Annabel Lee ─ emily prentiss

twenty-six

THE fact that Bel basically needed to be babysat at 14 was embarrassing enough. She put a lot of brain power into not thinking about that when Kaira was around, trying to convince herself that Kaira was more like a friend there to keep her from accidentally burning the apartment building down, usually to no avail. Needing her babysitter to take her to therapy was a new level of humiliation. Her face burned as they sat next to each other in the waiting room.

"I really could have walked," she insisted quietly. "It's like ten minutes."

Kaira cracked open a poetry book for school. "It's what I'm here for. Besides, it's not like I've got anything else going on other than assigned reading and papers."

Logically, Bel knew it wasn't that deep. Kaira probably hadn't thought much about Bel seeing a psychologist (and was already well aware that Bel was fucked up). But Bel was still incredibly self-conscious about her issues. Her past was screwed up enough on its own. The addition of psychological issues just added insult to injury.

She was aware of the fact that she'd come out relatively okay considering what she'd been through. Her psychological response to what happened could have been way, way, way worse. She'd met other foster kids with similar experiences (minus the "kidnapped and tortured by a serial killer" thing) who developed much more extreme issues than her own. Resilience was the technical term for that, Val, her therapist, told her when she asked how people could experience very similar trauma to one another and end up with radically different degrees of psychological damage. A lot of factors went into it, like genetics and early environment. Bel was objectively pretty resilient, but she didn't feel that way when she got overly anxious walking alone or freaked out going shopping with Penelope, Emily, and JJ last week.

Val's office door opened, and a boy a little older than Bel stepped out.

"I'll see you in two weeks," Val told him, and he nodded before heading into the hallway. She turned to Bel and gestured for her to come in. "Hey. Come on in."

Bel stood up slowly and shuffled into the office. She lowered herself onto the couch across from Val's chair, still hesitant despite the fact that she'd been doing this for weeks now. Val fell back into her own chair and crossed her legs.

"So how's it going?" Val asked. Bel shrugged.

"Eh."

"That good, huh?" Val laughed. "How are you doing at school?"

"Pretty okay. I got a ninety-eight on my history test. Highest grade in the class." Bel smirked. "When I showed her, Emily taped it to the fridge."

Any time she opened the fridge and saw her 98 displayed on its metal surface, she couldn't suppress a little smile. Part of it was satisfaction about sticking it to the teacher who doubted her, but most of it was because it felt good to know that Emily was proud of her. Nobody had cared enough to be proud of her achievements in God knew how long. To not only have made someone proud but to have made someone she loved so deeply proud made Bel euphoric.

"Nice job!" Val beamed, only enhancing the warm sensation of euphoria in Bel's stomach. "What about friends?"

"I've been sitting with the group at lunch every day," Bel said. "I went over to one of their houses again. Freyja lent me another CD, Meteora. I've also been invited to a sixteenth birthday party. I haven't asked Emily."

Bel had been pulled into a friend group of five people. She was basically adopted by Freyja, a sophomore in her home ec class, when she didn't have a partner for a worksheet on nutrition during their cooking unit. Freyja soon invited Bel to sit with her friends at lunch. Bel had grown relatively close to all of them and had been to a couple of their houses, although Freyja was still her closest friend. Isla, another sophomore in the group, was hosting what she called a "lazy sweet sixteen." Instead of a big, fancy party at an overpriced venue—another sophomore recently had a sweet 16 rumored to have cost in the thousands—she was putting up some cheap Party City decor and having a small party in her parents' very large finished basement.