by E. E. Holmes
“You shouted out Milo’s name right before the soda can exploded,” Dr. Mulligan repeated. “What happened there?”
“That was… that was just a coincidence,” I said, perhaps a bit too casually in my effort to repair the damage. “I was about to tell her off for using Milo like that, and she spilled her stupid soda.”
“Using Milo like what?” Dr. Mulligan asked.
“Like he’s a prop in her melodrama,” I replied snappishly. “I’m sure you’ve realized this, but Meghan has an unprecedented talent for making everything about herself. She didn’t care about him, and the only thing she’ll miss about him is having one more body to drag into her self-penned romantic crises.”
“Other people are allowed to grieve Milo in their own ways,” Dr. Mulligan said reprovingly.
“She’s not grieving, she’s performing!” I shouted. “And that’s exactly why Milo was…” I stopped myself, backtracking. “That’s exactly what Milo would have said if he’d been there.”
“You’ll get through all of this easier if you let yourself realize that we all share in Milo’s loss,” Dr. Mulligan said softly. “It doesn’t just belong to you. You don’t have to bear it alone.”
I laughed. It sounded hollow and empty and dead in my own ears. “Yes, I do.”
“Have you thought any more about what we talked about? About the new treatment we discussed?”
I swallowed hard. A powerful antipsychotic med, just approved by the FDA for use in minors, and I was a prime candidate for the clinical trials. I’d been on drugs like it before, and they’d turned me into a zombie, though they had dulled the impact of spirit visitations as well, mostly by keeping me practically oblivious to the outside world. No, thank you. If I had to choose between being a headcase and being a vegetable, I knew my choice.
“No,” I said. “But I will.”
And though she called after me, she allowed me to leave her office. When I returned to our room, I found Carley sound asleep, her phone back in her hand, and fresh tear tracks running through her make-up.
§
One of the good things about having Carley back was that Milo made fewer attempts to visit me in our room. He knew how hard it was to maintain a façade of sanity in front of Carley, and he didn’t complicate matters by trying to talk to me while she was in the room. And she was in the room a lot—much more than on any other occasion when she’d checked in for a stint at New Beginnings. But even when Carley wasn’t around, he didn’t accost me. He just sort of hung out in the background, inviting conversation but never initiating it himself. Maybe it was because of the fiasco in group, but he stayed way back when the other students were nearby. He was probably afraid that he would accidentally blow something else up. He took to hanging around the back corner, occasionally trying to manipulate a pack of playing cards.
As for me, my feelings of guilt only multiplied. My best friend had remained earthbound as a ghost to stay with me, and I was ignoring him, punishing him for wanting to look out for me. What the fuck was wrong with me? What kind of heartless person does that? I was the only person he could possibly talk to, and I’d abandoned him. But seeing him like that… every glance, every conversation was like the jab of a knife between the ribs.
It’s your fault, Hannah. Jab.
He stayed because of you, Hannah. Jab.
He never would have done it if he hadn’t known what you could do. Jab. Jab. Jab.
It was unbearable. My anxiety began to spiral. I started looking desperately for a release, and before long, found myself looking down at my own arms, at the criss-crossing of little scars, wondering how it would feel to replace one pain with another, just for the relief. It had been several years since I’d coped in that way, and the fact that I had allowed the thought to pop back into my unguarded head made me feel sick and angry.
Meanwhile, everyone around me was watching me spiral, but no one could understand the real reason, because I couldn’t tell anyone without convincing them I’d gone officially over the mental cliff they’d watched me teeter on for years. The doctors and staff eyed me with wariness and concern, while the other kids had all but broken out the tubs of popcorn waiting for me to snap. Every time I tried to shift my attention outward, to distract myself from my own misery, all I could see was the staring and the concern. And as fragile as I felt, it was nothing to the way Carley was deteriorating.
I doubted Dr. Mulligan had said a single word to the board about the phone access for Carley, but if she had, it had made no difference. I did what I could to distract her, to engage her in any other activity, from board games to movies to any one of the dozens of classes and workshops offered to residents. Sometimes she drifted along to one with me, but more often than not, she stayed in bed, glued to her phone. The frustrating part was that she was doing everything required of her, as far as the doctors were concerned. She never missed a group or individual session. She participated and said all the right things. She ate the food they put on her plate, which they monitored closely, as disordered eating was one of Carley’s many issues. As far as they were concerned, she was going right down their checklist, a complete success. But they didn’t see the way she lay awake at night, the way she tumbled down a rabbit hole of self-loathing every time she picked up her phone or sat down in front of a computer. Carley had gone through these motions too many times, knew what she needed to do to keep the staff happy, and made sure she did it. Sure enough, a few short weeks later, she was packing up her bag again to return home, where her public socialite life was waiting, ready to swallow her whole once again.
Later, I wondered if she knew. As she packed her suitcase, as she chatted about where she was going to get dinner that night, about the party she was invited to on Saturday, about how her boyfriend was hinting about taking her away to Cabo for the weekend. I wondered if she knew, as she pulled me into a hug that felt like a cry for help.
I think she must have known.
