teach me gently on how to breathe || tradley/brad

خفي

Brad balls his hands into fist and squeezes them against his thighs, fixing his eyes on the terrible, oak tree painting on the mint green walls. He doesn't care if his therapist notices he isn't listening to her anymore. He hopes she will. Maybe it'd shut her up for once. He's already taught himself how to tune out her critical voice and still seem like he's listening, being able to pick up the sounds of her words and knowing exactly when to engage in her informative lecture with an interested 'hmm' or 'yes/no' or a (hopefully) convincing 'i see that now,' but today it's like he's forgotten how to click the mute button when he needs it most. All she wants to talk about is school: his grades and his friends and how his peers treat him. If Brad wanted to be attacked about what's going on in his school life, he might as well just pack up his bags and head back home.

"I know how your grades dropped drastically from the beginning of the year," she informs him, like she knows everything about him. Brad wants to roll his eyes at her. He's already sat down with his parents and had this talk about his grades dropping twenty percent. They already tried prying into his life to find out "what's wrong with him" before sending him to bed with the same information they'd started with. "Do you know what could've happened to interrupt your performance in school?"

Brad doesn't really have a response for that, except sometimes in life you figure out some things are less important than others. He'd rather stay awake all night doing one-hundred push ups than studying for a stupid test. "I went down the wrong path, but I see my mistakes now, and I'm going to do better," the sixteen-year-old decides to say. It sounds convincing to him, convincing enough to push her off the topic of his life and attack him with her endless statistics instead, but she still refuses to just leave it alone, and he's forced to sit through fifteen minutes of her asking about his life. He thinks he's going to die, if he hasn't already.

Eventually, Brad calms down, because he's sure she's not going to say, "Tell me about you friends," which she does.

It's the first time one of her questions have actually left him speechless. All he can do is squirm uncomfortably in his chair, wondering why there isn't a clock on the wall to inform the patients how much longer you have to last in hell. He thinks about making up a friend, but his mind is so messy, he can't even think of a fake name. "Um," he pathetically utters, anxiously looking down at his lap, like the answer will be written on his hands, "they're cool?"

She sympathetically nods. Brad squeezes his hands into fist against his lap again, frustrated. "You're a smart person, Brad," Miss Lillian surprisingly compliments him. "You hold a lot of dedication and perseverance."

"Thank you?"

"And that's what anorexia loves about people. It takes your intelligence and uses it to lie constantly about eating, and it takes your perseverance to push you to keep exercising even when you're tired and can't go any longer." Brad thinks about all the hour runs he took before running home, how he would lock himself in his bedroom and exercise until his dad forced him to go to sleep, how great it felt to see the number on the scale drop, how great it felt to feel his ribs whenever he breathed in. "Anorexia takes a good person and takes advantage of all their good qualities until there's nothing left but a self-centered, moody liar."

Brad's pretty sure his therapist just called him a dick.

"I can see that now," the curly-haired boy replies as his brown eyes roll back over to the sloppy, oak tree on the wall. He tries figuring out the significance of the terrible painting in hopes it'd wash his therapist's untrue statement from his mind. He knows he's not self-centered or moody or a liar. Maybe he did suddenly drop all of his "friends" to prevent them from interfering with his weight loss, maybe he is kind of irritated ninety-nine perfect of the time and accidentally snaps at people without really understanding why, and maybe he did lie once in a while about why he's wearing long boxers in the summer and why he drinks more water at dinner than what's on his plate, but that doesn't make him a dick.