The Evolution of Mara Dyer

32

OKAY, EVERYONE,” BROOKE SAID, CLAPPING HER hands twice. “We’re finally going to finish this round of sharing with Mara, Adam, Jamie, Stella, and Megan. Let’s all take out our fear journals.”

The unenthusiasm among my Horizons compatriots was palpable, but I was the queen of apathy today. Noah was theoretically roaming Little Havana in search of answers and digging through his mother’s things. I wanted to be with him but instead I was here, and it annoyed me.

Some students withdrew composition notebooks from small bags they had with them. Others walked over to the bookshelf to retrieve theirs. Phoebe was one of the walkers. She sat down next to me.

I felt the urge to move.

“Who wants to go first?” Brooke asked, glancing at each of us in turn.

Don’t make eye contact.

“Oh, come on!” She wagged her finger. “You’re all going to go eventually.”

Resounding silence.

“Mara,” Brooke said. “How about you?”

Of course. “I’m still . . . unclear . . . about the . . . parameters of this . . . exercise,” I said.

Brooke nodded. “It’s a lot to process, I know, but you’ve been doing great these past few days! Don’t worry, I’ll walk you through this. So what we’re going to do is make a list of situations that make us anxious or fearful. Then we rank them—one for things that make us very slightly anxious, and ten for situations that make us extremely anxious.” Brooke stood up and walked to a low bookshelf in the corner of the room. She took out a composition notebook. “And with exposure therapy, we confront our fears little by little. That’s why we keep journals with us, to write about our feelings and anxieties so that we can see how far we’ve come from where we started, and to find common ground with our peers during Group,” Brooke finished. She looked at my lap, then at the messenger bag beneath my chair—freshly combed for contraband and not found wanting. “Where’s your journal?”

I shook my head. “I never got a journal.”

“Of course you did. On your first day, don’t you remember?”

No. “Um.”

“Check your bag.”

I did. I rummaged through it and saw the small sketchbook I kept with me for art therapy along with a few spiral notebooks, but not a composition one.

“Are you sure?” she asked me.

I nodded, looking through it again. Nothing was out of place, except a stray piece of paper at the bottom.

Brooke sighed. “Okay, well, take a blank notebook for today,” she said, and handed me one along with a pen. “But do try to find it, please?” Then she turned back to the group.

“All right, guys,” she continued, “I want you to flip to the most recent page in your fear journal. Mara, since you aren’t sure where yours is, just start listing some anxieties and rank them the way I described, okay? In fact, let’s all take five minutes to look over our lists and see if we can find anything else we want to say.”

Adam coughed, and it sounded a lot like “bullshit.”

“Was there something you wanted to say, Adam?”

“I said this is bullshit. I did it at Lakewood. It’s stupid.”

Brooke rose and tipped her head, indicating that Adam should get up and follow her. He did, and they moved off to the side. Brooke spoke quietly and patiently, but I couldn’t make out her words.

I wished Jamie was sitting closer so I could ask him what Lakewood was. Sadly, he was on the opposite side of the room.

But Stella was right beside me.

“She could almost pass for normal,” Jamie had said about her.

Which made her more normal than me. Maybe I could make a new friend.

I leaned over to her and asked, “What’s Lakewood?”

“A lockup,” she said, cracking her knuckles.

I stared at her blankly.

“A secure residential treatment center?”

Still nothing.

She sighed. “You know how this place is a feeder for the Horizons inpatient program?”

“Kind of?”

“We’re assessed here, in the day program, and then they tell our parents whether they think we’re sane enough to hack it out here or whether they think our issues are serious enough to need inpatient treatment.” She twined a strand of curly hair around her finger. “The Horizons RTC is inpatient, but you get to move around, to come and go from your room and stuff—the retreat’s coming up, you’ll see. Anyway, that’s a normal RTC. At the secure RTCs, you’re basically locked in your room unless they come get you. You’re followed everywhere. Lakewood’s in the middle of nowhere—practically all RTCs are—but without the good food and counselors who actually care. It’s pretty much the last stop before state institutionalization.” She cocked her head to the side. “You’re new to this troubled teen thing, aren’t you?”

I looked over at Adam with new eyes. “Apparently.”

“Veteran,” Stella said, and shrugged.

I was curious what she was in for, but she didn’t volunteer and this wasn’t exactly prison.

“Well, Adam,” Brooke said loudly. “If you don’t want to participate, I’m going to have to let Dr. Kells know and you’ll have to do it with her.”

“He doesn’t belong here,” Stella said quietly as Adam and Brooke walked back into our circle. I wanted to ask her more, but Brooke was ready to move on.

Back to me.

I successfully avoided mentioning any of my real (and valid) fears of the Jude and supernatural varieties by rattling off a bunch of benign, normal ones like bugs and needles. Jamie attempted to ruffle Brooke’s patience with answers like “intellectual bankruptcy,” and “sea monkeys,” while Megan earnestly volunteered every phobia I’d ever heard of and several I never knew existed (“Doraphobia” is the fear of fur).

This earned an obnoxious comment from Adam, who Jamie then accused of having a fear of “physical inadequacies” of a very private nature, which resulted in what I thought was an unjust scolding from Brooke and also caused another Jamie-Adam confrontation. I was rooting for Jamie to land a well-deserved punch to Adam’s brutish head but the face-off ended before it got too exciting. Stella managed to get by without participating at all. Lucky girl. I unintentionally caught a glance at her fear journal but saw only one word (“voices”) before I quickly looked away.

Hmm.

When we were finished, we all handed our notebooks back to Brooke and she then asked for volunteers for a “flooding session.” Megan’s hand went up, bless her, and I had the non-pleasure of watching the poor girl’s big, brown eyes go wide with terror as Brooke talked her through scenario after scenario in which she would encounter and then be confined in small spaces. Brooke talked her through it; first Megan sat there and imagined approaching a closet. Then she imagined walking next to it. Then in it. Then Brooke guided her closer and closer to one in real life. When the fear threatened to overcome her, she said a word that told Brooke she couldn’t take it anymore, and then they backed up. Megan was committed, though; a True Believer. She really did seem to want to improve. Admirable.

When the session ended, we all applauded and offered our encouragement: “Way to go!” “Great job!” “You’re so strong!” Exclamation points included.

We broke for snack time then—just like kindergarten!—and I pulled out my sketchbook to work on an asinine project I’d been assigned: pick an emotion and draw it. I wanted to draw a raised middle finger, but I would draw a kitten instead. Normal people love kittens.

But when I reached inside my bag for my sketchbook, my hand closed over that stray piece of paper.

I withdrew it. Unfolded it. I read what it said as the hair rose on the back of my neck:

I see you.