Chapter 1 #4
Lilliam rolls her eyes but continues. “Mom: I bought you an Hermès scarf. Dad: The scarf I got you is better. Me: They’re both great.” She stops again.
Ms. Waters leans toward her. “How does that make you feel?”
Lilliam looks down at her nails. “I prefer Burberry, but I would never tell them that.”
Gray scoffs so loud that we all look at him.
“Be respectful,” says Ms. Waters.
“Of what? Am I supposed to feel bad that she’s a poor little rich girl? Who cares?”
Lilliam’s indifferent mask falls for just a second. “My parents certainly don’t.”
I glare at Gray. The second I think he has the slightest chance of being nice, he once again reminds me he’s actually a jerk.
“How often do they buy you things?” Ms. Waters asks.
“About every week,” she says. “My closet is a high-end department store.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
“Like an emotional football,” Lilliam says.
We all stare at her, impressed with her self-diagnosis.
“Very good. Thank you, Lilliam,” says Ms. Waters before turning to Joey. “Your turn,” she says.
He picks up his marshmallow people stools and dives right into it.
“Jo-eeeey, tell your mother to stop micromanaging me. You sure, Dad? Jo-eeey, tell your father he needs to man up and grow a pair. Mom, I can’t tell him that!
Joey, just say the words please take on a more active role, okay? Okay, Mom.”
His reenactment is not actually about the moment he learned about the divorce, but Ms. Waters lets it slide. “Do they often make you play messenger?” she asks.
“All the time.”
“That’s messed up,” Preethi says gently.
“Thanks,” says Joey. “I mean, not thanks, but yeah, it is.”
“How does that make you feel, Joey?” Ms. Waters asks.
“It sucks, big-time,” Joey says. “It makes me not want to talk to either of them.”
“Thank you, Joey.”
Ms. Waters shifts her attention to Gray. “Your turn.”
I peer at him, curious to see how he responds.
A little anxious, too. I want to tell him this is probably the only safe place on Earth to reenact your parents’ breakup, but that might sound patronizing.
I know this because I would find that patronizing.
After all, reenacting divorce with marshmallows is absurd to begin with.
Gray says nothing. He only beseeches the heavens, just like he did earlier this morning. Again, I feel his pain. But at the same time, I want to hear his backstory. I want to figure him out.
Ms. Waters considers him for a long moment. “I’ll come back to you,” she says. “Isabel, you’re next.”
I try not to squirm in my chair but squirm anyway. I pointlessly nudge my marsh-people around. Every time I think about the moment they told me, I feel as if I’ve woken up in a parallel universe where the people I think are my parents are actually strangers.
I hold up my mom-mallow. “Darling, we have something to tell you. Me: You’re not getting divorced, are you?
Dad: Actually, sweetheart, that’s what we want to discuss.
Mom: Sometimes after a long marriage, the people in it find that they don’t have much in common anymore.
Dad: And that they’ve essentially turned into roommates.
Mom: We still love each other. Dad: But not in the way that we should.
We grew apart and fell out of love. Me: But why?
Mom: There is no why. Just like no one knows why people fall in love. Me: Aaaah!”
I carefully take the me-mallow apart and set its separate pieces down.
“Their breakup made me feel . . . disoriented,” I say, before Ms. Waters can ask. “That probably sounds clichéd.”
“Not at all,” says Ms. Waters. She examines my face. “Did it feel good to say all of that all at once?”
“Kinda,” I admit.
She turns once again to Gray. We all do. He just sits there, staring down at his boot.
I don’t know what comes over me, but suddenly I’m urging him to participate. “Come on, Gray,” I say. “You can do this.”
Ms. Waters shakes her head, wanting me to stop, but I ignore her. “We all did it.”
“Isabel,” Ms. Waters says, voice firm. “It’s up to Gray.”
“He’ll never feel better if he doesn’t at least try,” I say.
Ms. Waters raises her voice. “Let’s move on.”
“No,” Gray says, finally looking up. He locks his eyes on mine.
“You want to know so badly? Here you go.” He picks up the smallest marshmallow molecule, wiggles it, and then begins talking like he’s leading story time for a bunch of kids.
“Once upon a time, little Gray came home to find his mother and father fighting.” He picks up the mother marshmallow.
“It turns out Gray’s mother had been having an affair with a man who was kinder, better looking, and richer than his father.
Oooh, bad mother. But it’s not so simple.
