She has an enormous tank in her office with a fat, slow turtle that paddles and paddles, paddles and paddles, barely making any headway. I watch that poor fucker all the time, I could watch him for hours and days, I find him so incredibly patient at a task that ultimately means nothing, because it’s not like he’s getting out of the fucking tank anytime soon, right?
And Casper just watches me watch him.
Casper smells nice. She’s always clean, her clothes rustle softly. She never raises her voice. She rubs Sasha’s back when she sobs so hard she chokes. She positions her arms around Linda/Katie/Cuddles like a goalie or something when one of the bad people breaks free. I’ve seen her in Blue’s room, even, on the days Blue gets an enormous box of books from her mother, pawing through the paperbacks and smiling at Blue. I’ve seen Blue melt a little, just a little, at this smile.
Casper should be someone’s mother. She should be my mother.
We’re never in darkness. Every room has lights in the walls that ping on at four p.m. and ping off at six a.m. They’re small, but bright. Louisa doesn’t like light. Scratchy curtains cover the windows and she makes sure to pull them shut, tightly, every night before bed, to block out the squares of yellow from the office building next door. Then she drapes the bedsheet over her head for good measure.
Tonight, as soon as she’s asleep, I kick the sheets off and pull the curtains apart. Maybe I’m looking for the salt stars. I don’t know.
I pee in the metal toilet, watching the silent lump of Louisa beneath her pile of covers. In the weird mirror, my hair looks like snakes. I squeeze the mats and dreads in my fingers. My hair still smells like dirt and concrete, attic and dust, and makes me feel sick.
How long have I been here? I am waking from something. From somewhere. A dark place.
The bulbs in the hallway ceiling are like bright, long rivers. I peek into the rooms as I walk. Only Blue is awake, holding her paperback all the way up to the ping-light to see.
No doors, no lamps, no glass, no razors, only soft, spoonable food, and barely warm coffee. There’s no way to hurt yourself here.
I feel jangly and loose inside, waiting at the nurses’ station, drumming my fingers on the countertop. I ding the little bell. It sounds horrible and loud in the quiet hall.
Barbero rounds the corner, his mouth full of something crunchy. He frowns when he sees me. Barbero is a thick-necked former wrestler from Menominee. He still has a whiff of ointment and adhesive. He only likes pretty girls. I can tell, because Jen S. is very pretty, with her long legs and freckled nose, and he’s always smiling at her. She’s the only one he ever smiles at.
He puts his feet up on the desk and pops some potato chips into his mouth. “You,” he says, salty bits fluttering from his lips to his blue scrubs. “What the fuck do you want at this time of night?”
I take the pad of sticky notes and a pen from the countertop and write quickly. I hold up the sticky note. HOW LONG HAVE I BEEN HERE?
He looks at the sticky note. He shakes his head. “Uh-uh. Ask.”
I write, NO. TELL ME.
“No can do, Silent Sue.” Barbero crumples the chip bag and stuffs it into the trash. “You’re gonna have to open that fucked-up little mouth of yours and use your big-girl voice.”
Barbero thinks I’m afraid of him, but I’m not. There’s only one person I’m afraid of, and he’s far away, on the whole other side of the river, and he can’t get to me here.
I don’t think he can get to me, anyway.
Another sticky note. JUST TELL ME, YOU OAF. My hands are shaking a little, though, as I hold it up.
Barbero laughs. Chips clot the spaces between his teeth.
Sparks go off behind my eyes and my inside music gets very loud. My skin numbs as I walk away from the nurses’ station. I’d like to breathe, like Casper says, but I can’t, that won’t work, not for me, not once I get angry and the music starts. Now my skin isn’t numb but positively itches as I roam, roam, looking, looking, and when I find it and turn around, Barbero’s not laughing anymore. He’s Oh, shit-ing and ducking.
The plastic chair bounces off the nurses’ station. The container holding the pens with plastic flowers taped to them falls to the floor, the pens fanning out across the endless beige carpet. The endless, everywhere beige carpet. I start to kick the station, which is bad, because I have no shoes, but the pain feels good, so I keep doing it. Barbero is up now, but I grab the chair again and he holds out his hands, all Calm down, you crazy fucker. But he says it really soft. Like, maybe he’s a little afraid of me now. And I don’t know why, but this makes me even angrier.
