Besides, it’s not as if at least half the student population of Albert Einstein High School isn’t in therapy as well. Still. The last thing I need isMichael finding out that I’m so crushed from his rejection that I’m seeing a shrink. How humiliating!

“Who elsedoes know?” I asked.

“No one knows, Mia,” Dad said. “You, your mother, your stepfather, and Lars, here.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Lars said, not looking up from the rousing game of Halo he was playing on his Treo.

“We’re the only ones who know,” Dad went on.

“What about Grandmère?” I asked suspiciously.

“She doesn’t know,” Dad said. “She is, as usual, blissfully ignorant of everything that does not directly involve her.”

“But she’s going to figure it out,” I said. “When I don’t show up for princess lessons. She’s going to wonder where I am.”

“You let me worry about my mother,” Dad said, looking a little steely eyed, like Daniel Craig inCasino Royale . If James Bond were completely bald. “You just worry about getting better.”

Which is easy for him to say. He’s not the one who’s committed to speaking in front of the Opus Dei of women’s organizations a week from tomorrow.

Anyway, when I got back to the loft, I found that Mom had used my absence as an opportunity to clean my room and send all of my bedding out to the laundry-by-the-pound place. She had also opened all the windows and turned on all the fans and was airing out my room so energetically, Fat Louie wouldn’t come out from under the bed for fear of being swept up in the windstorm.

Meanwhile, Mr. G had taken away my TV. Which Dad informed me they aren’t replacing, because Dr. Knutz doesn’t believe children should have their own TVs.

So now I know what Dr. Knutz and I will be discussing for a good portion of our appointed hour together tomorrow.

Whatever. I guess I have bigger things to worry about. Like that while I was showering just now, Mom snuck into the bathroom and stole my Hello Kitty pajamas. And threw them down the incinerator.

“Trust me, Mia,” she said, when I confronted her about it. “It’s better this way.”

I guess she’s right. Maybe Iwas getting a little too attached to them.

Still. I’ll miss them. We went through a lot together, my Hello Kitty pajamas and I.

Mom, Dad, and Mr. G are all sitting around the kitchen table right now, having some kind of not-so-secret conference about me. Not-so-secret because I can totally hear. I mean, I might be depressed, but I’m not DEAF.

To distract myself, I went online for the first time in, like, a million years to see if anyone had e-mailed me.

It turned out they had. A lot. I had 243 unread messages.

And, okay, most of them were spam. But quite a few were cheerful attempts to make me feel better from Tina. There were some from Ling Su and Shameeka, too, and even a couple from Boris. (He is such a good boyfriend. He always does exactly what Tina tells him to.) There were quite a few from J.P., mostly funny forwards I guess he thought might cheer me up or something. Not that he knows I’m down. He BETTER not know, anyway.

Then, as I was going through, sending message after message into my trash folder, I saw it.

An e-mail from Michael.

I swear, my heart started beating about a million miles a minute, and my palms got instantly soaked. I so didn’t want to click on that message. Because what if it was just a reiteration of what Michael had said to me on Sunday? The thing about how we should just be friends and see other people? I don’t want to see that again. I don’t want to hear that again. I don’t even want tothink about that again. I’d been doing everything I could all week NOT to have to revisit that particular conversation in my mind…and now there was a chance of it flashing in front of my eyes?

No way.

But then, just as I was about to hit DELETE, I hesitated. Because what if itwasn’t about that? What if—and, okay, I realized this was a bigWhat if even as I was thinking it, but whatever—what if it was an e-mail telling me he’d changed his mind, and didn’t want to break up after all?

What if he’d been as depressed as me this past week?

What if, after a week apart, he’d realized how much he misses me, and as much as I was sitting here longing tobe in his arms, smelling his neck, Michael was longing tohave me in his arms, smelling his neck?

And before I could change my mind, I clicked OPEN….

SKINNERBX: Hey, Mia. It’s me. Well, obviously. Just checking in to see how you’re doing. Lilly tells me you haven’t been in school all week…hope everything is all right. I’m settling in here in Tsukuba. This place is a little nutty—they really do eat noodles for breakfast! But fortunately you can still find egg sandwiches most places. The work is what I expected it to be—hard—but I really think I have a solid chance of actually getting this thing off the ground. Although who knows if I’ll still feel that optimistic after a few more weeks of this.

