Sacred Sins

in an in-between space. Adolescence wasn't simply awkward for him, it was miserable.
    He was wearing jeans, good, solid jeans, with the button fly raved about in the slick commercials, and a gray sweatshirt with the Maryland terrapin grinning across his chest. His leather high-top Nike's were trendy and new. Light brown hair was cut into moderate spikes around a too thin face. Outwardly he looked like an average fourteen-year-old boy. All the trappings were there. Inside he was a maze of confusion, self-hate, and bitterness that Tess knew she hadn't even begun to touch.
    It was unfortunate that instead of being a confidante, a wailing wall, or even a blank sheet of paper to him, she was only one more authority figure in his life. If just once he'd broken out and shouted or argued with her, she would have felt the sessions were progressing. Through them all, he remained polite and unresponsive.
    “How are you feeling about school, Joey?”
    He didn't shrug. It was as if even that movement might give away some of the feelings he kept locked so tightly inside. “Okay.”

    “Okay? I'd guess it's always kind of tough to switch schools.” She'd fought against that, done everything in her power to persuade his parents not to make such a dramatic move at this point in his therapy. Bad companions, they had said. They were going to get him away from the people influencing him, those who'd drawn him toward alcohol, a brief flirtation with drugs, and an equally quick but more uneasy courtship with the occult. His parents had only succeeded in alienating him, and hacking away a little more at his self-esteem.
    It hadn't been companions, bad or otherwise, who had taken Joey on any of those journeys. It was his own spiraling depression and search for an answer, one he might believe was completely and uniquely his own.
    Because they no longer found joints in his dresser drawers or smelled liquor on his breath, his parents were confident he was beginning to recover. They couldn't see, or wouldn't, that he was still spiraling down quickly. He'd simply learned how to internalize it.
    “New schools can be an adventure,” Tess went on when she received no response. “But it's tough being the new kid.”
    “It's no big deal,” he murmured, and continued to look at his knees.
    “I'm glad to hear that,” she said, though she knew it was a lie. “I had to switch schools when I was about your age and I was scared to death.”
    He glanced up then, not believing, but interested. He had dark brown eyes that should have been eloquently expressive. Instead they were guarded and wary. “Nothing to be scared of, it's just a school.”
    “Why don't you tell me about it?”
    “It's just a school.”
    “How about the other kids? Anyone interesting?”
    “They're mostly jerks.”
    “Oh? How's that?”
    “They sort of stand around together. There's nobody I want to know.”

    No one he did know, Tess corrected. The last thing he'd needed at this point was to feel rejected by the school after losing the classmates he'd been used to. “It takes time to make friends, friends who count. It's harder to be alone, Joey, than it is to try to find them.”
    “I didn't want to transfer.”
    “I know.” She was with him there. Someone had to be. “And I know it's hard to feel as though you can be yanked around whenever the people who make the rules feel like changing them. It's not all that way, Joey. Your parents chose the school because they wanted the best for you.”
    “You didn't want them to pull me out.” He glanced up again, but so quickly, she hardly caught the color of his eyes. “I heard Mom talking.”
    “As your doctor I felt you might be more comfortable in your old school. Your mother loves you, Joey. Transferring you wasn't a punishment, but her way of trying to make things better for you.”
    “She didn't want me to be with my friends.” But it wasn't said with bitterness, simply flat acceptance. No choice.
    “How do you feel about that?”
    “She was afraid if I was around them, I'd start drinking again. I'm not drinking.” It was said not resentfully, again not bitterly, but wearily.
    “I know,” Tess said, and laid a hand on his arm. “You can be proud of yourself for pulling out, for making the right choice. I know how hard you have to work every day not to.”
    “Mom's always blaming things that happen on somebody else.”
    “What things?”
    “Just things.”
    “Like the divorce?” As usual, a mention