Keep Me If You Can (If You Can #3)

28. Go clap emoji To clap emoji Therapy clap emoji

Chapter twenty-eight

Go *clap emoji* To *clap emoji* Therapy *clap emoji*

“O h, you absolutely have ADHD,” Dr. Klum said, shuffling some papers from the folder in his hands. “Definitely. I knew that about three minutes into the appointment.”

“Oh,” I said. “But I’ve been here for an hour.”

“Yes, well, the rest of this has been trying to figure out how severe it is, but you’ve got a lot of trauma mixed up that’s gonna make it hard to figure out what’s your brain wiring and what’s a ‘daddy issue’—and remember, those were your words, not mine.” He found what he was looking for and bit the lid off his pen. “But I don’t do talk therapy. You’ll need a psychologist for that.”

“If it was that obvious, how did no one know before now?” I asked.

Dr. Klum blew out a loud breath of air. He was a heavy-set, high-energy man with wide brown eyes, medium brown skin, and a lack of fucks to give. I’d liked him immediately when I walked into his office; everything he’d said was straightforward and to the point, like he had no patience for games.

“Honestly, Nellie, you’re damn good at masking,” he said.

“Thanks,” I replied.

“Not a compliment in this context.”

“Oh.”

“What it means is that you’re very, very good at hiding things that are giving you trouble,” he said.

“But I wasn’t trying to hide anything.”

“And therein lies some of the difficulty in diagnosing ADHD for anyone who isn’t a standard Caucasian male.” He sat back, crossing an ankle over his knee with a self-satisfied smirk on his face. “You’ve been so conditioned to hide the symptoms that you don’t realize how convoluted a system you’ve had to create to manage your time so no one realizes you’re falling behind. Then something happens that worsens your ADHD symptoms and your systems no longer work. That means the fake persona you’ve created to cater to everyone else is too tired to keep covering your own ass. And lucky you, this can be caused by anything. Stress. Lack of sleep. Hormones. Diet. Trauma.” He pointed his pen at me. “I’m guessing something happened around the time you started noticing the issues with being late and not being able to focus and all that getting worse.”

It could’ve been a few different things, actually. Which was kind of the point, I guess, but also, he had to be wrong.

“What fake persona?” I asked. “I don’t fake who I am—”

“Have you ever felt the need to hide who you are to impress people?” he asked.

“No, of course—”

And then I stopped and frowned. The smug look on Dr. Klum’s face widened.

“See?” he said.

“No.” I folded my arms. “I was doing that because my dad wanted me to impress people.”

“And now you see my conundrum from the last hour,” he said. “Is that ADHD or is that trauma?”

“I guess we’ll never know,” I muttered.

“Wrong. We’re finding out.” He started writing on one of the papers in his lap. “You need therapy.”

“That’s it?” I asked. “Just therapy?”

“And meds. You’re okay with taking pills?”

“Uh… mostly,” I said. “Like, I was on the pill but after this, um, thing that happened a few weeks ago, I went to get an IUD. Because I forgot to take a few of them.”

“Smart,” Dr. Klum said. “Well, they don’t have an IUD for ADHD meds, so we’ll have to stick with Vyvanse. Set an alarm on your phone or whatever to remember to take it. We’re gonna get you on a starting dose, but we’ll move up fairly quickly because—and now, don’t take this as enabling or excusing you buying Adderall or whatever your dumbass TA sold you, because I am very firmly telling you to never do that ever again—but since you did do that and seemed to have a good reaction to whatever you took, I’m confident we can nail your dosage without too much trouble. If not, we try a different med until we find the right one.”

“So this whole mental health thing is really just throw it at the wall and see what sticks, hey?” I asked.

“Professionally speaking, no, it’s much more complex than that,” he said. “Personally speaking, absolutely. Brains are complicated and what works for you won’t work for someone else. But for now—ADHD. Meds. Therapy. Seriously. You have a lot to work through.”

That was the understatement of the fucking century.

It was a bit of a surprise that Dr. Klum said he’d known three minutes into the appointment seeing as I was ten minutes late. And as I’d explained to him, I was ten minutes late because my dad had called.

“You couldn’t hang up on him?” Dr. Klum had joked.

“Oh, he would’ve lost it if I did,” I’d said. “But I would’ve had to answer for that to happen.”

“Why didn’t you answer?” he’d asked.

