Nerve
The memory of that West Bridge office, with the purple butterflies on Lucy’s shirt and the bright ponchos that made me roll my eyes, felt like a lifetime ago.
Now, she was a small, glowing square on my laptop screen, sitting in that same armchair, a ceramic mug held between both hands.
Even through a monitor, she peered over the edges of her small-framed reading glasses with that same subtle, unhurried presence that used to make me squirm.
There was no chaise to perch on here, no physical distance to cross, yet closing my bedroom door and opening the call link always felt like stepping into an airlock.
Outside this room, I had boundaries. Outside, I had witty deflections, a catalog of hyper-specific observations about the sidewalk, and Zane’s broad shoulders to hide behind.
In here, none of that worked. Lucy knew the drill.
She could still pull poetry from my chaos, which meant she also knew exactly when I was trying to perform.
“You’re quiet today, Seren,” Lucy said, her voice coming through my laptop speakers with that familiar cadence. “Even for you. Where are we starting?”
I shifted my weight, pulling my knees closer to my chest, my bare toes digging into the heavy fabric of the quilt.
“I’m just tired,” I muttered, looking at the small square in the corner that showed my own face.
Pale, guarded, eyes too round for the space.
“Do you ever feel like we’re going to run out of things to talk about, once I’m over it? ”
Lucy didn’t shift in her chair. She didn’t offer a sympathetic tilt of her head. “Over it… over what happened in high school?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Obviously.”
“Where did this thought come from?” Lucy asked me, her voice not shifting from its calm cadence.
“I don’t know,” I said. Lucy looked at me. She knew I was lying. I sighed. “Just something I mentioned to Zane today.”
“Okay,” Lucy replied. She was always playing poker with me. “Do you think you are close to being over it, as you put it? Or is that just something you are considering?”
I nodded, my teeth finding the dry skin of my lower lip, biting down hard enough to hurt.
“Sometimes I wish we could just… move on. I look at people on campus, and they’re just walking.
They’re going to class, they’re complaining about the cafeteria food, they’re existing in the present tense.
I’m always checking the weather. I’m always looking at the sky, waiting for the first drop of rain, wondering if the person standing next to me has a knife behind their back. I’m tired of it.”
“You’re tired of hypervigilance,” Lucy clarified gently.
“I don’t know,” I muttered. “I guess so. I just… it’s in the past. I want to leave it there.”
“The past doesn’t work like that,” Lucy said, her pen bouncing between her fingers, hovering just over the pad in her lap. “You can’t just leave it there. Not when it still affects the way your brain behaves, your daily decisions and the way you react.”
I leaned my chin on my knees, watching her through the screen.
She was wearing a deep teal poncho today, her gray hair pulled back, completely unfazed by my frustration.
“I don’t want to be the girl with a tragic story forever.
It’s exhausting to still be talking about the wreckage when everyone else is just living their lives. ”
“Who is everyone else?” Lucy asked, her tone soft and steady.
“Austin. Cassidy. My dad,” I said, letting out a deep breath. “Zane. Mostly Zane.”
“Is Zane telling you that you need to move on?”
“No,” I admitted, looking down at the quilt. “He told me today that I’m the easiest part of his day. He said loving me has never been hard.”
Lucy jotted something down on her pad, then looked back up at me over the edges of her reading glasses. “And how did that make you feel, Seren?”
“Like he’s wrong,” I said. I pulled my legs tighter against my chest, my fingers drumming against my shins.
“Because if he thinks I’m easy now, what happens when I’m not easy, again?
What happens on the days when the anxiety comes back, and I can’t even sit at a campus table without looking for an exit?
He is default-set to protect me, but everyone has a limit. Eventually, people get tired.”
“We have talked about this, Seren. You need to stop forecasting people’s actions from the fear-based part of you.
It is not fair to you, and it is not fair to Zane,” Lucy said, her voice dropping into that familiar, patient tone.
“But when you ask if we’re going to run out of things to talk about once you are over it, it sounds to me like you are questioning your own worth.
