“Are you sure you won’t fuck me?” I whispered.

“Fucking is escape,” he said.

“Can’t I escape?”

“Do you want to?” he said. “Or are you curious?”

It was a test. I would be curious.

“One must seek to learn something from everything,” Freud said.

I paused for a long time, waiting for the pulsation in my crotch to subside. I squeezed tight the muscles there, willing the sensation away. I allowed my mind to float back to the scene, the velvet seats, Werther’s despair and mine…

“What else do you remember?” Freud prodded.

“I remember the intermission,” I said.

When the lights came up, I’d peered into the orchestra down below. It was dark, but I could still make out the tiny heads. A kid reached up and patted his dad on the top of his head; the father grasped the kid’s forearm and I winced. But he brought the little hand to his mouth and kissed its palm, then blew raspberries into it, making his son laugh. I felt a hand on my forearm and saw that my mother, stretching across my father’s lap, was handing me a butterscotch candy. She pointed at her cheeks, hollowed out with sucking, and raised her eyebrows: she knew they were my favorite. Maybe she was apologizing for her tone earlier, with the Lyles, I reasoned, or maybe she was rewarding me for my compliance. Or maybe she just loved me the most, my mom. I took it from her elegant fingers and unwrapped it.

“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.