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Sundance kid.  Except that I was in a mental health treatment center in Florida.  And I wasn’t a gun slinging outlaw.  Oh fuck it, never mind. 
     
                      The point was that I had fought therapy for so long that our easy candor was pretty unbelievable.  It was no secret that I didn’t like people.  I avoided them on a good day.  But Dr. Todd was different.   Maybe it was the fact that he didn’t look at me like I was crazy.  There was no forced sympathy or condescending advice.  He let me talk.  Or he let me stay silent.  He'd push when he needed to but let things go when I needed him to. 
     
                      So having him check out my journal surprisingly didn’t feel like a complete invasion of privacy.  Something I had written had thrown me into a tailspin and go figure, my therapist wanted to know what that something was.  Made sense, right?  Plus if I ever wanted to get out of here and get on with living my life, I had to figure out how to handle this new level of bullshit I had unloaded on myself.  Why couldn’t my life ever be simple?  What happened to the normal teenage experience?  Shouldn’t I be making inappropriate remarks about girls’ tits with my friends and devising ways to get my girlfriend to screw me? 
     
                    Nope, I had been given the shitty parents and chemical imbalance card.  Woohoo!  Lucky me! 
     
                      I nodded.  “Go right ahead.” My voice sounded thready and breathless from my most recent round with the crazies.  Dr. Todd gave me a small smile before opening my lime green notebook.  He thumbed through the pages until he stopped at the entry I had written.  He had asked me to reframe a painful memory.  He had told me to think about something that hurt, something that had been extremely difficult for me and to look for a positive to take from it.  Reframing was hard on a good day. 
     
                      Had I mentioned that today was a not a good day?
     
                      When Dr. Todd had finished reading, he looked up at me.  “Well, you definitely picked a doozy to focus on,” he said in a way that made it difficult for me not to laugh.  I appreciated his dry humor. 
     
                      “Well, you know what they say.  Go big or go home.”  My lips quirked in an effort to smile.  I probably looked as though my mouth were spazzing out. 
     
                      Dr. Todd gave me an answering smile and looked back down at my notebook.  “I'm glad to see that you were going in the right direction with this activity.  Tell me what made you have the reaction you did.”  Ahh, so now I was going to talk about my feelings.  I just loved when therapy became so clichéd. 
     
                      “Well, I think it's pretty fucking obvious how I was feeling.  I had a goddamned anxiety attack.  I wasn't hearing the birds fucking chirp and seeing rainbows, okay!” I bit out angrily.  Dr. Todd closed the notebook with a snap.
     
                       “No, I'd say not.  Don't get defensive, Clay.  Now please tell me, what were you feeling?”  he asked me again.  I took a deep breath and tentatively started to think about the situation I had just shared in my journal.   I had to be careful.  I couldn't lose it again.  I had come too far, I would learn to deal with this shit or it would kill me!
     
                       “Angry,” I said shortly, settling on the truth.  I could have dodged the question, but after my little episode, I was too exhausted and way past hiding what I was thinking.
     
                     Dr. Todd frowned.  “Angry, huh.  At who?”  I wanted to groan.   That was a loaded question.
     
                      “Maggie.  Me.  Ruby.  My parents.  Take your