by Ariel Kaplan
“Just imagine he’s singing to a bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s,” I said. “That’s what I do.”
Delia laughed.
“Don’t make fun,” I said. “I’m sure Mrs. Butterworth is a lot of people’s dream woman.”
“She’s sweet,” she said. “She’s curvy.”
“She doesn’t talk back, and she’s recyclable in most municipal locations.”
“You want to tell me why that guy was calling you Beth?”
“There’s a segue.”
“I never really believed in those. So why was he?”
I shrugged.
“Where is Bethany, anyway?”
I said, “On a date.”
“A date?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t think Bethany went on dates.”
“This is actually the first one,” I said.
“Ah,” she said. “And everything makes sense again.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Who’s the guy?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said bitterly. I turned my phone back on, just to see if I’d missed anything important and crew-related.
“Ha,” she said. “Nice tone. I’m surprised she didn’t make you go over there and help her get dressed.”
“Shut up, Delia,” I said.
She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. “Are you mad because she did ask you, or because she didn’t?”
“Can we not do this right now?” I asked. My phone took that opportunity to start pinging with missed texts. There were a good dozen of them, all from Bethany, and I stuck my phone back in my purse without reading them because I didn’t want to do it sitting next to Delia.
“Lot of messages,” she said.
“I did tell you to shut up, right? That did happen?”
She scoffed. “Must be tough being Aphra Brown, patron saint of the codependent.”
“What?”
“Oh, please.”
“You might as well finish that thought now. You’re going to anyway.”
She was silent. Finally, she said, “You have a whole lot of relationships that are based on other people needing you. That’s all.”
“Really. Do I.”
She sighed. “Bethany needs you because she can’t talk or whatever. Mom and Dad need you to take care of Kit. Kit needs you to act like a grown-up because Mom and Dad keep forgetting he exists. And according to Mom, now some guy needs you to teach him to row a goddamn boat, like it’s so hard.”
“Those are called relationships, Delia. They’re what people have with each other.”
“Mmm, no. A relationship implies something two-sided. That’s not what you do. You don’t want the give-and-take. You want someone who needs you. You’re desperate for people to need you, because you can’t believe they could ever possibly want you.”
I gripped my seat belt very hard with both hands.
“Yeah,” I said, “well, I’d rather make myself useful than mutilate my face to make people like me. And by the way, do you think Sebastian’s going to keep hanging around once he finds out what you really look like?”
In the headlights of the oncoming traffic, I could see her face go tense and very, very red. “My face,” she said. “Looks like this. And fuck you.”
“Truth hurts, doesn’t it?”
“You would know.”
“What does that mean?”
“Bethany has a boyfriend now. She’s gorgeous. What the hell does she need you for? Nothing. Not anymore.”
“I’m her friend.”
“Are you? Are you really?”
“You were always jealous of her.”
“There’s only one jealous person in this car. And it’s not me.”
By then, we were home. I stormed into the house with Delia on my heels; she blew past my parents and down to the basement. I stomped up the stairs.
“What was that?” my mom called from in front of the TV.
“Oh, nothing,” I shouted. “I’m great.”
“I thought you were at Bethany’s?”
“Change of plans!”
I got ready to slam my door a good one, when I remembered Kit was asleep and that was too bratty even for me; plus, Delia was in the basement and wouldn’t hear it anyway. So I just collapsed onto my bed and mashed my face into my pillow, quickly becoming aware of the sickly sweet smell of my own breath.
From downstairs, I heard my father say, “Remind me why we’ve been farming her out to therapy every week for the past ten months?”
“What else are we going to do?”
I couldn’t hear what my dad said, but my mom replied, “I don’t know. I don’t know! It’s going to take time—”
“How much time? How much time is it going to take?” There was silence. “Maybe we need to try something else.”
“And what would that be?”
But then their voices dropped, and I never did hear what it was.
I was brushing the Zora residue off my teeth when I remembered that it was Sunday, which meant I had school tomorrow. I hoped blue liquor didn’t make you hungover. I’d never had a hangover before, but they sounded unpleasant.
Going back through Bethany’s texts, I read an increasingly frantic series of questions sent from the theater bathroom because Greg wanted to go out for ice cream after the movie and she simultaneously did and did not want to go. The last message had been sent about an hour ago and said, I just got home, where are you?
It was 11:30, which meant she was probably asleep by now. Plus, I kind of didn’t trust myself to talk to her with Delia’s words still stuck in my ear. I hated my sister so much. Like, it wasn’t enough for her to go after my face; she had to take a swipe at my personality, too.
Of course, that was the exact moment my phone let loose with the Star Trek theme song.
I picked it up to put it in airplane mode for the night, but then I saw the message. It said:
I had fun tonight.
Oh, God.
I flipped my phone upside down. I did not need a rehash of Greg’s date with Bethany, as delivered by Greg to Bethany, before going to sleep. I knew I should just deactivate the thing.
