Work Text:
The cookie thing was the cookie thing, and Shane fucking hates how everyone here talks to each other. They’re all swapping notes on him. So even though the group therapist Roxanna is different from the family therapist Carly is different from his therapist Kieran is different from his psychiatrist Dr. Durand, every single one of them knows about the cookie catastrophe.
The cookie wasn’t even the catastrophe. The catastrophe was the humiliating mental break he had on the floor before he had the balls to eat the cookie. Crashing out about the filth on his hands and down his throat and in his guts, making its slow creeping way through him, making him—
Somehow he doubts that is going to make a difference.
Today, therapy is a group event, as in, he steps into Kieran’s office and Dr. Durand is in the spare chair that Shane’s never seen in use before.
“Hi, Shane,” says Kieran pleasantly.
“Good morning.” Shane’s not looking at Kieran. He’s eyeing up Durand—she, like every other psychiatrist he’s ever met, looks over fifty. She’s extremely tiny, for real, not just because Shane is used to being around people with NHL height, and she has severe eyebrows.
“Good morning, Shane,” says Durand primly.
“Would it be okay if Dr. Durand joined us for part of your session today?” Kieran is asking in his neutral therapist voice, the one that tries to disguise the fact that there is a right answer to the question.
“What for?” Shane hates how he sounds. Petulant and pouty and childish. “Can you turn off the light?”
He has practiced asking Kieran this question. He has practiced it with Kieran, in session, when Kieran noticed how quickly he was blinking when trying to answer a very straightforward question. It felt like a waste of time when they did it, but he’s glad of it when Kieran flips off the fluorescent overhead and switches on the Himalayan salt lamp on his desk.
“Thanks.” Durand is watching him closely.
Durand answers, not Kieran. “Even though I’m not your therapist, I’m still part of the team trying to figure out how we can best support you. Being here today will help me with that.”
She’s speaking in code, but Shane doesn’t have the key to it. He nods blandly. He controls nothing here. This is just one more thing passively happening to him—like everything has passively happened to him, since February.
“Okay.”
When Ilya has tried to convince Shane that therapy is a good idea and everyone should go, he’s made a really big point of how sessions are client-led, how much autonomy he has. Therapy in residential treatment is… not like that. Shane sits down and barely has time to fiddle with his wristwatch before Kieran starts in on the thing he least wants to talk about.
“How do you think this last family therapy session went?”
Shane would rather eat two desserts every day for a week than talk about this. He almost offers, but he’s not in the habit of writing checks he can’t cash.
“Bad.” Monosyllabic and aggressive. He doesn’t know why he’s like this in therapy. Shane likes Kieran. Kieran is awesome. Today his earring is a little pink triangle stud.
“I’m interested in why you think so.”
Shane presses his fingers hard to his wrist. “I freaked out. It was almost nice and I lost it.”
Kieran pauses almost imperceptibly before he says, “It sounds like that’s a familiar narrative for you, Shane.”
Squinting, Shane thinks about that. About Ilya eating a burger on the porch. Another cookie, another fight. Looking at his lab work with everyone who controls his career sitting in the room and trying to get him to answer for it. His head down on the table, world spinning and lungs squeezing tight so he couldn’t breathe, while Ilya scarfed down spaghetti and made Shane’s parents love him.
“Do you feel like that kind of thing has happened before?”
“Obviously.” Shane breathes. He can stare right into the salt lamp without it hurting his eyes, and he does, waiting for his pulse to slow. Counting. “I’m just—difficult. I freak out sometimes.”
Kieran is doing the thing where he lets there be a lot of silence. Shane can’t stand it eventually.
“Before I came here, we had a big fight about a cookie. It was so stupid. My labs were fucked up. Like, low iron, low hemoglobin, low B12. I was just anemic, I guess, and Marina decided we needed to change up the meal plan. The labs wouldn’t have been a problem if I wasn’t trying to get over the broken leg and get back to playing hockey. A lot of people are anemic. That’s not important, actually. The cookie wasn’t even on the meal plan. But Ilya was, like, stir-crazy, I guess. It was too hot to bake, but he did. He had his apron on and he said he wanted to do something nice because I was stuck at home. Not sugar cookies. They were chocolate chip. He loves North American sweets. Ilya wanted me to have one. I didn’t want one. It wasn’t part of the plan, and everyone was riding my ass about sticking to the fucking plan.”
