“I know,” she groans.

“The literal kiss of death.”

“Exactly,” she says. “I’m dead. My body just hasn’t gotten the memo.”

“Those Cheetos probably had some kind of reanimation spell on them,” I suggest.

She drops her forehead against the steering wheel for a second. “I liked him so much. There, I said it. How could this happen?”

“Is it possible he just, I don’t know, ate Cheetos?”

“I mean, I’m no forensic investigator, but I would say there’s roughly a one hundred percent chance that’s exactly what happened.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? I abandoned you to make out with a Frito-Lay product.”

“Honestly, Meg, if I needed you, I would’ve found you, mid-cheese-powder make-out or not.”

“I die,” she says. “I die a thousand deaths every time I think about it.”

“I think you should give him another chance.”

She looks at me, utterly aghast. “That’s just because you’re all moony! Because you obviously just kissed someone who didn’t taste like the floor at Derek Dillhorn’s fourth-grade birthday party!”

“I would bet money Brian’s mouth doesn’t always taste like that.”

“We’ll see,” she says. “I may just be too scarred. Hey, do you want Waffle House? I’m starving. Starving for details. Starving for waffles and starving for details.”

“That sounds good, but I think I need to sleep for ten hours first. Maybe reconvene for dinner?” We’re driving past the Presbyterian church now, which is back to normal—the additional wing vanished, and the parking lot too big for the small Sunday crowds. “Hey, does anything about that building seem different to you?” I ask.

Megan peers out the window. “Just the haze of flaky, cheese-flavored orange hanging over everything, but that could be my imagination.”

We pull up to the curb in front of my house, and Megan presses the heels of her hands into her eye sockets and drops her head back into the headrest, groaning again for good measure.

I pat her arm. “This too shall pass.”

She straightens up and sighs. “From your mouth to Grandmother’s ears.”

I get out of the car, legs wobbling from fatigue, and wave goodbye as Megan pulls away. I turn back to the house just as Gus comes running through the front door and across the yard. “Jack!” I shout, annoyed. He’s always leaving the front door unlocked, and half the time it pops open and Gus takes a jaunt around the neighborhood. I lunge to grab hold of his collar before he can take off, but as my fingers curl around the leather, it happens again.

One second Gus is there, the next he’s gone, and I nearly let out a shriek as the collar drops limp in my hand. I turn in circles, searching the abandoned block. “Gus?” My dog is gone, and I don’t know what to do. I turn in circles, calling his name more loudly. “Gus! Gus!”

And then he’s back. Like it never happened, wearing his collar and trying to pull me up the street to where a decidedly terrifying standard poodle lives. I dig my feet in and try to yank him back toward the front door.

My mind is reeling. My stomach roils. I drag Gus across the yard and run up onto the porch, but I come up short. It feels like my heart just slammed into a wall. And now Gus is gone again. The door and the shutters are red, not green like they should be. I’m so freaked out that for some reason, I still try to jam my house key into the lock, but it won’t work. My insides are screaming, I can barely breathe, and I fumble with the key, panic filling me up like a flood of acid. “Gus,” I say again. Then, “Grandmother. Grandmother! Are you there? Please!”

The key finally slips into the lock as the door turns green again before my eyes, and Gus reappears in the same moment.

I run inside, hauling Gus in after me, and lock the door behind us. I slump against it and slide to the ground, wrap my arms around Gus’s neck as tears stream down my cheeks. I nuzzle into his fur and wait for the fit of trembling to pass.

11

My first session with Alice is eerily similar to every appointment I’ve had with real therapists, as long as you completely ignore the Hoarders-esque state of her office and the way she keeps snapping her gum and the fact that she occasionally rolls her eyes when I say something she disagrees with. I have this sense that she’s assuming the pose, role-playing the whole thing like we had to do in A.P. Psychology.

It’s like we’re playing doctor until we get to the bits that might actually be useful, when she sits forward abruptly, drums her lips, then jots something down haphazardly in her notebook.

“Are you sure there’s no faster way to do this?” I ask. “Maybe if you told me what you’re writing down.”

“There’s no faster way,” she says, scribbling furiously. “I’m following my gut. Some things may seem mundane to you, but they might hold the key. Other things may seem really big and have nothing to do with it. I just want you to keep talking.”

And I do. For ninety-five straight minutes, and I don’t leave a single second empty. And I feel productive, like I’m getting something done and need to keep plowing ahead.

I tell her about my tantrums and how dance seemed to get them out of me, and how Mom thought that meant maybe I’d had ADHD. I tell her the night terrors started out as dreams, then spread to the visitors at my bedside and I’d scream until they disappeared and Dad would come running in with the baseball bat he kept under the bed. I tell her things I’ve never said aloud, not even to the other counselors, because the words themselves make me feel weak, and when I feel weak, I cry, and when I cry, I feel out of control. I tell her how, when I was little, I thought Debra Messing and Isla Fisher and Amy Adams were the very definition of beauty and how, when the twins turned three and their baby-blond hair started darkening toward Mom’s reddish color, I was secretly heartbroken, as if I’d lost something, no matter how stupid or self-absorbed that sounds. They were going to look like our parents, and I was going to keep looking like a stranger.

But I tell Alice the truth, because for the first time, I want the counseling to work more than I want to hide the parts of me I’m scared of.

At some point we bounce toward the present. “The Wrong Things,” Alice says. “The changes or flickers. Tell me about those again.”