But if I did that, Greg would ask Bethany why she’d ignored him, and she’d probably freak out and that would be unfair.
I was not going to talk to him and pretend to be Bethany.
I was not.
I picked up the phone.
Are you there? he’d typed. I really liked the movie. And the other parts, too.
He thinks you’re Bethany, I told myself. He thinks you’re Bethany.
I don’t know how much of the next decision was because I was upset at Delia, or lonely, or the result of the two Zoras I’d had, but I typed, Me too.
I wish we could have talked more, though. I wanted to tell you something.
Yeah?
Yeah. So I was bold. I talked to my parents again.
This was okay. We weren’t talking about the date; we were just talking about Greg’s parents. I’d just make sure he was okay, and then I’d tell him I was deactivating the app because I was done with the project, and that would be the end of it. If he wanted to text Bethany, he’d have to use her actual number.
They weren’t happy. My father got his calculator out and added up all the money they’ve spent on swimming for the past nine years. He wrote it down on a piece of paper and everything.
That’s not fair.
It kind of is. They thought it was a long-term investment in getting me a scholarship. They think it’s my fault that I haven’t kept pace.
You’re not an investment, I said. You’re a person.
Anyway, I told them I’d pay for college myself.
But it isn’t you
r fault!
Maybe it is.
But you’re so—wonderful, brilliant, perfect—good at so many other things!
I think they think if I’d been more focused, I could have been the next Michael Phelps. They just thought…they thought I was going to be a lot better than I am. And I’m so tired of it now. They don’t understand that.
I’m sorry.
I’m just so glad I found you, he said. You’re the only person I can talk to about this.
I screwed my eyes shut.
Are you still there?
Yeah, I’m still here.
Oh, good. I thought maybe I freaked you out or something.
No, I said. I’m not freaked out at all.
Are you okay? You seem kind of quiet.
Well, of course. There’s no audio on this app.
Ha, ha.
I had a fight with my sister earlier. I guess I’m still thinking about it.
I managed to catch myself before I hit send, deleted sister, and retyped brother.
Did something happen?
Not really. Just a character assassination on his part. It’s kind of his specialty.
Well, your character is unimpugnable, as far as I can tell.
He said to the person with the fake identity. Still, I said, Thanks for saying so. I think I should probably go sleep it off. See you tomorrow, right?
Of course, he said. I miss you already.
Me too.
I ended the chat. I should have deleted the app. I really should have deleted the app.
I didn’t delete the app.
* * *
—
The next day was Therapy Day, which was probably a good thing. I wasn’t exactly keen on explaining the Greg situation to the good doctor, but there was really no one else I could tell. And because of that whole doctor-patient confidentiality situation, I didn’t even have to worry about her passing the story on to someone else.
Still, I knew she wasn’t exactly going to approve. She does this thing where she just looks at me and goes, “Hmm,” which I know is her being professionally nonjudgmental while thinking, I would like to smack you. Sometimes I think it would be easier if she would just let me have it, but she never does.
I’d gotten the rundown of Bethany’s date at lunch and was still trying to block most of it out. She was all hand-fluttery about the whole thing. And then I got to spend an hour in Latin staring at the back of Greg’s head, which didn’t make me feel any better.
So by the time I got to Dr. Pascal’s, my mood was pretty sour and I was feeling attacked on all fronts. She let me into her office and I sat on the couch, pulling my customary three peppermint Life Savers out of the bowl. My goal, always, was not to chew them. If I did it just right, I could have a mint in my mouth for the entire fifty-minute session.
Next to the mints there were a couple of Muppets, probably from her last patient. Sometimes I forget that she mostly sees little kids. I guess she probably talks to them differently from how she talks to me. I scooted Elmo and Cookie Monster out of the way and put my water bottle down while she finished whatever paperwork she was doing from the last patient. I wondered if the kid had been more of an Ernie or more of a Bert. Bert, probably. Ernie doesn’t seem like he’d need much in the way of psychological help.
Back when I’d started with Dr. Pascal, I’d looked up the theory of how psychology works on Wikipedia (as one does) and started with the old man (as one does). Sigmund Freud believed that the human mind was composed of three main parts: the ego, the superego, and the id. I imagine that the id is the little devil who sits on your shoulder and tells you to take what you want, the superego is the angel on the other side telling you to behave yourself, and your ego is you, the head in the middle that has to figure out what to do. In terms of Dr. Pascal’s Muppets, the id…well, it’s like Cookie Monster. It wants what it wants when it wants it, and it wants it now. It’s like the two-year-old that lives in your brain and never grows up. It wants cookie, damn it. The ego, maybe, is Big Bird, who is pulled in multiple directions and doesn’t really know what to do, and the superego…I don’t know which Muppet is the superego. Grover, maybe. He’s got that superhero thing going on.