I’m raising the chair again when Doc Dooley shows up.
If Casper is disappointed in me, she doesn’t show it. She just watches me watch the turtle, and the turtle does his thing. I’d like to be that turtle, underwater, quiet, no one around. What a fucking peaceful life that turtle has.
Casper says, “To answer the question that you asked Bruce last night: you have been at Creeley Center for six days. You were treated in the hospital and kept for observation for seven days before they transferred you here. Did you know you had walking pneumonia? Well, you still have it, but the antibiotics should help.”
She picks up something chunky from her desk and slides it to me. It’s one of those desk calendars. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but then I see it, at the top of the page.
April. It’s the middle of April.
Casper says, “You just missed Easter at Creeley. You were a little out of it. You didn’t miss much. We can’t really have a giant bunny hopping around a psych ward, can we?” She smiles. “Sorry. That’s a little therapist humor. We did have an egg hunt, though. Thanksgiving is a lot more fun around here: dry turkey, lumpy gravy. Good times.”
I know she’s trying to cheer me up, get me to talk. I slide my face to her but as soon as I meet her eyes, I feel the fucking sting of tears and so I look back at the stupid turtle. I feel like I’m waking up and going back into my darkness, all at once.
Casper leans forward. “Do you remember being in Regions Hospital at all?”
I remember the security guard and the forest of hair inside his nose. I remember lights above me, bright as suns, the sound of beeping that never seemed to stop. I remember wanting to kick out when hands were on me, when they were cutting away my clothes and boots. I remember how heavy my lungs felt, as though they were filled with mud.
I remember being so scared that Fucking Frank was going to appear in the doorway and take me away, back to Seed House, to the room where the girls cried.
I remember crying. I remember the splatter of my vomit on a nurse’s shoes, and the way her face never changed, not once, like it happened to her all the time, and I wished my eyes to tell her sorry, because I had no words, and how her face didn’t change then, either.
Then nothing. Nothing. Until Louisa.
Casper says, “It’s all right if you can’t remember. Our subconscious is spectacularly agile. Sometimes it knows when to take us away, as a kind of protection. I hope that makes sense.”
I wish I knew how to tell her that my subconscious is broken, because it never took me away when Fucking Frank was threatening me, or when that man tried to hurt me in the underpass.
My broken big toe throbs beneath its splint and the weird foot-bootie Doc Dooley put me in. Now, when I walk, I really am a crazy freak, with my nesty hair and my clubby arms and trussed-up legs and limp.
What’s going to happen to me?
Casper says, “I think you need a project.”
It isn’t true that I want to be like the turtle and be alone. What’s true is that I want Ellis back, but she can never come back, ever, ever. Not the way she was, anyway. And it’s true that I miss Mikey and DannyBoy, and I even miss Evan and Dump, and sometimes I miss my mother, even though missing her feels more like anger than sadness, like I feel when I think about Ellis, and even that, really, isn’t true, because while I say sadness what I really mean is black hol
e inside me filled with nails and rocks and broken glass and the words I don’t have anymore.
Ellis, Ellis.
And while it’s true that my clothes are from the lost and found, it isn’t entirely true that I have nothing, because I do have something, they just keep it from me. I saw it once, when Doc Dooley told me to stop watching the movie during Entertainment and come to the nurses’ station. When I got there, he pulled a backpack, my backpack, from beneath the desk. Doc Dooley is super tall, and handsome, the kind of handsome where you know he knows how handsome he is, and that his life is that much easier for it, and so he tends to be kind of easygoing with the rest of us, the unhandsome. So when he said, “Two boys dropped this off. Does this look familiar to you?” I was momentarily blinded by the whiteness of his teeth, and fascinated by the velvety quality of his stubble.
I grabbed my pack and sank to my knees, unzipping it, shoving my hands inside. It was there. I cradled it, sighing in relief, because Doc Dooley said, “Don’t get excited. We emptied it.”
