When Flint came back from winter break, I was sitting in the lounge. He had an oversized suitcase in each hand and he was hitting every couch, wall or garbage can that was in his way. He was too wide to do otherwise. I laughed at the sight. It was so Flint of him to do, not care what happened to him or why as long as he get things done the way he wanted to. Taking one suitcase at a time had probably never crossed his mind. I would have thought about everyone I was disturbing with the noise and the fact that it looked like a tornado had just moved through. In reality, that is what Flint was, a tornado. Watching him carve a path to his room, I had the sudden desire to be pulled into his twister. I jumped in front of his path.

I threw my arms around him, my Hail Mary pass. “Can we be friends again?”

He didn’t take his hands off the suitcases, so I let go of his neck, seized with the fear that he was going to say no.

“Are you still in EMS?” he said.

“But I’m trying to get things under control.”

“I really wish you would stop doing it. It’s really hard for me to watch you destroy yourself.”

Flint continued to his room, knocking over an end table and lamp that I ran to catch before he noticed. I thought about running after him, begging him to accept my apologies and let me start over. When he had run past me, he had broken my ability to be without him. I sat back down on the couch and let myself be consumed by daydreams.

The new semester didn’t start off well. I was immediately scheduled for a ton of duty, which took up any time that I wasn’t in my morning classes. Ruby and Akul had started spending all their time in our dorm room fighting about anything their minds could get their hands on. The University had decided that I needed to see a counselor who asked a lot of uncomfortable questions over her horn-rimmed glasses. Who even wears horn-rimmed glasses anymore? And Sandy, the Queen of making my life hell, was pushing through the executive board a series of rules that would prevent anyone from being in a relationship with someone else in EMS. If she had understood that John was my lifeboat and that I was floating through a tropical storm, maybe she would have lightened up on the forward attack.

My first session with the psychologist slash counselor didn’t go so well. She asked me a ton of questions about how I was feeling and who my safety net was and what I wanted to talk about. And I felt like I couldn’t give her a straight answer. I couldn’t tell if she was on my side or not and I had become so used to hiding my inner life from anyone outside of the walls of the skin. It didn’t make sense that someone who was appointed by the University who had caused some of my unhappiness would be in charge of making everything okay again.

“Is there anything I should know?” She twisted the cord holding her glasses on her face.

“I’m really trying,” I said. Trying to do what, I didn’t say. I don’t think I knew at that point. I was hitting fastballs with a wild bat, hoping they wouldn’t boomerang back and hit me in the face. I was trying though.

She smiled with her lips closed. “Thanks for coming in today. I’ll let you know when our next session will be.”

And that was the end of that. I started going to see her once every week or so, depending on how busy she was. She seemed frazzled, all the time. She worked with a few other counselors and they always had someone walking into their offices. I would sit in the waiting room and wonder why they had ended up here. I would think hard about whether it had been something minor, whether they had brought themselves there, or whether they were just like me and everything was tumbling down around their ears. One girl, a waif with thin blonde hair had walked out of one of the counselor’s room’s when I was in the waiting room once. Her eyes were swollen and she was clenching and unclenching her fists as she walked. I recognized her feeling, terrified and helpless. I had wanted to reach out to her, hug her and let it heal us both. But I had been scared that I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. So I kept my hands in my own zone, and let her walk by, alone.

John had tried to visit me when I was at one of these sessions. When he asked me where I had been, I had made the mistake of telling him that I had been in my dorm room.

“Ruby let me in,” he said. “You weren’t there.”

“I don’t know what time you were talking about then,” I said, shoveling ignorance over my lie.

He brushed it off with a flick of his wrist. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I can’t help if I don’t know what it is.”

“It’s nothing,” I said.

“If it was nothing, you would tell me. And maybe that’s the problem.”

I thought about what he had said the whole night. Was it a problem? Should I be sharing what was going on with me with everyone else? Why was I even doing damage control the wrong way? If I told him what was happening, it would all be real. And I couldn’t fix it if it was too real. I needed to maintain a distance of denial, in case I couldn’t fix it and it all went horribly wrong.