"I hate them!"

The slam of Dr. Ann's door echoed the sound in his bedroom the night before. The shocked look on the therapist's face almost made Tyler feel more angry. He knew what she was going to ask. He knew what she was going to say.

"I hate them!" he repeated, yanking his beanie off and throwing it on the floor like a child throwing a tantrum. "I hate them, I hate them, I hate them!"

"You hate who?" she asked softly.

"My parents. I hate them." He sat down, but then stood up again and paced in front of the couch. "Especially my mom. She doesn't listen to a word I say. She hears me, but she doesn't listen."

"That would be hard," Dr. Ann mused.

"Sometimes I think she hates me back," Tyler said, digging his hand through his hair as he paced. "But I don't really believe that. I think she loves me. But I think she loves me because she has to."

"What do you mean?"

"She's my mom," he said simply. "She has to love me."

"No, she doesn't."

"What?" Tyler paused and looked at her in confusion.

"She doesn't have to love you," Dr. Ann said.

"Then it's official," Nico said. "She definitely hates you."

"So she actually does hate me?" Tyler asked her. "I thought you were supposed to make me feel better."

Instead, Dr. Ann smiled. "What makes you think she might love you?"

Tyler opened his mouth, ready to answer the question if she had said hate, but then paused and had to think about it. He slowly sat down next to Clancy as he thought, but his hands wouldn't hold still and he picked at his cuticle until it bled. He looked down at his hand and stuck his finger in his mouth to clean off the blood. His hands were still shaking.

"Do you want a bandaid?" she asked.

He nodded, and she gave him one. He put it on and wrapped it tight enough to turn his finger purple. Clancy gripped his arm until it hurt.

She watched him for a moment and then stood up and got something from the closet where he'd seen the suckers last time. When she turned back around, he saw it was a zentangle coloring book and some markers. "Will coloring help your anxiety?"

"How did you know I was anxious?" he asked softly.

"I can see it in your body," she said. "You're tense and shaking, and your knee is almost vibrating. Your eyes keep darting across the floor, and you're still picking at your fingernails."

He hadn't realized he'd been doing half of those things. "Oh," he said. "Yeah, I'd like to color."

She handed him the coloring book and markers and he flipped through the pages until he found one he liked. As soon as he started coloring, he felt more comfortable talking. There wasn't the pressure of making eye contact, and he didn't bounce his knee, since the coloring book was on his lap.

They sat in silence for a long time, but it was a sort of peaceful silence. He wasn't sure how long they didn't speak, but he was about a quarter done with the coloring page when he felt comfortable enough to speak again.

"She tells me she loves me a lot," he said.

"Hollow repetitions," Nico said. "That's all they are."

"Do you think she means it?" Dr. Ann asked.

"Sometimes," he answered truthfully, coloring a flower yellow.

"I like yellow," Clancy mumbled to himself.

"And sometimes she hugs me, but I usually don't like that," Tyler continued, looking for more flowers to color yellow. "She came after me when I ran out of here. It took her an hour to find me, though. Then she hugged me really tight and I felt like a little kid again. I don't know if she just didn't want me to run away again or if she really wanted to hug me. I don't like hugging her. I don't like it when people touch me."

"Except Josh," both Clancy and Nico said.

"Except Josh," Tyler mumbled.

"What's different about Josh?" Dr. Ann asked, and he looked up in surprise. He hadn't thought she'd heard him. People usually didn't pay attention when he mumbled.

"I don't know," he said honestly. "Maybe it's 'cause he needed my protection. We've only ever touched once, when he fell asleep on my arm, and that was because he needed to be protected. I liked that. I liked protecting him. But everyone's so busy trying to protect me that I can't even get out of my house anymore."

"Can you touch your imaginary friends?" She paused for a moment. "Can I say they're imaginary, or does that make you uncomfortable or angry?"

"No, it's okay. I know they're not real." Tyler shifted a little. He actually didn't really like it, but at the same time, he liked that she didn't say it cautiously, like he was a bomb she had to disable. She just stated the fact. "And yeah, I can touch them, but I don't like to. They're really cold all the time. And Clancy grabs my arm a lot and it makes me nervous."

"Cold?"

"Yeah, like...like the Arctic." Then he remembered when Josh had said that it was the Arctic where he came from, and he quickly changed his mind. "No, not the Arctic. More like...snow. Like the really wet snow that soaks into your bones and makes your feet all soggy."

"Eww." Clancy wrinkled his nose.

"Yeah, let go," he said, and Clancy released him with a muttered apology. "He was holding onto me again," he explained to Dr. Ann. 

"Do you think she brought you here because she loves you?" she asked.

"I feel like she's making me go because she doesn't want a freak for a kid."

Nico snorted. "Who would?"

Dr. Ann shifted in her chair very deliberately. "Just because you're different from other people doesn't make you a freak, Tyler."

He paused, realizing she hadn't said his name in a long time. His mother said it all the time, as if reminding herself who she was talking to. He liked that Dr. Ann said it like it was important. She didn't take it lightly. She saved it for special sentences.

"I like when you say my name like that," he said suddenly.

She smiled. "Like it's important?"

He looked up and blinked in surprise. "Yeah. Like it has weight. Because it does. Every sentence has weight and when my mom says my name in every other one, it makes them all really heavy and I don't like it." He shifted his weight and adjusted his grip on the marker, but didn't color with it. "How'd you know?"

