Freedom of Sketch

Headshrinking

"You're a shrink?" I say indignantly.

Linda closes the door. "That's one way to put it, yes," she says, sounding amused. "Don't worry. We're just here to talk."

I flop onto a squishy leather couch and moan. "That's exactly what I was afraid of."

Linda gathers her various instruments of psychoanalysis: a pen, wide-ruled notepad, and clipboard, and perches herself in a stiff-backed armchair across from me. "This is a safe space," she reassures me. "Everything we talk about will be confidential unless I have reason to believe it could cause harm to you or someone else."

I slouch into my hoodie, willing it to swallow me whole. "Why do we have to do this?" I grumble.

Her somber eyes are very round, the irises a faded blue. "We had a meeting about you," she says gently. "The drawings are on a laundry list of issues we're concerned about. That, plus the fire and the attack on Brooke."

"Drawings?" I exclaim. "Principal Matheson just found the one in my locker, and I tried telling him that it was for a class assignment and that it wasn't supposed to be - "

Linda raises her hand to silence me. "You don't remember the folder of drawings you left behind in class after your confrontation with Brooke?"

I can't find my pulse. The heat emanating from the red space heater behind the couch threatens to cook me alive. There's a stray hair caught in my eye but my bones have fused together and I can't move. I'm not known to draw pictures of puppies and rainbows. I finally swallow a few times and catch some of the words floating around in my head. "Who saw them? How many people are mad at me?"

"Mad at you? Honey, no one's mad at you. We're just worried." She clicks her pen. "It's the principal, guidance counselor, a couple of your teachers...."

"My teachers?" I touch my face; my skin is clammy. My eyes wander past Linda and follow the slow swaying of an elaborately feathered dream catcher above her desk. There's a mini fridge covered with magnetic poetry in the back corner. On the door is a laminated, handwritten sign that says, 'Normal' is just a setting on your washing machine. If Linda weren't picking at my brain, she might be harmless, even cool.

Linda brings the notepad closer to her eyes and squints. "Yes - some of your poetry was concerning, and there's also the collection of artwork we found." She looks back to me and smiles sympathetically. "Usually I let those kinds of things go. Some kids like to express their creativity in a dark, brooding way."

I give her a very enthusiastic nod. "Exactly! Finally, someone gets it!"

Linda sighs and rests her notepad on her lap. "But Shiloh, all of these recent events have made this more of a cause for concern." She brushes away a lock of hair and glances at me.

I stare vacantly past the dream catcher and into the naked tangles of tree branches just outside the frost-etched window. "It looks worse than it actually is," I argue. "I got into a fight with another girl. I drew a generic picture of a suicide. The art studio just happened to catch on fire. It's a clusterfuck."

Linda chuckles. "Murphy's Law," she muses.

"Huh?"

"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong," she explains, scribbling furiously on the notepad, then flipping to a fresh page.

"Yes!" I flail my arms.

"So tell me about the fire," Linda says, leaning forward and crossing her legs. "Principal Matheson says he didn't find any matches or lighter fluid in your locker: nothing to explain what happened," she adds. "So I want to hear from you."