“Hello, Aphra,” said Dr. Pascal, and then, looking up from her paperwork, she added, “Whoa, there’s a mood.”
“I’m not in a mood. Wait. Yes I am. I am in a mood. Having a mood? Which is it?”
“There’s not a significant difference,” she said.
“Really? I think there is. If I have a mood, it’s something I’ve developed internally, like the flu. If I’m in a mood, it’s an external thing I’m caught in. Like fog.” I adjusted myself and flopped back against her couch with an oof. “Or a hurricane.”
“Fortunately, your mood doesn’t seem to have damaged your verbal acuity.”
“It never does, Dr. Pascal.”
“Well, let’s go with that second analogy, then. You’re in a mood. What do you think would help?”
“An umbrella. And maybe some boots. Like, those kind that go over your knees and keep all the water out, but I would like a pair that don’t make my feet sweat, so if you could make that happen, that would be great.”
“Let’s back up,” she said. “Now, just to be clear, are we going with the fog or the hurricane?”
“The hurricane. I wouldn’t need hip waders for fog.”
“Right. So that’s good. Now. Please plot for me the track of this hurricane. It started off down in the Caribbean as a tropical storm, and then…”
“I’m not really sure how it started,” I said. “Well, I guess it started because Bethany went on a date and Delia picked me up from a party.”
“Those things happened on the same day?”
“Yeah, they did.”
She scribbled in her notebook.
“Tell me about Bethany’s date. Did she ditch you to go out?”
“No,” I said. “That wasn’t it. It’s just…it’s complicated.”
“I’m good at complicated. That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” she deadpanned.
I sighed. Then I explained to her, in very abbreviated terms, the whole Greg situation. I may have left out the part where I’d talked to him again last night.
She said, “Hmm.”
“Big bucks, Doc,” I said. “Big bucks.”
“They aren’t actually that big. So, that’s an interesting series of choices you made.”
“Really, that’s your analysis?”
“You know, they told me you made Lisa Fagan cry, but I didn’t actually believe it. Let’s keep going. You said that was how your mood started. But then something else happened.”
“Yeah, I also had a fight with Delia.”
“This is all in one week? What happened?”
I explained about stopping by the party (without mentioning my Zora consumption) and that I’d danced with some guy and then gone home with Delia. “So we were driving home, and everything was fine, basically, and then she told me I have, like, an obsession with other people needing me. Or something.”
“An obsession?”
“That wasn’t the word she used. She said that I engineer my relationships with people so that they need to have me around, because I’m such an ugly loser I don’t think they could actually want me around of their own free will.”
She nodded and made a bunch of notes.
“You’re writing this down?”
“Always. So I’m guessing that made you pretty mad.”
“Well, yeah.”
“Do I even want to know what you said to her?”
“Well, I was mad.”
“Uh-oh.”
“And I may have told her that letting people need me in order to want me around was a lot less horrible than mutilating my own face in order f
or people to want me around, and even after she did that, all she could manage was her douchebag boyfriend who will probably dump her in a hot second as soon as he gets a look at her baby pictures.”
She put down her pen. “Oy gevalt.”
I wanted to explain that this was the kind of thing I would really like to be able to blame on my id. I’d been an asshole, and I knew it. At the time, I’d been so mad that the words had come out unfiltered. The problem was, I kind of meant it, and Delia knew that. “That’s kind of what Delia said, only with less Yiddish and more f-bombs.” I sighed. “She’s not speaking to me at the moment. But I am also not speaking to her, so that works out okay.”
Dr. Pascal took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “There’s a lot to unpack here.”
“Are you sending me back to Lisa Fagan?”
“No,” she said. “No. But we’re not getting through it all today, either.”
I moved on to my second Life Saver.
“So,” she went on, “I know from our many, many conversations that you love your sister, even though you’re mad at her.”
“Right,” I said. “I mean, of course.” I resisted the urge to correct love to storge, because she seemed like she’d had about as much of me as she could take that day.
“And you know she loves you.”
I nodded. “I know I shouldn’t have said that to her. But she shouldn’t have said what she did, either.”
“That seems to have struck a nerve, huh?”
I looked out the window.
“I just want to clarify one thing….Did she say no one could want you around, or that you thought that no one could want you around?”
“The second one.”
“You do recognize those are not the same, and what you told me initially was the first thing?”
“I guess I misspoke.”
“No, Aphra, I don’t think you did.”
“Oh, here goes,” I said.
“I think Delia’s known you a long time, and she’s probably aware of more that’s going on with you than you realize. I think she called you out on how much your self-esteem is driving the bus for you, and hearing that from her hurt like hell.”
“I have very healthy self-esteem,” I protested. “I’m pretty much 70 percent water and 30 percent ego. Delia’s the one with the low self-esteem. She’s the one who thinks her face is so damn important. I know mine is the least important thing about me.”
