We Are All Completely Fine

“I feel sorry,” Stan said. “I don’t mean to bore you. I don’t know why I do that. I just . . . fill the room.”

All her stories are about how the boys did this with their father, or did this other thing on their own. She doesn’t seem to be in their lives. She’s watching them, like they’re on TV.

We wore our scars like badges.

The idea that people could change themselves, he told Dr. Sayer in their pre-group interview, was a self-serving delusion. She believed that people were captains of their own destiny. He agreed, as long as it was understood that every captain was destined to go down with the ship, and there wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it.