FACELESS

Chapter Six

Jesse (my therapist, or so what she calls herself) comes into my room after J finishes putting on my new bandage. She gives J a hard, cold glance, her eyes glaring into J's. After that, J leaves without a word. She doesn't check my IV drip before she leaves.

"How are you doing, Audrey?" Jesse smiles up at me. Her smile is a forced one. I feel myself beginning to miss J's sunshine and optimism in this room.

"Great." I reply. Not really, but it's not like I could tell her anything else.

"What don't we talk about you? Not the incident, not the aftermath. Let's talk about you, shall we?"

I let the words escape out my mouth before I could even stop it.

"Did my parents put you up to this?"

Jesse blinks. I don't think she expected that when she first walked into the room, and then she frowns, her lips twisting together and she shook her head. "No, why would you think that?

"Right," I click my teeth, "Why else would you ask about me?"

"Audrey," she continued. "It is part of my job, I'm a therapist, remember?"

I let her words float across the room, and I let it enter my ears and travel into my brain. "So?"

"There are laws for my job, Audrey, I- "She pauses. "I can't just reveal what you tell me to someone else, it's the patient's confidential rights."

I roll my eyes, crossing my arms across my chest. "My mother could pay you thousands for you to just reveal that I'm psycho and they could fix me somehow in a mental hospital."

Jesse stays silent, I let the air conditioner noise drown me. I don't want to think about my parents or the way Jesse is staring at me right now – Is it pity that I see? Or is it mockery, that I wasn't perfect and even my own therapist despises me. I can't help but wonder what kind of person would volunteer to be a therapist, listening to people's depressing thoughts all day. I have enough of my own. I can't ever ignore my own demons screaming into my ears from the inside and tearing me apart every time they get an opportunity to.

How many horrible, horrible things does a therapist hear every day?

Do they bring home some of those demons, too?

"Audrey," Jesse's voice snaps me back to reality. I feel as if I'm ready to collapse, even though I've just woken up earlier. I want J back, back to my side, watching me eat – I don't want to talk to Jesse today, or anytime in the near future.

"You have to understand I'm here to help you, not to tip off all your personal details to your family." Jesse continued, "In order for me to help you, you need to trust me."

Trust.

What a word, right?

Jesse expects me to trust her – a stranger who I only talk to because I screwed up my face, and now she's going to try to forc - coerce me into telling her about my feelings and how I feel about the incidents, what I want to do after I recover.

She says the word 'recover' with such high spirits I almost started laughing. She thinks that I'm going to recover after this – funny. I'm not going to recover. I know without looking, and I know I shouldn't get my hopes up, because I always end up disappointing myself. I don't want to have the hope that I'll look like myself still after the bandages come off. It's not possible. It's not possible. It's not possible.

I don't want to talk about the incident because I don't want to think about the people who did this to me.

Jesse keeps talking, she's unzipping her bag, sticking her hand in and retrieving her notebook – my notebook. She details all my information down in the book and all the treatments she plans to give me. I wonder what else she writes inside, other than the treatments. Maybe one day she forgot her grocery list, and she just grabbed this book and somewhere, between some of the pages scribbled with "anxious, self-loathing." And "distrusting of others", there is a small, tiny column of food she should had bought back to celebrate Christmas with her friends and family. The remnants of the handwriting filled with guilt, and partially, the unprofessionalism of desecrating her patient's official notebook with her own words of mundane tasks like getting avocados, or turkey from the deli sections in a supermarket. And maybe, just perhaps, while she fumbled between the avocados she held between her two hands, picking and choosing the one best suited for her dinner by pressing into the skin and deciding which ones are the ripe ones – she didn't have to worry about how people looked at her.

How people would look at me.

"Can we begin?"

I pause, "Do we have too?" I play with the blanket in my hand. "I mean- I know I have to do the therapy. But, is it compulsory?"

Jesse sighs. She leans back onto her seat, the chair creaking with strain. "Okay, but if we skip today, you have to talk to me the next session. Are you alright with that?"

"Yep." I say, avoiding her eyes.

"Okay," she say, stuffing the notebook back into her bag. She zips the bag and pauses, her hands lingering at the zipper.

"No skipping?" Her voice sounds different. Not like Jesse The Therapist anymore – a friend. She sounds like a friend who would be talking to me. I felt myself freeze, because I haven't heard voices this soft when talking to me.

Always, it was voices with sharp, menacing meanings behind. Oh, Audrey, did you sleep with that bed hair all the time? You look like the merlion. They always laugh, hovering above me with their mouth muttering words that are hostile, rude and plainly horrible.

And sometimes, rarely, someone would speak to me in a nice tone, their tongue whispering the words like snowflakes landing on my skin, melting against me. It's very rarely that I hear something like this. Way before the incident, after Mia and I fell out and she changed her seats after asking our teacher, seemingly the whole class had turned against me; Me, the poor, pathetic Audrey Tan.

It's been nearly too long for me to even remember who was mean and who was nice to me. I don't usually let their faces hover in my mind so at night I could sleep soundly without their faces haunting me in my sleep. I let my mind forget what happened in school and of course – that includes everyone in school.

Except, this time, I can't forget.

I took notice of Jesse looking at me, waiting for a reply. I cough, nodding my head. "Yeah, no skipping."

"Okay," she says, slinging her bag over her shoulders, "I'll go today. Your next session is tomorrow."

"What?"

She smiles. "See you tomorrow."

And then she leaves.

I lay down on my bed, sighing, feeling the bed cushioning me underneath. I close my eyes, and I can immediately feel the bandages pressing against my skin, the cooling sensation is subsiding. My stomach growls again.

I sit up, feeling the bed creaking underneath. I focus my vison onto the calendar beside my bed. November 16.

I have three more months to go.

I close my eyes, and let myself fall back into slumber.