“We’re the only ones who know,” Dad went on.
“What about Grandmère?” I asked suspiciously.
“She doesn’t know,” Dad said. “She is, as usual, blissfully ignorant of everything that does not directly involve her.”
“But she’s going to figure it out,” I said. “When I don’t show up for princess lessons. She’s going to wonder where I am.”
“You let me worry about my mother,” Dad said, looking a little steely eyed, like Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. If James Bond were completely bald. “You just worry about getting better.”
Which is easy for him to say. He’s not the one who’s committed to speaking in front of the Opus Dei of women’s organizations a week from tomorrow.
Anyway, when I got back to the loft, I found that Mom had used my absence as an opportunity to clean my room and send all of my bedding out to the laundry-by-the-pound place. She had also opened all the windows and turned on all the fans and was airing out my room so energetically, Fat Louie wouldn’t come out from under the bed for fear of being swept up in the windstorm.
Meanwhile, Mr. G had taken away my TV. Which Dad informed me they aren’t replacing, because Dr. Knutz doesn’t believe children should have their own TVs.
So now I know what Dr. Knutz and I will be discussing for a good portion of our appointed hour together tomorrow.
Whatever. I guess I have bigger things to worry about. Like that while I was showering just now, Mom snuck into the bathroom and stole my Hello Kitty pajamas. And threw them down the incinerator.
“Trust me, Mia,” she said, when I confronted her about it. “It’s better this way.”
I guess she’s right. Maybe I was getting a little too attached to them.
Still. I’ll miss them. We went through a lot together, my Hello Kitty pajamas and I.
Mom, Dad, and Mr. G are all sitting around the kitchen table right now, having some kind of not-so-secret conference about me. Not-so-secret because I can totally hear. I mean, I might be depressed, but I’m not DEAF.
To distract myself, I went online for the first time in, like, a million years to see if anyone had e-mailed me.
It turned out they had. A lot. I had 243 unread messages.
And, okay, most of them were spam. But quite a few were cheerful attempts to make me feel better from Tina. There were some from Ling Su and Shameeka, too, and even a couple from Boris. (He is such a good boyfriend. He always does exactly what Tina tells him to.) There were quite a few from J.P., mostly funny forwards I guess he thought might cheer me up or something. Not that he knows I’m down. He BETTER not know, anyway.
Then, as I was going through, sending message after message into my trash folder, I saw it.
An e-mail from Michael.
I swear, my heart started beating about a million miles a minute, and my palms got instantly soaked. I so didn’t want to click on that message. Because what if it was just a reiteration of what Michael had said to me on Sunday? The thing about how we should just be friends and see other people? I don’t want to see that again. I don’t want to hear that again. I don’t even want to think about that again. I’d been doing everything I could all week NOT to have to revisit that particular conversation in my mind…and now there was a chance of it flashing in front of my eyes?
No way.
But then, just as I was about to hit DELETE, I hesitated. Because what if it wasn’t about that? What if—and, okay, I realized this was a big What if even as I was thinking it, but whatever—what if it was an e-mail telling me he’d changed his mind, and didn’t want to break up after all?
What if he’d been as depressed as me this past week?
What if, after a week apart, he’d realized how much he misses me, and as much as I was sitting here longing to be in his arms, smelling his neck, Michael was longing to have me in his arms, smelling his neck?
And before I could change my mind, I clicked OPEN….
SKINNERBX: Hey, Mia. It’s me. Well, obviously. Just checking in to see how you’re doing. Lilly tells me you haven’t been in school all week…hope everything is all right. I’m settling in here in Tsukuba. This place is a little nutty—they really do eat noodles for breakfast! But fortunately you can still find egg sandwiches most places. The work is what I expected it to be—hard—but I really think I have a solid chance of actually getting this thing off the ground. Although who knows if I’ll still feel that optimistic after a few more weeks of this.
Did you see they’re supposedly in talks for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel reunion movie? I thought you’d be excited about that.
Well, I have to go…I really hope you’re out of school because you’ve jetted off to somewhere great for princess duty, and not because you’ve come down with something.
Michael
I sat there for a long time with my finger poised to click REPLY. I mean, he’d expressed concern over my health (physical, not mental, but that’s okay. I doubt even Michael would have been able to predict I’d hit rock bottom, self-actualization-wise, and end up in a cowboy psychologist’s office in my Hello Kitty pajamas and a duvet).