Page 1 of True Sight
1
CONRAD
Happy people are annoying.
The thought comes to me as I sit on an uncomfortable sofa with a pair of dark gray eyes surrounded by circle wire frames staring back at me. There are plenty of other ways I’d like to spend my Thursday afternoons but here I am.
“So, why are you here today?” Hanna asks, sitting cross-legged in an oversized armchair that looks like it was pulled out of a dumpster. The corners of the arms are snagged and the way she sinks into the cushion makes me believe it was once owned by a human three times her size.
My eyes scan her office from where I’m sitting on a navy blue velvet couch. The space is small, but warm. There’s funky pieces of art hanging on the walls and the matte sea glass paint on the walls reminds me of the ocean. Or the river. Or both, I guess. My eyes land on her desk and find a personalized name placard that reads ‘Hanna Smith, MD.’Who in their right mind names their kid ‘Hanna’ with such a basic last name like Smith? I guess I haveno room to judge seeing as how my parents gave me the whitest name possible.
Flicking my eyes back to the woman sitting in front of me, who looks more like a teenage girl, I take her in. She has longer-than-shoulder-length ashy blonde hair that’s straight as a pin. Freckles dot the bridge of her nose and she’s wearing a pair of loose fitting joggers and a T-shirt that looks less than professional for being a psychiatrist. The Apple watch on her wrist is pushed back in such a way that it exposes a tan line that tells me she must wear it daily. She’s one ofthosepeople. In her hand is a clear clipboard and a piece of paper, the pen poised between her fingers at the ready. When I look at her face again, she’s staring back at me, waiting. When our eyes meet, she raises a brow at me, indicating my need to answer her question.
“How old are you?” I ask, squinting at her from my seat. She looks like she can’t be more than twenty-four.
“I’m thirty-two,” she replies directly as if she’s gotten this question before.
“Aren’t you a little young to be a ‘doctor’ already?” I flick my chin towards the name placard on her desk.
“I graduated from high school at eighteen. Went to college and graduated at twenty-two. Graduated med school with honors from Columbia at twenty-six and finished my residency last year at MUSC just before my thirty-second birthday.” She sets her pen down, satisfied with the receipts she provided, and smiles smugly at me with her legs still crossed in the chair she is sinking into.
“You look much younger than thirty-two,” I deadpan, hardly blinking at her.
“I have a great skincare routine. Now, are you going to tell me why you’re here or not?” She raises a brow at me again, waiting for me to answer her question.
I run my tongue along the inside of my cheek and rub my fingernails together. Pushing out a heavy breath, I finally relent.
“My friends tell me I need to relax. They tell me that I’m too ornery and that it’s killing my libido. Well, only Malcolm says that but he’s pretty much addicted to sex so it’s not out of character for him to say things like that.” I pause and feel the corner of my mouth tip up as I think about my friends.
“They say I can be…unpleasant to be around. Grumpy, even. And…” I pause for a moment, wrapping my lips around my teeth. “I’ve been having nightmares.”
“What kinds of nightmares?”
I tip my head back and try to recall the last one I had. I’ve had them on and off for years now, but over the last few months they’ve gotten perpetually worse. Ever since I turned twenty-nine, I’ve had some kind of nightmare that causes me to wake up in the middle of the night drenched in a cold sweat.
“The kind that keep me up at night,” I say shortly, not wanting to give her more than that. She looks at me out of the corner of her eye but decides to move on.
“What does your family think about you? Do they think you’re unpleasant and grouchy?” she asks, calmly scribbling words down on her paper.
“I don’t have a family.” This gets her to stop writing and look at me. Not a single muscle on her face flinches.
“You don’t have a family?”
“They’re dead. All of them.” The words come out flat because after years of suppressing the feelings around being an orphan, the impact of that truth no longer affects me. I’m a facts and numbers guy—I don’t do emotions. And I’m fully aware that this is part of why I don’t have many friends or generallylikevery many people.
People like emotions. I do not. Therefore, I do not like people.
Hanna writes something down on her paper again. “Can I ask what happened to them?”
“I don’t see how it’s relevant.”
“I think you should let me make that decision. I’m the one with ‘MD’ behind her name, unlike some people,” she quips with a half smirk. Her comment reminds me of my friend Hank’s wife, Bailey. She puts me in my place just as readily as Hanna is now and I try not to be annoyed by it.
“My parents died in a car accident when I was in second grade. Once they were gone, I moved in with my only remaining family member which was my grandmother. She raised me until I was old enough to go to college and died during my first semester away. So like I said, no family.” I say it so casually and Hanna looks back at me without writing anything down.
“I’m sorry that happened to you. That must have been hard, losing so many people you loved at such a young age.”
I shrug nonchalantly. “I guess. I met my three best friends when I moved to Charleston to live with my grandma. They became my family—they still are.”
