I lowered my pencil and just looked at the sketch for a moment. Seeing the miniature version of me looking so happy on the Ferris wheel made me feel a little like I hadn’t missed out after all. And on top of that, the twenty minutes I had spent on the sketch was twenty minutes I hadn’t been thinking about my front door.

But when I got home and discovered that the front door was locked, all the warm, fuzzy feelings the doodle had given me dissolved as quickly as a lump of sugar in hot tea. I could see my blurry reflection in the panes of frosted glass in the door, so I just glared at her, the other me. I was furious with myself. I’d left a fun day out with my best friend because I hadn’t been able to stop obsessing about a door.

I let myself into the house quietly, resisting the temptation to slam the door in question. I could have gone back to the amusement park, I suppose, but then Tam and her friends would think I was even stupider than they probably already did.

As far as I could tell, becoming obsessed with a stray thought or fear, to the point that I couldn’t not act on it, was not something most people did. But I couldn’t help it. I knew I had been all sunshine and fearlessness when I was little, but at some point, anxiousness had crept up on me. I got twitchy about all sorts of stuff now. I worried the spider that ran under the floorboard would reappear on my pillow. I worried a shark would sneak into my school’s swimming pool (and, yes, I did actually know how absurd that sounded, but I worried about it anyway). I worried that a random, inconsequential thing I had said three days before was actually quite a stupid thing to say, and maybe everyone who heard it was now convinced I was stupid. I worried that Mum wouldn’t come home one day. I worried that one of us had forgotten to close the kitchen window before bed—

And so on.

I guess it wouldn’t be so bad if all I did was feel anxious for a little while, but that was never the end of it. Nope. I had to do something about it, or else I would never be able to get the worry or thought out of my head. That didn’t matter so much when it was stuff like the spider, because Mum would come to my room, find it, and poof! The worrying would stop, just like that. But sometimes it wasn’t quite that easy. Sometimes it was a lot harder to get my brain to be quiet again.

As I hung my backpack up on the hook in the hallway, the faint smell of paint and the sound of happy pop music drifted out of the kitchen, followed by Mum’s perfectly alive voice: “Kiki? Is that you?”