“How’s that?”

“Like, you say it’s stressful to have a change in circumstances, right?”

She nodded.

“But what I want to know is, is there a you independent of circumstances? Is there a way-down-deep me who is an actual, real person, the same person if she has money or not, the same person if she has a boyfriend or not, the same if she goes to this school or that school? Or am I only a set of circumstances?”

“I don’t follow how that would make you fictional.”

“I mean, I don’t control my thoughts, so they’re not really mine. I don’t decide if I’m sweating or get cancer or C. diff or whatever, so my body isn’t really mine. I don’t decide any of that—outside forces do. I’m a story they’re telling. I am circumstances.”

She nodded. “Can you apprehend these outside forces?”

“No, I’m not hallucinating,” I said. “It’s . . . like, I’m just not sure that I am, strictly speaking, real.”

Dr. Singh placed her feet on the floor and leaned forward, her hands on her knees. “That’s very interesting,” she said. “Very interesting.” I felt briefly proud to be, for a moment anyway, not not uncommon. “It must be very scary, to feel that your self might not be yours. Almost a kind of . . . imprisonment?”

I nodded.

“There’s a moment,” she said, “near the end of Ulysses when the character Molly Bloom appears to speak directly to the author. She says, ‘O Jamesy let me up out of this.’ You’re imprisoned within a self that doesn’t feel wholly yours, like Molly Bloom. But also, to you that self often feels deeply contaminated.”

I nodded.

“But you give your thoughts too much power, Aza. Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don’t.”

“But your thoughts are you. I think therefore I am, right?”

“No, not really. A fuller formation of Descartes’s philosophy would be Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. ‘I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.’ Descartes wanted to know if you could really know that anything was real, but he believed his ability to doubt reality proved that, while it might not be real, he was. You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.”

—

The moment I got back home, I could feel Mom’s nerves jangling about my visit with Dr. Singh, even though she was trying to be calm and normal. “How was it?” she asked, not looking back at me while grading tests on the couch.

“Good, I guess,” I said.

“I want to apologize again for the way I spoke to Davis yesterday,” she said. “You have every right to be upset with me.”

“I’m not,” I said.

“But I want you to be cautious, Aza. I can tell your anxiety is increasing—from your face to your fingertip.”

I balled up my hand and said, “It’s not him.”

“What is it then?”

“There’s no reason,” I said, and turned on the TV, but she took the remote and muted it.

“You seemed locked inside of your mind, and I can’t know what’s going on in there, and it scares me.” I pressed my thumbnail against my fingertip through the Band-Aid, thinking it would scare her a lot more if she could see what was going on in there.

“I’m fine. Really.”

“But you’re not.”

“Mom, tell me what to say. Seriously. Just . . . tell me what words I can say to make you calm down about it.”

“I don’t want to calm down. I want you to stop being in pain.”

“Well, that’s not how it works, okay? I have to go read for history.”

I stood up, but before I could get to my room, she said, “Speaking of which, Mr. Myers told me today that your essay on the Columbian Exchange was the best he’d seen in all his years of teaching.”

“He’s been teaching like two years,” I said.

“Four, but still,” she said. “You’re going places, Aza Holmes. Big places.”

“Did you ever hear of Amherst?” I asked.

“Where?”

“Amherst. It’s this college in Massachusetts. It’s really good. It’s ranked really high. I think I might want to go there—if I get in.”

Mom started to say something but swallowed it, and then sighed. “We’ll just have to see where the scholarships come from.”

“Or Sarah Lawrence,” I said. “That one seems good, too.”

“Well, remember, Aza, a lot of those schools charge you just to apply, so we have to be selective. The whole process is rigged, from start to finish. They make you pay to find out you can’t afford to go. We need to be realistic, and realistically, you’re going to be close to home, okay? And not only because of money. I don’t think you really want to be halfway across the country from everything you know.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Okay, I get it. You don’t want to talk to your mother. I love you anyway.” She blew me a kiss and at last I escaped to my room.

—

I did have to read for history, but after I finished, I wasn’t tired and I kept thinking about texting Davis.

I knew what I wanted to write, or at least what I was thinking about writing. I couldn’t stop thinking about the text—writing it out, hitting send knowing I couldn’t take it back, the sweaty heart-race of waiting for a reply.

I turned off my light, rolled over onto my side, and shut my eyes, but I couldn’t shake the thought; so I reached over for my phone, clicked it awake, and wrote him. When you said before that you like my body, what did you mean?