Shane stops, exhales.
“Whatever, we fought about it. He cried. I cried. I ate the stupid cookie.”
No one says anything. He wonders how they know that the story isn’t over.
Shane kind of feels like someone else is talking now, but it’s the sound of his own voice. “I didn’t say anything. Just got up, went to the shower, really hot, like, maybe actually scalded my shoulders a little? I don’t remember. I was there until it got cold. And after.”
Long after, scrubbing under his nails, down his back, washing his hair again and again, then sitting curled up on the cold floor, water streaming down over him until he heard Ilya knocking. He didn’t open. Ilya knocked and knocked and knocked and cursed the lock on the door and shouted for him and then said he was going to call Shane’s parents. Did call them. Told them everything.
“Well,” Kieran says, “this time we got through it without anyone locking themselves in the bathroom.”
Shane laughs. He doesn’t want to—would rather be angry and unamused—but he does.
“They just had to leave us in the kitchen so I could eat half a cookie.” Sounding pathetic, even to himself, Shane sighs.
“I’d like to talk about what eating the cookie was like,” says Kieran. His eyes flick over to Durand, who has been quiet, but has a small purple Moleskine notebook out now, and is writing in it with Yuna’s favourite brand of Japanese ballpoint pen. “I know you hate when I ask how stuff makes you feel, so just tell me about the experience.”
Shane taps his left foot, then his right foot, then counts to ten. “The rainbow sprinkles felt a little bit on-the-nose.”
That’s not right. That’s not important, even though it’s true. “It was yummy. Ilya told me a story about his mom.” Exhale. “I felt sick after.” That’s true. It didn’t sit heavy but dinner did. He felt dirty all over. How can he say that? He wanted to get out of it. Make up for it. Change the rules if they could be changed like that, out of nowhere, no one bothering to consult Shane even though it’s his life and his body and fuck. He couldn’t.
“Just felt wrong, I guess.” That’s as close as he can get.
Kieran seems to understand. He nods. “How do you deal with that feeling?”
“I just sat.” Shane can never seem to say what he means. “I like to look at the birds on the wall.”
“What about at home?”
Home. Shane’s throat constricts. “Well, the shower thing. Or I’ll just count. Like, um. I’ll tap my fingers, or do this.” He fidgets, feeling on display, like he’s doing an interview for GQ or shooting an ad for Rolex. “Or count my heartbeats. Just until it feels right.”
“I’ve noticed that,” Kieran says, and Shane would like to die, please, right here in this dumb office, in front of the aloe vera and the lamp and god.
“It just calms me down.”
“No one’s in trouble here, Shane,” says Durand in her soft voice. Immediately he’s got his hackles up. What makes her think that he thinks he’s in trouble?
“I know,” he says defensively. “I know it’s weird, you just asked what I do and I’m telling you.”
Kieran looks at Durand. Durand looks at Kieran. The salt lamp glows pinkly. Shane tries to remember the birds since they aren’t here to look at.
“I feel kind of attacked right now,” he blurts out.
Durand smoothes her hands over her pressed pinstripe trousers, which look like something that Ilya would wear to the Kingfisher. “Shane, I don’t want this to feel like an attack, because it’s not. I’m gonna suggest something, and you can stop me anytime if you’re feeling upset or have questions. Okay?”
Shane can’t say okay. Just nods curtly. He wants out of here. Wants to bolt.
Kieran holds out a rubbery-looking toy bao bun. He squeezes it in his strong, veined hand, like he’s showing Shane how to use it. When he sets it down on the edge of the desk, Shane picks it up. Squeezes hard.
