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Gabriella
*One*
“Are you ready for school next week, Gaby?” Dr. Newman asks, getting on with our questioning routine.
“Mmm-hmm.” I answer in a hard tone.
My therapist jots something down in that dumb white binder he always has with him.
“It’s your senior year. Excited?”
I amazingly restrain from rolling my eyes. “Yep.”
“How’s your asthma been lately?”
“Fine.”
“When was your last big attack?”
“I don’t remember.”
Dr. Newman glances up at me. “C’mon, Gaby.”
I inhale, puffing my cheeks up with air, and then exhale with a loud whoosh. “Last night.”
“Okay, why?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s because I have this little thing called asthma? Do you think that could possibly have anything to do with why I had an asthma attack?”
He sighs and snaps the binder shut in one fluid movement. “Okay, I can see we aren’t getting anywhere today.”
I scoff. “You think?”
He grimaces. “I know you aren’t thrilled with these sessions, but it really is a great opportunity to let your feelings out and share.”
I raise one eyebrow. “We’re not hippies, Sir.”
He lets out a small smile. “No, Gaby, we’re not. But do you see my point?”
“Nope.” I pop my gum rudely, challenging him to kick me out.
He takes off his rimless glasses and leans forward, endless patience in his eyes. “Look, Gaby, I want to help you. I really do. I won’t give up on you, I promise you that, but, if you won’t cooperate and talk to me, then I can’t do much else.”
I remain immobile with my lips pressed into a hard line.
“Well, if you won’t do this for yourself then do it for your mother. She just wants to help you.”
“Help me? No offense, but I don’t even know you Dr. Newman. How can you expect me to just pour my feeling out to some shrink I met a month ago?”
“I understand completely, but think about what your mother’s going through. You’re not the only one who's lost somebody here.”
“That’s not fair. She sends me off to you for an hour every day just so she can get away from me. She doesn’t care about “helping” me.”
“Gaby, you know that’s not true.”
“Yes it is.” I retaliate. “You don’t have to live with her and watch her move around like a zombie. She doesn’t want me around because she thinks I want to talk about it, whereas she’d rather pretend like it never happened. That’s why she sent me off to you.”
Before Dr. Newman can reply I feel myself proceeding with my tirade. The words just come pouring out. “And then when she’s not being all catatonic, she hovers over me constantly. It’s no wonder I have asthma with the way she’s always this close to me.” I hold my hand up, my index and thumb only mere millimeters apart. “She always makes a big deal about everything. I get up to go to the kitchen and she just has to know why.
I get up to go to the bathroom and she insists on waiting by the door like that crazy murderer is going to crawl through the window with his hand gun. And if he did she wouldn’t even know what he’d look like. She wasn’t the one who saw him shoot my dad. She didn’t have to be there and watch her father fall over like a ragdoll as if he’d never even been a living, breathing human being. She didn’t have to stomach that sick smile the guy had on his face before he made his escape. She didn’t have to sit there in a puddle of blood and wait with her father’s body until the ambulance arrived. No, he was all cleaned up by the time she came into the picture.” I let out an exhausted breath and force myself to say the last few words that have haunted me since the day my father was murdered.
“She doesn’t have to spend the rest of her life with that man’s face forever imprinted in her mind. She doesn’t have to live with the guilt of not even trying to stop that killer as he escaped. She didn’t just let him leave without putting up a fight.”
“Gaby, you’re seventeen.” Dr. Newman says gently. “That man is an extremely dangerous criminal. I don’t think your father would have wanted you anywhere near him.”
I know he’s right, but that doesn’t take away the guilt. I sigh and lean back into the tan, plush sofa. I don’t know what else to say.
Dr. Newman seems to sense that I’m done. He puts his glasses back on and runs a hand through his curly blond hair.
I have to admit, if I really had to pick my own shrink I would have picked Dr. Newman. He’s relatively young, late twenties to early thirties at the absolute youngest, and handsome. It could be worse, I guess. I could’ve gotten stuck with some stuffy, cranky old guy.
“Well, are you ready to call it a day, Gaby?” He asks, although I’m sure he already knows my answer. I’m not exactly fighting to hide it.
I stand up and sling my purse over my shoulder. Dr. Newman escorts me out to the waiting room where my mother is sitting in a far corner flipping through an issue of Woman’s World.
