Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

Author:Tommy Orange [Orange, Tommy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2024-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

The Only Thing Alive

A bad thing doesn’t stop happening to you just because it stops happening to you. In therapy this is called trauma. Opal had me doing therapy twice a week, individual and group. To make sure I had the help I needed if I needed it. That was how Opal put it to me, and that I had to go. Opal was overcareful about not saying that I needed therapy. Of course I needed it, but it was more like I had to go, like the way I always had to go to school and had to get good grades. Go. Get. Don’t give anyone an excuse to leave you behind, to not see you, to forget you’re there. Opal averaged ten miles a day on her mail route, so if anyone knew about not getting left behind it was her. We would not let what happened be the reason I get behind in school, even though school hadn’t even started yet; Opal said we would rise above what happened because bad things happening to you were opportunities, ways to find out who you were, find out what else couldn’t keep you down, and were the only way you could find out how strong you really were. Opal got too positive after the powwow. It wasn’t like her. She’d always been so real. Positive thinking sounds stupid. But I get it. I just hated that what happened had changed her, had changed everything, hated it so much that some days I wished the bullet had killed me.

So I needed therapy. Obviously I needed therapy. I’d gotten shot while I was dancing. That was some fucked-up shit to have happen. But there was more I should have been to therapy about before, my whole childhood with my mom before she died.

But nobody wants to be told they need therapy just like nobody wants to be told they got problems. Paid therapy felt better to me than some kind of free or court-mandated kind. Plus the therapist was supposedly Native. Opal had found him on the internet. He’d said his grandmother was a full-blooded Arapaho. He looked white to me. And then sometimes not, sometimes he seemed hella Indian, like in what he said and the way he said it, like how what Opal said could sometimes seem to come from a long time ago, and you just knew it was some hard-won wisdom passed down to her, something simple and timeless, that you could actually use in your life.

I’d heard the word trauma before, everyone knows the word trauma. But when I heard it used about me, I didn’t like it.

“All of the work we’ll be doing together will be related to your trauma response,” Dr. Hoffman had said in our first session. “The four F’s,” he said. “There are four kinds of trauma responses, two of which you’ve probably heard of, fight and flight, but the two other lesser-known responses are freeze and fawn.”

“Fawn? Isn’t that like a deer?” I said, and a yawn escaped Dr.

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