As Jessica rattled off her list, Dr. Lincoln scribbled down notes. Once she was finished, she asked, “Okay, so how much of that criteria do you feel you meet and where do you feel inadequate by those standards?”
“Uh, I fail to meet all of that.”
“How does that make you feel?”
“I don’t know, I guess it makes me feel nothing. I hated Emma.”
“Who?”
“Oh, just this girl I went to high school with.”
“And where is Emma now?”
Jess scoffed. “No clue. Hopefully knocked up by Greg Burns with the world’s worst morning sickness.”
The doctor made another quick note. “That’s an interesting wish for someone who you seem to harbor ill will toward. Do you think of pregnancy as a form of punishment?”
These questions seemed to be getting further and further from the real reason Jessica was here, and when she looked up at the clock and saw that her appointment was almost over, she felt impatience grow in her.
“Can we get back to the me being crazy thing?”
Dr. Lincoln clasped her fingers together, setting her hands gently in her lap. “I don’t believe you’re crazy. But there are quite a few issues that I can already see surfacing that seem to be affecting your life in a negative way.”
“So no medication?”
The doctor shook her head. “No medication. We may later decide to take that step, but I simply don’t know that it’s necessary.” She paused. “Does God ever tell you to mete out justice or harm anyone, Jessica?”
Jess rolled her eyes. “No. Usually he just tells me not to smite people.”
“So the voice is an agent for making good decisions?”
Jess allowed herself a moment to think about it. “Yeah. I guess so. Huh. Who woulda thought?” It felt revelatory, even though she supposed it should have been obvious that, duh, God would be an agent for good. He was good, wasn’t He? That’s what everyone had led her to believe. But sometimes when He wouldn’t shut up—or rather the voice in her head, which was likely just her own mind, wouldn’t shut up—it was hard to see that. Especially when He wouldn’t stop saying lecherous things about her mother.
The sound of Dr. Lincoln clearing her throat brought Jessica back to the room. “So from what I can tell, there’s no rush to move onto a prescription. I prefer to avoid that path for patients whenever possible. Plus, I can’t technically prescribe anything, since I’m not a psychiatrist.”
Jess narrowed her eyes on the doc. “You can’t even prescribe me anything?”
She shook her head. “Nope. Psychologist, not psychiatrist.”
What a waste of time. “Okay, cool. Well, I got to get going, then.” She grabbed for her backpack on the floor next to her, but Dr. Lincoln stopped her with a small, “Um …”
Jessica looked up.
“How about a little homework?”
“Homework?!” The thought of more to do made Jessica’s head pound just behind her eyes.
“Nothing terrible or time consuming. You can do it even while you walk around campus.”
“Okay,” Jessica consented hesitantly.
Dr. Lincoln placed her pen neatly on the clipboard and then set it on a small table to the side of her chair, clearing the space around her. She inhaled deeply, a serene expression surfacing. “I want you to pay attention to the moments when you see something happen and feel like it should be some other way. Then I want you to ask yourself why you feel it should be that way. Keep asking until you come to an answer.”
Jess concentrated, trying to follow along. “And then what?”
“That’s it!” Dr. Lincoln beamed. “Just notice when something isn’t the way you think it should be, and then ask yourself where you picked up that presumed expectation.”
“Like how?”
“Hm. Okay, what’s something that’s happened recently that wasn’t the way it ideally should be, according to you?”
Where to even start? Jessica’s mind produced a horror collage of the past eighteen years of her life. Jimmy’s face was on there, and, like the collage on Leslie’s wall, Jameson Fractal’s face was also on there. Then there was a spattering of grackle remains, a handful of bloodstained pairs of pants, Chris’s flaccid firehose, a jester hat, an essay covered in red ink, and of course, a couple dozen images of people in the act of cheating on their spouse—those were God’s memories, though, and could make up an entire collage on their own that would cause even a pervert like Gary “Catlady” Higgins to blush.
So she settled with a less traumatizing example for the exercise. “Chris got super upset with me when I told him I thought I might be schizo.”
Dr. Lincoln nodded sympathetically. “And do you think he should have acted differently?”
“Yes.”
“How should he have acted?”
“He should have agreed with me.”
The doctor nodded again. “You wanted him to agree that you might be crazy?”
Well, when she put it like that. “I mean, okay, maybe not.”
“But you do think he should be more supportive?”
Jess opened her mouth then paused. Shit. Maybe this doctor did know what she was doing. “Well, I guess he’s been pretty supportive already.”
“That’s not what I asked,” she added gently. “I asked if you think he should be more supportive.”
“I guess I think he should be less supportive.”
“Why do you think that?”
But before Jessica could reply, Dr. Lincoln held up a finger. “You don’t have to say it. Just think about it. That’s the exercise.”
By the time she’d bid goodbye to the doctor and scheduled a second appointment via the student worker at the front desk, she was feeling much less frantic than when she’d arrived, but much more depressed and a little bit outsmarted. She should text Chris. But what would she text him?
