Asleep

by Krystal Wade

  Shaking overtook Rose now. No amount of breathing could fix this. She didn’t know what to do.

  “There has to be something.” She scanned pages she’d already read, every last line, right down to the headers and footers, and there, at the very bottom, Rose discovered the words she’d needed to find, a clue, however subtle, that connected her to the doctor’s book: PROJECT HS.

  Those eight letters were on every page, sometimes the top, sometimes the bottom, always small and easily missed.

  HS equaled Heather Shepperd, the institute, everything that was wrong in Rose’s life. No one saw her for who she was, only for what she could be, or what had already been. A dead friend, a bad reputation for an institution.

  Why couldn’t anyone see that? That these weren’t Rose’s problems but their own, deep-rooted fears rising to the surface.

  “I have to call my parents.” No one would understand those letters at the bottom of every page in her file, at least not until they read the book. But Rose didn’t have anything else.

  Phillip shook his head. “Not a good idea.”

  “Why? I don’t have manic depression. I don’t have depression, not really. My parents are just lazy and don’t know how to talk to me, and it makes me sad sometimes, but not this. This is crazy. I’m not crazy.” The phone sat on Dr. Underwood’s desk, practically glowing like a lighthouse’s lamp, and Rose nearly screamed with relief.

  “I’ve tried it.” Phillip frowned. “A crazy person calling from an asylum for help? Usually a red beacon indicating we’re not better. They’ll keep us locked away.”

  “I don’t care. I have to call them.” Rose lunged for the receiver, but Phillip ran away from the window and stopped her. He replaced the phone on the hook before she had a chance to dial a single number. She twisted out of his grasp and ran to the other side, trying to get a better angle around him, but he grabbed her elbows and pulled her away.

  Beating at his chest with her fists, she wanted to scream at him but knew she couldn’t. Knew she shouldn’t. “What are you doing? Let me go. We’re not crazy. They’re crazy. We don’t belong in here.”

  “What did you find, Rose?”

  She took a step backward, fingers inching toward the phone. “Dr. Underwood said something to me about how he’s working to cure my fears. This book, Phillip, and now my chart? He’s got me in something called Project HS.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know.” Rage swirled through Rose, and if Phillip didn’t get out of her way, she’d end up throwing a chair at him rather than through the window. She took a deep breath to regain control, the sound of the air squeezing through her lungs nearly as loud as her beating heart, and tried to make sense of the situation. “It all has something to do with Heather Shepperd. Her name is everywhere, like he’s obsessed.”

  Rose moved toward the phone again.

  Phillip scooted it just out of reach, eyes on Rose but not quite focused. “We need something we can show someone. Video of us in the room. Pictures.” Sighing, he loosened his grip on the receiver. “Something we can show the police. And we have to find out why Dr. Underwood is so invested in this. The project name isn’t enough.”

  It was enough for Rose, but she knew he was right. No one would connect the words Project HS with abuse, beatings, and orderlies kicking her in the gut.

  Footsteps rumbled the floor outside Underwood’s office, and Rose and Phillip paused, muscles frozen by fear. Neither of them took a breath or spoke, but somehow they both crept over to the back wall and pressed against it, flattening themselves so they might not be seen if someone walked inside. Phillip held a finger to his lips, though Rose dared not make a sound.

  “All clear on this side, Thomas,” Mr. Gordon said, his voice muffled through the door. “I think they must be returning their jackets. Let’s check out the west end.”

  The footsteps retreated, and Rose leaned her head against the wall and sucked in a huge breath. That was when she spotted the book lying on the edge of the desk, taunting her. She tiptoed across the room and picked up Fear and held it under Phillip’s nose. “There’s probably more in here”—she gestured at the four walls—“more in this office, but you’re right. We have to find your file, and we have to find more proof.”

  She carefully and quickly returned the file and book to their home on the shelf, amazed at the smoothness of the false back, of how the edges blended without lines. Then, while trying to hold back a growl, she picked up the mess Phillip created during his tantrum, straightening the rug, chairs, books, papers. “What now?”

  He cracked the door open and peeked into the corridor. “We come back next chance we get.”

  “So we can be locked out of everything again?”

  He smiled and tugged her out of the office, where the air was at least ten degrees cooler and helped soothe some of her anxiety and anger. “No. So we can come back with a key.”

  Rose opened her mouth to ask what he meant, but hurried footsteps rattled the floorboards. Someone else was coming. Someone who probably knew they weren’t in the west wing. They weren’t outside. Or in their rooms. Would they suspect they’d been in the doctor’s office?

  “See you tomorrow, Rose.” Phillip loped across the corridor and into his room, just as Nurse Vicki rounded the corner.

  Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, and she let out a relieved sigh when she spotted Rose standing stupidly in the center of the room with her hands fisted. “There you are.” Nurse Vicki held out a small paper cup, her bright red lips puckered up like she’d just eaten something sour. “You didn’t stop by the nurse’s station this evening for your medications. Bottom’s up now.”

