without too much trouble. In fact, the lightest digging reveals that she’s got a ten-year-old boy with a photo-filled page on a kids’ social networking site. It took the species millions of years to climb down out of the trees, and only ten years more to jump into the fishbowl.
Five afternoons later he’s up in the counseling center, trying to keep his limbs from shaking free of his body. The reception area is cheerful and fabric-oriented. Two female students sit nearby, each texting into their laps. In the stack of magazines spread around for waiting clients, he finds, to his horror, a copy of
Becoming You
with his fingerprints all over the text.
They call him in by anonymous number. He’s a wreck by the time he reaches the office. Candace Weld, LPC, rises from an L-shaped desk in the corner to shake his hand. She introduces herself, but he knows her already. She holds herself nothing like Grace: a cardinal in place of a scarlet tanager. She regards him, her face tipped in a tentative smile. She’s maybe thirty-eight, six years older than she should be. But the puzzled eyes, the brave cheeks, and the childish pug nose combine to slam his chest.
“Please sit,” she says, and waves at a stuffed chair. She sits in another, angled toward him. A shaded reading lamp stands between them. A half-height bookshelf hugs the wall behind her, filled with books on healthy living. He recognizes one of the happiness encyclopediashe’s been poring over these last weeks. On the wall above the bookshelf hangs the azure dream of Hopper’s
Lee Shore
. The room is an aggressively cozy corner of a furniture showroom. They sit together, home again after a long day, trying to decide on pizza versus sushi. Grace, wild Grace, domestically tranquil at last.
“How can I help you?” she asks, her face a cheerful blank. It’s no one he’s ever met.
He tilts his head and grimaces as warmly as he can. “I’m not here for myself, really. I’m concerned about one of my students.”
She recoils an inch. For just an instant, he’s unreadable. Like he’s grabbed her by the elbow and started cackling. Then she smiles and says, “That’s fine. Tell me.”
Weld thought:
This man has recently been shocked to discover that he still has a future.
He sat in her stuffed chair, his eyes panning like a security camera, his chest so cupped that she twitched a little when he claimed to have come about someone else.
Four weeks earlier, yet another besieged student had erupted and shot up yet another school, this one in Wisconsin, only three hundred miles away. It happened every other semester, like some natural cycle, and every time, in the wake of the tragedy, a wave of concerned Mesquakie instructors flooded the counseling center. When those waves hit, the counselors were cautioned to work doubly hard at treating each case as if it were unique.
Candace Weld started the consultation with all the set protocols: Has the student made any direct or implied threats? Does the student display violent, erratic, or aggressive behavior? The questions just baffled the visiting instructor. Does the student display behavior that might require immediate medical attention? His each
no
was increasingly agitated.
Early on in every consultation, Weld liked to give her clients vivid shorthand names. She often tagged her art students after artists—
Munch
, a photography MFA candidate badly in need of lorazepam.
Botero
, a pale girl who planned to eat her way into her mother’s heart.
Morandi
, a sandy glass-bottle freshman reconciled to his gray still life. But Russell Stone was a writer, or, as he explained, “At least I play one in the classroom.”
Fyodor
, she decided, penning the name at the upper right of her fresh spiral pad: Fyodor, feverish with beliefs.
In what way did he find the student’s behavior troubling?
He laid out the whole story, which Candace Weld noted in detail.
Document everything
. The stranger the tale, the more
Five afternoons later he’s up in the counseling center, trying to keep his limbs from shaking free of his body. The reception area is cheerful and fabric-oriented. Two female students sit nearby, each texting into their laps. In the stack of magazines spread around for waiting clients, he finds, to his horror, a copy of
Becoming You
with his fingerprints all over the text.
They call him in by anonymous number. He’s a wreck by the time he reaches the office. Candace Weld, LPC, rises from an L-shaped desk in the corner to shake his hand. She introduces herself, but he knows her already. She holds herself nothing like Grace: a cardinal in place of a scarlet tanager. She regards him, her face tipped in a tentative smile. She’s maybe thirty-eight, six years older than she should be. But the puzzled eyes, the brave cheeks, and the childish pug nose combine to slam his chest.
“Please sit,” she says, and waves at a stuffed chair. She sits in another, angled toward him. A shaded reading lamp stands between them. A half-height bookshelf hugs the wall behind her, filled with books on healthy living. He recognizes one of the happiness encyclopediashe’s been poring over these last weeks. On the wall above the bookshelf hangs the azure dream of Hopper’s
Lee Shore
. The room is an aggressively cozy corner of a furniture showroom. They sit together, home again after a long day, trying to decide on pizza versus sushi. Grace, wild Grace, domestically tranquil at last.
“How can I help you?” she asks, her face a cheerful blank. It’s no one he’s ever met.
He tilts his head and grimaces as warmly as he can. “I’m not here for myself, really. I’m concerned about one of my students.”
She recoils an inch. For just an instant, he’s unreadable. Like he’s grabbed her by the elbow and started cackling. Then she smiles and says, “That’s fine. Tell me.”
Weld thought:
This man has recently been shocked to discover that he still has a future.
He sat in her stuffed chair, his eyes panning like a security camera, his chest so cupped that she twitched a little when he claimed to have come about someone else.
Four weeks earlier, yet another besieged student had erupted and shot up yet another school, this one in Wisconsin, only three hundred miles away. It happened every other semester, like some natural cycle, and every time, in the wake of the tragedy, a wave of concerned Mesquakie instructors flooded the counseling center. When those waves hit, the counselors were cautioned to work doubly hard at treating each case as if it were unique.
Candace Weld started the consultation with all the set protocols: Has the student made any direct or implied threats? Does the student display violent, erratic, or aggressive behavior? The questions just baffled the visiting instructor. Does the student display behavior that might require immediate medical attention? His each
no
was increasingly agitated.
Early on in every consultation, Weld liked to give her clients vivid shorthand names. She often tagged her art students after artists—
Munch
, a photography MFA candidate badly in need of lorazepam.
Botero
, a pale girl who planned to eat her way into her mother’s heart.
Morandi
, a sandy glass-bottle freshman reconciled to his gray still life. But Russell Stone was a writer, or, as he explained, “At least I play one in the classroom.”
Fyodor
, she decided, penning the name at the upper right of her fresh spiral pad: Fyodor, feverish with beliefs.
In what way did he find the student’s behavior troubling?
He laid out the whole story, which Candace Weld noted in detail.
Document everything
. The stranger the tale, the more
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