“Stop pushing me!” I said, too loudly, shocking myself. My throat had gone tight, my mind cloudy.

Freud didn’t respond.

I had the urge to grab his wrist, dig my nails into his arm—Jojo, her scared, fierce face—my eyes grew hot and wet and I reached up toward Freud’s hands but I didn’t grab him, I didn’t claw him, I laced my fingers between his and lifted his hands off my scalp and just held them, held his hands.

“You need to let go,” he said, and gently released my hands, then placed his palms on my forehead once more.

“Hold me,” I whimpered.

“You want me to take away your discomfort.”

“Yes!” I said.

“But discomfort is where we begin.”

Long minutes of silence.

“Are you still there?” I asked.

“I’m here.”

“Do you want me to keep telling you the story?”

“Why do you think you asked me that question?”

“Because I want you to beg me,” I said.

“You want me to care.”

“Yes.”

“I care.”

In the auditorium, I told him, I was seated next to my father, with my mother on his other side. Seats stretched around us in a sweep of red velvet. We were in the front row of the balcony; people sat in boxes below us and in long curves along the sides of the room. They looked cozy, ensconced in their pods, waiting for the show to begin. Usually, when the three of us sat together, my mother positioned herself between us, but because we’d come with the Lyles, my mother now sat next to Patrice. I was jittery at the opportunity to sit near my dad for the hours of the production. I shifted my body closer to his, not quite brushing his arm. His body was angled just slightly toward my mother’s. He parted his hair on the left; I could see the bare skin between the sections of dark brown. It had a sheen to it, as if he had scrubbed in between the two sections of hair with a scratchy sponge. It was the straight-est part I’d ever seen, the hair branching out from it like Moses’s sea. I longed to touch it, that bright line, to feel the tidy hair grazing the tip of my finger from both sides.

My mother whispered something to him. I watched as his left eye crinkled at the corner. I remembered the crinkle with such precision, and the sharp tug it elicited inside me—I wanted desperately to know what they had said. But I didn’t interrupt. I looked down: my hands sat barren, holding each other. My mother had made me wear a blue dress with a waist that pinched. It felt too young for me, and my hands, surrounded by the blueness pouting from my lap, looked ridiculous. My mother laughed, an ethereal sound.

I peered over the railing into the orchestra, speckled with gray and brown and black and blond and also shiny heads, gaps of plush red where people hadn’t shown up. The room felt too big to me, an abyss that would dissolve me if I let it, like salt in hot water. I could have sat in one of those seats, next to another girl, alone with her parents, too. She would love grapes as much as I did, would love peeling off the skin in thin filaments, finally biting off each end and sucking out the middle to make a tiny, squishy doughnut. We would each squint an eye and look at each other through our empty grapes, and we would giggle so high and hard the opera would tell us to be quiet.