Nothing had been resolved. The shrink was supposed to be her emergency ripcord. She’d believed that the woman would be able to set everything right, but all she’d done was shake things up even more, create more mental and emotional cracks in the house Jessica had built for herself. She’d started the session feeling fairly certain that she was crazy and not God’s daughter, but now she doubted even that. In fact, she seemed to doubt both possible outcomes equally, which logically, should have meant she was 50/50 on the crazy or messiah thing. But somehow it was more like 10/10 or 90/90, depending on the logic of her illogic.
She sloughed uphill toward her dorm, each step feeling like her shoes were caked in thick mud. Would she ever get it together? Her maybe-half-brother had gone out with a bang. Would she? It was seeming more and more like her life would simply go out with a whimper. And part of her actually hoped she was only fifteen years away from that day. If there was a God, if there was a Heaven, it had to be less complicated than her life right now.
When she returned to the dorm, she plopped down on her bed, took out her phone, pulled up the calculator and began some long-neglected accounting. Three hundred and sixty-five days times fourteen years, add in leap days, plus remaining days till her next birthday …
It was an exercise she’d perfected as a child, except now, as she stared down at the dwindling number, she was only moderately surprised to discover that she wished the result of her calculation was much lower. Much, much lower.
“It’ll be fine, Chris!” Jessica assured him over the phone for the fifth time in their short conversation. “Leslie and I are just gonna head over there, have a drink, maybe meet some people, and then head out.”
The whole plan terrified her, actually. But what was courage without fear? Anyway, as self-indulgent as counting down the days until her thirty-third birthday was when she was feeling low, she knew it was a recipe for mental disaster, and she wasn’t quite ready to charge headfirst into that dead end. Sure, she was either crazy as a loon or she was likely doomed to some crucifixion equivalent in approximately five thousand two hundred and thirt
y days, but she might as well get drunk and have some fun in the meantime, right?
At least that’s what Mrs. Thomas had convinced her of, once she’d finally found the time to sit down and write her life mentor an overdue email. The woman made a few points. One excerpt had stood out to Jessica as tremendously comforting in its logic without being annoyingly optimistic:
The situation, as you paint it, seems rather bleak. I could argue with you on your beliefs, but we both know that never changes anything. But you do seem miserable, and I don’t agree that that has to be the case. So I’ll play along. You’re either batshit insane or you’re doomed to a painful death at an unfortunate age. I can see why that might make you feel miserable. What I’m going to argue, however, is that you’re not making it any less miserable by sitting around sulking and begrudging Chris for not understanding your dilemma.
Let me pose a couple questions:
What is worse than being crazy?
What is worse than being doomed to die (which we all are, by the way)?
The answer is this: being either of those things and not making new friends. I know it’s hard, but you have to get out there, meet new people, take risks with those people, make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, make worse mistakes, learn from those as well, and then do it all over again. That’s part of living, which at this point you’re still on the hook for.
So go party. Get drunk (don’t tell your mother I said that). Loosen up. Either the Big Man will protect you or you’ll have an alarmingly convincing and widely corroborated case for pleading insanity whenever you end up on trial.
Not even twenty-four hours after receiving that email, Leslie had invited Jessica to hit a frat party with her, and the timing seemed too perfect to pass up, despite Jessica’s strong feeling that she should avoid raging parties. But Dr. Lincoln’s homework made quick work of that objection.
Why did she feel like she should avoid raging frat parties with a bunch of underage drinking and people she didn’t know? Well, because of the way it might look to others. But clearly nothing she did looked the right way to others, so screw it. Might as well get tipsy.
Chris wouldn’t be soothed, though. “How am I supposed to relax when I go out of town for one night and my girlfriend decides to head to a toga party?”
“Easy, Chris. You’re starting to sound jealous.” She knew immediately she was projecting, but what did that matter? If Chris could go on an overnight trip to College Station for his teammate’s bachelor party, she could go to a toga party. From the stories she’d heard of Henry, the team’s safety who was the one tying the knot shotgun-style, there was virtually no way Chris wouldn’t end up at a strip club.
“There’s a difference between jealous and worried. I know you wouldn’t do anything. I trust you. I just don’t trust a bunch of fratty douchebags with more roofies than common sense.”
She laughed dryly. “Seriously? You think they’re going to try something on me? You know they wouldn’t be able to actually … you know.”
“No, I don’t know. I know that I can’t, but I don’t know about other douchebags.”
“You think you’ve been singled out for this curse? You think God doesn’t simply want to ruin my life, period?”
“I don’t know. I just … it could be that there’s a specific reason we can’t.”
Jess scoffed. “You mean outside of me being doomed to die a virgin? No, listen, it doesn’t matter. Nothing’s going to happen. It’ll be fine. You go enjoy your strippers or whatever and I’ll call you when I get back to the dorm, okay?”
His heavy exhale sent a burst of static through the phone. “Okay. Sounds good.”
He didn’t deny the stripper thing! She felt her chest tighten, but said nothing. “Love you.”
“Love you too, Jess.”
She ended the call and shoved her phone into the side of her strapless bra, which was the only place to safely tuck it away when her outer clothing consisted of a cheap twin-size white sheet she’d bought from Walmart earlier that day.
