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"You said they never hit you," she started, slipping slightly into profiler mode which I would normally find sexy, but in that moment, with her magnifying glass focused on me, I only found it unsettling.
"No hitting."
"But it wasn't just psychological, right?"
"For the most part, yes. But there was some EST in my teens when I was becoming 'defiant'. Really, I was just able to see how fucked up it was that I wasn't allowed to have a TV, video games, music, or toys."
"You weren't allowed to have toys?"
"They figured I would learn to entertain myself better if I had to find ways to amuse myself. I had a lot of pet potato bugs," I said with a head shake.
"So... nothing? Not even simple wooden toys?"
"Do matchsticks count? I used to built fucking cities out of those things."
"Did you have friends?"
"We lived out in the boonies and most of the kids were put off by how I would analyze everything they did or tell them how I knew they had hotdogs for lunch because of the grease stain on their pants and the mustard on their cheek. As if the red hair wasn't bad enough, I was a freak."
"Were you always prone to the... ah... flipswitch thing? When you go dark and obsessive?"
"My father was a flip-switcher when he couldn't figure something out. It was night and day when things were going well versus when things were being more complicated than he felt they should be. Because, you know, humans aren't rational and predictable like he liked them. He was a bear for a week once when some agoraphobic patient of his wouldn't respond to exposure therapy. That was the week he decided to cure me of my fear of bears."
"By?" she asked, tone guarded, likely knowing she wasn't going to like what was to follow.
"By chaining me to a tree like a fucking dog all night," I recalled, remembering how sick I had been. Literally sick with fear. I vomited over and over until there was nothing left to throw up. Then, terrified the meat I had from dinner, even regurgitated, might be appealing to the bears, I had dug a hole in the half-frozen ground with my bare hands and buried the sick.
"How old were you?"
"Seven? I think. Hard to tell. Somewhere around then. Fucking crazy thing was- it wasn't some irrational fear. We had bears. I could wake up most mornings to see one out back. But he was in a mood about the patient he couldn't fix so he figured he'd fix me."
"Did he?"
"Do I seem fixed, baby?" I asked. "I mean, I wasn't mauled to death that night and it wasn't as big a concern after that. But I became obsessed with phobias and motivators after that. It wasn't good enough if some kid told me he was afraid of the dark. I needed to know what he thought was in the dark to be afraid of and then I needed to know where he got the idea of what was in the dark. Eventually, somewhere in my teens, I became a lot more like him. When I couldn't figure something out, be it school work or some study I was doing on someone without them knowing, I would shut down and get either cold or cruel, I would become obsessed with stabbing my fingers in the wounds to see if they squealed."
"Why does Duke's past bother you so much?"
"Duke's past doesn't bother me, aside from being disgusted that skinheads still exist. It interests me that he has so much guilt about it when it was beyond his control. I wanted to see what kind of power his family still had over him. I wanted to know if his motivator was obligation."
"Was it?"
"It was shame," I said, shaking my head. "He's so fucking convinced that he's covered in scum because of them that it is hard for him to accept that he deserves more than to be covered in shit the rest of his life."
"What is your motivator?" she pressed.
"Good question," I said, shrugging. "Fuck if I know. I'm too all over the place to figure mine out."
"Why did you run away?" she asked.
"Raising Renny," I supplied.
"I'm sorry?"
"Raising Renny," I repeated. "When I was seventeen, they brought me down to their office in the basement where they had stacks of paper laid across the table. Seventeen of them."
She nodded them, understanding. "One for each year of your life."
"Exactly. Had they maybe not been batshit fucking crazy, it wouldn't have been so unsettling. But they chronicled everything. How many times I wet the bed and what that said about my mental capacities. What my nightmares were. When, how often, and speculations on why I started getting hard-ons around eleven. The embarrassing and fumbling stories of my first crush. I sat there and read it from first to last page, finding they somehow knew about how I lost my virginity and what it said about me that I chose the girl I chose to do that with. I flipped shit."
