Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson Page A

them is worth reading. There are no fairy tales, no faerie tails, no sword-swinging princesses or lightning-throwing gods. The pages of sentences of words of letters might as well be mathemati-cal equations marching to their logical conclusions. Cough Drop Nancy is not a doctor. She’s an accountant.
    “I wonder if there might be two struggles going on.”
    She kicks off her shoes and sits cross-legged. The wrinkles on her face say she’s pushing sixty, but yoga classes keep her body as flexible as a girl’s. “Confusion and grief about the loss of a friend, and the desire to keep your parents at a distance.”
    She waits for me to fill the air with words. I don’t.
    “Or I could be totally wrong,” she says, “and none of this is affecting you in the slightest.”
    Rain pours down the windows.
    . . . I started coming here after the first prison clinic stay because Dr. N. Parker is a scam artist specialist in crazy teenagers troubled adolescents. I opened my mouth during the first couple of visits and gave her a key to open my head. Ginormous mistake. She brought her lantern and a hard hat and lots of rope to wander through my caves. She laid land mines in my skull that detonated weeks later.
    I told her I was pissed because she was moving things around in my brain without permission. She booby-trapped me so that every time I had a simple thought—
    like, Physics is a waste of time , or I need to charge my phone , or Japanese can’t be that hard to learn —the annoying-question-from-hell popped up— Why do you think that, Lia ?
    I couldn’t ask myself a question— Why am I so tired? —without getting slammed by three or four shrink-supplied answers— Because my glycogen levels are low, or Because I am experiencing an ill-defined sense of loss, or Because I’ve lost touch with reality , or the ever-popular— Because I am a whacked-out nut job.
    Once I got angry and mouthed off. I told her she was a pathetic loser and I bet she didn’t have any kids or grand-kids or if she did they never called and her husband left her, or maybe it was a girlfriend, you never can tell, and even her own mother gave up on her because she wouldn’t live in the real world with breathing people, she stayed sealed in this room with the fake books and the fan blowing and rain on the windows.
    Nothing I said made her angry. I couldn’t even make her blink. She just asked me to stay in the feeling and keep talking. So I shut up.
    I used to dream about bringing a knife to therapy and slicing her into pork chop–sized pieces.
    Ten minutes have gone by. As the couch warms up, I sink deeper into the cushions. The leather creaks.
    “What words are in your head right now, Lia?”
    Pissed. Pig. Hate.
    “I’d like to hear them.”

    Jail. Coffin. Cut.
    “You have to work at recovery, Lia. Suspended animation isn’t much of a life.”
    “My weight is fine. I can bring in Jennifer’s stupid notebook if you want.”
    “It’s not about the number on the scale. It never was.”
    Hungry. Dead.
    Twenty minutes spin by. I weave my fingers in and out of the afghan. She is Charlotte, I am Wilbur
    ::Some Girl!/Useless!/Delirious!::
    and this pink crocheted nightmare (polyester yarn) is her web. No, she’s not Charlotte, she’s Charlotte’s annoying cousin Mildred, the stupid one, whose webs always break. If my parents had let me invest the money they wasted on this lady, I’d have my own apartment by now.
    Forty minutes. I have plucked stray hairs from at least seven different people out of the afghan: a long black one, a shiny white one, a wispy blonde, a curly auburn, a brown hair that was white at the root, and a short hair that could have been a guy’s—or a girl’s who doesn’t fuss with the way she looks. The hair of rich people who like to whine to strangers.
    “You didn’t have to come here today,” she finally says.
    “You could have used the excuse of a therapy appointment to get out of class and do whatever you wanted.