The Screaming Season Read Online Free PDF

he cocked his head, appraising the view. “Let’s walk along that path and meet some of your committee members on the way. Are you comfortable in that chair?”
    I wasn’t particularly, but the only piece of furniture more comfortable was my bed, and there was no way I was doing that. I had never been to a therapist’s office where I had to lie down. I wasn’t about to start now.
    I could feel Celia struggling, and I coughed to hide it. The grapefruit juice sloshed on my index finger. He noticed.
    “I’m making you nervous.”
    Why hide it? Therapists valued honesty. Crazy people told themselves lies. Sane people faced trouble head-on. Or so I had been informed. Over and over again.
    “Maybe I’ll tell you how the exercise works, and you can do it on your own later.”
    Said the spider to the fly. I smiled politely, pretending to buy it. I knew full well that he was going to try his mojo out on me.
    “So, are you ready?” he asked.
    “I’m taking a vote,” I said, and when he grinned, I honestly thought there might be hope for the relationship.
    “You’re walking along a path,” he said, looking not at me, but at the circle of light on the wall. “You make the path as real to yourself as possible. It’s bordered with palm trees, or ice plants, or geraniums . . . ”
    Southern California borders, then. We had geraniums in our front yard. I could smell them now, their pungent, earthy-lemon odor. I could see the glint of light on my mother’s wedding ring as she weeded the beds of shocking pink and orange blossoms. The wheels of my trike, squeaking as I rode up and down the driveway, up and down, watching her weed, impatient for her to finish because I wanted a grilled cheese sandwich.
    When she got sick, we let the geraniums go and our front yard became a weedy mess. We had never had a sprinkler system because my mom liked to water the yard herself. Someone put an anonymous note in our mailbox and called us white trash because parts of our yard were so overgrown, while others were dry as dust. When CJ started dating my father, she hired a service to install sprinklers and we weeded together. She called them our “dirt dates,” and pretty soon I relaxed around her. In no time at all, I could smell the geraniums again, even from the backyard.
    The backyard . . . where Celia had appeared in the pool and told me I had to come back here . . .
    The little girl in me resented CJ for taking my mom’s place. But the young woman that I was becoming was grateful to her for the weeding, the home-cooked meals, the snacks for sleepovers. And the two goofy little boys who became my stepbrothers.
    “And as you walk along the path, bordered by geraniums . . . ” He paused. “What’s on the path? Gravel? Dirt?”
    Ashes, I thought. Open graves. But I said, “Sand. From the beach. We’re barefoot.”
    “The warm sand squishes between your toes and above you, the . . . seagulls? . . . are circling.”
    Vultures. Ravens. But now I was just fighting him in my private, childish way.
    “You discover you’ve been moving up an incline. And as you look down over the crest, it looks . . . ”
    “Like Marlwood,” I said, surprising myself.
    “Which looks like . . . ”
    “Something out of Charles Dickens, mostly,” I said. “The old buildings, anyway.”
    I pictured Founder’s Hall, with the bell tower, very creepy. Always cold. When we sat in there for assemblies, we took turns seeing who could make the most clouds of breath. And my dorm, Grose. The brick walls covered with bad art, the dark wood floors, so shiny that when I walked down them, I could see . . .
    I felt Celia’s icy presence. She was joining the party. Mad tea party.
    “You can see your reflection in the wood,” I told him.
    “Go on.”
    “And there are five huge bathtubs in the bathroom, and you can see where they used to have lids on them. They put the bad girls in them and locked the lids on. Only their necks and heads stuck out.
    Celia moved