?"
She asks me some variation of this question every week, and for some reason she always uses the pronoun "we" instead of "you," as if her feelings and my feelings are fundamentally bound together by some weird therapist-patient emotional link.
"I'm all right," I say. Which is also pretty much a variation of the answer I give every week.
"Ten milligrams of the fluoxetine still working well for you?" she asks.
"Hasn't made me suicidal yet!" I quip and flash her a thumbs-up.
Julia does not find my joke amusing.
"I understand that you started school this week."
"I did indeed," I confirm, taking a long gulp of water. The worst thing about therapy is that I have this habit of lifting the cup to my mouth and drinking reflexively every couple of minutes, just to have something to do with my hands. I can never tell that I'm even doing it until I realize how urgently I have to pee thirty minutes into my eighty-minute session.
"And how has that transition been?"
"Fine," I say. "Just trying to pass my classes. Stay out of the way of all the imbeciles at Clayton—which is, you know, everyone. Not have another meltdown. Normal junior year goals, you know."
"Mmm. How would you compare yourself emotionally now versus last spring?"
