“Break for lunch,” Ms. Waters says.
Outside, I’m too embarrassed to stay with the rest of the group. I walk away from them as quickly as I can. The morning fog has burned off, leaving behind a warm, clear day. I set off in the direction of a building on the far side of the quad. If I wander the campus for the entire lunch hour, I won’t have to talk to anyone. Especially Gray.
I’m walking for less than a minute when Preethi tracks me down. “Ms. Waters sent me to come get you. She says no one is allowed to go off on their own.”
Reluctantly, I follow her back to a cluster of picnic tables where everyone else is gathered. Preethi joins Joey and Lilliam at one table. Gray is sitting by himself at another. He has headphones on and is plugged into his guitar, playing music we can’t hear.
Ms. Waters passes out sandwiches from a lunch cart. Once we all have something, she leaves, saying she has to take care of some wedding things.
I can’t decide where to sit. Definitely not at Gray’s table. But I’m also too agitated to sit with Preethi, Joey, and Lilliam. Assuming Ms. Waters doesn’t recommend all of us for continuing therapy, we’ll never see each other again after today. Why make small talk and ask each other questions about our lives when we’ll just forget those answers by tomorrow?
I choose the remaining empty table, put on my headphones, and eat quickly. I open my sketchbook and realize my initial sketches of this Safe Harbor crew are all wrong. Joey, for instance, isn’t some mindlessScreenager. He’s trapped in his phone by all the parental cross fire going back and forth. I give him a helmet and ashield and set him in between two pockmarked battlefronts. I cross out his caption.
It’s the same for Lilliam. She’s caught between loyalties, with each of her parents trying to outdo the other for the Best Parent Ever award, and failing in the process. I redraw her arms stretched out tight by two opposing crocodiles. Below her, a swamp. I cross outDiva.
I revise Preethi’s drawing to show her standing on a tiny floe in the middle of the sea, with a speech bubble saying,Everything’s fine!Her caption,Did Not Get the Memo???, still technically makes sense, but it feels mean-spirited now. She’s just trying her best.
Finally it’s Gray’s turn. His takes the longest to redo because I have to draw two Grays. One of them is the angry Gray that I’ve seen so much of today. The other is the curious, amused Gray that I’ve caught only small glimpses of, the one who looks at the world with a kind of skeptical affection. Does he feels split in two the way I do? The me before my parents’ divorce wasn’t perfectly happy, but at least she thought the ground under her feet was made of concrete instead of quicksand. I miss her. That girl trusted herself and other people. She wasn’t unsure abouteverything.
I refocus on my sketch. I make the Grays face each other. They both yell,Get out of my way!
I cross out his caption, too, and close my sketchbook.
Why did I push Gray to talk about his parents before? Why did I try to play therapist? It’s not my job to try to make him feel better. I can barely makemyselffeel better.
It occurs to me that I’ve never, ever drawn a single self-portrait.
If the amount of laughter coming from their table is anything to go by, Preethi, Joey, and Lilliam seem to be having a great time. I envy their easy camaraderie. Over at histable, Gray’s concentrating hard, his fingers flying across the guitar strings.
To anyone looking, we must seem like a group of ordinary teenagers, goofing off on a Saturday afternoon. No one can tell just by looking that deep inside, we’re all mourning the death of our families. The families might’ve been good or bad, but they were ours, and now they’ve suddenly become unrecognizable.
The rest of the hour goes by quickly. Before I know it, Preethi is yelling that it’s time to go back.
I go up to Gray and nudge him.
He slides his headphones off. “What?”
“We gotta head back.”
He sighs. “Fine.”
I stop him. “Can I listen?”
“I suck,” he says.
But that can’t be true. I saw the intensity on his face. It’s the same look people tell me I get when I’m drawing.
He considers my request for a long while. Finally, and with a shrug, he decides to hand me his headphones. When I slip them on, I can smell cedar and sleepy cotton pillowcases.
“Playing kinda blind, but here goes,” he says.
He plays, and just like I guessed, he really is very good.
We hear the raised voice as soon as we turn down the hallway to our classroom. A man’s voice—obviously upset—on speakerphone. Inside, Ms. Waters is sitting at the big desk, staring down at her phone. Her arms are wrapped around her waist. She looks like she’s been crying.
“This is out of control,” the man says. “We agreed on a budget.”
“Her fiancé,” Preethi whisper-shouts to the rest of us.
