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I scowl. “One time she accidentally painted me. Ruined a sweater. That got her going.” The more I think about it, the more I realize Paige has issues. What was I thinking, telling her my hardest stuff? I must be lonely in ways I don’t necessarily recognize consciously.
“Would you describe either of these instances as uncontrollable laughter?” Leigh asks.
“Yes. It was highly irritating.”
“Irritating or hurtful?”
“Irritating,” I insist, because it feels slightly pathetic to admit that the second time, it hurt quite a bit.
Leigh appears to mull this for a bit too. “Do you know if your neighbor has sustained any serious emotional traumas or possibly major stresses in the last couple of years?”
“She lost her parents in an accident when she was in high school, I believe. But that was some time ago. As for lately, I wouldn’t know. I’ve known her barely more than a month. She’s a single mother without a co-parent. And I believe she recently finished her college degree.”
“How long ago was high school for her?” Leigh asks, her gaze suddenly sharp.
“She’s twenty-six, I think.”
Leigh’s face relaxes. “That’s not too inappropriate.”
“For what?” Almost as soon as I ask the question, I realize what she’s thinking. While it is strange that my first lengthy conversation with Leigh is about another woman, there’s no romantic context here. “It’s not like that with us. I’m almost ten years older than her.”
“Sometimes people’s life experiences make them old souls. She probably acts and thinks older than twenty-six. Besides which, speaking in terms of the brain, she is a fully grown, fully shaped adult.”
My mind strays to an unhelpful place when Leigh says, “fully shaped,” a phrase one might use in reference to Paige after seeing her in jeans.
But that is entirely beside the point.
“It’s not like that,” I repeat. “My interest is . . . elsewhere.” Is that too big of a hint? Or is it far too subtle? Why am I so bad at this? Before I can spin out any further, Leigh has moved on with her analysis.
“All right. You’ve described someone who sustained a major trauma in her life with the sudden loss of her parents at an early age, who was fairly recently under a great deal of stress finishing a college degree as a single mother. Plus she’s just purchased a fixer-upper house. Do I have all that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And twice now during a stressful interaction with you, she’s had a fit of uncontrollable laughter.”
I nod.Reluctantly. I don’t like the way she’s building her case, as if Paige might have a solid defense.
“Honestly, Henry, it sounds like a trauma response. It’s a lesser-known one for sure, but sometimes when a person’s natural default is toward laughter anyway, it masks a reaction that’s attempting to happen at a deeper level, a reaction that might hurt them. The person laughs because it feels like a safer release valve for big emotions, but if you know them well, you’ll sense a slight hysteria to it.
“It’s a sign of anxiety and can sometimes become its own problem because the very nature of being uncontrolled stresses the patient to the point that they begin to fear social situations that may provoke the response. There’s not a great deal of documentation on this, but in general, this reaction tends to develop during a time of extreme duress and to fade as circumstances settle down.”
“Or she’s simply rude.”
Leigh smiles. “Always a possibility. You’re in a better position to say than I am. I’m not a therapist, but clinically, if I were looking at these facts in a case study, it would read as a trauma-induced response to me.”
I’d intended to ask Leigh if signing the petition was fair on my part, but I don’t need to. I suspect I know what she’d say: no. That there is more to the story of Paige’s behavior.
At some level, I know I’m not justified. It’s why I feel uneasy about signing. It was petty.
But it may have been even more harmful than I realized if Leigh is correct about Paige’s laughter—bizarrely—coming from a place of trauma or even just heavy stress.
Is it possible I’ve made a bad situation worse?
What if Paige really meant it when she said she was sorry?
Chapter Twenty-Six
Paige
