In our second session, Gwen brought us into the room together, and we sat in comfortable chairs arranged in a circle. I looked at Gwen and at my mother, and I knew this wouldn’t work. Gwen’s dangling earrings and sky-blue eyeshadow, her gold ankle bracelet against her tan leg. My mom’s clear, pale skin, her hair pulled back in a bun, her lack of frivolity. She’d never worn makeup and hardly ever spent a penny on herself. Gwen wanted her to talk about Dad, how things were before they split up, things that had happened. One of us had said something. Was it just me? I felt pain in my chest. Mom wasn’t going to budge; her face was set. She wouldn’t say anything bad about Dad. She didn’t tell things. There was a poster on the wall of Holly Hobbie, in her rag dress and her ridiculous gigantic bonnet, smelling a flower. We couldn’t see her face. We looked at the walls, at the green industrial carpet on the floor, at the tweed weave of the chairs we were sitting on, anywhere but at each other. My mom’s loyalty to my father hurt me. I had betrayed her over and over, most recently to Gwen, a stranger, who was writing her notes on the clipboard with a pencil that had troll hair sticking out at the end, with googly eyes glued on. Marie’s eyebrows rose as she watched her write. Gwen wasn’t going to get anywhere with us.

Afterward my mother decided that counseling was useless, that she couldn’t bear Gwen’s sweet, patronizing voice. “We just need time,” she said. We never went back.

Now Marie took out white powder and started blotting it across her cheeks and forehead. I watched her for a minute. Our features were different. At school, people didn’t believe we were sisters. Marie, like Ellen, was small-boned, her face petite. Mine was wider and flatter. While Marie was alert and pretty, Sage said I was more “ethereal,” as if I was always preoccupied. My eyes were a lighter blue than Marie’s, more like my mother’s than any of my siblings, and while they all had light-brown or blond hair, my hair, eyebrows, and lashes were all dark. Hippie hair, Marie called it. It just fell straight down either side of my face, all the way to my waist. It was shapeless compared to her punk cut or Sage’s layers, but I’d never really had any good ideas about how to get it cut. A lot of the girls in my class had gotten Dorothy Hamill haircuts, but I didn’t think that would suit me. I had a gap between my two front teeth, so I smiled with my mouth closed. Marie was applying purple lipstick now, so dark it was almost black.