“You’ve been spending an awful lot of time up here lately,” her dad pointed out.
“What?” Gabby looked at them with bald denial. “No, I’m doing things. I saw Shay for coffee today, even. I’m functioning.”
Gabby’s mom reached out and took her hand then, squeezed it like Gabby had terminal cancer. “It doesn’t really seem like you are, bug,” she said.
“Can you leave me alone?” Gabby said, and it came out a lot more like begging than she meant for it to. “I’m fine.”
Her dad shook his head. “You’re not, sweetheart.”
To her absolute, abject horror, that was when Gabby started to cry. “So what?” she asked, pulling her hand away from her mother’s, sounding snotty and shrill even to herself. “You want me to go play checkers with Dr. Steiner again and talk to him about how broken my brain is? Or like, go on Prozac and be a zombie all the time?”
“Gabby, hey,” her mom said, looking like she was about to cry herself. “Your brain isn’t broken. Don’t say that, sweetheart.”
“Why not?” Gabby demanded. “It’s what you think, clearly. Is this what you guys talk about all the time behind my back, and Celia and Kristina too? How crazy I am? At least Celia also says it to my face.”
“Nobody thinks you’re crazy, Gabby,” her dad chimed in softly. “And it wouldn’t need to be Dr. Steiner. We could find somebody down in the city near school, somebody you liked.”
“I’m not going to like anybody,” Gabby argued. “I can already tell you that.”
“Maybe not,” her dad agreed. “But I bet we could find somebody who could give you some strategies for coping better, even if they weren’t your best friend. There’s no reason for you to feel like this all the time if you don’t have to.”
“Aunt Liz has been on meds for years,” Gabby’s mom told her. “Do you know that, is that something you know? That she gets anxiety too? So did Grandma Grace. It runs in families. I don’t know why we never talked to you about this before.”
Gabby shrugged, staring at her hands in her lap instead of looking at her parents. Because you’re afraid of me, she didn’t say.
“This is our fault,” her dad said, getting up from the desk chair and sitting beside Gabby and her mom on the bedspread. “We should have pushed you about this stuff a long time ago. We should have taken better care of you.”
“I’m not doing it,” Gabby said, shaking her head stubbornly. “I’m not.”
“We can’t force you,” her mom said, scooping Gabby’s tangled, matted hair up off her shoulders; this time, Gabby didn’t flinch away. “It’s not like when you were little, where we could just pick you up and carry you somewhere you didn’t want to go. You’re a grown-up now; you’re going to college. And you have to be responsible for your own self.”
“I don’t want to,” Gabby said, and started crying all over again. She felt like she could cry forever. She felt like she might never, ever stop. “I’m so scared.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” her dad said, and his voice was so quiet. “We know you are.”
RYAN
Ryan met his dad at a diner up in New Paltz, all peeling tabletops and Naugahyde seat cushions clumsily bandaged with duct tape. Ryan ordered a burger and a heaping side of onion rings, choosing not to say anything about the fact that the guy had been half an hour late. He’d showed up, hadn’t he? That was something. “How you doing?” his dad asked, sliding into the booth and ordering a cup of coffee from the waitress. “Your summer good?”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, though good wasn’t really the adjective he would have chosen to describe it. “Pretty good.”
“Good,” his dad echoed. “Look, I’m sorry again about the graduation thing.”
“Oh, no.” Ryan shook his head. Even though it was just at the beginning of the summer it felt like it had happened to somebody else entirely. He kind of didn’t care anymore. His dad hadn’t shown up when he said he was going to, but his dad hardly ever showed up when he said he was going to. Somewhere along the line, Ryan had realized that no matter what he did—or didn’t do—that was probably never going to change. “It’s cool.”
Ryan took a deep breath. “I have something to talk to you about, and I wanted to do it in person,” he said, looking at his dad across the booth. He was wearing a faded Sunoco T-shirt Ryan remembered from when he was little; there was a day’s worth of graying beard on his chin. “I’m not going to go to Minnesota.”