Did you see they’re supposedly in talks for aBuffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel reunion movie? I thought you’d be excited about that.

Well, I have to go…I really hope you’re out of school because you’ve jetted off to somewhere great for princess duty, and not because you’ve come down with something.

Michael

I sat there for a long time with my finger poised to click REPLY. I mean, he’d expressed concern over my health (physical, not mental, but that’s okay. I doubt even Michael would have been able to predict I’d hit rock bottom, self-actualization-wise, and end up in a cowboy psychologist’s office in my Hello Kitty pajamas and a duvet).

Still, that had to mean something, right? That there’s something there? That maybe he still loves me, at least a little? That maybe there’s a chance after all that someday, some way, I might be able to smell his neck again, on a semi-regular basis?

But then…I don’t know. I thought about what he’d said on the phone. About just wanting to be friends. That’s all, I realized, this e-mail was. A friendly note to show he had no hard feelings over the J.P. thing.

HOW COULD HE HAVE NO HARD FEELINGS OVER THAT? HADN’T HE CARED ABOUT MEAT ALL ?????

Or had I, in the complete psychotic break I had last week over the Judith Gershner thing, managed to destroy any iota of romantic feeling he ever had for me?

Which is when I moved my mouse from the REPLY button to DELETE. And pressed.

And just like that, his e-mail was gone.

And no way was I writing him back.

Michael may be over me. But I’m not over him. Not yet, anyway.

And I can’t pretend like I am. And I’m not going to do something stupid and undignified like hit REPLY and ask him to take me back.

But the only way I know how not to do that is just not to say anything to him at all.

After I deleted Michael’s e-mail, I checked ihatemiathermopolis.com. There were no new updates, thank God.

Well, why would there be? I haven’t been out of the house all week. Whoever is running the site doesn’t have any new material.

Now Mom’s calling me. She and Dad and Mr. G have ordered pizza from Tre Giovanni. We’re all going to sit down to dinner like a normal family. Just me, my mom, her husband, their kid, and my dad, the prince of Genovia.

Oh, yeah. We’re a normal family, all right.

No wonder I’m in therapy.

Friday, September 17, French

Oh my God. It is so…surreal, being here.

I think Dr. K was wrong, and I do need drugs. Because I just don’t see how else I’m going to cope. I know he said it’s good to do one thing every day that scares you—thanks for that, by the way, Eleanor Roosevelt, thanks a lot—but this is like NINE MILLION THINGS all at once.

And, yeah, okay, I don’t know why SCHOOL should be so scary. I was never scared of school before. At least, not this much.

But there’s so much more to it than just school. There’s having to TALK to people. There’s having to act NORMAL. When I know I’m NOT normal.

And, okay, the truth is, I’ve never been normal. But I am more NOT normal than ever. I have lost my support system—the ONE thing I have been able to count on for the past two years to keep me sane in this sea of complete insanity—Michael.

And now, just like that, he’s gone—completely ripped from my life—and I’m just supposed to go on like nothing’s happened? Yeah. Right.

And I have to be here, in this—let’s face it—nuthouse, with all these people who are WAY CRAZIER THAN I AM (they just won’t admit there’s anything wrong with them—unlike me) with absolutely no one to look forward to going home to and saying, “Oh my God, you would not believe what so-and-so did today.”

Seriously, that is just cruel.

But I guess it’s what I deserve. I mean, it isn’t as if I didn’t bring all this upon myself with my own stupidity.

At least I haven’t been forced to suffer the onslaught of a full day of this place. I got to spend my morning waiting around Dr. Fung’s office to get my blood drawn. And since I’d had to fast since midnight the night before, in order for my blood work not to get messed up, I was practically STARVING. I mean, it was bad enough I had to get out of bed, shower, and get dressed.

But I didn’t even get breakfast!

Worse, even though my belly was totally empty, I couldn’t…well, for some reason my uniform skirt wouldn’t close. I mean, it would zip—mostly—but I couldn’t get the button to go through the slot, because there was all this SKIN in the way. I finally had to use a safety pin to keep my skirt on.

At first I thought my skirt must have shrunk at the cleaners and I was kind of mad about it.

But my bra didn’t fit either! I mean, I realize it’s been a while since I put on any underwear, since I was in my Hello Kitty pajamas for most of the week.