Susan

This is a story about Susan. Draped permanently on the back of Susan's chair is a sweater embroidered with birds—­that type of lady. She has this thing I hate, where she's just always medium, room temperature. Susan looks like a preschool teacher with no emotions. She smiles, she nods, but she almost never laughs or speaks. That might be the number one thing I hate about coming here. She won't even laugh at my jokes! I know that life with me is a ridiculous hamster wheel of agony, but I'm kind of hilarious, and I'm just trying to make this whole situation less awkward.

I'm the one who begged for my first session, but I was desperate, and it was almost my only choice. Now that I'm actually doing this, I hate it. I just want Susan to buy my usual pitch: I am okay. I am smart and good. I am regular, and I believe in God, and that means I am happy.

By the way, of course my therapist's name is Susan. It seems like everyone I meet, everyone telling me how to be, is a Susan.

I don't trust a Susan, and I don't think they trust me either.

I don't like Susan, but I want to impress her—­I'm usually so good at it.

But this is what I mean about the bird sweater. I know the bird sweater is awful, and just uncool and unappealing in every way—­it doesn't even look comfortable. But other Susans like it, and generally all Susans do. It is a sensible piece of clothing; it is normal, and it makes sense. Wouldn't it be so much easier if I liked the sweater, if I just wore the fucking sweater and didn't make such a big deal out of everything?

This Is a Story About Me

This is a story about me, and I am the hero of it. It opens with a super-­emo shot of a five-­foot-­nothing seventeen-­year-­old black girl—­me—­in the waiting room at my therapist's office, a place that I hate. It's so bright outside it's neon, and of course the soundtrack is Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco, because I have more feelings than anyone knows what to do with.

The smell in here is unlike any other smell in the world, some rare concoction of pumpkin pie–­scented candles and every single perfume sample from the first floor of Macy's. I bet Susan Brady LCSW decorates her house with Thomas Kinkade paintings and those little figurines, cherubs dressed up for various occupations, I don't know. The other thing I hate about coming here is the random framed photo of, I believe, Bon Jovi on the coffee table, which also features a wide assortment of the corniest magazines of all time.

(White people love Bon Jovi. When Marissa and I went to Lake Havasu with Kelly Kline, because that's what white people do here in the summer, Bon Jovi was the only thing her family listened to—­that freaking scratched-­up CD was actually stuck inside the thing on their boat. I had a moderate time at "the Lake," except for when I had to explain my summer braids to Kelly and Marissa, for probably the eight hundredth time, to justify why I didn't have a hairbrush to sing into. They made me sing into a chicken leg because of course. I was also shamed for not knowing any Bon Jovi lyrics. That was around this time last summer, but it feels like a past life.)

(Another thing I hate about coming here is how I have to think about everything I've lost, everything I've done wrong, and everything I hate about being alive.)

The thing I like about it here is that there's Werther's.

Susan opens the door and spreads her arms to me in a weird Jesus way, the sleeves of her flowy paisley peasant top billowing at her sides. She has kind of a White Auntie thing going on, or a lady-­who-­sells-­birdhouses-­at-­the-­church-­craft-­fair thing: a sad squinty smile, a dull brown bob, a gentle cadence to her voice. I can tell she's used to talking to children—­probably rich white children—­and as I stiffly arrange myself on the couch in her office, I'm suddenly self-­conscious about my largeness, my badness. I just feel so obvious all the time.

Excerpted from Who Put This Song On? by Morgan Parker. Copyright © 2019 by Morgan Parker. Excerpted by permission of Delacorte Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.