Like a game of chess, I predict your move
I think I know you better, better than you do
I'm sick of feeling cheap, cheated and abused
Sick of losing sleep, thinking about you.

- The Downtown Fiction

Fall Semester, Week Three

"Can I be honest?" Clove asks, barely able to hear herself as she tugs at the sleeves of her turquoise top with unease.

"I'd most certainly prefer it."

It's eleven am on a Monday.

"I've never done anything like this before. Talked to a shrink, I mean. It's making me a little seasick."

Normally she'd be tagging along with Enobaria and scouring the city for wrong-doers.

She's had this appointment set for three weeks. It was a bitch to get. Only the looniest of the loony toons she goes to school with would make advanced reservations to see the school counselor anticipating the stress of their return to campus. As if a school counselor can fix someone with a 19 credit course load in Chemical Engineering. She's a shrink, not a voodoo shaman.

"I'm not a shrink, Clove. I'm a counselor, and rest assured that it's normal for students to look for someone they can have a healthy discourse with."

The 'not shrink,' Euphemia (so says the masters in counseling diploma dangling on the back wall), is a fair-haired woman draped in an eccentric fuchsia dress who Clove would peg as likelier to be engaged in fashion design than psychology.

"Have the past two weeks been stressful for you?"

Clove snatches up a Hershey's kiss from the shrink's bowl. "Every week is stressful for me."

"And what helps you manage?"

"Reciting three hail marys and praying that I'll reincarnate as a hotel heiress."

"Right," the counselor smiles slightly. "Well, you scheduled this appointment to talk about relationship boundaries. That's quite an interesting topic for someone your age. Most students aren't so self-aware at such a young age."

Clove leans back, muttering, "Hard not to be when it's this obvious."

"Why don't we start at the beginning, then?"

"Sure," Clove agrees haphazardly. "Um, alright. Well, I'm from Lovingston. Bout' five years back my sister had to pair up for an assignment and she got assigned to the new guy from Kentucky - Gale Hawthorne."

Clove tucks a loose strand of hair back, grazing her knee with the palm of her hand.

"Clove?"

It strikes her that there is a bathroom down the hall. She could leave the room under that very pretense, to never return. She owes no one no explanations.

But it isn't fair. This story has been disseminated a handful of times, and never by her hand.

She steadies herself, and moves forward. "So, he became a pretty regular guest in household over those few weeks. Right before October, he and Annie were finishing up when the computer short-circuited and deleted most of their revisions. My sister had a panic attack, and instead of freaking out like a normal person would, Gale actually managed to calm her down. Then he made her dinner, and started telling her a bunch of embarrassing stories about himself to make her feel better. He was different, you know? Annie used to say Gale was a real southern gentleman."

Euphemia (or Effie, as her business card states) watches Clove for a minute, "Well, he certainly did well in that situation. He sounds... resourceful."

Clove looks up towards Effie, her hair falling behind her as she sits on her palms. "Do you listen to Taylor Swift?"

"I imagine everyone has at some point."

"She has a song, Fifteen, and every time I hear it, I think about how much I needed that song when I was fifteen. Gale was older, and sure, Annie wasn't at the top of the food chain, but even she had a better chance with him than I did."

Effie seems to consider interrupting, but ultimately doesn't. She does scribble more notes. Clove doesn't even want to know.

"A couple weeks later he found me smoking outside of Rapunzel's - this old book store where they used to host open mic nights. Gale said I reminded him of home, everyone smoked in Kentucky. It wasn't exactly a Pulitzer-winning opening line, but hey, it got the ball rolling on our fairy tale romance," Clove scoffs bitterly.

Effie watches Clove take tissue and form it into the shape of a ribbon as she continues, dryly adding, "Then he started to ask how I could possibly ruin the wondrous trees around me by smoking. This was literally the first thing he noticed. Not the ridiculous pixie pigtails, not the three hundred neon bracelets around my wrist, or the fact that I was wearing enough eyeliner to fool a raccoon. Jungle boy wanted to know why I smoked cigarettes."

Hitching one leg over the other, Effie points out, "Different strokes for different folks."

"I looked like a three year outlined my eyes in sharpie six times," Clove breathes, disturbed.

She places the tissue ribbon beside her.

"We ended up running circles around each other for a few weeks. I wanted him, and he wanted... Annie. Look, I love my sister, but back in high school, no one wanted Annie. She's basically Ophelia - crazy, exotic, overly dramatic, with a penchant for theatrics."

