“Why not?”
“They’re not pieces of paper. They’re situations.”
“What if you put them down on pieces of paper?”
“You’re not serious.”
“Sure. That can be a very therapeutic thing to do. You write out a problem that is bothering you, and then you flush it. Or burn it. Destroy it in some way as a gesture of setting yourself free.”
“Yeah, but I can write my heartbreak down on paper six thousand times and flush it just as many. I’m still going to be heartbroken when I wake up in the morning. I’m still going to feel awful when I see Noel at school.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
“How do you know until you try?”
“You’re serious.”
“This week. Consider writing something that’s bothering you on a piece of paper and flushing it,” said Doctor Z. “It can be a small thing, if you want. It doesn’t have to be your heartbreak, if you’re wedded to that.”
“I am
“Really?” she said. “Really?”
After swim practice on Thursday I was in the B&O, reading
“Can I sit with you?” Nora asked.
We hadn’t hung out since school started. She was friendly, and we chatted in the halls if we ran into each other, but most of the time she was in Kim and Cricket land.
“Knock yourself out,” I told her. “You okay?”
Nora sniffed and shook her head. “Not really.”
“What happened? Something with Happy?”
“No, Happy’s fine.” She’d been arranging her tall frame on the chair across from me, digging around in her book bag, unwinding a cotton scarf she had around her neck. Now she looked at me and chewed on her thumbnail.
“What, then? Did I do something?” I asked.
“No.”
“Is it about Noel?”
“Roo, please, can you stop asking and just let me tell you?”
My skin felt hot and I nodded silently.
“Kim, Cricket and I were on a three-way call just like an hour ago,” she said. “Kim set it up so we could all talk about yearbook stuff while she had to be home supervising the gardener. I was talking to them on my cell from the photo lab where I was printing. I don’t know where Cricket was, but anyway. We finished the yearbook stuff and I hung up and put the phone down without really looking at it, because I had a picture in the fixer and I realized it had been in there kinda long.”
She stood up and ordered a black coffee from the guy at the counter. Like she didn’t want to go on with the story. But black coffee doesn’t take long to serve, and pretty soon Nora was back sitting across from me.
“So like ten minutes later I went to use the phone again and it had never hung up. I put it to my ear and Kim and Cricket were still talking.” Nora wiped her eyes. “I know it’s a bad thing to do, but I listened, and it didn’t take long to figure out they were talking about me.”
“Ag.”
“Cricket was saying she was sick of hearing about Happy Happy Happy all the time, and Kim was saying I was just so controlling about yearbook, which is really unfair because I’m the editor, I’m supposed to be the boss of it, and she didn’t have to be on it if she didn’t want to.”
“What did you do?”
“Cricket said I was no fun anymore and did I have to wear a stupid jog bra all the time, there was something about the jog bras that just really annoyed her and she couldn’t stand to look at my uniboob one more day.”
It was true. Nora did have the uniboob. But in her defense, she has these really ginormous hooters, and she’s kind of self-conscious about them, so she squashes them down with the jog bra. Summer after freshman year, back when all four of us were friends, Kim and I had written an entry in our group notebook on “The Care and Ownership of Boobs”3 that was in part intended to alert Nora to the uniboob issue that was going on. In fact, Kim and I had had a long discussion over whether to explicitly include information on the uniboob problem, but we had eventually decided to leave it off because we were too scared of hurting Nora’s feelings. We had hoped she would just read the instructions on the care and ownership and reexamine her own boob-related practices.
