The Crazy School Read Online Free

until she had to look down at the Kleenex instead of me.
    Blinky bitch.
    “Let’s let Tim have the focus,” I said. “He’s hurting.”
    Mindy got pinker. “How can you even say something like that without any emotion at all ? Like you’re all . . . like you don’t even have anything inside except, like, words. ”
    Sookie and Tim’s attention snapped back and forth between us like it was Wimbledon or something.
    “It’s cultural,” I said.
    “She’s all, so, like”—Mindy fl apped her free hand, trying to get the other two on board—“cold.”
    I sighed. “It’s an illusion.”
    “It’s disgusting, ” Mindy said, blinking at Sookie and Tim in turn. “Madeline’s, like, this gross disgusting robot.”
    And you’re like this repulsive inarticulate piece-of-shit tawdry butt-head, so neener neener fucking neener.
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    Sookie turned toward me. “Madeline, how does it make you feel when Mindy says that?” she crooned.
    “Um . . .” I looked at the window again.
    “Now, be honest, ” she said.
    “Well, okay.” I dropped my eyes. “I guess Mindy’s saying that I’m ‘a gross disgusting robot’ makes me feel as though she only cares about Tim as a prop on which to, like, lavish utterly insincere gestures of affection, so as to mask her apparently crushing sense of generalized inferiority with a temporary veneer of ersatz empathy and concern?”
    Silence.
    “And that, ” I said, leaning over to squeeze Tim’s knee, “that just makes me feel really, really sad for her, you know? Because Tim deserves to be heard .”
    “You are so . . . She is such a . . .” Mindy would have been blowing out fl ecks of spit if her jaw weren’t still frozen shut.
    Sookie turned to Tim. “Would you be all right if I followed up on this with Madeline for a little bit now?”
    He mumbled assent.
    “So, Madeline,” said Sookie, “how are you?”
    “Sookie, I’m terrifi ed.”
    Then my eyes got all leaky and my nose started running, but that bitch Mindy didn’t offer me a single Kleenex.
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    “Terrifi ed?” Sookie leaned forward and rested her hand on my knee. “Tell us about that. What are you scared of ?”
    “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing here. I just want—” My throat closed up.
    Maintaining immaculate eye contact, Sookie started to nod, her head rising and falling so slowly that I fl ashed on those prehistoric-bird-looking oil derricks you see along desert high-ways, bobbing for sips of crude.
    “This isn’t about ‘supposed to’, Madeline,” she said. “Therapy is time for you. No judgment, no standard you have to meet . . . not in this room. Not with me. Ever.”
    Not exactly true. Ever.
    But, okay, I smiled at her. “I appreciate that very much, Sookie. I do. Except I’m not talking about feeling terrifi ed in this room, or with you.”
    “Mmm-hmmmm,” she prompted.
    “I’m talking about, you know, working here. At Santangelo.”
    “You’re terrifi ed of working here ?”
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    “Not, like, in a personal-safety sense. I mean whether I’m doing a good enough job. With the kids.”
    “Tell me what you’re feeling about that, ” she said.
    “I don’t know if I’m helping them. I might be making it worse. I mean, the meds that get handed out at lunch. Lithium?
    Haldol? We are not talking about ‘the worried well’, here.”
    “And that makes you feel scared?”
    “The fact that my students are in crisis matters to me. I take that very seriously. I want to do right by them to the best of my ability.”
    Again with the nodding.
    I wondered if it was something they taught in shrink school. Intro to Nodding 101. Advanced seminars on The Nod Through History: Freud, Jung, Adler, and Nodding and Nuance, a Feminist Perspective.
    Then Sookie gave me the Empathy Smile. Sweetly enigmatic, with a touch of sadness