Shawn sends silly TikTok videos that actually made me smile. And then there’s Devonte.

He got the entire track team to send me a message saying they are praying for my mom. And he calls me every night. I tell him I won’t be great company, but he says he just wants to hear my voice.

He found a joke book that was like a hundred years old at a flea market and insists that out of the three hundred or so jokes, one of them has to be worthwhile. So right before we hang up for the night, he tells me one. They all suck. But what I love is the hope in his voice, right before he tells me the joke. He’s always so full of hope . . .

Normally, I would try to fix the situation, get up just because I’m told to do so. But the thing about life on the ocean floor is that you don’t have to do a damn thing you don’t want to do. That includes getting out of bed. So when they try to get me to face the world, I grunt and go deeper into my covers.

School is unhappy that I have not been to class in weeks. They’ve called the house and insisted I go to a counseling session. My uncle said it seemed like a good idea. Man, you know it’s bad when Black folks have to go see someone. I tell him that I don’t want to go and he says I should at least give it a try. In the end, I only agreed to go because Uncle Ty spoke in his “Ain’t no body here play’n with you” tone.

So, now we are headed for the therapist’s office in Midtown. My uncle took me, fearing I wouldn’t go otherwise. We enter the waiting room; everything from the dusty-blue color palette to the water fountain mounted on the wall suggests that I should be calm or, at the very least, should pretend.

I made a deal with my uncle: if there were three things that feel wrong about being there, we could go back home. So after walking over to the water fountain, I spot something and walk back toward the reception desk.

“Does a dead bee in the water fountain count as one?”

“Bit-Bit, that’s just nature,” he says.

“I guess, but you ask me, it was self-inflicted. That bee chose a watery grave rather than being stuck in here.”

He drops his head in disbelief but then says, “All right, Bit-Bit. That’s one.”

“Thank you.”

He rolls his eyes and smiles playfully. He hasn’t smiled in forever, so it’s nice to see that on his face. I don’t need my smile back. I’m good with losing it. What I want back, surprisingly enough, are my tears. I ran out of them a long time ago.