She got into bed and picked up her book. What, she thought as she found the page where she’d left off, was she going to do today? It was nice to have her father out of her hair, but suddenly she saw herself sitting in the same room, in the same bed, reading the same book (or slight variations on it) day after day, week after week, until her mother came and returned her to civilization.

“Fuck!” she said, slamming the book closed.

She couldn’t live with him. She just couldn’t do it. How was she supposed to deal with someone who didn’t even get angry? It’s like he’s goddamn Gandhi or something, she thought. He hadn’t questioned her about Nick’s shirt. He’d said nothing about her obvious dis of last night, hadn’t even seemed to expect an apology. What was she supposed to do with someone like that?

Part of her argued that she should be thrilled to be living with a father who, apparently, didn’t care what she did. She could stay out whenever she wanted to. She could get high. She could lie around all day. I could fuck any guy I want to, she added. He probably wouldn’t care if I did it right there in his bed.

The problem, she saw, wasn’t that her father didn’t care what she did, it was that his disinterest took all the fun out of doing any of it. A number of sessions with her mother’s therapist—plus thousands of hours of watching The O.C. and VH1’s Behind the Music—had helped her realize that she frequently did what she did not because she really enjoyed it (although it did provide a temporary thrill that was undeniable) but because she liked getting a rise out of people. As she’d remarked to Sam and Bree following one of her meetings with the therapist, “It was way more fun to be a problem child before therapy and antidepressants.”

Clearly, she hadn’t abandoned the whole bad girl thing entirely, and she didn’t intend to. Even though she knew it was a temporary diversion from figuring out who she wanted to be when she grew up, she enjoyed herself, at least usually. Bree called it psychological masturbation. And the way she felt when she shocked or angered people really wasn’t all that different from the way she felt when she came. It took her out of her body for a while, made her feel in control.