left for work at the fire station and Andy’d caught the school bus an hour ago. I knew Mom had made his breakfast and probably eaten with him, but she was drinking coffee while I ate my cereal. To be with me. Just to be with me.
Yes, I wanted her to drive me. I knew how all those stars felt with the paparazzi following them around. The reporters were in front of the house again. I’d heard Uncle Marcus out there when I first woke up, telling them to leave Andy alone as he walked to the bus stop. It was one thing for them to hound me, another for them to go after Andy, and I hoped Uncle Marcus walked with him to the corner. Andy wouldn’t know what to say to the vultures, or else he’d say too much. You never knew with him.
If Mom drove me, I could lie down in the backseat until we were past the news vans. But I had to face this mess sooner or later, and it was my mess. Not Mom’s.
“I’ll be okay,” I said. I wasn’t just dreading getting past the reporters, but the appointment itself. What was I supposed to say to a shrink? Open up with my deep dark secrets? Everyone already knew mine. I was an arsonist. A murderer.
“Can you work on the flyer this afternoon?” Mom asked.
“I’m almost done with it already,” I said.
“You are?”
I’d gotten to work on my “assigned tasks” right after the meeting, before Mom even came upstairs to tell me what they were. I’d been sitting at the top of the stairs during the whole meeting, taking my own notes. I’d heard how angry Keith sounded. I got a glimpse of him storming out of the family room, but didn’t see any of his face. I couldn’t blame him for being totally pissed off. He probably had plenty of anger to go around ever since the fire, most of it aimed at me. The least I could do was my part to help find Sara. “I just need a picture of Sara. Did you find one?”
“I did.” Mom stood up and walked over to the refrigerator. She pulled a photograph from behind a magnet. “Will this do?” she asked, handing it to me. It was of Sara and Dawn at Jabeen’s, both of them smiling from behind the counter.
“Yeah.” I wondered if she thought it bothered me to see Dawn in the picture. “I can crop Dawn out and blow Sara up bigger,” I said, like it was no big deal. God, Dawn was so pretty and so mature looking! How could I have thought Ben would be seriously interested in me? I’d been such an idiot.
We still had my white Jetta, only now Andy was learning to drive it. I couldn’t picture it. Andy, behind the wheel of a car? Watch out. Today, though, the car was mine. I got into the Jetta inside our garage. I’d missed driving and that sense of freedom it could give you, but I felt kind of nervous since I hadn’t driven in a year. I had to go through a mental checklist, like a pilot. The car’s in Park. Press the button on the remote to raise the garage door. Turn the key. Give it a little gas. Put it in Reverse. I started backing out of the garage.
Suddenly, there they were in my rearview mirror—the reporters with their cameras, jumping out of their vans. Oh, God. I took my foot off the gas, letting the car come to a stop. Exactly the wrong thing to do. The faster I got past them, the better off I’d be. I floored it. I’d had a few frightening moments in the last couple of years, but flying backward down my driveway toward a bunch of reporters was one of the scariest. I was totally out of control. People jumped out of the way. The crazy girl’s coming! I hit the brake when I got into the street, shifted into Drive and took off with a squeal of my tires.
I raced down our short street and turned onto the main road, glad now that the summer traffic was gone and I could go fast. I’d driven a half mile before I slowed down. Another half mile before my heart did the same.
I wasn’t free at all. Not even a little bit.
I was driving into Hampstead when I noticed the white van behind me. I couldn’t believe it! I should have been more careful. No way was I letting them follow me to the therapist’s office. Maggie Lockwood was seen walking into psychologist Marion Jakes’s office for her court-mandated counseling. I zigzagged all over Hamp-stead until I was a hundred percent sure I’d lost the van. I spotted the little parking lot behind the therapist’s building, but I drove past it to a nearby veterinarian’s office, where I hid the Jetta between a van and a pickup. I felt like I was in a movie. A thriller. By the time I walked into the therapist’s office, I was sweating.
The small waiting room was empty. I sat down in one of the eight chairs and picked up an old copy of Us from the coffee table, but I didn’t open it. I was thinking about the Web sites where I could post Sara’s information. Wow, so many missing people on those sites! It was discouraging, and I wondered if everything I was doing was for nothing. The whole situation didn’t make sense. Sara wasn’t the type of woman to just take off. At least, the Sara I knew before the fire wasn’t. But who knew how this year had changed her? It had changed me plenty.
An enormous man walked through the office door, and I figured he was another patient, maybe waiting for a different therapist. I glanced up just long enough to catch his eggplant-shaped body before quickly lowering my eyes to the magazine cover again.
“Miss Lockwood?” he said.
I was confused. Oh, God. I hoped he wasn’t one of the reporters. “Yes,” I said.
“I’m Dr. Jakes.”
“No,” I said. “Dr. Jakes is a—”
“A woman?” He smiled, and his eyes nearly disappeared above his round cheeks. “I’m Marion Jakes.”
Oh, no. I didn’t budge. The only thing that had made the idea of counseling tolerable was imagining a kindly, maternal sort of woman, maybe my mother’s age, as my shrink. This guy was not only obscenely fat, but he was ancient. The small amount of hair he had on his round head was gray. The buttons of his blue shirt strained at their buttonholes, and he wore ridiculous red, white and blue striped glasses.
“Come in,” he said.
What choice did I have? I got up and followed him into a room even smaller than the waiting room. This one had four leather chairs facing each other, and I sat down in the one closest to the door.
Dr. Jakes took up most of the space in the room. “How are you today?” He dropped into one of the big leather chairs. It creaked beneath him.
“Fine,” I said.
He looked like he didn’t believe me. “You’re very pale,” he said.
“I…I’m fine.”
“Well—” he folded his hands across his belly “—I know why you’re here, of course, since this is court-ordered psychotherapy. I know what you were convicted of doing and that you were released Monday after twelve months in prison. What I don’t know is how you feel about being here.”
He waited for me to speak, but I looked past him, out the window. I wanted to be outside again. I wanted to be home.
“Okay.”
“Just okay?”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” I said.
“Have you ever been in therapy before?”
I shook my head. “Just…you know, the high-school counselor about college, but that’s not therapy, I guess.”
“You had college plans?”
“I was going to go to UNC Wilmington,” I said. “Before…everything happened.”
“Well,” he said, “here’s the way this goes.” He leaned forward and I was afraid he might roll right out of his chair. “We’ll be a team, you and me. Together, we’ll figure out what we should be working on. Set some goals.”
“I don’t really have anything to work on.”
“No?”
I shook my head. “I’m basically a normal person. I just