There's a beat, before she adds. "It's not all her fault, you know? She has anxiety disorder, but that's a different problem for a different shrink for a different year."

Effie's lips quirk upwards and she smooths her dress flat, agreeing primly. "Yes, one issue at time for now."

"Back to Gale. He was hot. Did I mention Gale is hot? Gale's hot, and he was smart enough to know that. He developed a reputation around school ridiculously fast for someone new. If you were lucky enough, though, you'd catch a sliver here and there of who he really was - brave, kind, intense in the best way possible."

Effie speaks softly, slowly, as if to make a point. "It's perfectly normal for teenagers to idealize their partners, but no one is perfect."

Clove exhales. "It was like hero worship." Her head falls as she brings a knee to her chest. "I was willing to do anything. My best friend, Dicey, he, we, I-" Clove flails her hands dramatically, gesturing in open air.

"I had sex with my best friend in order to convince myself I wasn't just an inexperienced little girl. Like that's how maturity works." Clove adds as an aside, "Like right now I'm working with the world's biggest manwhore on a group project, and he's on par intellectually with Snooki."

"He must be reasonably intelligent. UVA isn't your neighborhood community college."

Clove stuffs two more Hershey's Kisses into her mouth. Her face contorts in displeasure.

"He is also another problem for another shrink for another year."

"So, it's Halloween - Dicey and I had spent most of the afternoon watching movies, getting busy, then watching classic cults under the blankets. Eventually, we ended up at Thom Ender's party, and it was weird, really eclectic. Dicey found some kid with a pipe and suddenly we're all jazzed up - God, I'm lucky whatever we smoked wasn't laced with heroin, because it could have been anything and I would have been too dumb to say no. "

By this point, Clove is running her fingers through the holes in her jeans, and groaning to herself. "So here's where it gets really messed up. Gale is friends with Thom, the indie kid, and so of course he's at the party, but unlike me and Dicey, he's actually dressed up - as a lumberjack, of course - and stone-cold sober."

Effie notices a tonal shift in Clove, preempting her to prepare another box of tissue. "Here," she murmurs softly.

Clove accepts the box. "He was rugged, loose. You could just breath the sexual tension, and then he asked me if Annie was around. I set myself on a warpath, I wanted everything Annie obliterated, so I put on this sweet little mask and asked him to speak with me privately in one of the rooms. So, he took me to Thom's sister's room, and asked if everything is okay with Annie, and-"

Clove breaks, crushing the tissue box in her right hand, and covers her mouth. "I'm sorry," she sniffles, "I'm not normally a crier."

"Something tells me this was a long time coming," Effie says reassuringly, "But if you're not ready-"

"No-" she cuts in. "I made up a story about Annie and an imaginary boyfriend. And he didn't get angry, didn't really do anything, just looked really put-out. I wasn't in class with them so I didn't know what Annie did, if she'd given him any hope, or was totally oblivious, but I begged him to stay and tell me everything about Kentucky, the environment, anything."

Clove looks up, contemplative, and quiet. "He stayed and we just talked - talked, and talked until there wasn't anything left to say. And at the end of the night, he pushed back my hair and gave me a kiss on the cheek, said I'm kinder than I let on, and got up to leave, and then I just - I didn't want any games anymore. I just wanted him. So, I went for it. It was like we were characters from an indie movie, and every beat was on tempo with the music that night.

But in the morning, I felt more like we were trapped in an angry classical number. I came down from my high so fast. I was naked in a stranger's bed with some guy I didn't really know. Gale was two and a half years older than me, practically an adult. I knew Dicey inside and out, from the bottom of our hearts to the top of our heads, but half the things I knew about Gale were things I told myself that probably weren't even real."

"It's a common plight," Effie replies, penning more details. At Clove's wary stare, she offers, "What was next for the two of you?"

"I expected it to be awkward, to be a one-time thing, but it happened again, and again, but we didn't date, we weren't really friends, and Annie's therapist figured out before she did that Gale has the hots for her, so what does he do? Gives her a self-esteem exercise to see if Gale would like to go a movie with her sometime - supposedly just to help Annie make more friends - but of course Gale was such a slut that he took it entirely the wrong way and asked about her boyfriend - the one that didn't exist."

