Order in the Court (7 page)

“We
are
friends.” And we were. It’s hard not to be friends with the only person in the world who knows what you’re going through. “But you’re right. We should talk about other stuff. How’s school? What’s your roommate like?”

“He’s a bore, but that’s fine with me,” Brandon said. “Everyone else wants to party all the time—even though no one’s legal—but Joshua, that’s his name, he just sits in the room and studies. I don’t mind the company. It means when I stay home, I don’t feel like I’m wallowing, or being antisocial.” He paused. “It’s hard to make friends when all you want to do is be alone, but I do want to put myself out there. I need to do something normal, or I’m going to explode.”

Everything always circled back to the loss we shared. Brandon lost the love of his life, he told me, touching the engagement ring Jessa never saw. He’d put it on a chain and wore it around his neck, rather than return it to the store. He’d saved for so long to buy it, the perfect ring. How often do you find an eighteen-year-old so ready to be married?

“I don’t even know what’s normal anymore.” I crossed my legs and pulled my pillow into my lap. I missed having stuffed animals on my bed to hug when I was scared or lonely, but I’d given up the habit when I was fifteen and refused to regress. “Everything’s different.”

“Have you met any pretty girls at your new school?” Brandon asked, and I felt as if the air had been sucked out of my lungs. He sounded completely serious. It was hard to tell over the phone, without his face to tell me if he was pulling my leg.

“Are you serious?” I asked and then added nastily, “Have
you
met any pretty girls yet? How many casual hookups have you had?” I didn’t bother saying that no, I hadn’t met any pretty girls (or boys!) yet. I figured it was implied.

Brandon didn’t answer for a moment. “I didn’t think. I mean, I did, but… sorry.”

The anger faded. In its place a sad sort of silence formed. I could hear Brandon breathing; it was a little shaky.

“I know you said we couldn’t talk about the murders,” I said finally, closing my eyes and hugging my pillow a little more forcefully. “But I miss them so much sometimes, and I can’t even articulate how much it… changes me.”

“We have to be able to talk about them without it being about the murders,” Brandon said. “Can’t we talk about them without it being about how they’re dead? Jessa had this awesome method for doing large multiplication questions, with these squares and lines, and I tried to use it in class today and made a fool of myself by getting a totally wrong answer in Intro to Statistics.” He sounded so confused by it.

“It was Ricky’s method, actually,” I laughed, imagining Brandon’s failed employment of the strategy during class. When he was confused, a deep line would appear between his eyes, a crease that immediately smoothed when he found the answer he was looking for. Sometimes I saw remnants of the crease, a scar-like white line that didn’t quite disappear until several minutes after the problem had been solved. I never pointed it out to him. “She found it from a viral video and taught us all junior year.”

“Jess held out on me, then!” Brandon laughed, and I imagined the crease smoothing, the little scar. “She didn’t teach me until last year, when I took data management.”

“You weren’t in our class that year! It’s not like she deliberately refused to teach it to you.”

“I’ve missed this.” And all at once, the world came crashing back, and I was alone in my bedroom hugging a pillow, and Brandon was in Pennsylvania, and Ricky and Jessa were both dead. “I’ve missed you.”

“You’re the one who left, though,” I said quietly, and even to my own ears it sounded bitter. “You get to go on with your life like it didn’t happen, and I’m here preparing to testify in a murder trial.”

“I don’t get to move on like it didn’t happen,” Brandon protested, and I felt bad for suggesting it, but I didn’t take it back. “Nothing will ever be the same. Least of all you. You’ve changed.”

“I think I have a right to have changed.”

Brandon didn’t respond for a long time. I checked my cell phone to see if he’d hung up; he hadn’t. I couldn’t even hear him breathing. After a while he spoke again, but his voice was softer than before.

“You have every right,” he said, “but it doesn’t mean I don’t miss you. The real you, who wasn’t so….”

“Bitter?” I asked, I’ll admit, bitterly. “Pessimistic? Depressed? Cynical? Damaged?”

“Hurt” is the word he pulled out, disregarding my list of others. “Not damaged, hurt. But you’ll get through it: this, the trial, all of it. You always do.”

