Read Online Pasadena by Sherri L. Smith - Free Book Online

first-year Yeats at me instead of admitting you’re being petty? Tally’s talking about skipping the funeral because of you.”
    â€œOh?” I say, combing my fingers through my hair. “Who’s being petty now?”
    â€œStill you,” Joey says.
    â€œHey, ‘to thine own self be true.’”
    My phone rings. I swipe it open. “Hello?”
    â€œJude, it’s Dr. Bilanjian. How are you?”
    The voice is female, neutral, calm, and oh-so-familiar.It sends a jolt of adrenaline down my spine. “Dr. B,” I say. “Long time no chat.”
    â€œDo you have a minute to talk?”
    I look around at the traffic walling Joey’s car in on four sides, the crowded beach to our right, the haze pressing down on us from the water. “I’m afraid not. I’m in the middle of something. What’s up?”
    Dr. B pauses for a long moment, lining up the words like golf balls on a practice range. Once she starts swinging, there’ll be no need to stop. “Your mother called me. She told me she’s worried about you and wanted to know if we could have a few sessions. Would you like that, Jude?”
    Dr. Theresa Bilanjian is my psychiatrist. Not therapist, not counselor, my psych doctor. I am not on meds, nor am I in therapy anymore. But there was a time, right after we moved to Pasadena, when my mother thought a few months of talking to a professional would be a good idea. “To help you adjust,” she’d said.
    I’d gone to Dr. B for most of my freshman and sophomore years. By then, I’d made friends—namely Maggie—and I hadn’t slit my wrists, so I was allowed to have my Wednesday afternoons back.
    â€œWell, if you decide to,” she says, plowing through my silence, “I have some time Wednesday afternoon. Whydon’t you swing by the office? It sounds like we’ll have some things to talk about.”
    I hang there, mouth open, a thousand responses coming to mind, all of them negative.
    â€œOkay,” I say. The path of least resistance. If I refuse, my mother won’t leave me alone. Dr. B is less cloying than my mom. “See you then.”
    â€œWho was that?” Joey asks when I hang up.
    â€œNothing. Friend of my mother’s. Where were we?”
    â€œSitting in traffic, arguing,” he says. We sit in silence and crawl forward a few more yards. I shove the phone call to the back of my mind. Dr. B can wait.
    â€œWhere are we going, exactly?” Joey asks, changing the subject. Good boy. Even I can use a halftime every now and then.
    â€œLuke’s. He’s got something I need to see.” Photos, I’m hoping. Scads of them.
    But what would they tell me?
    Maggie Kim was the sun in our universe. We all circled her. Never the other way around. And now that she’s gone, we’re shifting orbits. Colliding, like me and Tally, or drifting apart. It makes me wonder what Maggie saw in everybody else, these people she called her friends. Edina, Tallulah, Dane. What were they to her when theymean so little to me? And who meant so much to Maggie that she would share her bed with him, but not his name with the rest of us?
    Or maybe he meant so little. And that’s why Maggie’s dead.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    By the time we get back to Pasadena, it’s nearly three o’clock, and later still by the time we get to Luke’s house. Luke lives south of my place, in Alhambra. Craftsman bungalows and stucco apartment buildings swap blocks with each other, leapfrogging toward the boundaries of crisscrossing freeways. Luke’s parents have money from a dry-cleaning chain they started when Luke was still in diapers. It keeps him in camera equipment and photography lessons. Soon it’ll pay for a college education and maybe a portrait studio of his own one day.
    The house is a stucco ranch affair, newer than the bungalows across the street.
    Luke’s father opens the