“No,” I said. “I never—”
“It’s like any mental aberration. You’re not in full control of it, but in time, you’ll get better,” Dr. Samuels said. He finally smiled. “There’s nothing really to do about this. No medicine to take. Some people go to a therapist, of course.”
“We don’t need to do that,” Cassie said quickly. “We’ll handle this ourselves.”
Dr. Samuels nodded.
“I don’t do anything else?” I asked.
He shook his head. “In time, you’ll begin to lose the symptoms. You’ll go back to being a normal teenage girl.” He patted my hand and closed his bag.
“I’ll walk you out,” Cassie said. “Just wait here, Semantha,” she told me.
I couldn’t move, anyway. I was as solid as a statue and just as cold.
Cassie returned ten minutes later. She began to pace in front of me as she often did when she was doing some serious, deep thinking.
“Okay,” she said, pausing and turning to me. “Here’s what we’ll do. If this continues and you do indeed grow larger, you’ll wear a girdle.”
“A girdle?”
“Yes. It’s something women used to wear often. It will hold you in so that Daddy especially will not notice anything.”
“But maybe we should tell him, Cassie. He’ll be angry.”
“I doubt it. He’d only find a way to blame himself for something else. It’s enough that he thinks he can’t be a good father without Mother at his side. Your condition will only reinforce that guilt in him and make him even more unhappy, as hard as that is to imagine. When it’s all over, we’ll tell him, and he’ll be proud of you and me, proud that we handled a serious situation ourselves without troubling him.”
“Maybe this will stop,” I said hopefully. Then I realized something else. “What about school, Cassie?”
“What about it?”
“We’ve got to arrange for my attending a new school after the summer.”
“Not while you’re in this condition.”
“But … if I don’t get better, Daddy will wonder why I’m not going. We’ve got to tell him about this.”
“No!” she shouted. She immediately calmed. “I mean, we’ll hold off as long as possible, especially while he’s under such pressure.”
“What will we say?”
“We’ll say you decided you wanted to continue home-schooling. I’ll tell him we visited some schools and none was very attractive to you or to me, for that matter. Don’t worry. I can convince him as long as you tell him the same thing.”
“But … I want to go to school.”
“You will, as soon as this is over.”
“How do we get it to be over?”
“I spoke with Dr. Samuels a little more about it when I escorted him out. He suggests a little tough love.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You already know what that means. I explained it when we had the problems with Mother.”
“But how does that apply to me now?”
“It means don’t expect me to be sympathetic to your aches and pains and complaints, Semantha. I’m not going to stay home and babysit you, either. However, you are not to leave the house now. Our little trips are ended until this situation changes. I don’t want the grounds workers seeing you, either, just in case you forget to wear your girdle or something. Understand?”