Read Those That Wake 02: What We Become for Free Online

across at an empty seat. He blinked and craned his neck to take in the whole café. Laura was gone.
     
    Laura sat on her bed fuming, her arms hugging her knees, her forehead pressed down on her kneecaps, her entire body tight. Irritability growing into unreasoning anger was not an unfamiliar symptom to her. Her “episodes”—as her mother so charmingly put it—had begun that way. Those had been brought on by a fixation in her senior year of high school. Now, though libraries and librarians had no special bearing on that time of her life, she could feel the more extreme symptoms of her episodes sniffing around her delicate psyche. She ignored the bleat of her cell, chiming from where she’d kicked it under her bed. Ten minutes after it had given up, there was a knock on her door.
    “Go away,” she said into her thighs.
    The knock came again.
    “Fucking fuck,” she hissed, and got up and flung the door open. She turned her back before she could take in Josh’s slackened jaw and confused eyes. She stormed back to the bed and huddled herself into the same position. She heard the door close and Josh come over and stand there, dumbfounded.
    “I’m sorry,” she said without looking up. “It’s not you.”
    “Uh, yeah, I know. Cuz, like, I didn’t do anything except what you asked. Is it the cellenses? I mean, jeez, I could—”
    Laura looked up; her luminous blue eyes were blazing, and tears moistened their edges.
    “No,” she said. “I don’t
know
what it is. Do you
get
that?”
    He stared down at her silently for a moment longer and then sat down and wrapped his strong arms around her. At first she remained stiff, but when he didn’t let go, she rolled into him and, without returning his embrace, let him take her weight.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, for no reason other than he knew it fixed things sometimes.
    “
I’m
sorry, Josh. It’s my fault. It’s bringing back some stuff.” And then, shaky, “Stuff I thought I was through with.”
    “Are we going to talk about that stuff?” He invited as casually as he could.
    “No.” She may have been shaky, but her response was definite.
    He held her in the quiet room, expecting there might be hard tears. But they just sat like that, for minutes.
    “So, just what the hell did your mother say to you?”
    Laura laughed harshly.
    “She gave me some advice. And I’m going to take it.”
     
    Laura sat on the big, plush yellow sofa chair across from the neatly dressed girl in an office chair. In a sense, Laura was looking into her own future. Having already declared her psychology major and intending to follow up her degree with postgraduate work, it wasn’t more than four or five years before she was going to be sitting on the other side, looking at a young freshman come to pour out her anxieties.
    The office, in the basement of the student services building, was carefully modulated to present a tone of informal but caring concern. A trickle of light poured in from the high window, illuminating the small bouquet of geraniums, chosen to evoke neither thoughts of death (lilies) or romance (roses), two primary reasons a distraught college student might show up for free counseling. There was a teddy bear on the secondhand wooden shelf with all the worn psychology texts, and by the clock on the desk was a small base into which you could easily slide in or remove a nameplate. The one there now read TERRI .
    “How are you doing, Laura?” Terri smiled softly, and it was the element that completed this bizarre feeling Laura had of entering a performance.
    “I’ve been better,” she said, settling in.
    “How are classes?”
    “Classes are fine,” Laura responded. “It’s my boyfriend.” She regretted it instantly. “Sort of.”
    “A breakup?”
    “No, no. Nothing like that. It’s not my boyfriend, really. It’s . . . he’s more like the focus of something else. Something’s getting me down, and I’m putting it on him. I guess.”
    “All right,”