The guard gave Lita's arm a hard pull, sending her staggering forward and causing her dark brown hair to spill forward into her equally dark brown eyes. "Alright!" she snapped, her frustration getting the better of her. "I'm going, okay? It's not like it's easy to walk in this shit." She held her hands out and gave her wrists a good shake to emphasize the chain that kept her from walking faster than a shuffle. All this just to visit a damn shrink, like she was Hannibal fucking Lecter or something. She reached up to brush back her hair, but the chains stopped her from raising her hands above her chest.
The guard kept her moving down the corridor, clearly enjoying the way Lita had to waddle quickly to keep up, until they reached a thick wooden door with a nameplate on it. 'Henry Butler, M.D.', it read. Below that, in smaller letters, it said 'Staff Psychiatrist'. The guard knocked on the door. In a bored voice, she called out, "Gutierrez is here, Doctor."
After a moment, the door opened to reveal a Caucasian man in his early forties. His sandy blond hair had just a touch of gray, difficult to spot under the dim fluorescent lighting, and he wore a suit but no jacket. Lita caught sight of it hanging off the back of his office chair. He had a high forehead and cold blue eyes that were magnified by his glasses, making him look a little bit like he was examining her through a microscope. Lita gave a little shiver, hoping he wouldn't notice--she couldn't afford to have this meeting go badly. "Come in," he said in clipped, formal tones, gesturing to the room beyond him. "Have a seat on the couch."
Lita yanked her arm free of the guard before the other woman could release it, and stepped into the room. "Back in an hour," the guard said with a scowl on her face, still managing to sound bored. "You know what to do if she causes trouble." She closed the door, leaving Lita alone with the doctor.
Lita hobbled over to the couch, while Doctor Butler sat down behind his desk again and flipped through some papers. "Do you think you're going to cause trouble, Carmelita?" he asked, his tone deceptively mild.
Lita glared at him. "It's Lita," she said, sitting down on the couch. "Just Lita, okay? And no, I ain't going to cause trouble. Is that what you're writing down in that file? That I'm some kind of psycho or something?" She wished she could calm down, but something about the way he looked at her was putting her on edge. She tried to remind herself that he wasn't the bad guy, that he was the one who was going to let her out of here, but five years in prison had made it hard to trust anyone on the other side of a desk.
Doctor Butler looked up at her, his light blue eyes showing nothing but calm. "I'm not writing anything down, Lita. I'm just going over your records." He glanced down again at the papers. "Please tell me if any of this is incorrect. Your full name is Carmelita Gutierrez, age twenty-one. Born in Los Angeles, self-identify as Hispanic. You had two years of high school before you were arrested at the age of sixteen and tried as an adult for grand theft auto, and sentenced to ten years in prison due to exacerbating factors--"
"Bullshit factors, more like," Lita snapped out. She knew she should be trying to appear calm and contrite--this was the start of the parole process, and making a bad impression on the prison psychiatrist pretty much made sure that she'd be serving out her full sentence--but the injustice of it still stung. "Jaime had a crowbar with him to pop the hood, and I had a screwdriver on me to get at the drive shaft. Fucking D.A. said we were carrying weapons, and the fucking public defender didn't do shit to stop him. A fucking screwdriver, and it tacks seven fucking years onto my sentence. And they call it the fucking justice system."
Doctor Butler closed the file and went around the desk to sit in a chair at the foot of the couch. "So you feel like you were unfairly treated," he said. "Do you think you've been able to channel those emotions constructively?"
Lita shot him a stony glare, but all he did was stare back at her. After a moment, she shrugged derisively. "I got into a few fights, okay?" she admitted reluctantly. She waited for him to respond, but he just kept looking at her. She felt the silence weighing on her, judging her. "So is that it?" she said at last. "I mix it up a little in the exercise yard and I'm all out of chances?"
"Not at all," Doctor Butler said. "But it does mean that if I am to recommend your release, I need to give you some tools to help deal with your anger first, otherwise you'll simply wind up back here again. Neither of us want that."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small silver pendant. "I've had a great deal of success with patients like yourself using guided meditation," he said, allowing the pendant to hang down at the end of its chain and starting to swing it gently back and forth. "It's a technique that allows you to center yourself when you're feeling frustrated, so that you can return to a state of calm instead of allowing your emotions to control you."
"Hey, whoa, what the fuck?" Lita said loudly in tones of surprise and alarm, looking straight up at the ceiling. "Are you trying to fucking hypnotize me? Because I didn't agree to that!" She flicked her eyes down for a moment to the psychiatrist, just to see whether he was still holding the pendant, then back up to the ceiling as soon as she saw that he was.
