Stanley comes to see me after I refused to go to his office. I’m slumped on my bunk bed, unable to move. He takes one look at me and says with deep concern in his voice, “What’s wrong, Tiara?”
“Go away.”
He turns to the door. Jesus, get that guy. His shrink training sure was worth the shitload of money it must have cost his parents.
“Wait.”
When he sits down, I close my eyes and start. “I feel like kicking and screaming but can’t. I haven’t got the strength to even sit up,” I say. “I keep thinking about Texas, and a lot of stuff pops up. Stuff I’ve told you about. It goes as far as my tenth birthday, and then I remember that horrible storm we had a few weeks after my birthday. Then, nothing. Like my memory is a train entering a tunnel, somebody hits the emergency brakes and then it derails in total darkness.”
I can’t help it, tears of frustration well up in my eyes. Stanley is swimming in milky fog.
“Which storm? You’re talking about your tenth birthday, so you can’t mean Katrina, right?”
“Katrina was long gone. I mean Hurricane Ike. Actually, by the time Ike made landfall it was downgraded to a cat two, so in truth it wasn’t a hurricane anymore but it still was one major nasty storm.”
“Why don’t you start at your birthday and take it from there. Tell me all you remember about those weeks leading up to that particular storm.”
So I tell him.
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