  Rose did as instructed, but she held the pills on her tongue until the nurse walked away, then rushed to the bathroom and spit them in the toilet. After they swirled into the old pipes, she took up pacing the bedroom, back and forth from the barred window to the door. She didn’t want to intentionally miss her dose and go through another night like the last one she had, but she didn’t want to be forced to draw, to be kicked, to be scratched by trees. Rose didn’t want any of this.

  She wanted home.

  She wanted to call her parents and take back every wrong thing she’d ever done, plead with them to believe her.

  But she didn’t want to send out a red light, a beacon of warning to her parents that she needed to stay here. Rose needed a friend higher up the food chain than Phillip, than a patient. She needed someone she could trust, someone she could confide in and ask for help.

  And Rose thought maybe she knew just the person to help.

  17

  Several hours later, Rose’s restless pacing slowed to a crawl. Her back and feet ached, her toes numb from the cold hardwood, and while no one had come for her tonight, she didn’t stop. Not now. Not after staying up this long with her mind running through endless possibilities. Did Dr. Underwood intend to ever discharge her? Would Rose be a prisoner here into adulthood, a puppet that reminded him of Heather Shepperd? A girl without a face, without a life of her own, just a recycled version of someone long dead? What was the doctor’s fascination with Heather? Rose could understand if the woman had made it out alive and back into society as a success story, but she’d killed herself. They’d failed her. But Underwood wasn’t around when that happened. So why did he care so much what happened to the facility in the past? And what did any of this have to do with Phillip?

  The walls closed in on Rose, expelling the air from her lungs, pressing against her arms and legs, crushing. She was suffocating. She needed out. She needed air. Increasing her pace again, she ignored the pains and took short, shallow breaths. Her fingertips were turning blue. Why was it so cold in here?

  In this lab?

  That’s what she was: a lab rat.

  A rat.

  A victim of science.

  Nurse Judy told Rose if she could breathe in and let it out, she could get through anything, but, at the moment, that didn’t seem true. Rose cou
ldn’t get a solid hold on her nerves long enough to take a deep breath in. All the air seemed to be going out, away, somewhere else.

  Be-ep, be-ep, be-ep.

  The call of a truck’s reverse signal broke through her panic. Gasping, Rose ran to her window and looked down into the lawn. Another white box truck pulled up to a gate along the side of the building. The panels were blank spaces. Nothing there to denote what kind of delivery this was. And Rose couldn’t remember ever hearing signals this late at night before, though she realized she was usually drugged up at night.

  Fascinated at the idea of what they might be doing, Rose watched until the truck was tucked squarely out of sight. Knowing everything else that had happened because of the article printed in the paper—the interviews, the police—she figured it had to be some kind of clean-up crew. Dr. Underwood probably didn’t want anyone shoveling human feces during the day.

  She stared into the lawn, not focusing on anything, until her feet were too tired to hold her up any longer. Turning around, she slid down the wall and sat on the cold floor. Rose tapped her foot to an imaginary beat. And she chewed her thumbnail. Then she held her fingers in front of her face and traced the outline with the index finger of her other hand.

  Morning was still too far off. She needed to tell someone her story. But she had to survive this night first, and Rose’s restlessness couldn’t take it anymore. A whole world existed outside these windows, a beautiful world that never stopped. She should be a part of it. Not stuck in here. Not trapped. Not poked and prodded like the rats.

  “Forget this,” Rose muttered to herself as she bolted for the door. She tried the handle, just to see if she could get out and go spend some time with Phillip, maybe sneak through the halls and explore parts of the building she hadn’t been to yet.

  Unlocked.

  Rose took a step back, unsure what to do. Every other time she’d tried her door, it had been locked. Why not tonight? Was the staff out of sorts because of the meteor shower? Had they forgotten? Or was this a dream? Or a trap?

  She stood there, weighing her options, and stared at the silver handle like it might bite her if she got any closer. Go and possibly be subjected to more abuse? Go and possibly be free for a night? Or stay here and not do anything?

  Before she changed her mind, Rose yanked the door open and padded across the empty space to Phillip’s room. He was lying on his back, one hand behind his head, the other held up to the moonlight beaming through his window. He bent a finger, then the next and the next, until he’d made a fist.

  Counting. Always counting. Rose counted the days. Phillip the bruises and days, but she was so glad he was different now that he’d stopped the medications. He wasn’t this mindless counting freak who could barely spit out an intelligible sentence. He wasn’t looking over his body and rocking back and forth every time he found a bruise. Now he was just Phillip, someone stuck in here and suffering just like her, someone who’d lost his mother and father and had been locked away because he was afraid.

  Fear linked them, though Rose didn’t know how.

  After staring at Phillip for this long, she felt like an intruder. But Rose needed to see him like this more, to help distinguish which version of him was real or the illusion of his medications. She needed to see Phillip be Phillip, study him like the live subjects she’d occasionally paint at school.

  He dropped his hand and rolled toward her. His eyes went wide and he jumped out of bed and was at the door almost instantly, startled to find Rose standing there. “What are you doing out here?”

  Cheeks prickling with embarrassment, she fought an urge to stare at her feet, choosing instead to meet his eyes. “Couldn’t sleep,” she whispered as though she had nothing to be ashamed of. “Figured since we don’t seem to be strapped to our beds tonight, we could hang out.”