Less than a month later, I was coming back in from the cafeteria when Milo popped up out of nowhere in the hallway, scaring the hell out of me and making me drop my cup of tea all over the floor.
“Damn it, Milo!” I shouted, before catching myself and dropping my voice. “You can’t do that! You know you can’t do that!” Down the hallway, through the open door to the rec room, I could see necks craning, curious faces looking to see what the commotion was.
“It’s just me again!” I called loudly into the room, making them jump and look away. “Just crazy Hannah Ballard making a scene with another one of her invisible friends! Nothing to see here!”
“I’m sorry,” Milo replied, crouching down so that he could talk to me as I sopped up the spilled tea with a wad of tissues from my cardigan pocket. “I didn’t mean to freak you out. I just… I need to talk to you…”
“Milo, we already talked about this,” I muttered. “I really just need you to—”
“I know we did, and I respect that. And I… I wouldn’t even be here right now if it wasn’t really important,” Milo hissed.
“What could be so important that you couldn’t just wait for me to get back to my room where I wouldn’t cause a scene?” I muttered. The tissues were falling to pieces in the puddle of tea, making an even bigger mess. I sighed.
“I… well, that’s the thing, really. I need you to… just don’t go back to your room, okay?”
I chanced a glance up at Milo. “What do you mean, don’t go back to my room?”
“Just… just don’t, okay? Go do something else for a little while. Go to the rec room, or… or the reading room or something.”
I frowned at him. “But why?”
“I just… can you just do this one little thing for me? I just need a little time to… just, please, Hannah, okay?”
I stared at him now, all pretense gone. He looked almost frantic.
“Tell me why.”
“No.”
“Milo, tell me!”
“No. Please, Hannah. Please, just listen
to me.”
We looked into each other’s eyes for a long moment, trying to communicate without words. He was screaming at me, screaming at me to listen.
I should have listened.
Before I could even ask myself why I was doing it, why I was ignoring him when he was clearly trying to look out for me, I had jumped to my feet, abandoned my tea disaster in the middle of the floor and took off toward my room, Milo floating along behind me the whole way, shouting for me to stop, to listen…
I felt her there the moment I put my hand on the doorknob. Her energy shot through me like a bullet, and I turned to Milo. His face was so, so very sad.
“Don’t, Hannah. Please.”
I opened the door.
Carley was crouched in the corner of her bed, her back pressed to the wall. Her face was a tear-stained mess of make-up tracks, and her hair was a tangled nest. She was wearing a satin dress and one stiletto heel. When she looked up and saw me there, her eyes were wild, her voice echoing to me from a place I couldn’t reach.
“Don’t make me go back out there, Hannah! I can’t go back out there!”
She flickered out of focus, then back into focus, like an image on a screen.
I didn’t speak to her. I stepped out and shut the door again, muffling her cries.
“I’m so sorry,” Milo whispered. “I’m so sorry, sweetness. I tried to warn you.”
“When?” I managed to croak out, even as my throat seemed to swell shut against the howl of grief fighting to escape my mouth.
“I don’t know,” Milo replied, and I could hear the tears in his voice. I squeezed my eyes shut so that I wouldn’t have to see them. “I honestly don’t. I just felt the energy in the building shift, and I knew there was another… someone else like me here. I followed the traces and I found her there, in your room. I didn’t know what to do, but I thought, maybe if I could get her out of there before you saw her… Oh, sweetness, I am so sorry.”
The ground beneath my feet felt like quicksand. The entire hallway seemed to be spinning. Not only could I not cry, not scream, but I also couldn’t breathe. Blackness was gathering around the edges of my vision. Vaguely, I heard a voice, footsteps coming toward me.
“Hannah?! Hannah, are you alright?!”
“Carley… Carley…”
“What about Carley? Hannah, take a deep breath, honey.”
It was Dr. Mulligan. She caught me just as the ground started rushing up to meet my face.
“She’s… I can’t… help me, please. I can’t keep… I don’t want to… help me.”
And then everything went mercifully black and silent.
§
I could probably remember more of the next few weeks, but I don’t want to. The hospitalization lasted forty-eight hours, during which they tried to protect me from the details of what had happened to Carley. Even later on, when I was able to bring myself to read about it, there was too much speculation and rumor to dig through to uncover the truth at the heart of it all. What I did know was that it didn’t matter if it had been intentional or accidental. I knew what had killed Carley. She was drowning and the world reached out a hand only to use it to shove her head further beneath the surface.
As soon as I could speak, I asked for the new antipsychotic, and it was granted immediately. The world around me faded into gray and shadows and ambiguity. Milo and Carley and the other spirits were still there, but I could push them away now. And with them, all the living people blurred into the background, too. Conversations were senseless background noise. Faces dissolved into nothingness. I didn’t know how I looked to the other residents of New Beginnings, and I didn’t care. For the first time, I had found an off switch for the world. All I cared about was not feeling. Not feeling. Not seeing. Not hearing. Not being. I retreated into the vacuum of me, and I might have stayed there forever if she hadn’t shown up, come crashing through the void like an asteroid, shattering my cocoon into a million needling shards and jolting me back into reality.
