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like we were going to keep talking.
    She bolted, of course, but I was surprised she’d stopped for even that moment.

SIX
    TODAY WAS A LAURIE DAY TOO —as if I hadn’t dealt with enough crap with Caro and lunch already. I’d hoped to miss school to see Laurie, but naturally she has afternoon hours for her “teen” patients. Lucky, lucky me. Mom, thankfully, had to do some grocery shopping and just dropped me off. I wasn’t up for a discussion about “how things are going” with her while I was stuck in the waiting room.
    Eventually, I guess Laurie must have somehow known I’d looked through all the magazines twice and was contemplating bolting and had me called back.
    She started off normally enough—for her, anyway, with the “How are you feeling?” questions and all that crap. But then she said, “Today I want to talk about Julia.”
    “Okay, well, it’s been ninety days today,” I said, because telling Laurie to shut the hell up doesn’t work. I’ve tried it.
    “No,” she said. “I mean, tell me about her.”
    “Well, the accident—”
    “No, before that. When did you first meet?”
    “She moved here when she was twelve.”
    Laurie was silent. She does that sometimes. I can never tell if it’s because I’ve said something wrong or because she’s thinking. Either way, I always end up babbling.
    “I was eleven.” See? Babbling. Does Laurie really care when I met Julia? Highly doubtful.
    “What did Julia think about your drinking?” And once again, I was right. She’d gone right for the drinking. So predictable.
    I stared at her, annoyed. She stared right back.
    “Well, if it hadn’t been for…if it hadn’t been for that night, for me, she never would have—”
    “Let’s not talk about that right now,” Laurie said. “You drank before the accident, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “A lot?”
    I shrugged. It wasn’t like we hadn’t talked about this before.
    But she kept quiet again, so I finally said, “Yeah, a lot.”
    “When did you drink?”
    “Before parties, at parties. Weekend stuff. Last year, though, I drank at school sometimes.”
    “Why parties? Why sometimes at school?”
    I made a face at her because, really, how stupid could she be? Even I know I drank because it made me feel okay about having weird red hair and being so tall. It also made me less nervous about acting like an idiot in front of other people, and parties and school were times when I desperately didn’t want to seem stupid. Drinking made me feel so much better about—well, everything.
    “Amy, I know we’ve covered this before, but I think we should talk about it again. Let me ask another question,” Laurie said, as if I could stop her. “What sort of things did you do to keep your parents from noticing you took alcohol from them?”
    “My parents don’t drink.” I knew she had all this in her little file or chart or whatever. My first week at Pinewood I talked and talked and talked about all this crap, and she was in the room when I did. (And she had her damn pen.)
    Laurie didn’t say anything, though, just gave me her interested look (You’d think they’d learn more than oneexpression in shrink school), so I sighed and recited what we both already knew.
    “My mom had a cousin who died from alcohol poisoning when he was twenty-two. My dad’s aunt was an alcoholic. Why don’t you just say you want me to ask them about my dead drunk relatives?”
    “Right now, I really would like to focus on you. How did you drink?”
    I rolled my eyes and opened my mouth, holding up a pretend bottle.
    She clicked her pen twice. I hate that damn thing.
    “Julia would swipe stuff from her mom or find someone who’d buy for us.”
    “So she drank too?”
    “Sure, if there was nothing else around.”
    “And if there was?”
    “If there was what?”
    “If there was something else around?”
    “Then she’d do that.”
    “I see,” Laurie said, and the minute she did I knew where she was going and it pissed