“Ready now?” Leslie asked.
Jessica stole another look at herself in the full-length mirror. She and Leslie had spent the last half hour watching videos in their bras and underwear and then practicing and perfecting the toga wrap. She’d decided to go for it and hike hers up to above her knees to show off the ripped calves she’d developed since starting school at a campus built on a steep hill. She’d even made it so the lower part of her thighs were showing, stopping just short of revealing the part where the cellulite started to clot on her hamstrings. Nobody needed to see that.
What am I doing, going to a party? How could this be anything but a bad idea?
She shut it down. Chris went to bars and parties without her. She could do the same. And just because the only kegger she’d ever attended had ended with a hit-and-run fatality/resurrection didn’t mean they all had to end so miserably. Once again, it had been Dr. Lincoln’s homework that had illuminated that flaw in her logic.
Plus, she had enough makeup on that it was practically a disguise. Chris might not have even recognized her like this, with eyeshadow, blush that made a jawline appear out of nowhere, a sexy toga that left one shoulder bare, and her hair in long curls, compliments of Leslie’s magic touch. Looking this put together for once felt like going undercover.
“Yeah, let’s go.”
As they pulled off onto a quiet country road on the way to the frat house, Jessica proposed a burning request to Leslie. “Hey, can you just not mention who I am to anyone who doesn’t already know?”
Leslie’s head darted around quickly in surprise as she inspected Jessica’s face. “Why?”
“I just want to be an average person, if that’s possible.”
Leslie nodded. “Yeah, okay. I mean, you’re not an average person.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I’m not even talking about the God thing.”
“Huh?”
Leslie slowed the sedan to better take the increasingly shoddy gravel road. “Even outside of the messiah thing, you’re not average. You’re smart, funny, brave, and sheesh—look at you! You look hot tonight.”
Jessica couldn’t hold back a grin as her heart floated in her chest. “Huh.”
She could feel the bass in her bones before she could actually hear the music. The makeshift lot was packed, and Leslie was forced to squash a small sapling with the hood of her car to squeeze into a tight space.
As soon as Jessica opened the car door, she regretted having hiked up the toga so high and wished she’d splurged on the king-size sheet instead; it must have dropped ten degrees since they’d loaded into the car twenty minutes before.
“Shit it’s freezing,” Jess exhaled.
Leslie laughed. “No joke. Better get a drink to warm up.” She grinned, and Jessica returned the smile as her teeth started to chatter. Maybe she should have prepared for it being cold at night in early March, but it was Texas. She couldn’t be blamed for her assumption that it would stay in the midsixties after the sun went down.
Anxiety swelled in her throat the closer they came to the ranch-style house surrounded by cedar trees and stumbling college students, both swaying in the chilly breeze.
How did one start a conversation? Shit. She had no clue.
Why in the hell had she thought this would be a good idea? Whatever reasons had made sense to her only an hour before crumbled like a termite-eaten tree. Was she actually expecting to make friends, or was she really just a glutton for punishment?
“Brent!” Leslie hollered as they rounded the side of the house and approached the back deck where the majority of the partygoers were huddled. Icicle lights dipped and dangled above the area, casting a soft glow over the crowd, the makeshift bar area, and the speaker system.
It wasn’t much light, but it was enough for Jessica to realize she was overdressed. Way overdressed.
How are they not freezing to death? Girls in hardly more than Ace bandages that seemed closer to c
ensor strips than togas frolicked around with red Solo cups in hand.
On one of the benches by the railing of the deck stood a girl swirling her hips seductively to the music—a gesture that was entirely unnecessary to convey her attitude of down-for-whatever, considering all she donned was a few layers of Seran wrap around her waist and a strip of pink duct tape around her breasts. Jess hoped to her father that the girl had had enough sense to cover her nipples with something soft before sticking on the tape, but her mind wandered from that worry immediately as her eyes homed in on the girl’s shaved cooch, blurred just enough by the layers of clear plastic wrap to remind Jessica of a blurred face on TV—she could definitely tell it was a vagina, but she couldn’t make out any of the defining characteristics. And that only made her want to inspect it more.
But showing up to a party and immediately zoning out on a girl’s vag seemed a poor strategy for making friends.
A shirtless man with a towel tied around his waist pushed through the crowd and greeted Leslie with a smile. “Hey girl.”
“Hey,” she said back before opening her body toward Jess. “This is my roommate, Jess.”
Jess searched his face for the telltale signs of recognition she was so used to seeing when someone’s perception of her went from plain Jane to oh shit it’s the Christ Child.
But the way Brent looked at her didn’t fit into either of those baskets. His eyes scanned from just below the bottom hem of her toga up to her eyes, taking a quick hop over to her bared shoulder. He licked his lips subtly. “Hi. Brent.” He offered her his hand and she shook it.
“Nice to meet you.”
He continued to stare at her, and when she looked away and glanced back at Leslie, the girl was too focused on Brent’s face to notice.
Ah. Leslie had a thing for Brent. Noted. “So how do y’all know each other?” Jess asked, taking a stab at normal small talk.
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