Sarah kept quiet for most of the sessions, just nodding and only answering questions when the therapist threatened to tell the judge that she wasn’t cooperating. But she never truly opened up, and the therapist was smart enough to cut through the bullshit.
“You’re weak, you know that?” The question had come after nearly three minutes of dead silence, and Sarah felt her cheeks redden from both anger and surprise.
“Excuse me?” Sarah straightened in her chair and resisted the sudden urge to strangle the bitch in front of her. “Well, why don’t we step outside so you can find out for yourself.”
The therapist raised her hand and worked it like a puppet. “Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. That’s all you do. And what little action you do perform is nothing more than a cry for help.” She leaned forward, matching Sarah’s intensity instead of shying away from it like every other adult that had tried to intervene in her life. “So you got hit a few times, and your parents are dead, and you had a really hard life growing up. You know who cares?” She leaned closer, so close that Sarah could see the hole from the nose piercing she had in her right nostril. “No one. Zero people give zero shits about you and your troubled past.”
“Fuck you.” Sarah retreated into her chair and crossed her arms. She bounced her leg nervously and impatiently, staring up at the clock and wishing that their thirty minutes would pass quicker. “I don’t need to hear this shit from—”
“From someone who doesn’t understand?” The therapist feigned sympathy and batted her eyelids as she puffed out her lip. “You’ve been giving that excuse since the day you figured out it worked.” She pointed to the closed door of her office. “You know how many kids I see every month? Every year? Hundreds. And every single one of them has a sob story, sister, so don’t sit in that chair where so many have sat and tell me that your story is worse than theirs.”
Sarah lowered her head, picking at her fingernails, which she always did when she was nervous. “Maybe it is.”
The therapist scoffed and shifted the papers on her legs as she fidgeted in her chair. “I can promise you that it’s not.” She huffed a little longer, and then finally settled down. “You keep heading down this path and it’s going to cost you more than you think.”
“And what’s that?” Sarah focused in on her left index cuticle, scratching harder.
“Your life.”
Sarah stopped her scratching and looked up.
“You could do a lot of things, Sarah.” She flipped through the papers on her lap and lifted one up for Sarah to see. “You scored through the roof on your assessment test, which means that your failing grades aren’t due to a lack of ability, it’s due to a lack of effort.”
“Where did you get those?” Sarah asked.
“And in my experience, kids with ability who choose not to flex them end up applying their time to more unsavory deeds, and that’s not a road that I want to see you walk down.” She set the test scores aside and folded her hands in her lap. “You can either come to these sessions and listen to what I have to say, which will help you, or you can just sit there like you have been for the past two weeks, do your time, and when you’re released, go and fall into whatever routine that you want.” She leaned forward and this time placed her hand on Sarah’s knee, squeezing hard. “But if you don’t change what you’re doing, you won’t be doing it for very long.”
It could have been the fact that no one, in a position like the therapist had been in, had ever talked to Sarah like that before. Or it could have been the fact that Sarah was able to recognize the truth when she saw it, but when the session ended and Sarah was escorted back to her cell and she was forced to sit on her cot while her roommate yammered on about how she would cut Sarah if she tried any shit on her while she was asleep, Sarah decided that she did need to make a change, and the exclamation point was the heavy, metallic thud of the door closing and being locked in her cell.
And that’s exactly what she did.
Sarah was seventeen when she made that choice, and she suspected that if she had chosen a different path or decided to ignore the woman’s advice, that her future would have turned out exactly how the therapist had envisioned. Sarah had seen firsthand the future that the therapist described. She saw it in the homes that she was forced to live in and the people that were responsible for her care.
Sarah didn’t understand it at the time, but that therapist saved Sarah’s life. And sitting in the woods in some forgotten town in the northern-most portion of the country where it got so cold you could freeze to death, Sarah wondered if she had wasted the opportunity.
While she had been able to stay out of jail, she couldn’t stay out of trouble. And that trouble had led her here, and she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to escape.
Finally, after another few minutes, the lights on the trooper’s car lit up and he peeled out of town, speeding toward the highway. Faye had come through. She had asked her to call in a report of a tip that they had spotted Dell twenty miles south. They said a young woman was with him.
Once the lights had disappeared and she couldn’t hear the sirens anymore, Sarah darted from the woods and made her way toward the house.
From her position in the woods, she was able to see the side door that she had used frequently to walk out back and take her breaks for lunch. She remembered that the doors had never been