I took out my tender kit, the army medical kit that I’d found when I was fourteen and trolling the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store on West Seventh with Ellis. The metal box was dented, the large red cross on the front was scratched and losing its paint.
My tender kit used to hold everything: my ointment, my gauze, my pieces of broken mason jar in a blue velvet pouch, my cigarettes, my matches and lighter, buttons, bracelets, money, my photos wrapped in linen.
The box made no sound when I shook it. I dug deeper in the green backpack, but it, too, was dark and empty. No extra socks and underwear, no rolls of toilet paper, no film canister filled with panhandled cash, no pills in a baggie, no rolled-up-tight wool blanket. My sketchpad was missing. My bag of pens and charcoals was gone. My Land Camera, gone. I looked up at Doc Dooley.
“We had to take everything out, for your safety.” He offered his hand to me, and even his hand was handsome, with slender fingers and buffed nails. I ignored it, standing up by myself, clutching my tender kit and the backpack tightly. “You have to give the bag and the box back. We’ll keep them for you until you’re discharged.”
He reached out and tugged the backpack away, slipped my tender kit from my hand. He put them behind the desk. “But you can have these.”
Doc Dooley pressed the square of linen into my hands. Inside, protected by the soft fabric, are photographs of us: me and Ellis, Mikey and DannyBoy, perfect and together, before everything blew to hell.
As I walked away, pressing the photographs to my chest, Doc Dooley called out, “Those boys, they said they were sorry.”
I kept walking, but inside, I felt myself pause, just for a second.
My photographs are what I’m doing when Jen S. comes to find me the night after the toe incident: thumbing through them, greedy like I always am when I let myself think of Ellis, poring over the black-and-white images of the four of us in the graveyard, posing stupid like rock stars, cigarettes in the corners of our mouths, DannyBoy’s harelip almost invisible, Ellis’s acne hardly noticeable. DannyBoy always said people looked better in black-and-white and he was right. The photos are small and square; the Land Camera was old, something from the sixties, the first kind of Polaroid. My grandmother gave it to me. It had bellows and made me feel cool. We found some film at the camera store by Macalester College. It was a cartridge, and you slipped it into the camera, took the picture, ripped the film strip from the side, and set the little round timer. When it buzzed, you peeled back the film and there we were, old-timey and neat-looking in black-and-white, Ellis so beautiful with her black hair. And there was me, dumb little me, arms folded across my chest in my holey sweater and my hair all ratty, dyed red and blue in the real, color world, but muddy-looking in black-and-white. Who could look anything but gross next to Ellis?
“Cool.” Jen S. reaches down, but I wrap the photos back up in the linen and slide them under my pillow.
“Dude,” she sighs. “Okay, whatever. Come on, then, Barbero’s waiting in Rec. We’ve got a surprise for you.”
In Rec, the smell of popcorn clings to the room from the movie we watched earlier; the empty bowl rests on a circular table. Jen licks her finger and swipes the bowl, sucking off salt and bits of congealed butter. She makes oinking sounds. Barbero’s floppy lips curl. “Schumacher,” he says. “You kill me.” She shrugs, flicking her wet finger against the hem of her baggy green T-shirt.
She digs in one of the several “everything” bins, looking for her favorite deck of cards. The colorful bins are stacked on top of each other against the ivory walls of Rec. They hold playing cards, frayed boxes of crayons, markers, games.
A bank of three computers is tucked against one wall. Barbero fires one up and shoos his fingers at me while he enters the password.
“Here’s the deal, crazy.” Barbero flings a booklet at me. I have to bend to pick it up. He starts typing. ALTERNA-LEARN. THE RIGHT PLACE FOR YOU pops up on the page. “The good doctor thinks you need something to do to curb your anger issues, of which there are apparently many, and also your weird habit of not sleeping. So, looks like it’s back to school for you, dumbass.”
I look over at Jen S., who grins wildly while shuffling the cards. “I get to be your teacher,” she giggles.
Barbero snaps his fingers in my face. “FO-CUS. I’m over here! Here.”
I glare at him.
