Proving Webster Wrong

Chapter Thirteen -- Chloe

Chapter Thirteen

Chloe

I told Andrew that he didn't have to come in and wait, that he could go somewhere else and I would call him when I was done. He wouldn't listen. "What is there to do around here?" he asked as he locked the truck.

I wanted to beg for him to find something to do. Anything other then sitting in there. I knew I wouldn't be able to think straight without him right outside the door waiting for the hour to be up. He wouldn't listen to any of my warnings of how miserable he would sitting there flipping through the same five magazines.

When we walked into the waiting room Dr. Evans was standing at the receptionist’s window talking away. The one thing I liked about Dr. Evans was that she didn't dress like a hippie psychologist but she also did dress up in a suit or anything like that. She just wore blue jeans and a t-shirt, and that's how she was dressed that day and every other day I ever went in. The two of them stopped and looked our way at the sound of the bell over the door, the bell that drove me crazy every time I had to open that door.

I went signed-in while everyone stared at me. Were we late? I checked my phone. Then the clock on the wall. I have grabbed Andre's wrist and looked as his watch. They all said we were five minutes early.

It's just a slow day, that's all. I'm perfectly on time.

I followed Dr. Evans into her office."So who is the boy that brought you today?" she asked as soon as I sat down.

"An old friend," I said. I was in my usual spot, the right side of the couch, with my arms and legs crossed. My back was straight, no leaning back or slouching forward. Dr. Evans liked to call it the closed off position. I called it comfortable in an uncomfortable setting. My black bag sat on the couch beside me, leaning against me just enough so that I knew it was still there.

"I thought none of your friends knew about this." She pushed her rolling desk chair a little closer after pressing the record button on the tape recorder she kept in her desk. The first time I ever came she said she didn't stay on the other side of the room because this was a conversation and so there was no need for us to be shooting across the room.

"Up until yesterday we hadn't talked in four years. He only knows because I told him back in middle school when my parents forced me to go to the first doctor." That game of twenty questions before going to the appointment was not doing me any favors. I couldn't keep my mouth shut.

"Do you want to tell me what changed yesterday?"

"Everything." There. I didn't say more than I wanted to that time.

Dr. Evans stretched her legs out in front of her and crossed them at the ankles. Then she knitted her fingers together and put them behind her head. This was her trying to tell me that she was open to what ever I had to say. She was trying to remind me to relax.

She wasn't getting anymore of an answer to that question.

"What about the reason that you're here for an extra session?"

My fingers we already twisting. "Mom seems to think that if she makes an extra appointment for ever time she catches me in one of the attacks then things will get better. I don't think she understand this at all."

Dr. Evans rubbed her lips together. She always did that when she had something she wanted to add to the conversation, an opinion that might help out, but she would never say it until I gave her permission. It was another thing I liked about her. The other doctor did more opinion throwing than listening.

"Go ahead," I said. No matter how made at my mom I was for making me do this, or my dad for letting her make me do this, I always had a hard time taking it out on Dr. Evans. It was like I needed her to say something wrong so I had permission to be mad at her, more so than her taking my parents money under the promise that she would make me normal.