"Did the two of you talk about it?"

"Talking is not what I would have called it," Clove says grimly. "Gale found me outside of Rapunzel's - same place we met - and started screaming at me, asking if 'I'd had fun fucking with his head.'"

"And how did you respond to that?"

Clove clenches her teeth, "I cussed him out, which led to him to being a real fucking prize. He looked down on me and said that there was a reason why he liked Annie and not me, because she was nice. And then I started crying and vomited on his shoes."

"Not your day," Effie muses.

"Oh, it gets better. I almost passed out on the sidewalk and he ended up dragging me to Arrington to go to the hospital. He actually carried me into the emergency room like a baby - it was the most embarrassing moment of my life."

"A bit drastic, no?"

"And the nice thing about Gale is that usually he isn't."

Effie clicks her pen, pointing it directly at Clove. "Yes, well, panic can make people do crazy things."

"That could have been the end of it. I could have been just another bad story for Gale to tell his drinking buddies one day, but Mercury was in retrograde and I had a lifetime of bad karma, so when Doctor Hibbert came back and announced I was six weeks pregnant without asking me if I minded Gale knowing, I wasn't even surprised. Just blank."

This much, Euphemia Trinket knew.

"Children aren't a karmic punishment, Clove. They just are."

"Yeah, but tell that to a sociopathic fifteen year old who sees everything through a 'me, me, me' lense. Gale went on an incredibly obnoxious two-minute tirade about birth control. Like it didn't dawn on him that a fifteen-year-old girl with only one previous partner might not be on birth control.

I mean, Dicey and I had a bunch of condoms from the time we rode down to Virginia Beach for a concert and stopped into Planned Parenthood as joke, but I wasn't on any pills or patches or black magic."

Effie watches the clock patiently, "So how did you go from fifteen and pregnant to twenty and about to finish college? That is an impressive leap."

"I don't know," Clove says, biting into her fourth Hershey's Kiss. "Gale's given up a lot for us. That's why this is so hard, you know? Sage musta' been almost two by the time I got my acceptance letter, and I didn't really give him much of a choice - I told him he could come up with us to Charlottesville, or he'd have to visit on weekends. He turned Virginia Tech down for me when I was pregnant and I didn't even think of him when I'd applied a few years later."

"Give yourself some credit. He may have turned down school because it wasn't the right time."

"We come out to Charlottesville and ended up in family housing. It was the first time the two of us had actually lived together. I'd thought we'd become something, that having our own place with Sage would open us up to each other, but most of the time it was noisy neighbors," Clove counts on her fingers, "fighting over grocery bills, and Gale complaining about why he couldn't go to school too."

Effie watches her carefully, "Yes, not every teen pregnancy is an episode of the Secret Life of the American Teenager."

Clove groans. "Gale and I watch that show - we totally watch it every Monday to make fun of it. Which is sort of the point. Me and Gale are finally in a good place. We're friends now - we watch movies, and eat pizza, and play video games. If he'd been this cool in high school, maybe the two of us would have gone somewhere. Gale and I are friends - we work well as a team, but anything more than is just too stupid at this point, and it's confusing to Sage."

"Have you told him any of this?"

"Here's the thing, and I know it sounds absurd after everything I've done, but I don't want to hurt his feelings. He's a good person. He's a good dad, and how do you tell someone that's still not enough?"

"Life isn't about keeping score, Clove, and if he expects you to fall into his arms just because he's treating you nicely, then his behavior had the wrong motives to begin with. You have good reasons for wanting to preserve your friendship, and if moving in together can threaten that, then to what benefit will this decision be?"

Clove is taken by that though, when Effie hums. "Well, we've made it through our first session, and even though you may not think so, we've already accomplished a great ordeal. I want you think about what you want for daughter, Clove, what you hope to see. Let's discuss this the next time I see you, alright?"

Effie gets up, striding gracefully through the door, and allows Clove out. A smile finds the counselor at the familiar face awaiting her. "Ah, Cato. It's very nice to see you. Please come on in," she says warmly.

Cato and Clove lock uncomfortably into place, before their eyes meet, and Clove runs.

That is your Gale and Clove explanation and yes, it's going to add a very complicated dimension to Cato and Clove's future relationship. Cato wasn't in this chapter, and that's because he's been the primary focus of most of the last few chapters. He and Clove will be tagging along in chapter seven. See you soon :)

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