“I don’t know, Bee,” I said, and the nickname fell unbidden and seemed to hang between us. Jessa used to call him Bee. I had no right to do the same. I took a deep breath and ignored the trespass, hoping he’d do the same. He did. “I don’t know about this time.”

“I do.” I hugged my pillow a little tighter to my chest and tried to trust the one person who knew what it was like. He pressed on when I didn’t say anything. “You’ll be okay. I know you will. And I’ll be waiting for you to come back when you are.”

“You better be,” I said, but my voice sounded strange. It was like it was distant from myself, like it was in Pennsylvania too.

“I DON’T
want to be here,” I said, and my arms were crossed, but no one noticed, least of all my mother. She pretended to be engrossed in an old issue of
People
, her preoccupied little hum of acknowledgment clearly a brush-off. She passed me a crinkled
Time
magazine, with Hillary Clinton’s grinning face on the cover. Someone had put a pen through both her pupils and drawn on a detailed pair of devil horns, curved and ringed like a ram’s.

The office was painted a pale green, minty like a hospital, and the carpet was the tightly woven taupe Berber mass-ordered from whoever had designed every waiting room I’d ever been in. Interconnected hard-backed beige chairs with foam seats that seemed unfairly uncomfortable lined the walls and formed an island down the center of the room, with small tables placed every few seats that were covered in outdated periodicals. The woman behind the tiny window that served as reception kept popping her chewing gum. I wanted to tell her to cut it out, but I resisted the urge.

I had the overwhelming feeling this was going to be extremely unpleasant. It felt like I was going for a root canal, not a psychological assessment.

“I don’t want to be here,” I repeated, and my mother shushed me, looking apologetically at the woman across from us, who sat with her own surly teenager, a boy dressed head to toe in black and heavy chains. He had piercings in his ears, nose, and mouth, black-painted nails like Sasha’s, and was reading a battered copy of
Pride and Prejudice
.

I doubted there was anything actually wrong with him. His mother, a Chanel-wearing Tupperware-party mom, was probably “concerned” about his “lifestyle choices” and feared he was “drifting away from the family.” He looked perfectly okay to me, just a case of perpetual rock ’n’ roll. But I guess he could have been having real problems. You never know from the way someone looks. Sasha was one of the happiest people I knew, and he dressed the same way, with his anarchy nails and Beats around his neck pumping Panic! At The Disco when he was walking alone.

A woman dressed in a professional-looking white blouse and loose black skirt appeared in the doorway and said, “Corinna?” without bothering to try pronouncing my last name. I stood, threw the
Time
magazine back onto the table next to my mother, and followed her into a back room that smelled strongly of lemon Pine-Sol. In it were two much more comfortable-looking chairs, a bookcase, and a desk. On the far wall was a framed doctorate in a fancy frame and a painting of a sailboat on calm waters, side by side. I sat in one of the chairs, feeling out of place.

A woman entered the room, a different woman than the one who brought me in. She had long brown hair pulled back into a high ponytail and wore pink lipstick that was a shade too light for her olive complexion. She wasn’t wearing a lab coat or anything else to identify her as the doctor except a file in her hand, but she introduced herself as Dr. Marianne Wagner, and told me to call her Marianne. I did not.

“So tell me,” she said as she settled into the chair across from me rather than the desk chair, “why are you here today?”

“My mother made me come,” I said incredulously, knowing she must know that. “I don’t think I need to be here. I think I’m dealing pretty well, considering.”

“Considering what?” Dr. Wagner asked, and I blinked at her, not understanding.

“Isn’t it in your notes?” I couldn’t see how it could not be. “I witnessed a murder, and I’m set to testify at the trial.” I just assumed my mother had told these people everything. What was the point of coming here if they didn’t know why I was there?

“I see,” Dr. Wagner said, and I wanted to punch her.

“No, clearly you don’t see. Are you even licensed? Is this a joke?” I crossed my arms, seriously considering standing up and leaving the room. “Because it’s not funny.”

