The Night We Asked for One Bed and the Whole County Looked In

Her office smelled like peppermint tea and printer ink.

There were baskets of stress balls on the shelf and a poster that said Your Feelings Are Real.

I believed the poster more than half the adults in the building.

She offered me a chair.

I took the hard one instead of the soft one on purpose.

“I just wanted to check in,” she said.

That phrase makes me want to run into traffic.

Check in.

Like I am a hotel people visit when they feel responsible.

“I’m fine,” I said.

She nodded like she had expected that.

“I heard there’s been some attention around your family.”

“Attention” was a pretty word for it.

I looked at the jar of peppermints.

“I’m not failing any classes.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“I know how this goes.”

Her face changed a little then.

Not offended.

Sad.

Maybe she did know how this went too.

“I’m not here to judge your mother,” she said.

I flinched so slightly most people would have missed it.

She didn’t.

And then I knew she’d seen it, and that made me mad at myself.

“My mother doesn’t need judging,” I said.

“She sounds like she’s working very hard.”

“She is.”

“And you sound like you are too.”

Something hot rushed up my throat.

The dangerous kind of emotion.

The one that makes you either cry or say the truest thing in the ugliest voice.

I gripped the chair.

“I was,” I said. “Then for like one second I wasn’t. And now it feels like the whole county saw me not drowning and decided to build a parade around it.”

The counselor sat very still.