When she sees us she stands up. “How’d it go?” She asks enthusiastically as if I haven’t been seeing Dr. Newman every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the past month.
“Fine.” I say at the same time as Dr. Newman says, “Great.” I glare at him and he smiles back at me with all the innocence of a five-year old. “You’ve got a great girl here Ms. Sparks.”
Mom puts a protective arm around my shoulders. “I know I do.”
“So, I’ll see you Wednesday, Gaby?” Dr. Newman verifies.
“Four o’ clock.”
“Looking forward to it.” He says. He shakes hands with my mother and then lets her lead me to the elevators.
We ride down to the 1st floor in silence. Mom is the perfect mother around people. She’s always put together, not a hair out of place, not a smudge on her face. But, when it’s just us…..that’s a totally different story.
Once we’re in the car I turn on the radio and turn up the volume. Mom immediately turns it back off. I shoot her a look.
“I have a headache.” She states; taking a long pull from her thermos filled with black coffee.
“Well, maybe if you didn’t guzzle that junk day in and day out you wouldn’t get so many migraines.” I mumble.
She pretends as if the hasn’t heard me.
I sigh and turn my head to look out the window, watching the trees and houses pass in a blur.
Once we are in our own driveway again I tear from the car and go into the house. My mom follows close behind, closing the door and locking it securely. She kicks off her shoes and goes to curl up in her recliner, still clutching the coffee-filled thermos tightly.
“There’s a frozen pizza in the freezer when you get hungry, sweetheart.” She says as she turns on the T.V.
I feel my anger melting away. I go to her and sit on the arm of her recliner. “Mom, I was thinking that maybe we could make dinner together tonight. We could have barbecued chicken and baked potatoes.” I swallow and go in for the kill. “You know, Dad’s favorite.”
She doesn’t turn away from the television screen, but I feel her body go rigid all over. Her hesitation is almost palpable.
“I-I don’t think we have any of the ingredients.” She states.
“I can run over to the store—”
“No.”
“It’s only, like, ten minutes away.”
“I don’t want you going out there alone.”
“Mom, it’s the grocery store. There’ll be lots of other people there.”
“I don’t care.” She says, her tone suggesting that she wasn’t going to argue anymore. She’s back in the “protective mode” again in an instant. I don’t know how she’s going to handle it when I go back to school for six hours a day, five days a week.
I feel my anger rising again. I wish she would just come out of her little isolated world already and be my mom again, be my friend again.
I sigh loudly and push up from the chair and thunder up the steps into my bedroom. I slam the door shut and lock it. I throw myself onto my bed face down and desperately chomp down on my bottom lip to keep my tears of frustration in. I beat my pillow with my fist a couple of times, but am not successful. I flip over on to my back and stare up at my ceiling until my vision is marred with relentless tears. This time I let them come, let them wash my face.
My life is a mess and it will never be normal again.
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This article has 41 comments.
Another great story! I can't wait to read chapter 2. The only thing I would suggest is working on your comma usage in dialogue. What I mean by that is, for example:
“Looking forward to it.” He says.
There's a sentence from the story, but it should be:
“Looking forward to it,” he says.
Your suppose to keep he and she lowercase after dialogue and use a comma after the dialogue, unless your using ? or !. It's just a suggestion - I know some people prefer to keep it capitalized. (I learned that from studying published books and they always use the lowercase lol :P )
Besides that, I loved it! Are you going to post the story with Theresa on here that you showed me on facebook?
I like it again your dialouge is completly profesional, I really want to read more. My favourite part was
“Okay, why?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s because I have this little thing called asthma? Do you think that could possibly have anything to do with why I had an asthma attack?”
You can see her personality right off the back
I'm really glad my feedback was helpful--I'm always worried I'm too harsh or too laudatory haha
Yeah 32 commas sounds like too much haha! I mean, unless someone was trying to write like Henry James or Nathaniel Hawthorne and they didn't use commas, that's really unnecessary. I don't think your paper needed any more than like 5 or something but I'm not a comma expert... I just know a really helpful rule:
"FANBOYS" Rule: Use a comma after FOR, AND, NOR, BUT, OR, YET, SO
pretty much for everything else you use a semicolon or a dash, but not necessarily I think...