Do you think that the only reason people stay close to you is to help you manage your pain? ”
I did not answer her. I just stared back at the screen, my bottom lip pushing out slightly as her words settled into me. She was doing it again. She was pulling the truth out of my chaos before I even fully understood what I was feeling.
“No, that doesn’t even make sense,” I said, trying to hide the way she hit my exposed nerve. “I want to be done with my pain so Zane can finally stop taking care of me. And we can move on.”
But even as I said the words, I kept flinching back to her question. I couldn’t argue the fact that my pain is the reason people stay. Zane, Cassidy, Austin, even my dad. Without the pain, would they have still seen me? Or would I have been something easier to look away from?
I let out a slow breath, leaning my forehead against my knees. I hated when she was right, mostly because it meant I couldn’t use my anxiety as an excuse to pull away from the people who were actually trying to hold onto me.
Lucy watched me, her pen hovering back over her paper. “But you are still trying to control how everyone feels about you, so you don’t get hurt. You can’t do that, Seren. You must let them be here in the way that they choose to be. In the way that it is.”
“I don’t like the way that it is,” I told her. “I mean,” I shook my head. “I like the way things are right now. I just wish… I wish things could be like this, but what happened… didn’t need to happen to end up here.”
“By what happened, you mean Jax and the rape,” Lucy told me, and the way she let the words land felt like the way my dad spoke about my mom. Unexpected thunder when you are looking at the sun.
Lucy must have watched the way my face changed. “You’ve gone back to that place,” she said. “Where you don’t want to name what happened. You were out of it, now you’re back.”
“Because Jax is dead and he should stay dead.”
What is it with all the dead people in my life? They keep coming back to throw my stuff around while I am trying to sleep. Lucy didn’t answer immediately. She shifted between writing things down in her notebook and looking at me.
“Have you ever noticed,” I started speaking without my own permission, the thoughts becoming words that took a path without my filter. “That once you’re raped… you can never be un-raped?”
I resented that. It had crossed my mind too many times to count.
It was not like cancer. You get diagnosed, you do the chemotherapy, you go into remission, and you don’t have cancer anymore.
It did not work like that when you get raped.
It is permanent. A change of state. A change of being completely. You can’t go back. Can’t get clean.
“I think it’s more important to talk about how you’ve been thinking about that.” Lucy held the mirror directly to my eyes. “What would un-raped look like to you?”
I closed them instead of looking. “I don’t know. That’s all I know now. Even when it doesn’t hurt so much, even when I almost forget.”
The silence stretched over the video call, heavy and thick, filling the corners of my bedroom until the hum of my laptop fan felt deafening.
I kept my eyes closed, letting the dark behind my eyelids shield me from the green light of the webcam.
I did not want to look at Lucy, and I definitely didn’t want to look at the small square showing my own face.
“When you say it’s all you know now, Seren,” Lucy’s voice came through the speakers, “it sounds like you’ve let that night become the foundation for everything else you build.”
“It is the foundation,” I said, opening my eyes to stare at a loose thread on my quilt.
“How could it not be? Every choice I make now, every time I look at a sidewalk, or a guy in the quad, or even the way I let Zane touch me, it all passes through that filter first. It is the starting line for the rest of my life. I can’t just pretend the track starts somewhere else. ”
Lucy didn’t argue. She did not offer a gentle metaphor to soften the edge of what I had just admitted.
“But you aren’t standing at that starting line anymore.
You have made it the last three years. You are in college.
You’re sitting in your room with a man down the hall who loves you.
The rape happened, yes. But it is not the only thing that has happened since. ”
“It feels like the only one that’s permanent,” I mumbled, my thumb catching on the rough edge of the duvet seam. “The other stuff… the good stuff… it feels fragile. Like it’s just a layer of paint over something rotten. One bad day and the paint chips right off.”
“Is that how it feels with Tom, too?” Lucy asked, shifting the mirror just a fraction, bringing my dad into the frame before I could brace for it. “Like it’s temporary?”
I swallowed, the sudden pivot making my chest feel tight. “No. It’s different with him. It’s not paint. It’s more like… I’m just waiting for one of us to slip and ruin the whole thing.”
“Because you’re still waiting for him to walk away,” Lucy stated.