I’d forgotten.
Again.
My stomach twisted.
I swiped to answer on the second ring, speed-walking toward the student center…my words spilling out too fast. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—I forgot, I lost track of time?—”
“Ophelia.” Her voice came through thin and high, like a piano wire pulled too tight. “Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been? This is yourthirdmissed appointment.Third. The office called me. Your advisor emailed me. They could put youon medical leave if I push it. And then you’ll be coming home. No arguments, no excuses…”
“I’mfine,” I said quickly, my steps slowing as I tried to come up with the right words to convince her of that. “It’s not a big deal. I just—Class ran over one day, and then I’ve had lots of practices, and?—”
“And what?” The wire in her voice tightened. “Youpromisedyou wouldn’t do this again.”
“I know.” The words scraped my throat on the way out. I stopped outside the building and leaned against the cold brick, trying to steady my breathing. “I know.”
“Then what is going on?” Every syllable landed like a small slap. “You were doing so well. We had a plan. You and I and Dr. Whitaker had a plan.”
I looked down at my shoes. Leaves stuck to the soles, wet and red like crushed petals. “Maybe I don’t need to go anymore,” I finally said, and even I heard how small it was. “I feel…good. Normal.”
“Normal?” The word cracked, like she might laugh or cry and couldn’t decide which. “You don’t get to declare yourselfnormaland fire a treatment team, Ophelia. That is not how this works.”
“I’ve been sleeping,” I said quietly. “And eating. I?—”
“And.”
“I met someone.”
The second the words slipped out, I wanted to scrape them back with my nails. The silence that followed sounded like a building holding its breath.
When she finally spoke, the wire snapped. “Oh, Ophelia,” my mother said, and her voice was shaking now, not soft—angry. Scared. “Notagain.”
Wind sliced across the quad, and I tucked my chin into my scarf, people streaming past with takeaway cups and bright orange beanies pulled low.
“I know,” I said, seeming not to have anything else to say to answer her. I took a deep breath, like I could pull bravery into my lungs with the air. “But this is different.”
“It’s always different, according to you.” She talked right over me, the way she did when she thought she had to pour fear into me fast before I made a mistake. “You convince yourself of it. And then I’m the one driving to a facility at midnight because you haven’t answered the phone in six hours and a boy’s name is written eight hundred times in a notebook.”
“Mom,” I breathed, my cheeks burning in shame. “Please.”
For a second my mind drifted, one of those bright flashes that made me dizzy with how real it felt. I saw the spiral of my notebook on his bedroom floor, my handwriting all messy and diagonal, his name looping through page after page until the margins were full. I remembered the exact way the light had hit the ink, how small the letters looked when he crouched down to pick it up. I remembered him closing the book and tossing it back on the bed, the sound a punctuation I could still hear. He hadn’t yelled. He hadn’t laughed.
I felt it now, how he’d cupped the back of my head, thumb pressing little circles into the place where my skull met my neck, the way his chest had risen under my cheek when I cried. He’d told me I was perfect, like it was a fact and not something dangerously fragile. For a beat, I almost believed it, and the shame that had been coiled in my ribs loosened enough that I could breathe.
“I’m not doing this again.” My mother’s voice cut through the memory. I blinked, shaking my head as if clearing water out of my ears, and forced myself back to the call.
I heard the sound of rustling papers in the background and the clatter of a pen. She was at her desk in her office, probably typing out an email to Dr. Whitaker as we spoke. “What about your medication…? Have you been taking it?”
I hesitated for a half second, the honest answer skittering through my throat—I hadn’t been bringing the meds with me to Matty’s house because I didn’t want him to see them, so I’d missed every dose this past week—but the thought vanished the second it arrived.
“Yes,” I lied, because the last thing I wanted was her driving up. And the truth was, I’d felt fine without it; being with Matty smoothed the jagged edges in a way the pills never had, like he was fixing what the doctors only managed to bandage.
“Every day?”
“Yes.”
“Show me the bottle when you get back to your dorm. I want to see the count.”
“I’m not a child.”
