That was how mental health therapy worked, I was pretty sure.

Hallway after hallway, I wasn’t finding a bathroom. A vacant one, anyway. I retraced my steps back to the ECT waiting room, and when I got there the janitor was still cleaning. He was on one knee, and with a dirty white cloth he wiped the silver handicapped-toilet bar.

“You going to be done soon?” I said.

“In a minute,” he said, without looking at me.

I tapped my foot. I was used to waiting. For the past four months I was seeing this girl—Tabitha, who I’d met at the clinic—and I stayed at her place in Overtown. One bedroom (always an unmade bed), one bath (makeup everywhere), tiny living room with blue walls (Christmas lights above the couch, even though Christmas was over), and a narrow kitchen (the brown cupboards never stayed shut). She worked retail all day for T.J. Maxx, and so I was stuck at her place watching TV or searching for work on her small laptop (UPS never got back to me). One night I made her dinner—one-pot pasta with broccoli and carrots—and even though she ate it I knew she didn’t like it. “That was pretty good,” she’d said, but with the same voice and scrunched-up face used to say, “That was pretty bad.”

The janitor switched the knee he leaned on. “Almost done,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him, and he started to clean behind the toilet.

Even though I spent a lot of time waiting for Tabitha, it was worth it until that day I brought her to the Social on the rez. Before that, we would stay up late and watch Netflix, eat junk, lie in bed and share cigarettes and read Ask Reddit threads on her laptop. But after the Social, we started to fall apart. She didn’t do nothing—it was me, my attitude, and I knew it. This was about three months back. It had rained that day, so the Social was held in the community building. Drum groups spread out across the basketball court (so many Native dudes wearing baseball caps backward, their braids pulled through the back hole), and small vendor tents circled the out-of-bounds lines. Tabitha loved it all, kept asking me to show her how to dance to this song, to that song. I showed her once. I was never good at dancing. When an honor song played—an elder had died not many weeks back—everyone sang around one drum, and while Tabitha could say a word here and there but didn’t understand, she still cried at the end. After that, we walked around some—smoked a cigarette outside—and I bumped into one of Mom’s friends, Cheryl, and she ignored Tabitha, kept asking how I was, how Mom was (which I didn’t know—we barely talked), and then at the end she pinched my arm and said, “You should find yourself a nice Native girl,” and walked away. I bet my mother put her up to it.