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and deal with some things in order to protect her feelings or make her life more bearable.
    “You’re nice,” I said, lamely. But it was how I felt.
    “Thanks.” She grinned. “Now get out of here. I can’t believe I caught you snooping.”

    When my father picked me up that night, I could tell he had had a martini or two and was feeling affable. As I climbed into the car—he hadn’t bothered to come to the door, preferring to honk instead—and buckled my seat belt, he asked, “How was it? Did you have fun?”
    “Yeah,” I said, when what I really meant was, I never want to go home again .

    Senior Year
    T he school psychiatrist’s office was a fascinating spectacle of ego in bloom. The good doctor, who insisted we call her Harriet (“Like all the other teachers”), kept her office impeccably neat. Her books, all academic texts and journals, were arranged alphabetically by title on frequently dusted shelves; her walls were covered with every diploma, certificate, award, and letter of recognition—framed—that she had ever received in her short career; every object in the room was turned ever so slightly toward the one chair that sat on the opposite side of the desk. It was as though Harriet wanted the student, her patient, to feel like he or she was the center of everything. It might have reassured some, but I found it vaguely unsettling, so when Harriet’s back was turned I liked to subtly shift a few of the items to take off some of the pressure.
    Harriet had no photos of friends or family to indicate that she had a private life, but whether it was a matter of personal taste, or an effort to make herself seem a little more human for our comfort, or just a sad attempt at cultivating an eccentricity, every spare inch of Harriet’s desk was covered with seashells. I would guess that, on average, Brighton students spent eighty percent of their time staring at the seashells and wondering if their presence was some kind of test.
    “Are you still having nightmares, Neily?” Harriet tilted her head slightly and gave me a tight smile.
    I’d been seeing Harriet more or less regularly since Carly died. Everybody, from my parents to the principal, insisted on it. They said I needed therapy to help me cope with the tragedy, with everything I saw. By the time she died, I hadn’t spoken to Carly in almost a year, but by discovering her body on thebridge that night, I had accidentally stumbled into the middle of something devastating, and people were worried.
    “They’re not nightmares,” I told her. “They’re just dreams.”
    “The dreams, then—are you still having them?”
    I shrugged. “Sometimes.” Every night .
    “And the sleeping pills I prescribed for you aren’t helping?”
    “No.” They did me no good sitting in the back of my medicine cabinet, hidden behind a box of Band-Aids.
    “Are you even taking them?”
    I hesitated. “No.”
    Harriet sighed heavily, like I’d let her down. “Why not?”
    “I don’t want to become dependent on them. That happened to a kid I knew.” On television .
    “I wouldn’t have suggested you take them if I didn’t think they would help you,” Harriet said. “If you take them responsibly and don’t abuse them, then there shouldn’t be a problem.”
    I shrugged. I wasn’t really interested in the sleeping pills. Yes, I was having trouble sleeping, and yes, that was partly due to the fact that I often experienced nightmares, many of which involved Carly and any number of absurd dream-scenarios connected to her death and the memories of finding her body. I didn’t know what the dreams meant—I don’t even know if I believe that dreams can mean anything—but I wanted them to go away on their own, I didn’t want to drug them into submission. To me, that just seemed like putting a lid on a problem and expecting it to go away, which in my experience rarely works. That, combined with how I felt the day before when the sedatives from the hospital had worn