trying to overcome them, I should try to get myself back to that place. So I could experience it again, so I could understand what sadness was. She said I had to know my emotions before I could control them.”
Every time she’d pause, the room would sit perfectly still. Aiden tried to focus on what she was saying, to take it seriously, but when it was silent for long enough, he couldn’t stop himself from drifting to the best moments they’d spent together—lying on her bed, sitting on the bleachers at the court—none of it had been real. He’d been an experiment for her, and a failed one at that. He held his face steady while she continued.
“I’d see Eddy,” she said, “every time I was leaving. He always had a counseling session after mine, but I couldn’t understand what he and Dr. Richardson talked about. He couldn’t communicate, so what good was therapy? But just from the way he acted when he saw her, the way he was around her, in that room . . . I knew she was doing something worse to him.
“I started staying late after my sessions, so I could try to see Eddy. I figured if I could talk to one other person who knew what I was going through, it would help me . . . I don’t know. And it did.” She looked over at Eddy; he didn’t look back. “He couldn’t talk, but I knew he could hear me, and he was trying so hard. He’d grab my hand, and I could tell from the way he squeezed it . . . that he was trying to tell me he could understand.
“It was weird, like he couldn’t figure out how to say or do anything with his face, but he knew what was going on. He kept motioning to my textbooks, so one day I opened one of mine up, and I started writing, and he started squeezing my arm, with the number of letters in every word. So I wrote, touch my shoulder, and he did.”
“He can read?” Aiden asked.
Emma nodded. “Then one day Dr. Richardson came out of her office and she saw us together, and she freaked. She said we should never speak, and should try to avoid being in the same place, because we’d ruin each other’s progress. That was when I knew that what she was doing to him was messed up. That he wasn’t like this when he came to school. She made him like this, and I could tell that Eddy was warning me—she was gonna start doing it to me too.
“So we had to find a secret way of talking to each other, something Dr. Richardson wouldn’t notice or understand. I realized, pretty early in my assessments—she didn’t know anything about the Bible. So I started scribbling Bible verses in the margins of magazines, with clues about where and what time to meet—and then I’d leave them on her table.”
“Wait,” Aiden interrupted. “You want us to believe he still has the Bible memorized?”
“He does,” she snapped. “And I don’t care what you believe.”
Aiden sat back.
“My therapy kept getting worse. Dr. Richardson would call me in three, four times a day, usually pulling me out of class. I knew it wasn’t normal, but I couldn’t talk to anybody about it. I tried to write about it, but she could read my journal, so . . . there was nowhere for me to hide.
“Last week, I collapsed in her office, after she showed me a video of my mom talking about me . . .” Emma choked, then caught herself. “Talking about me like I wasn’t there, or like I didn’t exist anymore. It was a real video. I don’t know where she got it. And then . . . when the video was done, she just picked up with it, laying into me, like she was my mom, and . . .” Emma stopped herself and swallowed, hard. “She apologized after, but . . . she didn’t mean it. I knew I’d stopped getting better, but she seemed to just be happier and happier. I told her I wanted to stop, but . . . she said I was making too much progress. And we couldn’t go back now.”
Emma cleared her throat. “I knew she wasn’t going to stop. That whatever she was doing, it wasn’t regular therapy. So I decided I had to get out. I figured if I had enough money I