"People like you typically don't like to hear their names very often," she said. "Sometimes it's because it's only spoken before they get hurt. Sometimes it's the only way they feel special, and when it's overused, it loses meaning. Sometimes they just don't like their name. But that seems to be a frequent occurrence with people like you."

"But names aren't that special," Tyler said.

"What makes you think so?"

"There's thousands of people named Tyler. There's probably a hundred thousand people with the surname Joseph. And I bet there's a bunch of people with that full name, too, either alive right now or dead. Even our own names aren't special to us. Someone else always has it." Tyler dropped his eyes to stare at the ground again. "No one's special."

"I told you, it's kind of like the place I came from," Clancy whispered. "No one's special and it's good to die. And I'm scared."

"Wait a minute," Tyler said as he thought of something. "You said that there were people like me. I'm not the only one like this?"

Dr. Ann smiled a little, like scones and hot chocolate. "There are people who have similar situations, yes."

"Even people who see imaginary people following them around?"

"Yes, even people like that. There was a famous scientist or mathematician, I can't remember his name, who had two imaginary people who talked to him like normal people would."

"Did they ever go away?"

"I can't remember," she said, but her eyes gave it away. She was lying. The man had lived with them his entire life. He didn't have to ask to see it in his face, and that made it hard to breathe. Would he be stuck with Clancy and Nico his entire life? But at the same time, he wasn't sure he wanted them to leave. At least not Clancy, anyway. He didn't know what he'd be without them. And he certainly didn't want to lose Josh.

"Have you ever treated someone like that?" he asked softly.

She shook her head. "Not until I met you. It's a rare condition, I'll admit, but it has happened. I tell you that so you can know you're not alone in this. A few other people know what it's like, to some extent."

"Do you think I have schizophrenia?"

"No," she said, and Tyler let out a sigh of relief. "At least not the common kind. You see them everywhere, and usually schizophrenics have episodes that are often violent and incoherent, and they're often scared of the people they see, because they believe they are trying to kill them. Do your two friends scare you?"

Tyler didn't answer at first. He just colored some dots red and avoided looking at anyone in the room. "Sometimes the other one gets me thinking. And then my own thoughts scare me. Does that count?"

"What kind of thoughts?" she asked gently.

He could feel Nico's soulless glare on his back as he colored silently. He didn't want to tell her what he'd been thinking. He hadn't told anyone, and though it hadn't been a problem before, now he could see it was getting worse. He didn't want to give his mother another reason to think he was a freak.

He saw Dr. Ann glance at the clock out of the corner of his eye. Their session was almost over. "Do you want to talk about it next time?" she asked.

"I think about the existential a lot," he said quietly. "And I think about how meaningless life is and how nothing matters and how I'm just a tiny ant in the universe and how it doesn't matter if I live or die because no one cares about a single ant."

Dr. Ann was quiet for a moment. And then she turned to the computer on her desk and typed something in, pressed enter, and told him to come look. Hesitantly, he put the coloring book on the couch beside him and stood up to see what was on her computer screen. It was a video of an ant hill, with thousands of ants running up and down and carrying things and fixing the top, and then it switched to a bunch of them carrying a chip toward the ant hill.

"You feel like one of these ants?" she asked.

"Yeah. And if one of those ants suddenly got smashed and died the whole ant hill would keep working and no one would miss him."

"There are hundreds of thousands of people who feel like that," she said. "And imagine if every one of those ants decided to give up like you said. If every ant suddenly got smashed and died. What would happen to the ant hill?"

Tyler watched it closely for a moment. "It wouldn't work very well. No one would be there to do all the jobs that need to be done."

"Exactly," she said. "Every ant has a job, and even if there are a thousand ants doing the same job, every one of them counts, because if one drops out, what's going to stop the rest of them from doing the same? And it's like the stars. You like metaphors and similes, right? It's just like the stars. There are people, astronomers, people who love the stars, and they would notice if one star went out. And the sky would look different. It wouldn't be the same without that one star. It would be a little less bright, and though most people wouldn't notice, those who care would. Do you get what I'm saying?"

"Yes," he whispered. He hadn't realized his eyes had filled with tears until he realized he couldn't see the ant hill video anymore. He turned away and wiped his eyes with his hand before she could see, but he thought she saw it anyway. "Thanks. I'll try to remember that when it gets hard."

"Alright," she said, smiling again, though this time it was sad. "And next time, I'll give you some more tips. Can you last until then?"

"I think so."

"Good. I think you can, too." She stood up with a sigh. "Then I guess our time is up. I'm sorry. I'll see you next week."

"What if I can't do it?" he asked very quietly, pausing at the door.

"Then you'll try again next week. It's okay to try again."

"Okay," he said. "Dr. Ann?"

"Yes?"

Her eyes were so warm and gentle and he resisted the urge to ask for a hug. "I think I trust you now. Like really trust you. Not just because I have to. I think you're my friend."

"I hope that you think we're friends," she said with a smile. "Because I think you're my friend, too."

He started to open the door, but then took a deep breath and turned back around. "You're like peaches and cream and hot chocolate and gingerbread and honey cider and I think that's very nice." Her smile widened, and he felt his face flush in embarrassment. "Sorry, that didn't make any sense," he mumbled.

"I think I get the idea." She kept smiling as she opened the door for him. "And I think that's the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me."

"Oh," he said, pausing one last time. "I think you're right. I don't think my mom really hates me."

"I don't think she does, either."

And this time, he went out feeling better than he had when he came in.