But hey I mean let's face it--who's going to notice or care unless it's like blatenently obvious that you need/don't need a comma somewhere? Even on like the SAT's and AP tests, the test-scorers don't care about grammatical/spelling errors unless it distracts from the overall greatness of the prompt so to speak. The same thing goes for creative pieces like this, as long as it doesn't pull the reader out of the story and make them go "wtf that's bad grammar" you've got nothing to worry about :)
simon cowel feedback--you asked for it!
I think this is off to a great start. There's room for improvement, but you did a lot of things well--particularly the dialogue--and the story itself is VERY relatable and very realistic--except my experience with shrinks has been that they are A LOT more patient than Dr. Newman... but then again I wasn't an obnoxious patient like gabby lol.
Other than that, I was impressed by how realistic everything was. You characterized the mother and daughter--and their relationship very well, it developed well, and it's entertaining, interesting, and especially very realistic. So you get an A+ for that!
The stuff that needs improvement in this story is actual writing mechanics. I noticed a lot of areas where commas/semicolons should/shouldn't be used but I really don't feel like being a comma nazi so let's focus on the stuff that stands out more. Here's some good and bad examples that I noticed:
"My therapist...him." I feel like a better adj than "dumb" could be used to describe his binder. This is the introduction and you really want to establish your tone here. I think Gabby seems like a smart, sarcastic kind of girl who has a broad vocabulary (but not too broad) and she likes to use it. Find a better word that she would use.
"I amazingly" instead of using an adverb to modify "restrain", try a stronger verb that conveys the meaning. Or just use "somehow" which looks better--more sophisticated.
"I pop my gum rudely, challenging him to kick me out.” This was a GREAT description. Just take out “rudely” and it's perfect. The action of popping gum is already rude, so you don't need to tell the reader that.
The gigantic paragraph “before…” is too big by itself. Use some indenting or spacing so that the reader isn't overwhelmed
Also “I can feel myself proceeding with my tirade” is an awkward sentence. Try something like "I feel a tirade coming"
"
"When she sees us she stands up....past month.” I like that passage a lot. You made a good use of that adverb because without it, we don't know how Gaby's mom says it. You also had a great tone here--it was especially strong because she's sarcastic and funny here. I would try to focus on this funny, sarcastic tone. It seems to represent Gaby well--especially when she's at Newman's office and in a bad mood. Then when she get's home the tone became more emotional, more sad. That change in tone that you had was very good.
Another good thing: When Newman and Gaby's mom say goodbye to each other--that whole scene was perfect. It's absolutely a perfect portrayal of what goes on in real life and it has just the right amount of individual perspective.
In the last paragraph, "I sigh loudly" again, try to find a stronger verb for "sigh loudly" (I happen to struggle finding a good verb for that myself, but the adverb has got to go.) Notice how you used "thunder up the steps" instead of "climbed up the steps loudly." Thunder is a strong verb. It's a good verb and it works there.
"I beat my pillow... sucessful." This is a place where an adverb would work. Try changing the sentence to "I beat my pillow with my fist a couple of times--unsucessfully."
The descriptions in the last paragaph are really good, but you started every sentence with "I (verb)" Unless you did this for a rhetorical effect, try to get some sentence variety in there.
Also, I think the last sentence is unecessary. Unless someone didn't read the story, they can already see that Gaby's life is a mess and won't be normal. If you just deleted that sentence, "This time... face." is a fine way to end this piece--especially since I think you're writing another chapter, which I hope you request me SC feedback on it because I want to read it :) (and even if you don't request it for feedback, I'm gonna read it anyway ;P)
So overall, I'd say this is a very good story. Some people might say that it's too typical, because Gaby is very much like your "typical" teenager with problems or something, and they would be right. BUT your portrayal of this "typical" teenager is so good that I think that it kind of makes you a spokesperson for all teens with problems--you give the outside world a very good perception. Even if this isn't your audience, I think a lot of parents should read this just so they get an idea of what their kids are thinking sometimes and so they can understand. I'm not saying write for them--keep on doing what you're doing. I'm just saying it's that good as far as being realistic goes. Great job!!
I understand that your character is upset, and that makes her a disagreeable, moody person, but she seems a bit one-dimensional throughout the story, like she's just some annoying, self-pitying bratty teenager. Give her a little more dimension, flesh out her character and things will improve a ton.
Also, I thought you could have ended on a better sentence. But good job, great idea, just fix up a few things and it should be great! :)