Chapter 1
Janine
It was funny, the first time I saw her. I saw her, and like I did with everyone back then, I decided I knew her. I thought I could see through that first glance of the features on her face, thought I could see who she was and what she felt and I thought I could see that those down curled lips, that freckled little nose, and those old, old, wise brown eyes were never meant to be happy. Never meant to smile, or to laugh. I thought her face was one resigned to terror and to pain and to sadness.
Of course, I thought a lot of things back then which I now would laugh at. I thought I was somebody special, somebody who could just see a person's whole being and know who and what they were from a simple glance. I thought I understood people's characters, and their actions, and the reasons behind those actions, and I thought I could do this with ease. That was strange, considering how different I was to them. It wouldn't have made sense for me to understand people so alien to me. But I wanted to, oh, how I wanted to, and perhaps for that reason I chose my job. I wanted to be closer to others, desperately wanted to believe that by understanding people and by helping them I might become nearer to them. I became a counsellor because I wanted to fit in.
Due to luck and genes I found the majority of my school life easy without needing to lift more than a finger, near to the end of it I managed to train myself to work a little harder and this small effort had me sailing through university and my doctorate in English Literature. My teachers saw me as a genius but also a great source of confusion. They couldn't understand me. I retained few friends from those years due to my incessant romanticisation of every person I was ever close to. I always grew far too attached, yet as the years went on I would grow less attached and suddenly I would hate the person I once saw as the sun in my life. These were, perhaps, the consequences of knowing a person too well. Nobody liked the way I wanted to see them as something they weren't – at the end of the day people are just people, and people are all they aspire to be. They wanted friendship, and friendship I could not give. I wasn't good with relationships.
Romantically, I was like a train wreck before the thing even sets off. I was bisexual and fell in love with the idea of far too many people; best girlfriends and odd-looking boys on public transport alike, and never enough with the person themself. Often I would find myself writing, inside my head, books about the people I loved. I would talk to them and laugh with them and live lifetimes with them in there, but it never amounted to anything real. That old rhyme – sweet sixteen and never been kissed? That applied to me, not just at sixteen but for a good few years after – not because I didn't want to have a relationship, or even because I was afraid; no – I just thought one would come to me. I thought all I had to do was wait.
So, back to this girl. She was sitting across the room from me in my office. It was my first office, I might add, in my first job at a state high school in north Massachusetts. She was my first 'real case' as they say, but I wasn't nervous. I was young, I was cocky and, though I mightn't have come across that way, I thought I was so, so ready for this. She walked into the room and I began the process of 'analysing' her. As if I could understand her from the freckles just below her bottom lip, as if I could somehow see her past and her burden and her pain through the strange brown pigment of her irises, know her torment and and her guilt from observing the couple of strands of dark hair escaping from behind her left ear. Jesus, I was full of it. But I wasn't ready for her. I wasn't ready for what she could do to me.