My sister.
I had drifted throughout my day, drifted back to my room, and there she was, standing in the middle of the room, reading one of my notebooks. What startled me most about her was how clearly she appeared to me—a single resolved figure in a blurred sea of undefined nothingness. Her very gaze, as her eyes met mine, seemed to reach across the room and shake me by the shoulders.
“What are you doing in my room?” Her appearance had startled me so thoroughly out of my walking stupor that I could think of no other question to ask.
She seemed startled as well. She did not answer me, but only stared with an alarming mixture of emotions chasing each other across her face.
A face I could have sworn I knew, and yet, I couldn’t place it. I shook my head. No. No, I didn’t want to be dragged back into reality this way, not when I’d become so adept at avoiding it. I would force her into the background, like all of the others.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I told her. “I took my meds. I haven’t missed any in over a month. Why are you here?”
“I… came to see you,” she said.
That voice. Hadn’t I heard it before?
No. No, I didn’t care. I refused to feel, to acknowledge. I closed my eyes. I willed the fog to descend. “But you shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be able to see you.” I opened my eyes again and found her still clear, still staring at me with eyes that felt familiar. “No! You aren’t supposed to be here! They promised!” Desperate now, I lunged for the intercom.
“Wait! Stop! Please don’t press that button! Just hear me out! Hannah, I’m real, okay? I’m a real person.”
“What do you mean, real?”
“I mean I’m not a ghost. I’m not like the others you’ve been seeing.”
“Not ghosts. Hallucinations. Dr. Ferber promised that—”
“—Fine! I’m not a hallucination either.”
What was going on? What did this girl know of ghosts? Where had she come from? Why did she know my name?
“Are you my new roommate? They didn’t tell me I was getting a roommate.” And even as I asked it, the specter of Carley’s death reared up in my chest, threatening to overwhelm me, and I had to fight to push it back down beneath the fog. I kept asking questions just to stave off the onslaught of reality.
“No, I’m not your roommate. I’m not a patient here.”
“What are you doing in my room? Why are you touching my things?”
“My name is Jessica. I came to get you out of here. Don’t you want to get out of here?”
“I don’t want to stay here, but I have nowhere else to go,” I snapped at her. Why wouldn’t she just blur away, like everyone else! Why was she burning through so clearly, so loudly?
“What if there was somewhere else you could go? What if there was a home waiting for you, a real one, not another place like this? Would you want to leave then?”
The question was almost enough to make me laugh. I sat on the end of my bed, trying to distract myself by straightening the blankets, which I hadn’t realized until this moment I had allowed to become wrinkled. How long had they been that way? “Yes, I want to leave. But they would never let me. And even if they did, why would I go with you? Who are you, anyway?”
“I’m someone who understands what’s been happening to you. Those people you’ve seen since you were little? I can see them too.”
I was angry that I had no choice but to look at her, to acknowledge her again. Why couldn’t she just leave me alone? “I don’t believe you.”
The girl came and sat down on the very end of my bed, as far from me as she could while still daring to share the space. I fought against the desire to move as far from her as possible, to put as much distance between us as I could. I barely heard what she said next.
“It’s true. I know everyone told you that they were hallucinations, but they aren’t. They’re ghosts, people whose spirits are trapped here. I can see them too, I promise you.”
I didn’t know who this girl
was, or what the hell she thought she was doing here, but she wasn’t going to get me to admit to anything. “No, ghosts aren’t real. In therapy, they told me that my illness—”
“—You aren’t sick, Hannah. They just don’t understand what you can do. Listen, I can prove it. I just met your old roommate, Carley.
My fingers froze on the edge of the blanket. I could hardly breathe. “You couldn’t have. She’s—”
“—Dead. I know. But I just saw her.”
I was shaking now. “I don’t believe you.”
“What about Milo?”
How could she know? There’s no way she could… “I… I don’t know anyone named Milo.”
“Yes, you do! He told me you were friends.”
Two could play at this game. Milo would never give me away to some stranger, that much I was sure of. “What does he look like?”
“Really thin with shaggy dark hair and blue eyes, likes to play solitaire in that common room downstairs.”
She could have gotten that description from anyone, I told myself. She would have to do better than that. “What did he say to you? Did he tell you anything?”
The girl nodded eagerly. “He seemed pretty interested in sharing his personal information, actually. He told me he was committed here for depression, anxiety, attempted suicide, and an addiction to prescription pain killers. He’s the one who told me how to find your room. He also told me I needed a new hairstyle and that he could tell I was crazy just by talking to me.”
I fought back a hysterical urge to laugh. “That sounds like something he would say,” I admitted.
I stared at the girl, right into her eyes. She stared back, not defiantly, but openly, eagerly, as though she was hoping I could read the truth in her eyes. And for one, strangely clear moment, I could.
“You really did see him, didn’t you?”
I saw the relief break over the girl’s face. “Yes. I’m telling you the truth, I promise.”
“That doesn’t explain how you knew I was here or why I should go anywhere with you,” I said, unable to quiet the almost hysterical suspicion that the girl was somehow trying to trick me.