And then I spent the next twenty minutes blabbing about the entire shitshow that was my life.

For a few days after what I referred to in my head as the Pregnancy Fiasco, I hadn’t heard a word. Not from my dad. Not from Kimberlee. Obviously not from JP. Not even Anne-Marie knew what was going on.

“Kimberlee’s Porsche is on the driveway again,” she’d informed me on the following Tuesday. “But I did not see her go into the house or either of them leave. And she missed an event on Wednesday night that I know she was supposed to attend.”

But a couple of days after that, my dad called.

It might have been the first time in my life I looked at my phone screen and didn’t feel the inherent need to answer. I’d watched it ring, his name flashing on the screen like a warning sign, until it went to voicemail.

Then, when my phone vibrated to tell me I had a new voicemail, I deleted it without listening to it.

I’d repeated the same thing the next day, and the next, and even when he’d called during Dr. Spitzki’s class, I’d watched it ring. Which I could only do because I’d turned the ringer off for once because I was so tired of my dad trying to call.

By the time my ADHD assessment rolled around, my dad had taken to not only calling daily, but texting.

Texting .

My dad did not text .

But I’d muted that conversation so the notifications didn’t show on my phone at all.

“I guess I could block him,” I’d said to Dr. Klum. “But it seems so final. Or what if I want to read the messages one day?”

“Very valid,” Dr. Klum had said. “But, ah, how did this make you late for your appointment?”

“Oh,” I’d said. “Because I missed my ‘You have to leave the house in eight minutes’ alarm when I silenced my phone.”

“Why eight minutes?” he’d asked.

“Because ten minutes makes it feel like it’s not that much of a rush and five minutes is too late,” I’d said, like it was perfectly normal.

I hadn’t known what to expect from my assessment, but it had gone by smoothly. Once he’d reiterated for the eighty millionth time that I needed a therapist—“I’m gonna need therapy to process the trauma of you telling me how much therapy I need,” I said at once point, and Dr. Klum shrugged and said if that was what it took, then he was fine with it—he handed me the prescription and gave me strict instructions to book another appointment in a month to follow up with him.

And that was it. I walked out of his office with a prescription in one hand and a diagnosis in… well, not the other hand. But in my mind and medical file, I guess.

“So what are you going to do now?” Sydney asked over beers at Lou’s Pub that night once I’d finished telling her that Glitch, Ms. Travers, and Ben had all been unbearably right.

“Go to therapy, I guess,” I said. “And fill my prescription. And then just, like, function as a human being?”

She laughed. “I meant about classes. This all started because you wanted an extension from Glitch. Are you gonna ask them for one? You have a case study due next week.”

“Yeah, but it’s done.”

“Seriously?”

I nodded, not looking at her. “And the one after that. And everything else for the rest of the semester.”

“After all that,” she said. “Well, I guess you had to be doing something while we weren’t hanging out.”

I shifted uncomfortably. She wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t that I was actively avoiding Sydney. I wasn’t actively avoiding anyone.

Except my dad.

And Kimberlee, I guess, by association.

And Anne-Marie a little, though not completely. Just when I couldn’t handle her particular brand of chaotic energy, which had been a lot the past few days.

But no one else. It wasn’t like I was avoiding JP. You can’t avoid someone who isn’t trying to reach you.

But I was inactively avoiding people. Inadvertent avoidance, as it were. Because as it turned out, a great way to distract myself from everything going on was to simply do my homework.

And then every single time my phone went off and I couldn’t stop reliving the things my dad said to me, to do more of it.

And whenever I started thinking thoughts I didn’t want to think, when I started remembering blue eyes and a smirk that turned to a smile showing off a crooked tooth on the left side of his mouth and how fucking angry I was that he’d gone and done the one thing I’d asked him not to—

Well, you get the picture.

Homework was the answer. Homework, and rewatching documentaries when I was done with my homework, and sleep. I hadn’t even been listening to the Why Am I Like This podcast. And this beer with Sydney was the first time I’d gone out in nearly two weeks.

The server saved the awkwardness of the conversation by walking up to our table at that moment to ask if we wanted a refill.

“Yeah, absolutely,” I said.

“Not for me,” Sydney said.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, never mind then.”

Sydney shrugged apologetically as the server walked away to get our bills. “I have to get home soon.”

I looked at her, feigning offense that wasn’t entirely fake. “But it’s Friday night!”

