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and Min did, that inexplicable gravitational pull that made it hard to say no.
    “Later,” Tip said, holding up two fingers in a peace sign. Greg ory Baron mumbled an apology as they left. The fries tasted pretty good. David Nelson sat next to me quietly, telling me no one time, then again, when I offered him some.

Chuck wanted to talk about my dreams. I told him I didn’t remember my dreams, which was a lie. I often found myself lying to Chuck, which was not a habit of mine in general. Back in August, I’d been excited when my parents, at the urging of the huddle of cops who’d been camped out at our house for weeks, told me about the arrangements they’d made for me to talk to a counselor. I imagined a pillowy room filled with deep couches and soft light where I would reveal my every everything and be rewarded with warm embraces or at least the same sort of suckers my pediatrician used to give out after shots. I imagined my new therapist saying things to me like “That was a great insight” or “I’ve been waiting anxiously through my other patients to get to my time with you.”
    But there were no pillows in Chuck’s office, no deep couches. He sat in a swiveling desk chair, sometimes spinning himself justslightly back and forth as if staving off boredom, and I sat in a wooden-armed, tightly upholstered chair that reminded me of a waiting room. There was only one window, and its venetian blinds were always down, open just slightly, so I could make out only thin stripes of pale sky. Chuck rarely smiled, talked in a low monotone, stared directly at my face, and habitually slid his thin, wire-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose. I wanted to like Chuck—or, more accurately, I wanted Chuck to like me—but it was slow going.
    Even with his early speeches about this being a safe space and no one else being privy to these conversations, not even my parents, and this whole process being free of judgment, I had the sense of being on the precipice of unwittingly implicating myself in some terrible thing. With his methodical questioning, his expressionless reactions, and his irregular and distracting habit of jotting something down on his pad while I spoke, I had free-floating guilt, as if all I had ever done wrong was soon to be revealed (yes, I cheated off Lisa Barney’s social studies exam when I fell asleep the night before without getting to the Geneva Protocol; yes, I was the one who made both of Oliver’s paws bleed after trimming his toenails too closely). A single poster hung in the office, behind Chuck’s desk. It was a reproduction of a Hockney-like painting, a front door of a house opening onto a sudden, serene ocean instead of a front lawn. I’m sure it was meant to be soothing—an ocean of opportunities awaits you just outside your front door—but it struck me more as a warning: take one wrong step and you’re sunk.
    “I don’t sleep enough to dream,” I said. I could remember part of one from the night before where I was getting married in a glittery purple dress and I had to clutch the dress to my chest because it was strapless and the elastic was old, so the whole thing felt like it was going to slip off.
    “Dreams can be just minutes long. Do you remember even part of one?”
    “Sorry,” I said.
    Chuck sat quietly looking at me. He was particularly skilled at this. Sometimes I looked away. Sometimes I catalogued his face: the brown soul patch, the unusually full lips that made him look slightly feminine and pouty. Sometimes I thought things like
Does he have a girlfriend?
or
How often does he have sex?
    “Okay,” he finally said. “How’s school?”
    “Fine.”
    “Are you still getting a lot of new attention?”
    The question embarrassed me, making me wish I’d never revealed the fact to begin with, as I had grown quickly to act as if it were unremarkable. I shrugged and briefly considered telling him about Tip at lunch, but I wasn’t sure what I’d say about it.
    “We can