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One person in particular noticed the new me. It was my Algebra teacher, Mrs. Hoeney. Shortly into the school year, she called me after class and harshly demanded, “What’s the matter with you?”
I did not know her well and was stunned. “I don’t know,” I said.
“I told Dave Douglas that you are coming to see him. Do you know who Dave is?”
Of course I did. He was the guidance counselor. Not the one who told you whether you should be a veterinarian or a pastry chef, the one who helped you with your problems. Dave Douglas lived and breathed guidance counseling. We were to address him by his first name. He had plants in his office, hanging from macramé holders. He walked the halls a little too slowly, sipping tea from a mug that said Fort Worth Stockyards. There were rumors that he and a former teacher’s aide had gotten into trouble at a hot tub party once. He wore jeans and sandals with socks all year round, and he had a Rollie Fingers mustache. Until now I had avoided him, but I had not been oblivious to his strange syrup and cigarette smoke scented presence. I had literally had nightmares about him. And now I was going to be one the members of his club?
“I’m not interested in seeing Dave Douglas,” I told her.
“He’s interested in seeing you.”
I cringed. “How is this your place to get involved?”
“Watching out for my students is part of my job,” she said.
I wanted to argue that sitting in her class for a few hours a week didn’t make me hers. Instead I simply said, “No thank you. I’m going to pass on this opportunity.”
“Are you on drugs?” she asked me.
I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. Drugs? It seemed that to adults, “drugs” looked like Good & Plenty candies. “Drugs” was a self-conscious, fuzzy idea balled up in their heads, put there by Good Housekeeping magazine. It was all-encompassing, with crack and marijuana being equally foreign and doomful. What they were sure of, though, was that we kids were taking them and they were the reason we were bad.
I had never used drugs in my life or even been to a party with them. Well, I had never been to a party, period. But still. In truth, the majority of the sophomores using drugs were in parents’ and teachers’ heads.
“Aren’t drugs scary and dangerous?” I asked. “I have heard that they turn good kids into monsters. What drug would you say I am behaving like I am on?”
“Very funny.”
I smiled. She responded with a smug, sneering smile meant to tell me she was tougher than I thought she was.
“I have to go to my next class,” I told her and walked out of there.
The next day I was called over the loudspeaker to the principal’s office. I was not surprised when I reached his office and saw Dave Douglas and Mrs. Hoeney seated in the cushy leather chairs beside his desk.
Being fifteen is a lot like having everyone you know drop you off at a psychiatric ward and tell the keepers that you are crazy. You are a defenseless victim and anything you say just makes them think you’re crazier. Resigning myself to my fate, I tried to clear my mind and soul of all traces of my essence, the way I heard prostitutes have to do. I began to feel like I was watching myself on television and I thought it must be working.
“Well, hello there! We’re going to get on fine,” said Dave, reaching out his hand to me and pulling me in for a pat-on-the-back-style hug. I held my breath, feeling completely violated. Apparently it was harder to remove yourself from the physical world than I had thought. The principal and Mrs. Hoeney smiled and nodded, and Dave escorted me down the hall to his office, a place I had previously only glimpsed.
It was a tiny interior office loaded down with coffee-ringed papers and crocheted pillows. There were Far Side clippings taped everywhere, and heavily piled shelves: Miniature motorcycles, a row of jade Buddhas, and tons of books about child psychiatry that any thinking person would have hidden out of our site. I began fantasizing about the garage sale I could have. An ashtray piled high with cigarette butts sat between us, for back in those days faculty could still smoke in their offices, and despite its filthy contents, the ashtray had a funky, old-fashioned look to it that I admired. Two dollars, I thought.
Dave Douglas waited for me to get settled in, then he leaned back and stretched, and either accidentally or on purpose to ease the tension, let go a small, stinky fart.
“Whoopsie,” he said, giggling like a ninny and popping his hand over his mouth as if he had just belched. It may be unladylike to say this, being that I hold a coveted position within the Savannah Junior League, but he was a total douche.
Right away, and again at the beginning of every subsequent session, he made a point to say, “You can tell me anything and it’s just between us.”
Right. None of this was between us. Every Tuesday and Thursday I was assigned to visit him. My classmates saw me get up, hand one of his passes (a big, bright orange slip of paper) to the study hall monitor, and go, obviously, to his office. If I didn’t show up, which happened one day when I was reading and forgot, he would buzz the study hall monitor and ask over the intercom where I was. And when I was in his office, any and all other students were free to watch me through the window in his door that he had ineffectively covered with a torn scrap of paper.
The second problem was that he had some very confusing techniques. After a couple of times without much to say, I tried helping the sessions move along by telling him about book reports I was working on. He kept interrupting with the most asinine questions: “Are you Boo Radley?”
“What? No, I’m a girl.”
“So you see yourself more in Scout?”
“Not really.”
“So maybe a little?”
“No.”