“You’re here because you have an eating disorder,” says Durand. Shane does not bother to protest. “We don’t like to talk a lot about diagnostic criteria or what’s in the chart, because what’s important is how we can help you, and it can be uncomfortable or stigmatizing for people sometimes, just thinking about labels like that.”
Shane has a lot of experience with labels. He worries he will destroy this toy bao.
“Anyway, a lot of the time, people with eating disorders aren’t actually worried about how they look, or losing weight, or anything like that. You’ve never talked about having body dysmorphia or wanting to be smaller.”
“Duh,” Shane interrupts before he can stop himself. “That would be stupid. I play with a bunch of huge guys who slam into me at top speed several times a night.”
“Exactly,” says Durand. She takes his lashing out in stride. “Sometimes, we start to look at what else might be going on and leading to these behaviours.”
“Behaviours like locking myself in the bathroom?”
Kieran chimes in, “A lot of the stuff we’ve talked about. Having a really small list of acceptable foods, needing a lot of rigid routine around food. All of that.”
“Right.” Shane does not like where this is going. His mouth is dry. If he squeezes the toy hard enough, he can feel his pulse in his palm.
“Based on what you’ve told Kieran and Carly, and me too, I think that you’re probably one of those people with something else going on.”
Shane exhales. “Can you just be direct, please? Take off the kid gloves.”
Durand smiles apologetically, then adds to it by actually apologizing. “Sorry. Okay, directly, Shane, it’s my opinion as your psychiatrist that you have obsessive compulsive disorder, and your eating disorder is probably part of that.”
Shane’s ears haven’t rung like this since the early days of the concussion. The bao is between his hands and he presses it between them, tight. Sweat beads on his palms, his upper lip. He blinks. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. How much time has passed? Durand has stopped talking. She’s waiting for him to say something.
“No, I don’t,” he says stupidly. Ilya has depression. Ilya has been suicidal, has spent days unable to get out of bed, weeks where he can’t sleep. Shane is fine. Shane wants Ilya. Wants Ilya to tell him that they’re wrong.
Kieran says, comfortingly, “OCD affects about 2.3% of the general population. It’s pretty common.” Shane’s mind locks onto that number like a lifeline. It snaps him back into the room.
“Okay, but how do you know?”
Back to Durand. They’re like a D-team ganging up on him and he’s trying to get to the net, but in this metaphor he guesses the net is ‘getting the fuck out of here’ and he’s got basically no chance. “Mental health conditions mostly don’t have definitive tests that we do. I’m happy to go through a screening questionnaire with you, but, honestly, Shane, the team here knows you really well and I feel confident making this diagnosis. I think it will help us give you the tools you need to transition back to your home.”
Well, at least there’s that.
“Maybe we could do that screening,” he says meekly. Just to know.
Durand has it ready, like she knew that he would ask. That rankles Shane. What rankles him more is how many of the screening questions that he ends up answering ‘yes’ to. He’s probably imagining it, but he thinks Durand looks smug.
Shane has been on a first-line SSRI for anxiety—he forgets the name—since he got here, and Durand explains that she wants to switch him to a different one. There are specific therapeutic tools, says Kieran, and they’ll start to use them. When Shane goes home (when he finally, finally goes home), he’ll need to keep doing therapy, which makes his stomach sink. Kieran will refer him to someone who specializes in treating adults with OCD.
Listening numbly, Shane turns the letters over in his mind. Overly Controlling Disorder. Optimistically Competitive Dude. Oh Crap Disorder. There’s something wrong with him. He’s always felt that, and it seems true now, real.
“I want to play hockey again.”
Durand smiles. “With treatment…medication, therapy, focusing on increasing your flexibility with food and eating… there’s no reason you won’t be able to.”
For the first time in fifteen minutes, Shane’s grip on the poor, abused bao relaxes.
“I do want to get better,” Shane says.
“That’s really great,” says Kieran.
As soon as he’s said it, Shane’s not sure if it’s true anymore. But he said it. So he must have thought it, at least for a second. That’s something. He breathes out, breathes in, something shifting in his chest. Thinking of home.