universe is conspiring against you. Why?”
“Because Mom has been shoving Capstone down my throat all summer—it’s such a status thing for her. And then you told me I should do it, and that Mom was paying you extra to make it happen, which is super-effing-unethical. Then Randall tells me June called to check up on me, and honestly it felt like a huge way out—”
“But now June’s given you an option you can’t refuse.”
“Exactly. I wanted to refuse it, too.”
“I think…” Dusk strums again, then begins to pluck something soft, “adults think about this a little differently. We can all look at these things and pick out times in our own lives that we lost out on something because we didn’t feel like doing it.”
I sit up to glare into the camera. Dusk visibly jolts.
“This isn’t a matter of ‘not feeling like it,’ Dusk. It’s a matter of ‘can’t.’ You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.”
“‘Can’t’ is such an arbitrary concept for you,” Dusk says. “Can’t, really? You physically can’t come up with something? Your hands won’t cooperate? Use your feet. Paint with your nose. There’s a person that uses their breasts to paint fruit, for crying out loud. Do you see what I’m saying?”
I honestly can’t believe I’m hearing this right now.
Griffin eyes me from over the top of my laptop screen, wary. He’s a boyish mirror image of me, blue eyes and soft face and dark hair. He’s changing, though—for the first time, his jawline is much more angular than mine. We still have the same combination of thin lips and cupid’s bows that we inherited from our paternal grandmother, and the same freckle just over our right eyebrows.
“No. Not at all,” I say. “For someone as hippie-dippie ‘creative’ as you are, I thought you would understand the creative process better.”
“I do understand the process—on a very personal level—and what I’m trying to explain to you is that this is an incredibly complex problem. It’s occurred to me today that the conversation doesn’t need to be ‘fix me so I can do this thing again’—we need to be asking ourselves why it is that you can’t do this thing anymore.
“I believe wholeheartedly that it feels impossible to you right now. I see you, and I hear you on this. But I think if we understood why it is—aside from what we already know, which is that you’re depressed, and very anxious, and incredibly worried about the future—we could maybe get an idea of what your artistic purpose might be moving forward.”
All I can do is blink at her.
None of this is registering, not at all.
“I think we need to shift the discussion toward the ‘Big Why’ here—is it because you are afraid of failing? Is it that your interests have shifted and you’re afraid of trying something new? You have this opportunity to get your fat out of the fire here, and if we know what the lay of the land is, maybe we can get you back on your feet again artistically—”
It doesn’t hit me how much this hurts until concern registers on Griffin’s face. Sometimes I feel like I’m witnessing things from outside my own body. I don’t actually recognize what’s happening to me until I watch people around me react to it.
Griffin’s face tells me to be sad.
Just like that, I’m registering sadness.
“It sounds a lot like you, my therapist, are telling me the very thing you call toxic in other people.”
“No, what I’m saying is that you’re putting yourself into a box, and you need to open your mind to other artistic endeavors—”
“I need to go. I honestly thought you’d help me figure this out.”
Her smile is soft. “I think you thought I’d give you permission to give up on yourself.”
My voice shakes. “I’m not giving up on myself.”
My tone hits a funny note at the end, too, like Dusk’s ukulele. I hear it at the same time Dusk’s untamed eyebrows shoot up into her hairline.
“Then what is it you’re giving up on, if it’s not you?”
My finger slams onto the touch pad of my laptop and the chat disconnects, a reflexive action that happens long before my synapses fire and I comprehend what it is I’m actually doing.
I just hung up on my therapist.
I’ve never just … ended a session with her before.
“Glad to see therapy’s going well,” Griffin says.
He’s sprawled onto his stomach to type rapid-fire into a laptop of his own.
“Don’t pick on me,” I say.
“Oh, come on.” He rests his