Location: Reddin Medical Center || Dr. Betsy Dobson’s Office
Date: Friday, August 17th
It’s not that his appointment with Betsy Dobson sneaks up on him each year, it’s just that it manages to be one of the very few things in Sterling’s life that he is capable of ignoring to the point where he just doesn’t prepare for it.
Maybe that’s for the best, though - if he’d given himself the opportunity to think about the session, there’s a good chance it would have distracted him from what he was really back on campus to do. Finding his stride with the other Foxes after a summer of practicing alone isn’t going to be easy, if the past three years are anything to go by - or if the past few days have been anything to go by, either. It’s discouraging, and it’s frustrating, but it’s also motivating; and in a perverse sort of way, welcome. If there’s one thing Sterling thinks he needs, it’s distractions, whether shiny or blunt, to keep him away from the questions and the uncertainty and the strange simultaneous emptiness and strained feeling in his chest that come with a lull and being left alone with his thoughts.
So, naturally, he’s as annoyed as he ever is to be taken off the court for reasons he deems unsatisfactory. (Which are, for the record, everything except: (1) crippling injury, and (2) death.)
Changing out feels traitorous, and the walk from the court to Reddin is through the oppressive humidity is more than enough time for his mind to start exploring what kind of things Betsy is going to try to talk about; it also happens to be enough time for him to start recoiling from those very same things, putting up sufficient walls around those thoughts. But the feelings still seep in through the cracks, under the door. He’s far from airtight, and it feels like that’s a flashing neon sign above his head as he walks down the hallway to Betsy’s office. The question crosses his mind of whether psychiatrists can smell emotions in the same way bloodhounds can track scents.
“Good morning, Sterling.” Betsy looks the same as ever, pale brown hair and narrow-rimmed glasses, a kindly but not overly-cheery-so-as-to-be-mistaken-for-fake smile curling her lips and making her cheeks bunch up pleasantly around her mouth. He supposes to someone else she’d seem inviting. “Would you like some hot cocoa?”
Sterling shrugs, which seems to pass as acquiescence, as Betsy sets down a mug a brief minute later in front of him where he’s thrown himself onto the couch, knocking the pillows askew. One of them sits forlornly on the floor, practically a dare for Betsy to pick it up, to attend to the collateral damage that seems to bracket Sterling’s entire existence as he thrashes his way through life, demanding to be acknowledged, to be seen, even if it’s in the worst ways. If she notices it, it doesn’t show on her face as she balances her cup on her knee and her notepad on the arm of her chair, surveying Sterling over her glasses.
Steam curls from the mug on the coffee table as the silence sits like a physical thing between them, gnawing on the bones of ‘fine.’ He’s struck with the distinct impression she’s trying to flush more information out of him, like trying to lull a startled animal out from the brush with silence so you can pounce on it again. It feels like a competition to see who will speak first, but apparently Betsy isn’t willing to play, or is more than willing to lose.
“You mentioned last year that you go home for the summer. Was that the case this year?”
“Yeah. Good ol’ Pleasant View.”
“You say that as if it is anything but pleasant.”
“I’d rather be here.” It’s not entirely true, but it’s not entirely false, either. Going home is like rowing against the tide that pushed him out of Utah; there’s always the siren song of misplaced optimism that promises the mother he will find once he gets there will be closer to the one he remembers from before the raid than the dead-eyed one he left at the end of Christmas break.
“Why is that?” Betsy sips her hot chocolate and doesn’t look at him when she asks and somehow that gives him enough room to answer with something shaped like honesty. He shifts on the couch and the toe of his shoe nudges against the coffee table enough to make ripples in the surface of the cocoa in his mug.
“I belong here more than I belong there.”
“You’ve said before that you feel very connected to your teammates, that you’re very proud of your identity as a Fox.”
Hearing it put so plainly winds his jaw tight, as if it could be summed up as simply as that. His nod is brittle and tense enough that Betsy slides to an adjacent topic, but it’s a fire instead of a frying pan.
“Your family still lives in Utah, correct?” The words aren’t a challenge, but it lands like one - the concept that Sterling would feel belonging in the basement of his aunt and uncle’s house more than he feels it in the Tower is laughable. Sterling’s edges sharpen, and he jams an elbow into a pillow as he props himself up further.
“Yeah. My mom, and aunt and uncle.”
An ache blooms in his chest and there’s a piece of lint on his joggers that needs to be taken care of immediately. No small part of him wants to rewind back to the day he told Betsy about his mother and punch himself in the mouth. Another part of him wants to take the hand that’s being offered to help him down from where he’s sitting on the lid of the box marked Do Not Open, knuckles white as he clutches desperately to it in an attempt to hold on as the contents underneath threaten to upend him.
“Shrink changed her prescription again,” slips out of the box, and he despises the sound of his own voice as he says it, how raw it’s gone, how quiet. He sits up and forward, leaning into the discomfort the same way he crooks his fingers at opponents to throw the first punch, because if he invites the hurt he can control it and make it his, rather than the other way around. When he sips the cocoa, it burns his tongue enough that he barely tastes it.
“She was...” His jaw works as he tries to bite the words into manageable pieces, turn mountains into molehills, make something crushing crushable. “...she was so fucking optimistic about it. Like they’re just magically going to fix her.”
Heat seeps into his fingertips where they’re pressed to the mug, something to echo that scorching derision he can aim at just about anything but his mother, no matter how badly he wants to. “And it just- they just drained it out of her again.” Like watching her die without the closure of a casket. Twelve hour shifts at the warehouse were an excellent way to avoid seeing how much she slept, how she drifted from room to room of the house, waif-like and pointless, how she wilted under the unforgiving light of a reality that had pulled the rug out from under her and taken her meaning with it.
“That sounds like it would be very hard to watch.”
Sterling shrugs and lazes back into a sprawl like all the strings holding him taut had been cut, propped on an elbow and scrubbing a hand back and forth across the surface of a pillow to make the fabric go from smooth to rough, the coloring shifting slightly with each pass. He presses a thumb into the neat striations of a tassel and watches as the threads spread, bent in a way they weren’t intended to.
“That’s something we could talk about this year, if you’d like. As I’m sure you remember, I have times available on a weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly basis - whatever would fit your schedule and your preference.”
The rest of the hour is devoted to talking about the still-festering failure of the last season; Sterling doesn’t dilute the acid in his voice or in his words when he talks about the teammates he sees as weak links in their chain. Respect is meted out when it’s deserved, but only then. Talk of the future stays strictly related to the season schedule; nothing beyond the Palmetto State campus encroaches on the conversation. Another pillow gets kicked to the floor.
When he leaves, the mug on the coffee table is cold and exactly one sip emptier.
