Borderline (The Arcadia Project, #1)(4)

“If not with me, you need to tell someone. Let the authorities decide the appropri—”

“I said stop it!” I grabbed the box of tissues from the table between us and flung it at the wall. Not helping my case for being functional. My heart was racing; my jaw was locked; my breath was coming fast and loud through my nose. The woman across from me was no longer Snow White but an old hag hawking apples.

“You’re angry,” the hag said.

It was like a seizure, something that swept over me unopposed and turned my blood to venom.

“Shut up,” I said between clenched teeth. “Just shut up right now or I swear to God I will punch you in the mouth.”

“Millie, let’s do what we talked about. What number are you at right now?”

“Fuck you.”

“If you can do this, it will be easier for me to believe that you are able to manage on your own.”

Once again I was reminded that Dr. Davis was smarter than I generally gave her credit for. “Eight,” I said.

“And what word did you assign to eight?”

It was hard to think through the fog of rage. But I had never been able to resist an urge to prove myself, and I knew she knew it too. “Furious,” I said. “I’m furious.”

“Can you tell me your ‘up thoughts’? If they are private, you can write them down.”

Any emotion, good or bad, lasts only a few moments unless we feed it. We are especially good at feeding anger, and Dr. Davis called the bits of kindling we toss onto the fire “anger up thoughts.” We use them without thinking, and it takes practice to pick them out.

“It’s not that simple,” I said.

“I know it’s hard to—”

“I’m doing it!” I snapped. “That was one of them.”

“I’m sorry.”

I stared at the wall, unable to address the thoughts directly to her, unable to look her in the eye with the full force of my fury, because the better part of me knew she was the only reason I’d made any progress at all.

“Leave it alone,” I said to the wall, struggling to make words out of the rage-doughnuts I was doing in the parking lot of my mind. “I told you to leave it alone and you ignored me. I’m sick of it. I’m not some poor little lamb with broken legs. Everyone here thinks they know me better than I do. I am not a f*cking child.”

I went on like that for a while; then we sat in silence for half a minute. When a fresh wave of anger hit, it was only a 4. Frustrated, I was able to do some mindfulness exercises, following my breathing in and out of my lungs. My pulse slowed, and my fists loosened. I turned the corners of my mouth up in a slight smile, as I’d been taught, but it felt ridiculous and I stopped.

“Are you angering down?” she asked.

“You can’t just verb any noun you want. But yes.”

“Can you share your ‘down thoughts’?”

I heaved a sigh and complied. “She didn’t mean it, she doesn’t understand the situation, she means well even if she doesn’t have a clue what she’s talking about.”

I shot her a glance, but if she was hurt, it didn’t show; I imagine therapists get good at that.

Maybe it was the aftermath of adrenaline; maybe it was a surge of contrition. But something made me blurt out, “Do you know anything about the Arcadia Project?”

After a moment of incomprehension, Dr. Davis’s face suddenly hardened into an expression I’d never seen. “No,” she said, like a snuffer on a candle. Not the no of ignorance, the no of don’t even think about it.

“So . . . you have heard of it.”

“I assume Caryl Vallo came to see you.”

I blinked. “You know her?” I said instead of, She’s real?

“Did she claim to be affiliated with the Center?” At the very thought, she seemed to be rapidly approaching anger level six: Incensed.

“Not at all. She said something about the Department of Mental Health. She didn’t mention this place.”

Dr. Davis exhaled.

“Who is she?” I prodded. “Is it some kind of scam?” Icy fingers of disappointment stroked my breastbone at the thought.

Dr. Davis rubbed the heel of her hand over her forehead. “No, they are state funded, at least in part, they’ve been around for decades, and there has never been any scandal around them that I could find.” She turned doe eyes on me. “But they’ve—they’ve taken people from us in the past, people we could have helped.”

“Isn’t getting us out of here the general idea?”

She shook her head, clearly frustrated. “What they offer isn’t healing. They all—they live together; there’s this intense secrecy. The whole operation looks like some sort of cult, but there has never been enough justification to investigate. I can’t be more specific without breaking patient confidentiality, but they’ve interfered before, once with a little girl I had invested a great deal in. I care about you, too, Millie, and I feel you could make real progress here, given enough time.”

“Speaking of time,” I said, pointing to the clock on the wall. We’d gone ten minutes over, which meant she was keeping someone else waiting. She was paid to say she cared, so I never believed it, but clocks don’t lie, and this one said she was holding on past the point she should have let go. That in and of itself made me feel that I ought to get as far away as possible.