“I have to be up early tomorrow,” she said.

“For what ?” I asked.

Her eyes didn’t quite meet mine and her face was turning pink at a steady pace. “I, uh… I’m going away for the weekend. With Reid.”

I almost spilled my beer. I didn’t, because the glass was empty and I didn’t actually knock it over, but if I’d had some left, I might’ve purposely tried to spill it to express how absolutely shaken I was by that statement.

“What?!” I said instead. “Where? And like… together?”

“Oh God, of course not,” she said, though the way her eyebrows pinched together betrayed something painful. “Not together-together. We, um…” She swallowed, then twisted her glass on the coaster. “We’re goingtomontrealtotellolivierswife. ”

The words spilled out the way my imaginary beer had, pooling between us as I processed what she’d said.

She still hadn’t told either Olivier or his wife what she knew. I didn’t fully understand why she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Like yeah, it was scary, and yeah, it shouldn’t have been her problem to deal with, but it was painful watching her stuck in a place between decisions, not willing to end things without saying why but not willing to reveal what she knew.

But I was the absolute last person who should judge her for something like that. And I’d told her I would support whatever she did, but…

“Without me?” I asked, trying not to sound hurt even though I was definitely fucking hurt.

Her face twisted regretfully. “I didn’t think you’d want to go to Montreal. And you’ve got so much other stuff going on that I—”

“I still want to be there for you, Syd,” I said. “You’re my best friend.”

“I know. But I didn’t want to add more to your plate. You’ve got a lot to handle right now.”

She didn’t say it condescendingly, but that didn’t change the fact that it felt that way.

“You could’ve let me make that decision for myself,” I said. “Or at least told me you were going instead of hiding it from me.”

She looked down at the table as she fidgeted with her glass again. “I’ve been worried about you.”

“Worried about what?” I asked, rolling my eyes. “I’m fine. I’m completely fine.”

“Are you?” she asked. “Because—”

“I am fine , Syd,” I said.

She twisted her mouth to the side but thankfully dropped it. “Does it help if I say I didn’t decide to go until yesterday and I wasn’t sure if you wanted that on your mind during your assessment?”

“A little,” I muttered.

“Well, that’s what happened.” She sighed and leaned against the back of the booth. “Olivier’s been suspicious for a while. It’s been two months since I’ve seen him and, like, over a month since we’ve really talked. I keep telling him I’m busy with school but he got annoyed when he said he’d come out to visit for a weekend and I turned it down. But I hadn’t figured out how to tell Clara yet. Or what I was going to do. I didn’t want him to be here.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Well, Reid pointed out the fact that Olivier doesn’t know that I know he’s married,” she continued. “So if I happened to run into him and Clara unexpectedly…”

I saw where she was going with it. “How would you do that?”

She pressed her lips together, not quite smiling. “Well, see, here’s the thing. He’s getting an award.”

“For Montreal’s Biggest Scumbag?”

“Close. For being a good cop or something like that. As a result of—get this—Clinton’s arrest.”

A laugh burst out of me. “Clinton’s arrest? The one where his wife did all the work?”

“Mm-hmm, yep.” The not-quite-a-smile widened into an actual one. “Of course he didn’t tell me about it, but I checked Clara’s socials and she made a post about it. So I bought a ticket to go down and ‘surprise him’ at the event.”

I couldn’t help but grin. “That’s devious.”

“Reid suggested I ask you to come with me, actually. He was going to come either way because he said he wants to make sure someone’s looking out for us, which I told him was kind of sexist but also, he’s bigger than Olivier and could probably kick his ass if things went badly. So I wasn’t going to say no.”

We got our bills and paid them, then walked home. It wasn’t until we were at our building that Sydney mentioned it again.

“If you do want to come, Nell, you know I’d love to have you there,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I have… you know. Homework and stuff.”

She nodded, though there was something remorseful on her face. “If you change your mind, you know where to find me. I can kick Olivier’s ass to the curb and then we can go out clubbing. With Anne-Marie, maybe.”

I appreciated the offer, but turned it down. Partly because she made a point of telling me Reid had gotten his own hotel room because roommates or not, sharing a room felt weird. Which meant the hotel would probably end up with only one room, so maybe she and Reid would finally get their heads out of their asses and hook up.

But I said no mainly because Syd was right.

I didn’t have any desire to go to Montreal.