Barbero ticks off his fingers. “Here’s the deal: don’t look at anything but the school site. Don’t look at your Facebook, your Twitter, your email, anything at all but the school pages. Your friend Schumacher here has volunteered to be your teacher and she’ll check your quizzes and all that shit when you finish a lesson.”
He looks at me. I stare back. “You don’t wanna do it,” he says, “the good doctor says you have to start taking meds at night to sleep and I have a feeling you don’t wanna do that. She’d rather have you in here than creeping down the halls like you do. Because that’s fucking weird.”
I don’t want drugs, especially at night, when I’m most scared and need to be alert. Doctors filled me up from the time I was eight until I was thirteen. Ritalin didn’t work. I bounced off walls and stabbed a pencil in the cloudlike flab of Alison Jablonsky’s belly. Adderall made me shit my pants in eighth grade; my mother kept me home the rest of the year. She left lunch for me under plastic wrap in the refrigerator: spongy meat loaf sandwiches, smelly egg salad on soggy toast. Zoloft was like swallowing very heavy air and not being able to exhale for days. Most of the girls here are doped to the gills, accepting their pill cups with pissy resignation.
I sit in the chair and type my name in the YOUR NAME HERE box.
“Good choice, freak.”
“Jesus, Bruce,” Jen says, exasperated. “Did you skip that day in nursing school when they explained bedside manner?”
“I got bedside manner, baby. Let me know when you wanna try it.” He flops on the creaky brown Rec couch and pulls his iPod from his pocket.
One whole wall of Rec is a long window. The curtains have been opened. It’s dark outside, after ten o’clock. Our wing is four stories up; I can hear the whoosh of cars in the rain down on Riverside Avenue. If I do school, it will make Casper happy with me. The last time I was in school, I was kicked out the middle of junior year. That feels like a lifetime ago.
I peer at the screen and try to read a paragraph, but all I can see are the words fucker and pussy bitch scrawled on my locker door. I can taste the tang of toilet water in my mouth, feel myself struggling to get free, hands on my neck and laughter. My fingers tingle and my chest feels tight. After I got kicked out of school, everything went haywire. Even more than before.
I look around Rec. Like a fussy little mouse, thoughts of who’s paying for this nibble at my brain, but I push them away. My mother cooked meat loaf with onions and ketchup and hills of mash on the side, in a diner for years, before even that went away. We aren’t people with money; we’re people who dig for change at the bottoms of purses and back
packs and eat plain noodles with butter four nights a week. Thinking about how I’m able to stay here makes me anxious and afraid.
I think, I’m inside and warm and I can do this if it means I get to stay. That’s what matters right now. Following the rules so I can stay inside.
Jen’s fingers shuffle and flutter the cards. It sounds like birds rushing to empty a tree.
Casper asks, “How do you feel?”
Every day, she asks me this. One day a week, someone else asks me—Doc Dooley, maybe, if he’s pulling a day shift, or the raspy-voiced, stiff-haired doctor with too-thick mascara. I think her name is Helen. I don’t like her; she makes me feel cold inside. One day a week, on Sundays, no one asks us how we’re feeling and that makes some of us feel lost. Jen S. will say, mockingly, “I am having too many feelings! I need someone to hear my feelings!”
Casper waits. I can feel her waiting. I make a decision.
I write down what it feels like and push the paper across Casper’s desk. My body is on fire all the time, burning me away day and night. I have to cut the black heat out. When I clean myself, wash and mend, I feel better. Cooler inside and calm. Like moss feels, when you get far back in the woods.
What I don’t write is: I’m so lonely in the world I want to peel all of my flesh off and walk, just bone and gristle, straight into the river, to be swallowed, just like my father.
Before he got sicker, my father used to take me on long drives to the north. We would park the car and walk the trails deep into the fragrant firs and lush spruces, so far that sometimes it seemed like night because there were so many trees, you couldn’t see the sky. I was small then and I stumbled a lot on stones, landing on mounds of moss. My fingers on the cold, comforting moss always stayed inside me. My father could walk for hours. He said, “I just want it to be quiet.” And we walked and walked, looking for that quiet place. The forest is not as quiet as everyone thinks.
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