"It's okay, Lita," Doctor Butler said soothingly. "You don't have to be hypnotized if you don't want to. You can watch the pendant and remain wide awake. It's just a tool to help you concentrate, that's all."
Lita looked down at him again. His face was set in a smile so calm and mild that it practically didn't exist. He continued to hold the pendant, letting it move from side to side with an effortless motion. She shot her gaze back up to the ceiling again. "I don't want to be hypnotized," she said forcefully.
"Then you won't be," Doctor Butler said calmly. "It's as easy as that. We're going to talk about ways that you can stay focused when your anger is trying to distract you and goad you into making a bad decision, and it helps to have something specific you can focus your attention on. But that doesn't have to be this pendant if you associate it with hypnosis. You can just as easily focus on the ceiling while I talk to you."
Lita snapped her eyes back down to the doctor. "I don't think I want to do that," she said warily. She glared at him, looking for some sign that he was trying to trick her, but his face remained resolutely unreadable. It bugged her--it was like being in a room with a robot. She found herself wanting to do something, yell or scream or punch him in the face, just to get him to react, but she knew that would be the worst thing she could do.
"You don't like being told what to do, do you?" he asked, staring at her with his big pale eyes. She held his gaze for as long as she could, but after a moment she flicked them down to the pendant with a sharp sense of relief.
"I just don't want to be hypnotized, is all," she said sullenly. She had a sudden urge to get up, to hammer on the door and ask to go back to her cell, but she pushed it down. "I don't have a problem with people telling me what to do, I just don't want..." She froze, fumbling in her head for a way to describe it that didn't sound like an insult. She hated the way he was watching her, evaluating her, judging her. She was scared of the way he was trying to get inside her head, make her doubt herself. She felt like he was just like the rest of them, like he wanted to break her down into a good little model prisoner, somebody they could let out who would find some shitty job sweeping floors for someone who was oh-so-fucking proud of themselves for giving her a chance. Somebody who was a nobody.
"...I don't want to be hypnotized," she ended lamely, unable to put any of it into words. She felt her cheeks burn with embarrassment, and stared tightly at the pendant in an effort to shut him out completely.
"And you won't be," Doctor Butler said smoothly. "This is simply a therapeutic exercise, Lita, and you're going to remain wide awake this entire time. You may find yourself calming down, but that doesn't mean you're hypnotized. That simply means that you're finding a way to let go of that aggression, using your focus on the pendant to keep the anger you feel from getting the better of you. As you watch the pendant moving back and forth, you'll find that it's easier and easier to center your thoughts and leave that anger behind."
Lita leaned back onto the couch cushions, trying to at least give the doctor a chance. Just so that he'd at least write down afterwards that she tried. It didn't feel like it was working--she still felt all knotted up with stress no matter how closely she followed the swaying pendant. It just went back and forth, over and over again in a steady motion. It was kind of impressive the way he kept it moving so evenly, but if he thought this was going to calm her down, maybe he was the one who needed a shrink.
"That's right, Lita," he said after a moment. "You're doing an excellent job now. Wide awake but feeling calmer now, more centered and able to listen to me without feeling upset or afraid. Whenever you feel those emotions, you're just going to take a moment and watch the pendant swinging from side to side at the end of the chain, always moving smoothly and effortlessly, until you feel peaceful and relaxed once again. Does that sound good to you, Lita?"
Lita nodded. "Yeah, um, okay," she said, just to let Doctor Butler know that she hadn't zoned out or anything. "That sounds fine." She kept her eyes on the pendant while she talked--she still didn't trust herself to look anywhere else, not while she still felt so messed up inside. At least when she was looking at the pendant, she wasn't looking at him.
"Good," Doctor Butler said. He paused again, letting the silence fall over Lita like a drift of snowflakes. Finally, he said, "Let's revisit our discussion earlier, Lita. Do you feel like you have a problem with authority figures?"
Lita tensed up instantly, but it helped to look at the pendant and not at him while she answered. "Maybe sometimes," she conceded. "A little. It gets under my collar when someone tells me what to do just because they think they can."
Doctor Butler nodded. The pendant didn't jostle even a tiny bit. "But it's only a problem when you let that anger distract you," he said. "When you're wide awake like this, your mind free of all distractions, it doesn't bother you, does it?"
Lita thought about it for a minute. She could feel the anger welling up inside her, telling her that the doctor was telling her that she should just swallow all that bullshit and stop getting mad about it, but as soon as the feelings built up they faded away. She just watched the pendant sparkling at the end of the silver chain and let them all go. "I guess not," she said at last. It felt like a relief to give up that frustration.
