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"It's just, one minute I knew who I was, and the next, I was kissing Katie and..."
Jessie stops speaking, leaving a dangling silence. She pretends to be looking at Dr. Rosenfeld, but really is looking at the wallpaper just above his head, to his left.
Dr. Rosenfeld lets the silence hang as he watches Jessie's body language. Her hands have retreated into her sleeves, fingers occasionally peeking out as she plays with the sleeve end.
Unlike when she first came to him, denying her eating disorder, she's sitting straight and tall. Instead of pulling her legs to her chest, even a little, Jessie has her feet on the floor, legs relaxed, slightly apart. Rather than having her arms further blocking her from confrontation with terrifying truths, her chest is open and her arms instead on the armrests of the chair.
She's made a lot of progress, despite all she's faced recently. Even with her dad's recent remarriage (and the attendant acquisition of two stepsisters, one of whom was overenthused by the change while the other simmered with confused resentment) and move--into the new stepfamily's established home, no less--along with her mother's near-fatal accident and lengthy hospital stay, Jessie had kept eating.
"And what? And the skies opened and angels rejoiced? And the earth cracked and you fell into flame?"
Jessie gives him that look, the one of mingled disgust and pity, and a few other things, that somehow everyone learns at puberty and outgrows at about 20.
"And we kissed! She's my friend, and she's a girl, and I don't know how it happened!"
"Oh, I think you know exactly how it happened, and just how you feel about it."
The look returns, magnified by about 40. Good.
"Or maybe you don't, and you suffered brain death sometime between your last visit and today. Tell me, if you can still access enough brain function to speak, where were you and what were you doing when you still knew who you were?"
Jessie sighs, shoulders slumping a little for a moment, curving inward, before she straightens and pulls her right knee upward. She doesn't hug it, her back stays strong and shoulders open, but she's hiding, just a little.
She remains too much her mother's daughter to not retreat into herself when she's confused, still worried about what will happen if public appearances aren't preserved.
"A couple of days ago she wrote me this letter, and had Grace bring it to me. I don't know if she read it or not. I mean, she says she didn't, but this is Grace. And later Grace saw me, and heard me tell Lily to tell Katie I was too tired to take the phone and Grace started talking about how lucky I am to be able to go for it with the person I love -- "
"So you're in love with Katie?"
Jessie sighs again, this time clearly in frustrated exasperation. "No!"
"But you kissed her."
"Yes."
"And you liked it."
"I guess? Kind of?" She rolls her shoulders inelegantly, inattentively, using them more than words to display the depth of her uncertainty.
"So are you in love with her?"
"NO! Yes. I don't know." Jessie puts her left foot on the chair beside her right, mostly hiding herself behind early adolescent lanky limbs.
"Tell me about this letter."
Jessie sits quietly for a moment, leaving Rosenfeld's question hanging in the air. She took a deep breath before beginning to speak again, this time in a slower, more measured and collected manner.
"It was a letter. She wrote all this stuff about how special I am to her, and how important our friendship is, and how much she enjoys spending time with me."
"No open declarations of love, no mention of how no one else loves you the way she does, how she'll slit her wrists if you don't go to the dance with her?"
The blonde hair swings as Jessie turns her head side to side, her expression half-bemused, half-embarrassed.
"Nothing like that. Just...sweet. She wanted me to throw it away."
"Which she? Katie or Grace?"
"Katie. She came by after school yesterday, because I'd stayed home. She found it on the floor in my room. Grace wasn't there."
"So does it matter if Grace read the note?"
"It's just that Grace is such a gossip. She acts like she isn't, like she's telling you this stuff for your own good, like she has all this wisdom from being so much older than me."
"But isn't she, sometimes? Isn't she the one who told you Katie's gay? A point you denied pretty strongly last time you were here?"
Jessie makes a noise somewhere between a sigh and an expletive, and puts her feet back on the floor, though she slides down into the back of the chair a little and brings her hands together, still hidden in the sleeve ends.
She doesn't say anything, and looks less in his direction than before.
"Jessie. Does it matter if Grace read the note?"
"YES! It's my note! She doesn't have any business talking about Katie like that."
"Are you afraid she'll talk about you like that, go around whispering to everyone that her stepsister's a lesbian?"
"I'm not a lesbian."
"But you said you kissed a girl."
"So?"
"So?" Dr. Rosenfeld echoed her snappy retort.
"I don't want her talking about me. It's not Grace's business, but she thinks everything's her business."
"What isn't Grace's business?"
"That I kissed Katie."
"What does it matter? What happens if Grace finds out?"
"She'll tell everyone! She can't keep her mouth shut!"
"I remember when you were upset that she found out you were seeing me. Who did she tell then?"
"Nobody."
"And when you fainted--who did she tell?"
"Just Judy. But then everyone found out."
"Who's everyone?"
"Everyone!" Jessie waved her hands in emphasis, fully opening herself to the conversation as she looked directly at him for the first time.
"Everyone at school? But they saw it. She didn't need to tell them. So is everyone your family?"
Small retreat, as she leans back into the oversized chair.
"I guess," she said, deflated like a popped balloon. "Mom has enough to worry about, and Lily will want to talk about it, like she's being all supportive when really she's just judging me, and Dad won't know what to do or think until Mom and Lily talk to him."
"The earth won't shatter? You won't be tarred and feathered or run out of town? You won't be drawn and quartered?"
"No," she said with that teenager sigh of frustration.
"You won't be put in stocks and have rotten lettuce thrown at you? They'll just talk you to death?"
"Yeah. I guess."
"And what will you say?"
"I. Don't. Know." The muscle in the hinge of her jaw is jumping, and her head is turned away.
"You need to think about how you feel about this, Jessie," he says. "You know this isn't their business, but is there even a this? Do you want to kiss Katie again? Why did you kiss her this time?"
Jessie slumps in her chair.
"I'll see you next week."
Jessie stood up and grabbed her bag, putting it on her shoulders as carefully as ever. Despite its size, though, she looked less burdened than earlier.
As it should be.