You can’t really blame Mother for her actions because the father has many, many faults of his own, including his own infidelity and being a nasty drunk and an all-around terrible father.
” He sets down the mother marshmallow and picks up the father one.
“Despite his many, many faults, Father did not think he was to blame. He yelled. He punched things. He threw all of Mother’s stuff out onto the lawn and then kicked her out.
When little Gray asked his mother if he could come live with her, she told him she needed space to get her mind right and to give her new relationship room to breathe. ”
He sets his marshmallows down and then gently smashes them all with his fist. “Wanna know how this made me feel?” he asks, still looking directly at me.
“Break for lunch,” Ms. Waters says.
Outside, I’m too embarrassed to stay with the rest of the group.
I walk away from them as quickly as I can.
The morning fog has burned off, leaving behind a warm, clear day.
I set off in the direction of a building on the far side of the quad.
If I wander the campus for the entire lunch hour, I won’t have to talk to anyone. Especially Gray.
I’m walking for less than a minute when Preethi tracks me down. “Ms. Waters sent me to come get you. She says no one is allowed to go off on their own.”
Reluctantly, I follow her back to a cluster of picnic tables where everyone else is gathered. Preethi joins Joey and Lilliam at one table. Gray is sitting by himself at another. He has headphones on and is plugged into his guitar, playing music we can’t hear.
Ms. Waters passes out sandwiches from a lunch cart. Once we all have something, she leaves, saying she has to take care of some wedding things.
I can’t decide where to sit. Definitely not at Gray’s table.
But I’m also too agitated to sit with Preethi, Joey, and Lilliam.
Assuming Ms. Waters doesn’t recommend all of us for continuing therapy, we’ll never see each other again after today.
Why make small talk and ask each other questions about our lives when we’ll just forget those answers by tomorrow?
I choose the remaining empty table, put on my headphones, and eat quickly.
I open my sketchbook and realize my initial sketches of this Safe Harbor crew are all wrong.
Joey, for instance, isn’t some mindless Screenager.
He’s trapped in his phone by all the parental cross fire going back and forth.
I give him a helmet and a shield and set him in between two pockmarked battlefronts. I cross out his caption.
It’s the same for Lilliam. She’s caught between loyalties, with each of her parents trying to outdo the other for the Best Parent Ever award, and failing in the process. I redraw her arms stretched out tight by two opposing crocodiles. Below her, a swamp. I cross out Diva.
I revise Preethi’s drawing to show her standing on a tiny floe in the middle of the sea, with a speech bubble saying, Everything’s fine! Her caption, Did Not Get the Memo???, still technically makes sense, but it feels mean-spirited now. She’s just trying her best.
Finally it’s Gray’s turn. His takes the longest to redo because I have to draw two Grays.
One of them is the angry Gray that I’ve seen so much of today.
The other is the curious, amused Gray that I’ve caught only small glimpses of, the one who looks at the world with a kind of skeptical affection.
Does he feels split in two the way I do?
The me before my parents’ divorce wasn’t perfectly happy, but at least she thought the ground under her feet was made of concrete instead of quicksand.
I miss her. That girl trusted herself and other people. She wasn’t unsure about everything.
I refocus on my sketch. I make the Grays face each other. They both yell, Get out of my way!
I cross out his caption, too, and close my sketchbook.
Why did I push Gray to talk about his parents before? Why did I try to play therapist? It’s not my job to try to make him feel better. I can barely make myself feel better.
It occurs to me that I’ve never, ever drawn a single self-portrait.
If the amount of laughter coming from their table is anything to go by, Preethi, Joey, and Lilliam seem to be having a great time. I envy their easy camaraderie. Over at his table, Gray’s concentrating hard, his fingers flying across the guitar strings.
To anyone looking, we must seem like a group of ordinary teenagers, goofing off on a Saturday afternoon.
No one can tell just by looking that deep inside, we’re all mourning the death of our families.
The families might’ve been good or bad, but they were ours, and now they’ve suddenly become unrecognizable.
The rest of the hour goes by quickly. Before I know it, Preethi is yelling that it’s time to go back.
I go up to Gray and nudge him.
He slides his headphones off. “What?”
“We gotta head back.”
He sighs. “Fine.”
I stop him. “Can I listen?”
“I suck,” he says.
But that can’t be true. I saw the intensity on his face. It’s the same look people tell me I get when I’m drawing.