Page 29 of It's Me They Follow
10:03 A.M.
My Gee,
You are a very talented storyteller, always have been. But that is not quite how I remember that night, but I was also a child, not a baby but if you were twelve, I was nine. You have some facts mixed with make pretend, yet I love the descriptions. The storytelling is top-notch.
With that said, I guess whatever stories we need to tell ourselves are the ones we will recall.
As I remember it, Daddy was not drunk that night; he was very sick and had been for some time.
And he did not choke you; he tried to help you stop choking. Yes, on an eggshell.
They did go for a drive after dinner. It was raining horribly.
That was the last time we saw them, but I don’t think Ms. Harriett had anything to do with it.
I am truly sorry that this is the story you have told yourself all these years, but it simply didn’t happen that way. I hope you can let that story go and tell a new one.
—Your Sister Friend, Elle
Chapter 17
JANUARY 16, 2020
6:24 P.M.
The Shopkeeper was an hour late for her writers’ group. Her walk to class was sweaty and lonely without ME. She hadn’t liked the tone of her sister’s reply. She’d also forgotten deodorant but not the envelope ME had given her as he’d left for good while saying they were going on another date.The Good Doctor could help, she hoped. She’d opened all the other envelopes from ME without a problem. But for some reason, now she wasn’t so brave. It was like hanging suspended from a wall by her throat; whenever she looked at the envelope, she couldn’t breathe.
She finally realized, after trying to ignore it for days, that she couldn’t do this on her own. All morning, she fought with herself about going back to class. She was slightly embarrassed and slightly perturbed. She wasn’t convinced The Good Doctor was helping her much, but if The Good Doctor helped her today, she promised she’d believe.
Plus, The Shopkeeper hadn’t left the bookshop much all week; she needed fresh air. That was the point of the class.s“Oh, what the heck, do whatever it takes,” she’d chanted at herself in the mirror that morning.
But the class was silent when she walked in. No one was writing. They were on their phones—everyone except the one guy in the corner, who coughed, sneezed, moaned, laughed, and then coughed again until she asked him with a pointed finger, “Are you okay?” It was “asthma,” he explained with a cough, cough, cough. She didn’t like his writing and never bothered to learn his name.
It was warm for a January day. As she looked for a seat, she realized there was no writing prompt on the board; there was no red wine being poured, no friendly word banter between word friends. Rose wasn’t reading. No Rocky song. If Rose wasn’t reading, something had to be wrong.
Ray waved The Shopkeeper to a seat next to Rose, who wore all white, like a ghost. She had a white rose in her hair, a white rose on her pen, and a long-sleeve white sweaterdress—she sat unnecessarily close to Lil Charlie, who looked more like a man than a boy this week.
The coughing guy kept on.
“Another experiment?” The Shopkeeper whispered to Ray, trying to understand what everyone was doing sitting around. She pulled out her chair and remembered she’d forgotten deodorant. She tried to keep her arms close to her body so he wouldn’t catch a whiff. Too late. She placed the envelope down in front of herself on the table. “Where is she?” she asked.
“Trying to find out now,” Ray replied, not looking up from his phone.
“Find out what?” The Shopkeeper asked Ray. No one used a phone during writers’ group.
“I read something somewhere,” Lil Charlie interrupted.
“‘Something somewhere’ is pretty vague,” said Ray.
“I read something somewhere about a gifted doctor,” Lil Charlie said, wiping his neck with his bandana. “A gifted doctor,” he repeated, and then trailed off, looking at his phone.
“There are a gazillion gifted doctors in Philadelphia.Cough, cough, cough.Did it say a name?” The coughing guy refused to cover his mouth.
The Shopkeeper shot him a look. “Cover, please?”
“I saw an article that said ‘foremost doctor,’” Lil Charlie said.
“An article about her?” The Shopkeeper pointed at the place where The Good Doctor usually stood. She thought maybe The Good Doctor had been exposed as a fraud. “I knew she couldn’t be that good.”
