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She also seemed to want to know if this was a hereditary thing. “Has anyone in your family experienced something similar?”

“My grandma’s sister’s wife apparently believed that she could telepathically communicate with the former prime minister of Norway, but she and I don’t have any genetic ties,” I answered.

“Mmhm.” I could hear her fingers clicking away. “What about your own history? You indicated that you’ve never sought therapy in the past or had any prior diagnoses.”

“That’s true.” I thought for a moment. “I would say that I was depressed when I was a preteen and teenager. I think that was normal for anyone in a situation like mine, since I was so isolated. Not that I wasn’t around people,” I continued. “At school, I was in a dorm so there was always someone there and before that, I was surrounded by my mom’s groupies. She always had a big crowed, but they weren’t real friends.”

“Why?” the counselor asked.

“She was paying them,” I explained. “She would give them cash to work on whatever project she happened to be focusing on at that moment, but they weren’t really employed by her. They never did very much, just the bare minimum, or they skipped on that entirely and spent their time smoking weed or drinking. As long as they listened to her and seemed to agree with her theories, then she considered them to be friends, no matter how little they accomplished or how gross they were. I think a real friend is someone who…” I stopped. “Does this have anything to do with the song? Because that’s my only problem right now. I want to get to the bottom of why I think that I hear it and I want it to stop.”

The therapist made it clear that my process was going to be long and would definitely involve more than one session. “We’ll meet for a few weeks and see if we can figure out what’s behind this,” she told me and our forty-five minutes were over. I had given her all kinds of information and it was probably unfair to expect a solution so fast, but I wanted one. The strange thing was, I didn’t even mind the song! When it came on, I would find myself humming along in the voice that had made Mr. Marchand so mad at the record store. The music would often fade into the background as a pleasant soundtrack for my activities, like washing the dishes. I had those plates, now.

But it was still weird. It wasn’t acceptable to believe that I heard it! I had to get it to stop.

I closed my laptop a little too hard. I had expected to feel better after my appointment, like I was making progress and taking steps toward a resolution. I was actually left with the feeling that my therapist might not have believed me. She probably thought I was only pretending, like what used to happen at boarding school. I would frequently wake up in the middle of the night when I was there, especially during the first year when I was in eighth grade. I was having nightmares that felt absolutely real and continued to feel real even when I turned on the light and knew that I was awake.

The whole “turning on the light and screaming” in the middle of the night didn’t make me closer to my roommate. She moved out because she was exhausted and angry, and I’d heard a lot from the other girls about getting my shit together and not being an attention whore. I had also overheard the dorm parent talking to another teacher and the words she had used were fancier than my classmates’ but meant the same thing, “histrionic” and “theatrical.”

“Makes sense, given the family,” the teacher had whispered back.

I sat at my table, the one that my neighbor Carmen had helped with, because it was so much sturdier than the desk that I’d put together on my own. What else could I do to fix this? Not my crap furniture, but everything! I had let other stuff happen, like how I’d gone along for years with all my mom’s nonsense—but sometimes, enough was enough. I had decided not to comply with my college roommate’s decorating ideas. I’d gone to that college although my mom thought that it was a waste of time and wanted to know why I would have bothered. I had answered that I didn’t want to limit myself in the future.

But I was self-limiting, too. There was no reason for me not to know how to use tools as well as Carmen. There was no reason that I couldn’t cook delicious meals, like the appetizers I’d bought and served to her. There was no reason for me not to be able to drive myself around and buy the food that I would learn to prepare.

I opened the laptop again and typed “Michigan adult driver’s license.” Rather than editing the scholarly paper on Isocrates and Athenian political violence, I studied What Every Driver Must Know to learn bicyclists’ hand signals and also what you were supposed to do if your car got stuck on railroad tracks. Then I looked through lists of driving instructors in Detroit and…what?

A few minutes later, I walked into Marchand’s Records and the little bell above the door clicked ineffectually. “I know you,” Gramps Marchand said. He pointed at me. “Little girl with the foghorn voice from the Milaflores Building.”

I stopped. “‘I’m not a little girl! I’m twenty-two, almost twenty-three, and I—”

“What do you want, Lauren Bacall?”

I started to think that he might be senile. Did he really think that was my name and that I was a child?

“I don’t have all day!”

“It doesn’t look like you’re so busy,” I pointed out. “Why did you call me Lauren? My name is Kat, short for Katherine Truman.”

“You’re certainly short for something.”

“Ok, bye,” I said. I headed toward the door.

“Hold on, hold on,” he called. “You’re the one who goes out with my grandson.”

“To exercise,” I added. “We go out to exercise. And once, he drove me around so I could get furniture. That’s why I’m here.”

“You don’t like the furniture? Complain to him.”

“No, I need to learn to drive and your name came up as the closest instructor. Is that real?”

“Of course.” He reached under the counter and pulled out a thick, cloth-covered, black ledger. “For a while there, nobody was buying vinyl. I had to supplement my income.”

“You don’t seem like the kind of person who would be a teacher.”

He stared at me in confusion. “Why? Why would you say that?”

I stared back, at a loss. “Uh…”