Chapter 21
Iwas in a mood.
Not my usual brand of sarcasm and quiet brooding, but something far more chaotic—a sugar-spiked, caffeine-fueled kind of restlessness.
My hands wouldn’t stop fidgeting. My leg bounced so aggressively I was vibrating the fucking chair in the waiting room.
I counted every ceiling tile; there were twenty-four in the perimeter.
I tracked every time the air freshener puffed out its essential oil spray, it had made its mechanical noise six times before I was called in.
Four people walked by me as I waited, one wore red heels, another wore a pair of tattered sneakers, the third a black pair of Uggs, and the fourth clomped by in dirty brown Timberland boots.
I had begun counting how many times I heard a taxi honk when Iris called out my name.
As soon as I entered the room, I couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t stop cracking jokes, couldn’t stop running from something that felt like it was boiling and writhing beneath my skin.
“Would you like to sit over here today?” Iris asked, nodding toward the couch with that sweet therapist smile she always wore. It was just how I referred to her at this point even though she insisted she wasn’t one.
I narrowed my eyes. “That’s the trauma spot. I’ve already cried over there. Stained the fabric with my manly disgrace. I can’t go back there. How do I know it won’t happen again?”
She tilted her head as if suddenly understanding the chaotic energy I had walked in with. “Then where would you like to sit?”
“Right here.” I patted the chair that I had already collapsed into, the one closest to her desk and leaned back, smirking. “Close enough to throw myself out the window if things get too serious.”
She didn’t laugh. She just folded her hands in her lap and said, “Tell me about the anger, Danny.”
Ah, there it was. Today’s agenda bomb dropped in the first five minutes. I let out a slow whistle. “Wow, Iris, coming in hot. No foreplay? You’re not gonna get me wet first?”
I was trying to goad her, trying to flare that little bit of discomfort that I had witnessed in one of our other sessions.
I was trying to make her forget that I had cried in her arms. Maybe if I used dirty humor to deflect, she’d do anything other than softly pick at the freshly formed scabs of my unhealed wounds.
Unfortunately for me Iris didn’t even give my words any attention, although I did notice that the tops of her cheeks reddened with a faint blush.
“You’ve been circling it for weeks. I see your anger under all the sarcasm. I can feel the rage under your humor, and I think you’re ready to explore it.”
I laughed. Loudly. “Define ‘ready.’ Because if you open that box, you need to really understand what you’re asking for.”
“What are you waiting for exactly, Danny? According to you, you’re running out of time.” Her voice was gentle, but her words cracked in the air around me like a whip.
I didn’t move. What she said hit me with all the subtlety of a freight train. I blinked at her. Looked away. Blinked again. My throat started closing in that way it did when I felt cornered. So, I did what any cornered animal would do—I detonated and struck back.
“No, see you don’t get it,” I said, standing up so quickly that the chair screeched and fell back behind me.
“If I let that out—if I really go there—I won’t come back the same.
I won’t be someone you can sip tea with while coloring cute little pictures and writing bucket lists of our hopes and dreams.”
“Maybe you were never supposed to come back the same,” she said quietly. “Maybe that’s exactly what you need.”
My hands curled into fists. My chest tightened like it was being compressed from the inside.
My skin was suddenly stretched too tight over my body, like my bones, blood and memories were trying to punch their way out of me.
The room tilted, not from dizziness, but from the kind of rage that made the edges of my sight blur.
I could taste blood on my tongue from where I had bitten the inside of my cheek.
For a split second I saw flashes—of him slamming the door in my face, the look on the social worker’s face because she didn’t believe me that an upstanding member of the church would do such a thing, the word liar reverberating in my brain.
All of it rose at once like a tide I could not stop but one I also could not drown in.
I sat there, trembling, jaw locked, hands in fists so tight my nails dug into my palms, the pain was the only thing grounding me.
I didn’t want Iris to see this part of me.
I never wanted anyone to. But it was too late.
Maybe you were never supposed to come back the same.
“I don’t want to be this fucking project for you, Iris!” I shouted. “I’m not some jigsaw puzzle you get to feel good about putting back together!”
I saw her eyes flicker to the side, probably checking if the hallway was empty. Then she looked right back at me, calm and unfazed as ever.
“I’ve told you, you’re not a project,” she corrected. “You’re a person.”
I grabbed that fucking notebook from her desk, flipped it around, and then threw it across the room. It hit the wall and fell to the floor, flopping open to an empty page.
“I’m a fucking wreck, that’s what I am!” I bellowed.
“A science experiment gone wrong! Of course I’m angry.
It’s not like you have to be smart and intuitive to figure that out, Iris!
Every person who was supposed to love me either fucked me over or left!
I didn’t deserve that! I was just a little boy. ”
My hand swept across her bookshelf. A small stack of books tumbled to the floor.
One of them hit the edge of her potted plant, plopping a puff of dirt onto the carpet.
And then—I didn’t know what possessed me—I grabbed the mug.
The mug I had bought her, and I hurled it at the wall.
With all my strength and every furious feeling inside of me.
It shattered into three separate pieces that skidded across the carpet, stopping only once they crashed into the opposite wall in a spray of yellow shards.
She didn’t flinch. She just sat there and breathed. Her calm and solid composure tore me out of the red-hot haze that had taken over me. Her steadiness was the first thing I could ever rely on, and that realization was almost physical.
“I’m so sorry,” I said instantly, hands up, stepping away like the shards might attack me back.
“Shit. I’m so—I didn’t mean—fuck.” I got onto my hands and knees and tried to clean up the mess I had made both literally and figuratively.
My hands were shaking, and I found I had sliced little cuts into the tips of my fingers as I tried to gather up the pieces of the mug, as if fixing that could somehow heal my shame.
“It’s okay.” She was on her knees beside me, cradling my hands away from the sharp pieces of ceramic.
“No, it’s not,” I said, gasping as if I had just run a marathon. “I broke it. I broke the goddamn mug.” I felt as though I had broken way more than that. Maybe the flimsy bit of respect that she may have had for me. Or some feeble semblance of trust.
“Let’s go buy a new one.” She stood and somehow, in what felt like just a moment, she had gathered up the pieces of mug and threw them out with a soft clink into the small garbage can beside her desk.
The books had been put back in their spot on the shelf, and her notebook had been retrieved, no worse for wear, as far as I could tell from my spot on the floor, where I was still crouched, my throat aching with shame.
My legs were tucked under me, and I didn’t want to stand.
I didn’t want to face it, how unhinged I had been.
“Come,” she urged softly.
I blinked up at her. “What?”
“Let’s go. You’ll buy me a new one. We’ll call it a field trip.”
“You’re serious?”
She smiled. “You broke it. You fix it. Seems poetic, doesn’t it?”
I couldn’t argue with that. It all just seemed too easy, to have a space to flip out in and still she came out unfrazzled, as if nothing crazy had just happened. Still, she felt safe to be around me. Her lack of judgment left me almost bewildered.
“I’m so proud of you for getting angry.” She smiled as if she could read my thoughts. Huh. Pride in myself curled within me, wispy and fragile like smoke, but there all the same.
As we stepped outside, the air was cold against my skin that was still heated from my meltdown.
The silence between us was heavy but not suffocating.
My boots scuffed against the pavement; each step rang in my ears.
I stole glances over at Iris, who walked beside me to the little gift shop down the street, her hand curled neatly around the strap of her purse like she hadn’t just watched me come apart in her office.