“Shh,” she said.

“Sorry,” I whispered. My cheeks burned. I slouched into the seat and sucked hard on the butterscotch. My dress itched my thighs, and I pulled my knees into my chest. I crunched on the butterscotch and it broke in two, and I pressed the jagged pieces with my tongue into the roof of my mouth, then listened as my parents talked with the Lyles. Patrice, like both of my parents, was a therapist, I told Freud, and when they were together they talked about work.

“Your parents are therapists?”

“Yes,” I said. That was where the rubber band idea had come from: it was one of their techniques. They worked out of the apartment next door, I told him. I would sit alone, doing my homework in our apartment after school, imagining all sorts of things going on just beyond the wall. I hated their clients; I wanted to know everything about them. So when they spoke about their patients in front of me, I tried to disappear.

Leroy had sat between his parents, and as his mother spoke, he leaned back into his father, who draped his arm around Leroy and patted his stomach. He sucked his thumb, something he seemed much too old for. Then he leaned forward, away from the pillow of his father’s body, and looked at me.

“Psst,” he said.

I gave a brisk shake of my head, trying to keep listening to my parents.

“Opera is so boring,” he whispered. “Right?”

I looked away from him, out into the orchestra. In the aisle, a tall woman stood in a long velvet dress, her sharp shoulders jutting out from the straps. Her companion was much shorter than she, a stubby and balding man, but they fit together, her effervescence shining onto him and his plainness grounding her.

“Right?” Leroy said again. “Isn’t it boring?”

I ignored him. I didn’t think the opera was boring at all. I thought it was devastating.

“Devastating,” Freud echoed.

“Yes.”

“How so?”

“Werther loved her!” I said, my voice catching unexpectedly. “He loved her and he couldn’t have her…” Saying the words, I felt my chest go tight, the same feeling I’d had the day before, on the back patio, the feeling that had made me desperate for the man with the cigarette. I needed to fuck someone now, I needed it, if I didn’t I might die, I might explode—

“What are you thinking?” Freud said, but I could only shake my head beneath his palms.

Many minutes of silence.

Finally Freud spoke again. “He couldn’t have her, just as you couldn’t have your father.”

“That’s disgusting,” I said quickly. Do you mean I can’t have you? Werther’s odes of horrible sorrow played again in my mind. Charlotte’s voice was high and screeching, it drilled into the top of my skull; but Werther’s slid straight down my throat and through my chest and into my stomach, where it made a red-hot home. He was in agony. Again and again, from my perch above the orchestra, I imagined running toward him on the stage, threading my arms under his long black coat; he would wrap it around the back of my head, press me to him, press his hard stomach back into me. He would hide me, swallow me, no one would even know I was there. Pricks of pain burned along my thighs; I was digging my nails into the skin.