Zac Kendall was looking at her now. He had seen her staring. Resolutely, Fran looked away. It was bad enough that he’d noticed her at all. If he noticed her acting crazy, the story would go all around the school. She had had way more than enough of that stuff already. Having accidentally caught Kendall’s eye once, she made sure not to do it again.
Then the receptionist called her name and told her to go to consulting room 14. She had to walk past Kendall and his mom on the way. Kendall pretended she didn’t exist, and she extended the same courtesy to him. Jinx, though, gave both the boy and the woman a piercing glare as she followed Fran out of the room, baring her teeth in a very convincing threat display.
Fran made her way down the corridor and knocked on door 14, then went on inside.
Dr. Southern was sitting in a plastic chair that was inadequate for his bulk, but he stood up as Fran came into the room. “Frankie!” he boomed. “Long time no see. Sit, sit.”
He ushered her into the ancient floral-patterned armchair that sat in the corner of the room. Like Southern himself, it was too big for this tiny space. It was also too soft, the deep cushion sucking your butt in and down so you had to choose between perching on the edge of it like a trapeze artist on a swing or sitting right back and getting half swallowed into its innards.
Fran always took the first option. Perching made it easier to look down at the paisley-patterned carpet if she got uncomfortable under Dr. Southern’s unblinking stare.
Jinx ignored the chair and went and sat on the window ledge. Fran was surprised that the fox had come into the consulting room with her, given her strong feelings about Dr. Southern. Maybe it was because of Zac Kendall’s two-in-one mom. Maybe Jinx thought Fran needed a bodyguard. Whatever it was, Jinx had put on her armor and her sword belt.
“How’s the chess?” the doctor asked Fran, pulling her back to reality.
Fran nodded. “Pretty good, yeah. We’ve got tryouts for regionals next week and I’m playing lots of games against the computer.”
“Winning?”
“Losing two out of three. But I shoved the difficulty setting right up to the top, so that’s not a bad average.”
“Still into the Hedgehog Open?”
“Of course. On account of it’s still awesome.”
“How’s your dad?”
“He’s fine.”
“I bet he was surprised to see Juju make that catch.”
“Nope. He won a bet on that.”
Dr. Southern guffawed. He was a Steelers fan too, but Fran was pretty sure that if he wasn’t he would have found some other thing to hang his small talk on. He always started their sessions with the same two topics, and with that box ticked he always got right down to business.
Like he did now. “So we’ve got some kind of a relapse going on,” he said. “Is that right?” He sat back down again, the plastic chair creaking a little under his weight.
There’s a Krispy Kreme box on the desk there, Lady Jinx said in a voice that dripped with contempt. Look! Right next to your file folder. He’s been pigging out on donuts. A whole box of them. Piggy piggy piggy! I bet he doesn’t give one to you.
Fran nodded, answering both of them. She’d seen the donut carton, and it didn’t bother her. She figured Dr. Southern had as much right to eat donuts as anyone else did. Being fat didn’t mean you had to live on lettuce. And Jinx only got all judgy like this when it was him she was judging. She didn’t notice other overweight people at all.
“Okay,” the doctor said. “Talk me through it. When and where and how much?”
“Stuff moving,” Fran said. “Stuff changing. I dozed off over my homework last night—”
“In your own room, the living room, what? Paint the picture for me.”
Like that makes any difference, Jinx scoffed. He wants to show you he’s listening, that’s all.
“In my bedroom. And I had a bad dream. I woke up feeling like someone was coming after me. Trying to grab hold of me.”
“Someone?” Dr. Southern tapped the point of his pencil on the desk, on a corner of it, close to his hand, where there was a little patch of bare wood probably made by years of this kind of impact. “Call it, Frankie. We’re talking the obvious someone, right?”
Fran handed over her journal. She didn’t want to say it out loud. Picota as a giant spider had felt terrifying but would sound lame, like a childish nightmare based on a childish fear. Even so, the words were forced out of her as Southern scanned the recent pages.
“Yeah, it was him. Well, it was a big spider-thing, kind of, and I don’t think it had a face, but it was still him. I mean, it was that memory and that place, so it didn’t really matter what the monster looked like.”
“The monster,” Southern repeated, still reading. “That’s how you were thinking of him?”
“He had, like, a dozen arms, Dr. Southern.”
“And by ‘that place,’ you mean the motel? Where he took you?”
“Yes.”
Duh, Jinx muttered.
“Okay.” Southern set the book down on the desk and turned his frank gaze on Fran again. “So you were reliving your abduction. I just wanted to make sure that was the context here.”
Fran didn’t say anything to this. From where she was sitting, it was a question that answered itself. Whenever her brain reached for nightmare imagery, it infallibly dipped into that same well.
“And the bad dream woke you. And then the changes kicked in after that?”
“I think a siren woke me. An ambulance out in the street. Or maybe it was the sound that made me have the nightmare, I don’t know. But yeah, I guess I was still thinking about Picota after I woke up. And then the weird stuff kicked in.”
She flicked her hand to indicate the same old, same old. Little bits of the world sliding in and out and round about like the squares on a Rubik’s Cube, which was a cool puzzle her dad had given her for Christmas once that had taken her more than half a day to figure out.
At the mention of Picota’s name, Jinx had drawn her sword and was thoughtfully testing its edge against the ball of her thumb. Now she took out a whetstone from the little pocket-purse-thing on her belt that Fran didn’t know the right name for and began to sharpen the blade.
“What weird stuff?” Dr. Southern prompted.
“Changes. Like, the colors of things changing. Where they were in the room. Or one thing turning into a different thing. You know.”
Like you told him all the other times. Stupid man!
Southern put the journal down, picked up his pencil again and did some more tapping with it.
“This was a one-off?” he mused.
“I suppose.”
“Well, it was or it wasn’t. Was this something that just happened all by itself, or was it part of a sequence you didn’t tell me about yet?”
“It was a one-off.”
“And it was right after a triggering incident. The nightmare.”
“Yeah.”
Now tell me how that made you feel, Jinx muttered, mimicking the doctor’s deep voice in her piping treble.
“Okay, give me some background,” Southern said. “Before it happened—I mean, in the days leading up to this, or even earlier on that same day—did you feel any increase in tension or unhappiness? What was your mood?”