Her thumbs are raw from where she has been scratching at them with the forefingers of each hand, digging her nails in hard and dragging them across the skin over and over again. Her feet are hooked solidly around the legs of her chair and have fallen asleep, and her jaw is sore from clenching, but she will not release—not her feet, not her jaw, and she will not stop the scratching. She cannot; in this posture she feels anchored and as much in control as she can be; if she were to shift positions, she’s not sure what would happen.

In the chair across from her, Dr. Steingold holds one of her sketchbooks in his lap; she stares at it covetously as the doctor turns the pages slowly, examining each drawing individually and making comments that Isabelle can hardly hear over the roaring in her ears. Her mind has been racing ever since the doctor produced the sketchbook from his desk drawer, this precious, private, utterly familiar thing emerging from a place so entirely unexpected and wrong. No one looks at her sketchbooks. No one has ever looked at her sketchbooks, and to watch this doctor doing just that makes Isabelle hot, nauseous, dizzy, as if she had awakened to find that he had been watching her while she slept. In this setting, her drawings seem foreign to her. Each time he turns the page, Isabelle wants to cringe as yet another of her drawings becomes something other than what it had been, somehow violated by this doctor’s eyes. But she holds her face still; only her fingers move, up and down and rough against her skin in the only way she can think to contain her desperation.

She is not sure whether she is more angry at her mother for giving the sketchbook to the shrink, or at herself for having allowed it to be discovered. Her mother would never have found her hiding place—behind the cabinet in her bathroom—and if she had, Isabelle would have known, because she has set a bobby pin just on the crack between the cabinet and the wall, so that if the cabinet were moved forward, the bobby pin would fall, and it hasn’t, which means that Isabelle herself must have left the sketchbook out in the open, but where? How? When? How could she have been so careless as to leave such a private thing out in public? Had she left it in the car? Or maybe beside her bed one night after she’d drawn herself to sleep? Or in the kitchen, where it might have gotten mixed up with her homework, or the newspapers stacked there? She wishes she could remember; she wishes that she knew so that she could relive the scenario, pinpoint the exact moment of forgetfulness, and punish herself for it. She does not like to forget.