All These Lives by Sarah Wylie

slides into the side of the couch. It’s not so much that I care about protecting her furniture from the melted brown chocolate; it’s more that I want to eat it. Plus, it’s especially pregnant, which means there has to be a giant peanut baby in there.
    I can feel Harry-with-an- i watching me, so I offer her some M&Ms.
    “No thanks,” she shakes her head. “I shouldn’t have any more.”
    Then, evidently deciding to go another route—and not terribly optimistic about it, if her expression is anything to go by—Harry-with-an- i holds her pen to the page and says, “Dani, tell me about Jena. And how you’re dealing with the situation.”
    Green—peanut.
    “Well,” I say, chewing, “to be honest, I’m not doing so well.”
    “Really?” Her pen lightly scratches the page and I can tell this is what she considers success. A sentence or two that summarize me, a paragraph to decipher me.
    “Yeah. Like, for instance, the other day, I had this really massive headache.”
    She glances up.
    “Oh, and then a few weeks ago, I had a runny nose. I sneezed a couple of times today in gym class, too.”
    The pen doesn’t move, although it wants to.
    “Danielle. I mean how do you feel emotionally. Mentally. Spiritually. Not physically.”
    Orange—peanut.
    Blue—peanut.
    Red—two peanuts.
    “Listen,” she says. “I know the last thing you want is to have to sit in a room with some stranger and discuss something that is so hard to talk about. But I also want you to know that I’m here to help. Whatever you say will just be between the two of us.”
    “Good. I was worried you’d tell my dad what I said about Santa. We haven’t told him we know about his nonexistence yet. Or that, in general, Santa sucks.”
    Harry-with-an- i shakes her head and chuckles lightly. “You have quite a sense of humor, you know that?”
    “I was being serious.”
    She puts down her pad. “I’ll give you the entire bag of M&M’s in my drawer if you’ll give me one sentence. Just one sentence about how you honestly feel.”
    “How big is the bag?”
    She stands up, goes around the desk, and pulls it out. It’s reasonable, probably weighs about ten pounds, since it contains all the different kinds of M&M’s she’s mixed together.
    This is bribery, I want to say. Instead, I stick a brown M&M in my mouth. “Can I say it now?” Peanut butter. It floods my mouth and my saliva drowns in it and I just want to spit it out all over her sterile, hip-psychologist office.
    “The sentence? Of course! Go ahead.” I start to open my mouth, but she stops me again. “Remember. I want honest and I want it to relate to the Jena situation.”
    “I feel,” I say, feeling myself choke on the peanut butter M&M, “like that bag is the size of my sister.”
    She stares at me for a second, down at the bag on her desk, and then back up at me. She looks at me for so long, her eyes boring into me, like she has X-ray vision, and I want to go home but not home to them and her and me but somewhere else. Just when I think that was not the right sentence and she will surely want more—maybe an office-full of peanut-butter-flavored barf, since that’s the best I can do right now—she pushes the bag across her desk. “When your father picks you up, ask him to help you carry it out.”
    There are exactly three minutes left of our session and she sits behind her desk, writing on her clipboard, and lets me eat my M&M’s.
    Except I don’t eat them.
    I let them roll off my lap when Harry-with-an- i isn’t looking. Into the spaces between the couch, empty spaces of nothing and darkness, and I help the ones that miss. When all M&M’s are comfortably accommodated and hidden, I point out that it’s the end of our time together, pick up the bag from her desk, and haul it out into the waiting room, which would be a lot easier if I could use two hands instead of one.
    Dad shows up late, looking tired and tentative, but hopeful. Probably he’s wondering if