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off, convinced me I wasnot the sort of person who would benefit from the use of sleeping pills.
    Harriet put down her pen and leaned forward just slightly. “Can I be completely honest with you?”
    “Sure.” I doubted that she was capable of complete honesty, but I was eager to hear her evaluation of me. After all, I’d been seeing her for over a year and she had never given me any feedback other than a prescription for Ambien.
    “I’m worried about you.”
    I scoffed.
    “It’s been over a year since it all happened and you don’t seem to have come to terms with the loss in any significant way. That concerns me.”
    “Yeah, well, it’s kind of hard to get over something like that.”
    “I am aware of that. No one is suggesting that you should just ‘get over it’—trauma like you experienced isn’t commonplace. It takes time.”
    “That’s exactly what I just said.”
    “The problem is that you’re not trying to work through what happened. Instead you’re trying to bury it inside of you, which is counterproductive to the healing process.”
    “Wow,” I said, picking up a seashell from her desk and tossing it from palm to palm. “That’s deep.”
    “I’d prefer it if you wouldn’t touch my things,” she said, holding out her hand for the seashell. I gave it over without argument, squinting at her.
    “Maybe you could use some therapy yourself, Harriet.”
    She ignored me. “I believe I was saying that it’s unhealthy to try to push things deep inside of you instead of letting themgo. You’ll never move on that way.” She took in a deep breath and sat back in her chair. This is how I knew the clincher was coming. “Then again, maybe you don’t want to move on.”
    I slumped in my seat and heaved a melodramatic sigh. “There it is.”
    “Why do you keep punishing yourself?”
    “You think I’m responsible for what happened?”
    “No, but it’s obvious that you do.”
    “That’s crazy. I don’t blame myself. Enzo Ribelli killed Carly, and he’s in jail. What have I got to feel bad about?”
    “Okay, maybe you don’t realize it, but I think that the nightmares are definitely a sign of latent guilt. The sleeping pills are a temporary solution, because you need sleep to live. But if you want the nightmares to stop, you’ll have to face whatever it is that’s causing them to manifest.”
    “They’re just dreams.”
    “Right.” She glanced at her watch. “It looks like we’re out of time for today. We’ll pick this up again next week.”
    “Can’t wait,” I remarked, getting up and slinging my bag over my shoulder. “How long am I going to have to keep coming here?”
    Harriet paused. “I don’t know. I’ll have to speak to your parents about that.”
    “Great.”
    I opened the door and turned to leave, slamming into Audrey on her way in. The contents of my backpack went skittering across the hallway. Audrey and I bent down to gather them up.
    “Oh, hi!” she said brightly, but falsely. She handed me a stack of notebooks.
    “Sorry,” I mumbled.
    She shook her head. “No problem.”
    “Everything okay?” Harriet called.
    Audrey smiled anxiously and shifted from one foot to the other. “Weekly appointment,” she said.
    Harriet appeared at the door. “Hi, Audrey. Come on in.” She shot me an impatient smile. “Class, Neily?”
    “Yeah.” I glanced at Audrey one more time and started down the hall.
    The last words I heard Harriet say to Audrey: “I’m so glad you decided to start seeing me.”

    “So, what words of wisdom did the headshrinker have for you today?” Harvey asked, falling into step beside me as I made my way to my next class.
    “Huh?” I wasn’t really listening. I was considering the odds of running into Audrey outside of Harriet’s office. I mean, the school had approximately five hundred students, so the odds of running into anybody anywhere on campus were pretty high if you did the math, but still.
    “Blue slip. Harriet the Spy? They