Dedicated to Sophia.
DISCLAIMER: This is mostly John Neufield's dialogue and James E. Reily's characters, I'm just put the two together for everyone's enjoyment.
"Just make yourself comfortable and keep talking," Simone said to Kay. "Say anything that comes to your head."
But saying that to Kay Bennett was like asking the ocean, as a favor, to turn cold in February.
For Kay couldn't help saying anything that came into her head. On her good days, Kay was as bright and natural as her friends; on her dark days, she was depressed, withdrawn and deep in conversation with her "English voices."
Kay Bennett, sixteen, was losing her mind.
Simone Russell, the first of Kay's friends to realize Kay's dangerous state of mind, is also the first to understand that Kay's only hope of help must come from her friends. Simone persuades Theresa Fitzgerald and Charity Standish that "group therapy" is the answer--providing Kay with a way of letting off some of the terrific inward pressure, postponing the inevitable explosion.
But Kay doesn't make their work easy. She's alternately sensible and violent, open and decietful, clear-headed and confused.
Kay's story is as current as the last time you looked at your wrist watch. Kay and her friends are completely real, caring about real things: civil rights, sex, Freddy Prinz, Jr., riots, diet Jello, Ricky Martin and their futures.
Funny as young people are, concerned in the same way, determined but a little at sea, Kay's "doctors" set out on a path of aid and comfort that will cause readers to reflect seiously, smile in recognition and sympathize totally with Kay and her illness.