100 Days of Cake Read Online Free PDF Page A

of the fish magnets we have up front.
    When the dude leaves, Alex points to my carton of lo mein and makes a face. “Not Wang’s best work, was it?”
    I shrug. “Definitely wasn’t the broccoli-rabe-sausage day.”
    â€œAfter we close, maybe I can take you out for a real dinner somewhere. No offense to Chuck, but this dump isn’t all that romantic.”
    That greasy pull in my stomach, and the uptick in my chest. Lowering my chin to my shoulder, all I can see is freaking T.J.’s annoying Captain America face. You’re just kind of different from what I thought before I got to know you.
    The sigh escapes before I can stop it.
    â€œSo I’m guessing that’s a no?” Alex sounds more amusedthan disappointed, which just makes me wonder if he even means any of it at all.
    Luckily, I don’t have to flat-out shut him down.
    â€œI can’t.” I try to sound breezy. “I have to get my head shrunk.”
    When I first started therapy ADF, I tried to hide it from Alex, but after the third week in a row when I left early for a doctor’s appointment, he got worried I was dying of cancer or something, so I had to tell him. Never even fazed him.
    â€œRight, it’s Thursday,” Alex says. “Some other time, I guess.”
    â€œYeah,” I say, but don’t offer up an alternate day/month/year, and he doesn’t push. Better this way, in our little aquarium without all that outside stuff.
    We watch more TV, and he eats my just-meh noodles until it’s time for me to leave.
    â€œSame time, same place tomorrow?” Alex says.
    â€œYou’re on, A-hat.”

    It’s only a fifteen-minute bike ride to Dr. Brooks’s office in a converted old house downtown, but it’s so hot that I’m a liquefied version of my former self by the time I arrive. My tank top is soaked through with sweat, and even in the blurry reflection from the big picture window, my face is the exact shade of a ripe tomato. I’m a few minutes late already, but I don’t want Dr. B. thinking I’m any more of a whackjob than I am, so I duck into the bathroom and change into Alex’s band shirt—which actually fits pretty well—splash some water on my face, and run my fingers through the knots in my nuclear-winter hair. I’m not a huge makeup person, but looking at myself in the mirror, I wish that I knew how that stuff worked, like V and her friends. I wish I could put on mascara without stabbing myself in the eye with the wand, or apply blush in a way that didn’t look clown-y. Finding a tube of tinted ChapStick in my backpack, I dot it on.
    Dr. B. is waiting for me at his office door, perfectly fresh in a light-blue polo shirt and khakis.
    â€œFor a minute there I was worried you were standing me up,” he says, and I giggle.
    â€œNever!”
    Okay, I admit, I may have a teeny tiny crush on Dr. B. The guy has a jawline like a cliff and these little depressions by his temples that give him this seriousness with a dash of vulnerability. Obvi, nothing is ever going to happen. Beyond the ethical no-no’s that he’s my doctor and probably thirtysomething, he’s got a lovely strawberry-blond fiancée who works in TV news in Miami. (There’s a framed picture of the two of them on his desk.) But, hey, a girl’s allowed to look, right?
    He ushers me in and closes the door, and I take a seat on the leather couch across from his chair.
    I am sitting BTW, not lying down the way they do on TV. When I came in for my first session a year ago, I saw the chaise longue and asked if I was supposed to get vertical. “Some patients do,” Dr. B. said. “Whatever makes you the most comfortable.” As if anything about the situation was going to make me comfortable.
    To say therapy wasn’t my idea is a colossal understatement. When things started falling apart for me on the end of sophomore year, my mom dismissed