"I'm Not Crazy"

XXIX.

The therapist looked sick to her stomach. I'd sickened her.

That reaction made sense to me in a factual way. I could understand why she was looking so squeamish. I understood a lot of things. I understood that the actual term for school was about to start for me again, and that I had very little intentions of going back after the catastrophe I'd had. I understood that the pediatrician had sent me home sick the day prior for exhibiting flu like symptoms, and I knew that those symptoms were actually symptoms of me not sleeping for at least a day if not more. I understood that The Thing was hovering right there in the corner staring back at me with its fleshy face and gurgling breaths. I understood that I was thinking very heavily about killing myself, and that those thoughts seemed somehow ludicrous and funny when considered alongside everything else.

I also understood that I'd finally sat down and looked up the name Ryland Brookes the night prior, and that I now knew all of the things that the entire world knew. I was privy to details that Riley hadn't wanted me to know. I now knew that he was a sufferer and a survivor. I knew that I really needed to take all of those meds that I'd flushed.

"Charlotte," my therapist said, because I was looking out her window at a bird that did not exist again to avoid how sick she looked.

"We heard it," I repeated, because I'd just told her a thing that I did not like to admit to. "Matty and I stood in the hallway and we listened to it happen. Franklin beat her and then we listened to him do it."

I wondered how much she was paid to listen to things like this. I wondered if she had a lot of clients who had such stories to tell. How many step fathers beat and raped mothers? How many children sat in hallways and listened to screams?

I had looked at Matthew almost desperately. I'd asked him to take me downstairs, but Matthew couldn't take his eyes off the door. Matthew was frozen and shaking at the same time. Afterwards he'd thrown up in the bathroom downstairs, and I'd always had to wonder how he could be so equally disgusted and intrigued in such unison.

And then when he came for me, I'd always wonder if it was something he just couldn't fight. Traumatized children repeat the behaviors they see. They don't know anything better. They taunt and they poke and they pretend that the things they've seen don't keep them up at night just as badly.

"She lied," I said, and I shouldn't have said it because I didn't have any idea if I could even trust this woman.  Trust didn't matter anymore, though. I was at the end of a very short rope and I had already accepted the outcome. "I didn't spend Christmas with them. I left after dinner on Christmas Eve, and I went home because I could hear Franklin hitting her in the other room."

My therapist nodded tightly.

"I'm not lying," I added. "I know I'm a liar, but I'm not lying about that. We heard it."

"Why would I think you were lying?" She requested softly.

She was blonde. I don't know if I've ever mentioned that. She was young, and blonde, and she had a voice that I thought would sound lovely if she sang. She was probably just a few years older than me. She probably went to a nice college with tall shelves in the library and wide windows in the dorms. If I really dedicated to the psychology thing at school I could be her in a few years, minus the blonde.

"Everybody thinks I'm lying," I replied. "Or that I'm crazy."

She put down the notebook that she always wrote in, and she sat up fuller to meet my eyes. She looked calm. Even in her horrified nature, she was calm. I really needed to figure out how to emulate it.

"I don't believe you're a liar," she said.

"You're wrong," I promised her. "I hide the truth all the time. I'm a liar by omission."