  Phillip’s eyes narrowed and raked over her for several long, uncomfortable seconds. Finally, after he must have deemed her real, he turned around and plumped up his blankets and pillows. “Go make it look like you’re in your bed. I have something I want to show you.”

  Rose padded back across the corridor to her room and lined her two pillows up in the center of her mattress, tucking the blankets in at odd angles to make it look as if she were all wrapped up in them. Just the way she would if she were sneaking out with Josh.

  The mere thought of him made Rose want to vomit. And when she remembered him serenading her with “Come to My Window” or using that finger to draw her near, she had to cover her mouth. How could she have been so stupid not to see what he was doing to her and Megan? How could Rose have been so stupid not to understand her friend’s anger when she got too close to Josh on the couch in New York? When Rose wanted to hold his hand in front of Megan for the first time, he pulled away and glanced at Megan, his cheeks turning bright red. Later he’d begged Rose to forgive him, promised he wasn’t embarrassed of her, just that he had seen the way Megan looked at them and didn’t want her to feel alone.

  And Rose fell for it. Like she fell for everything else since that first day he’d hung out at her house.

  “Just let me use your Biology notes,” Josh had whispered in her ear, running his fingertips along her hips. Something Rose had envisioned since Josh moved to Gatlinburg in eighth grade. She couldn’t believe he was finally at her house, touching her, on top of her, just as interested in her as she’d been in him for the last year. “I’ll take them next time. We’ll switch.”

  She squirmed beneath his weight as they lay on the thinking couch in the attic, giggling and just wishing he’d kiss her already. Rose gazed up into his eyes, pleading with him to just lean forward one more inch, to press his lips to hers. She’d give him all her notes from every class if he’d just give her that connection.

  As if Josh could read her mind, a little smile curved up one side of his mouth, and he pressed his hands on either side of her head, hung his face down closer, holding her eyes the entire time, and he kissed her.

  She gave him those Biology notes, but he didn’t take them the next time.

  “Looks good.” Phillip startled her out of the memory. Rose turned to find him standing in the doorway with his arms down at his sides and his shoulders holding the weight of the world on them. How long had he watched her? How long had she spent remembering someone she’d rather forget? “Let’s go.”

  Tentatively, Rose went with him and Phillip took her hand and led her through the institute, sticking to the shadows out of reach of the security lights. Before they arrived at the nurse’s station or the stairs to Hall HS, he ducked into a door on the left side of the hallway. At the back of this room was another door, which deposited them into a narrow, quiet space like the one they’d left, with a few exceptions. This hall had white tiled floors, the strong scent of antiseptic, and very little light.

  “How many times have you snuck out?” she whispered as he walked a little faster, making his way down the center of the hall.

  “Enough to know all these patients’ doors are locked, no one patrols here at night, and we can go practically anywhere from this side of the facility.” He smiled at her. “And, honestly, they have a much better view over here. Look.”

  They stopped and stood in what could very well have been the center of the institute, an open space cut into the four walls with a metal, spiral staircase winding up to a roof at least two stories above. The paint in this part of the building was pea-green and peeling everywhere. Little flecks of it littered the sterile tiles and rusted white stairs in need of repair.

  Rose stood in awe of what once had been a design meant to inspire, to soothe. She blinked and imagined what it would look like with the sun filtering through the windows and down through the grates on the stairs. She imagined people dressed in plain clothes, not scrubs, venturing those steps with a book opened in their palm, lost in another world. This place seemed otherworldly to her, lost in time, meant for the library of a mansion. The only things missing were bookshelves lining the walls.

/>   “It’s beautiful,” Rose said, perhaps a little breathless, keeping her focus on the details of the room. “But why is it here? In a place like this?”

  She sensed Phillip watching her, but she knew he wasn’t smiling or laughing or even judging. Phillip watched Rose as she watched the stairs, as a piece of art, something beautiful. She tore her gaze away from the sight and met his eyes, and she felt drawn to him, to his warmth.

  “I would love to see you draw something,” he said. “I bet it’s how the sun felt as it watched God create the world.”

  Rose fidgeted with the hem on her scrubs. She’d love to draw something too. The strong line of his jaw. The way his eyes were always so serious. Somehow she’d have to find a way to work in his soft, caring side. Because he was so gentle.

  So not the monster he described himself as.

  “Come on. I want to show you what’s up there.” He held out his hand toward the stairs. “You first.”

  Rose stepped onto the cold metal, half expecting the support beam running up the center to give out and crumble beneath her. But it held, and she took the rest without caution. At the top, her breath caught.

  Windows ran around a circular room overlooking the entire Institute. Rose could see the winding country road her family took to bring her here. She saw the tall oak in the center of the yard where she and Phillip sat to watch the meteor shower earlier. The box truck parked along the side of the building, a man with a clipboard talking to an orderly in blue scrubs. And Rose had a perfect view of the stars.

  Phillip pressed on a pane of glass and it swung out and open, allowing him to step onto a flat, shingled walkway lined with wrought iron rails. “I think this was built as a sort of shortcut for employees to get from one wing to another as quickly as possible. But Gordon says it’s no longer in use.”