Chapter 103: First World Problems

Saturday, April 2, 1983

Angie came into my room late in the morning, where I was doing a bit of work on an English paper. No time like the present!

“I’m thinking I want to call Jane and see if she’s busy.”

“Works for me. I have nothing until five, when I need to pick up Linda.”

“Which is fine by me. Paige and I are skipping tonight. You need a car, though!”

“I agree! I’m hoping that Mister Lancaster has good news soon. It’d be nice to be able to pick Jaya up.”

She chuckled. “I could go places with that.”

“Yes, you could. I don’t know if she’s into that, though.”

She rolled her eyes. “Good one!”

Jane was indeed free, so we made plans to meet at her office at two, with the standard ‘shopping at the mall’ excuse. In the past, we’d considered buying a few things so we had purchases in hand when we got home, but hadn’t actually done it. We went to the mall without buying things fairly often, so it didn’t seem necessary to try to fool Mom.

By two we’d made it to her office, where she greeted us with hugs.

“Anything new?” she said, as we settled in.

We both shook our heads. “We sent a letter to Gene’s dad,” I said, “But you knew about that. Besides that ... there’s a new Monty Python movie...”

“It’s good, too!” Angie added.

“It is. But that’s not really anything new,” I said. “I mean, it’d be new to Jane, but ... it’s not anything ... special.”

“It was special for me,” Angie said.

My ears perked up. I hadn’t known it was special.

She went on, saying, “It was the last Monty Python movie Daddy Frank took me to in my first life. I don’t think it was the last movie, but it could have been. I’m not completely sure.”

“You should’ve said something,” I said.

She shook her head. “Nah. I didn’t want to make it about me. Or about him, either. It was about us, and our friends, and our girlfriends. That’s partly why it was special for me. Now it’s a special memory for both lives. I don’t have to replace the first one, and the second one is just a pure happy thing without any tinge of regret. I still miss him, but even for second-life pre-me me ... who’s kinda not really there, if that makes sense...”

I nodded. It did, to me. It probably did to Jane, but without living it, I doubted she could truly understand remembering being someone and doing things even though you had never been that person or done those things. My first life generally aligned with the one my other self had lived until the bike wreck, but he hadn’t spent weeks in the hospital due to an appendectomy, nor other things. Angie’s was more confused, of course.

“ ... anyway, even for her, Daddy Frank died over three years ago, and for me it’s been almost two decades. I’ve made my peace with things. It’s all good memories now.”

Jane chuckled just a bit, shaking her head. “If I step outside myself and let myself realize how fundamentally strange this conversation is, then I realize you do have something new, even when you say you don’t. But from your perspective, it’s normal.”

I smiled. “Yeah, it is. We don’t have much choice. We have to normalize it or you’d be seeing us because we’d be nuts!”

Angie giggled, then said, “Okay, well ... yeah. Anyway ... mostly, we just wanted to check in one more time before things get so busy.”

“We saw Candice and Sherry yesterday,” I said. “So that’s maybe new?”

“As far as I know, they’re doing great,” Jane said. “I’m in regular contact with Candice, but I talk to the two of you much more often. It’s not the first time I’ve wound up with a patient via interviews about another patient, but it’s absolutely the most unique version of it, and I mean that even without all of your ... specialness.”

“They’re doing great,” I said. “If you pick the right night for the musical, you might see them then.”

“Or ... I might pick a different night,” she said, looking thoughtful. “It makes sense for all of you — I mean, including Candice, and Sherry — to know of the connection, but ... well ... there’s nothing wrong with it, but Erwin and Sandy don’t need to know that you’re seeing me.”

“You went to the same show last year,” I said.

She shook her head. “Candice saw me, but I avoided Erwin and Sandy. No one else there knows that I’m a therapist, except Sam and Helen and people you’ve informed. Even if they did, at a distance, they might just think we’re friends. But Erwin and Sandy would understand right away how we met. I didn’t like it last year, and I might just avoid it this year.”

“That works for me,” I said.

Angie nodded. “Yes. We’re comfortable with it, but I can see why you’d worry about it.”

Jane grinned a little. “Yes, you’re comfortable, but that’s because you’re you. Most teenagers — even the infamous Drama kids — really aren’t that comfortable with talking about therapy outside of very close friends. Not only that, but there’s natural curiosity: ‘Why would she, or he, need a therapist?’ Helen avoids asking herself that because you have just enough to cling to, and she has a reason to want you confiding in me. Sam avoids it by just following Helen.”

“Like any sensible husband would!” Angie said.

“Exactly!” Jane said. “But get past those two, and ... Jas is fine, because you are ‘infamous Drama kids’ now, and because she trusts you both, and because she can see things like Impostor Syndrome, Angie’s issues with Sharon and maybe questioning her sexuality ... things like that. But the more you spread it out and the more people ask the question, the more it becomes, ‘Why do two straight-A high achievers with happy social lives and clearly no pattern of abuse or the like need regular therapy?’ Without explaining about prison and ex-wives and lost kids and abusive boyfriends and all of the other things, how do you answer that?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I think that, if she ran with it, Jess would pick it to shreds, just as one example.”

“Cammie would,” Angie said. “Mel. I think Janet and Lizzie, both of them. Amit, possibly. Sue, definitely. All of them have their reasons for being distracted, and none of them knows how often we see you. If not for that, they’d eventually ask themselves the right questions.”

“Paige?” I said.

Angie shook her head. “I’ve told her about as much as I possibly can about Sharon and what happened, and also about my feelings about Daddy Frank, plus played up questioning my sexuality a bit more than I really was. Since it’s all true — I just went through the ‘questioning’ part a decade earlier than she thinks I did — it works. Plus, basically like Jas, she wants to believe me.”

“I had better check,” Jane said. “This is interesting, but it’s likely a bit of a detour from whatever you might have had.”

“I ... can’t think of anything else?” Angie said.

“I’m just getting a little grumpy in a very ‘First World Problems’ way.”

“That makes sense ... except that I’ve never heard that phrase,” Jane said, chuckling. “I think I can guess, though.”

“Oops,” I said. “A sign of how comfortable we are, I think. That’s an, um... 2000s or 2010s phrase. I’m not entirely sure when it came into vogue. Putting it in 1980s terms... ‘I missed a call from my boyfriend because my parents were using the phone, and now he hates me! My life is ruined!’”

Jane laughed, loudly. “I know girls who would say that. You even got the tone right! I see the meaning. Compared to all the basic needs it’s trivial, but when you have food, clothing, shelter, safety, and so forth all covered, it’s easy to obsess about things that are objectively not that important.”

“That’s it in a nutshell. Once they become the center of everyone’s existence, you hear it about someone’s cell phone battery dying. You wouldn’t believe how much drama can come out of a dead battery on a piece of electronics,” I said.

“I ... doubt I would.”

“By the 2010s, what I’m calling a ‘cell phone’ was a little tiny computer that could look up nearly anything you wanted to look up, connect you to pretty much anyone you wanted to connect to, play nearly any song ever recorded, play games — many of which were pretty social themselves — and on and on. Making what you’d think of as a ‘phone call’ was almost an afterthought. So, effectively, a dead battery meant you were cut off from instant communication with everyone but people who were physically present, which — in first-world terms — was unthinkable.”