The Blessed - By Tonya Hurley Page 0,10
office until the doctor could see her. It wasn’t like the movie psychiatrist’s office she’d been expecting, with the heavy drapes, thick carpet, comfy couch, and box of tissues. A smoldering pipe burning cherry tobacco and wall-to-wall bookcases featuring Freud and Janov were nowhere to be found either. The room was tiny, sterile, painted beige, and harshly lit—a perfect match to the hallway, except for the noticeable lack of religious iconography that peppered the rest of the hospital. No statues, paintings, no Eyes-Follow-You-Jesus 3-D portraits. Against the wall stood a glass-doored, stainless-steel apothecary cabinet filled with old charts and replicas of brains, whole and cross-sectioned. She took a seat in the chair, a padded pea green job with metal armrests, across from an institutional desk and standard issue high-back office chair. There was a nameplate on the desk but all she could read from this angle was CHIEF OF PSYCHIATRY. She was seeing the boss.
Agnes soon found herself mindlessly picking at the puscolored foam lurking just beneath the old, cracked leather seat covering, patience not being one of her virtues. If she wasn’t picking at that, it would have been her wounds, but they were tightly bandaged enough that she couldn’t do much more damage. The austerity of the surroundings made her more and more nervous and she found herself thinking about the boy in the hall. He was so young to be so whacked-out. Until now, she imagined her youth, her obviously defiant nature might help to put her recent behavior into perspective, to excuse it as a momentary lapse of judgment, and that she’d be let go with some kind of warning. Clearly, she wasn’t mentally ill.
The door sprang open and a well-groomed middle-aged man in an old-fashioned white lab coat charged in. Agnes flicked away the last bits of foam from under her fingernails and sat at attention, hands clasped daintily over her abdomen. She noticed that her charm was peeking out from her bandage and quickly pulled her hair around and over her wrist to cover it.
“Hello . . . ”
He paused. Scanning her chart to find her name.
“Agnes . . . I’m Dr. Frey. Chief of psychiatry.”
“So I see,” she said, unimpressed, tossing her gaze toward his desk plate. “Working so late on Halloween night?” Agnes asked.
“One of my busiest nights of the year,” Frey replied, smiling.
One thing she hated about herself was her impulsivity. She tended to make quick judgments, and already she didn’t like him. There was something about the rote politeness and elitist formality in his manner that put her off, but then she wasn’t exactly planning to open up either. Or maybe it was simply that he hadn’t bothered to find out her name before the appointment. Whatever. The doctor wasn’t much for small talk, it appeared. Neither was she. Agnes decided to cooperate for as long as it was in her interest. She wanted out.
“I’m sure you’ve heard this before but—” Agnes sputtered.
“But you’re not crazy,” he interrupted, matter-of-factly finishing her sentence without even looking up at her.
“I don’t belong here,” she almost pleaded, leaning in toward him with her hands outstretched, inadvertently revealing the bloodstains from her self-inflicted wounds.
“Are those tattoos, Miss Fremont?” He looked over the top of his glasses. “No? Then you probably do belong here right now.”
Agnes pulled her arms back and dropped her chin, unable to look him in the eye, but she could still hear him and he kept on talking.
“It says in your file that you are a good student, very social, never been in trouble to mention, no history of depression.” He flipped back and forth between the stapled pages in a manila folder. “So what changed?”
Agnes did not respond, shifting uncomfortably in her chair from both the pain of the question and the charm.
“Do you want to tell me about him?”
“Why does it always have to be about a guy?” Agnes blurted, trying to dam the tears that said otherwise.
“Because it usually is,” said Frey.
Agnes paused. She recalled in an instant almost every relationship she’d ever had, as far back as her first crush. There was definitely a pattern. They didn’t last. Even her friends were starting to joke that she couldn’t hold on to a guy. As far as she was concerned, her heart was just too big for those boys to handle. If she could just find one who could, everything would be okay.
“My mom thinks I fall in love too easily.”
“Do you?”
“I just follow my heart. I always