Last Chance Summer - Shannon Klare Page 0,62

actual law, or is it just something my parents made up to keep me plugging away at therapy back home?”

“Back home it’s different. Here, you’re in a gray area where you’re not legally considered a client. It’s in the welcome manual.”

“I didn’t get a damn welcome manual,” I said, rolling my eyes. I kicked a rock, bypassing my cabin for the gazebo. If we had to do this, we needed to get it out of the way before my girls realized I was gone.

We found our usual therapy setting a few minutes later, the lack of campers around it typical of morning time.

“You’ve got all of twenty minutes,” I said, tapping my wrist with my finger. “I’m out of here after that. You can just write in your notes how I said f-you and walked my happy little butt out of here.”

“Still hostile,” Madeline said.

“Still annoying.”

She took a seat on the bench, flipping through her notebook with a smile. “All right,” she said, clicking her pen. “The last time we chatted, you were explaining to me how your at-home therapist is, and I quote, ‘the most boring human on the face of the earth.’ Would you like to continue with that conversation, or do you have something else you’d like to talk about?”

I weighed the decision, my hands drumming absently against the gazebo’s wooden backing. In a plain green tee and blue-jean shorts, Madeline’s casual clothing and persistent smile made her way more welcoming than Dr. Heichman could ever hope to be. Maybe she could be the one to let me word vomit all the issues spiraling around my head.

As it stood, mine and Grant’s situation would end one of two ways: Either I would tell Grant the truth about Nikki and he’d judge me, confirming that everyone I let in always eventually left. Or his mom would get wind of my rap sheet and judge me hard enough I wouldn’t be comfortable staying with him anyway. What respectable politician would okay their son being with someone like me? None.

There was no happy ending. At least not one I could see.

“Alex,” Madeline said, tilting her head into view. “I can’t start our session time until you answer my first question. You’re obligated for at least thirty minutes.”

“That’s a stupid rule.”

“It’s Loraine’s rule, and as her employee I have to abide by it,” Madeline said. “So, what would you like to talk about? Dr. Heichman? How bored you are at camp? How the mosquitoes are tiny little raptors?”

I paused for a minute, picking at a loose string on my shorts. “Is there any way we could talk off the record?” I said. “Like, you could just start the timer and I could talk to you about whatever, without you relaying the information to Loraine?”

“I have to turn in my notes,” Madeline said.

“Why?”

“Rules.”

I pulled my lip between my teeth as an overwhelming sense of anxiety flooded my vision. I would work this out on my own before I let Loraine catch wind of it. She’d turn around and report everything to my parents. Then they’d take it and leverage it against the college fund I was already trying to prove I deserved. I didn’t need them sticking their noses in a complicated situation they had no part of, and I definitely didn’t need Loraine doing it.

Things were hard as it was.

Madeline tapped her pen against her notebook, her eyes hidden behind large retro-style sunglasses. From my vantage point, she seemed to be analyzing me with a magnifying glass, mentally surveying my responses before she summarized them and crammed them in her notebook.

“Never mind,” I said. “It was a stupid question.”

I crossed my arms and relaxed into my seat, my position firmly cemented on this side of silence.

Madeline frowned, her pen stopping. “You’re more than welcome to tell me whatever it is you wanted to say.”

Silence.

“I don’t have to jot down every piece of our conversation,” she said.

Silence.

This brick wall of resolve wouldn’t budge from now until the time I walked out of this camp. Had I realized everything was getting reported to Loraine in the first place, I would’ve shut up sooner and left both of them in the dark.

Madeline sighed and put her pen down, closing the notebook on her lap. “You can speak to me openly,” she said. “It’s my decision to choose what I do and don’t see fit to disclose to your aunt.”

“Just like it’s my decision to choose what I do and don’t disclose to you,” I