The doctor gestured with her pen toward the framed doctorate on the wall. “It’s got my name on it,” she said, smiling. Then she let it fall to a more neutral, professional face. “I don’t like to come into these meetings having formed an opinion already. My associate handles the booking and initial priority assessment, and she clearly decided that this is an emergency situation, since your appointment was booked so quickly.”

“You don’t know anything about me?”

“Nothing beyond your name, and that your mother is concerned you might be having some psychological problems that might require professional intervention, and you have no family history of mental illness. That’s all.” She made a note in the file in front of her. “And that you were witness to a murder, apparently. That’s got to have been a traumatic experience for you. I’m sorry that happened. It must really suck.”

“Yeah, it does suck.” I rubbed at my eyes tiredly. “I’ve been having nightmares since it happened, but they’ve gotten worse recently.”

“Why recently?”

“The man who killed them had a plea arrangement, but he’s backed out of it and is pleading innocent now. I’d thought there wasn’t going to be a trial, that it was all over, but it’s like it’s all started up again. And I wake up in a panic, thinking he’s going to get out of jail. He could be acquitted and put back on the streets.”

“And you’re scared of this man?”

“Of course I am. He killed my friends, and I’m the only living witness. I’m scared he’ll come after me if he gets out. Or that he’ll hurt someone else.” I began to fidget, not liking how comfortable I’d gotten with this woman I’d only just met. “I should be scared, that’s expected.”

“Of course, I’m not holding any judgment against you. Being scared of someone you saw commit an act of violence is very normal. How often are you having your nightmares? Are you concerned about them impacting your performance at school?”

I swallowed, folded my hands in my lap. “Not every night,” I said, “but nearly, for the last few weeks. But I’m usually able to get back to sleep afterward, so it’s not harming my studies much.” I picked at a loose thread on the arm of the chair, feeling stupid when I added, “But I’ve been getting angry, sometimes for no reason, and lashing out, which might be.”

“Lashing out how?” Dr. Wagner asked, looking at me attentively. It felt strange to be the center of anyone’s attention. Even my parents had a billion things to think about when they talked to me. You could have a whole conversation without meeting someone’s eyes. It felt strange, but also good. I didn’t mind it much.

“I threw my laptop at the wall the first time it happened,” I admitted. It was something I was still ashamed of, the cracked purple plastic a constant reminder of my slipup. “Sometimes I punch my pillows, or cover my face with them and scream.” I continued picking at the thread, looking away from Dr. Wagner’s heavily lidded eyes. “Or I yell at my parents over stupid things I don’t even care about. Get mad at my homework, or break pencils during class. It comes in little bursts and then goes away for a while.”

Dr. Wagner was still taking notes. I felt scrutinized, but it wasn’t like I could lie. She was here to help me, even if I didn’t need her help.

“My mother is concerned about me having panic attacks, mostly. They’re not too frequent, and they’re triggered by predictable things. I had one in the courtroom last month, which is what made her call you guys. She thinks I need medication, but I can handle it on my own. I use breathing exercises to calm myself down, and they pass.”

The doctor nodded, still scribbling. When she looked up, she had an unreadable expression on her face. She said seriously, “Corinna, do you know what the real problem is for people like you? Young, smart, independent people with no family history of mental illness?”

“No?” I phrased it like a question, not knowing what to expect from this woman, who had so far behaved nothing like what I thought a psychologist would.

“The real problem,” she said, leaning forward like she was giving me a secret, “is that you don’t know when to ask for help. Everyone thinks they can handle their problems, so even when things get really bad, they don’t realize when they can’t do it alone anymore.” She leaned back, smiling sadly. “You’ve been involved in something highly traumatic—hey! I didn’t say you were traumatized, so don’t put words in my mouth.”

My mouth snapped shut. I’d been about to protest that I wasn’t traumatized. She had read me like a book.

“You’ve witnessed an act of extreme violence, and sometimes it’s hard to come back from something like that. You are allowed to be angry, and scared, even for no reason. This is a healthy way of dealing with trauma. Panic attacks and nightmares are less healthy, but sometimes they’re needed too, unpleasant as they are. Nevertheless, there’s a point when they become disruptive to your life, and that’s when we need to figure out a way to manage them. Do you understand?”

“I don’t want any pills,” I said outright, and she nodded.