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Sydney plucks the ball out of my hand. “Thanks,” she says over her shoulder.
My palm is suddenly empty. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next.
Sydney notices. “Wanna play?” She holds out her paddle.
I scan the room. Debbie and Becca are sitting on the armchair, Debbie in the chair, Becca perched on the arm. Tiffany’s at the other end of the table, holding a paddle, still wearing her purse. Tara’s standing by the chalkboard, keeping score.
“You can just watch if you want,” says Sydney. She gestures to an empty chair.
“Please,” says Tara
Walking across the room to the empty chair seems like it would take a lot of steps. The door is much closer. I shake my head and turn to go, knowing, even as I walk away, that I was wrong. Getting to the door takes forever.
“Where would you like to start today?” you say.
I consider. “With Sam. Could we talk about Sam some more?”
“Sure.”
But I can’t think of what to say about Sam.
“Did I tell you about his hockey cards?”
You shake your head.
“He has this huge collection of cards. He gets a new pack whenever he gets sick. He loves those cards. He sorts them into piles all the time.”
You don’t say anything.
“According to teams or positions or statistics or whatever.”
You don’t move. I trace a triangle on the couch.
“My mom sits there with him after school. At the breakfast nook. She tats.”
You tilt your head to the side. “Tats?”
I stop tracing. “Tatting. It’s where you make lacy things like doilies and angels and things out of string. She tats and he sorts.”
Telling you about my mom and Sam at home in the breakfast nook feels wrong somehow, private.
“They have to take it easy,” I explain. “They have to rest a lot.”
“What do you do?”
“What do I do?”
“While your mother tats and your brother sorts, what do you do?”
“Oh.” I trace and retrace the triangle, stop, then start again. “Nothing. Watch TV.”
You wait for me to say more.
“I keep it on mute if they’re resting.”
You wrinkle your brow.
“I can read the captions if my mom and Sam are resting.”
“You watch the TV on mute?”
“I’m good at it.”
You shake your head slightly. “I don’t understand, exactly.”
I picture the big soundless TV in our family room, subtitles scrolling by at the foot of the screen. “The words at the bottom, they’re always a few seconds behind what the people on TV are saying. I can usually predict what they’re going to say.”
You seem like you’re going to ask a question.
“It’s kind of like a hobby,” I say.
You write in your notebook. “Do you have any other hobbies?”
“Not really.” I button my sweater. I unbutton it.
“What about running?” you say.
I can see myself running—not my whole self, just my feet beneath me, each one appearing, then disappearing, then reappearing, over and over and over. “What about it?” I say.
“Well, what does it feel like when you run?”
“I don’t know.” I pick at a hangnail. “I don’t feel much.”
You tap your finger to your lip.
“That’s sort of why I like it.”
Your dead-cow chair creaks. You lean forward and open your mouth to speak.
“My mom never liked it,” I say. “She always thought I was going to get hit by a car or something.”
You sit back.
“She said she was always waiting to get a call from the police,” I say. “Whenever I came in from running, she looked sort of mad.”
I picture my mom sitting in the breakfast nook, tatting and frowning, while Sam deals out his hockey cards in neat piles. She doesn’t look up when I come in, she just keeps tatting. Sam shows me his cards, pictures of hockey players smiling, hockey players skating, players with their helmets on, with their helmets off. “Don’t you want to take a shower?” my mom says. “Don’t you have some homework to do?”
You’re staring at me intently; you must have asked me a question.
“What?”
“I’m not sure I understand,” you say. “Why would your mother be angry at you?”
“I don’t know. As soon as I come in she always says. ‘Don’t you have some homework to do?’ So I usually just go upstairs and leave them alone.”
Your eyes widen slightly. “Is that how it feels?”
“What?”
“That your mother doesn’t want you around so she can be alone with your brother?”
I don’t know how exactly, but somehow I’ve said something I didn’t mean to say. Something that’s not quite true. Or maybe something that’s sort of a little bit true.
I spend the rest of the hour staring down the clock.
Study Hall is a completely different place at night. Everybody has to be there from seven till eight, since we all have to keep up with our schoolwork during our stay at Sick Minds. We’re supposed to be silent, but people whisper and pass notes all the time; whenever the attendant steps out, the room erupts.
Right now, though, it’s quiet. Tara’s painting her nails, Tiffany’s writing a letter to a friend out in the real world, Becca’s asleep, and Debbie’s tracing a magazine picture of a model in a ball gown. Only Sydney is actually doing homework.
The new girl, whose name is apparently Amanda—I checked the chalkboard—is stretched out in a chair in the last row, doing an imitation of being asleep. Her head is leaning against the wall, her eyes are closed, her mouth is curled in a half-smile. I know she’s awake, though, because I can see her bumping the inside of her wrist against the edge of the chair in a rhythmic motion.
Watching her bugs me, so I go back to my French assignment, which is to memorize vocabulary words that might come in handy on vacation, words for things like bikinis, rental cars, and restaurants. Since we aren’t allowed to use pencils here, even for math (they’re considered “sharps”), I have to write with a felt-tip pen, which smears; I crumple the page and start again.
The attendant gets up and says she’s going to take her empty soda can to the recycling bin down the hall. She says she expects us all to behave.
She leaves; instantly, the room comes to life.
“Can I have the nail polish when you’re done?” Sydney asks Tara
“If I can borrow your Walkman,” says Tara
While they’re busy making the switch, Tiffany turns around to check out Debbie’s drawing. Debbie cups her hand over it, too late.
“Why do you do that all the time?” Tiffany says to Debbie.
“Do what?”
“Draw pictures of thin people?”
The attendant comes back, clearing her throat loudly. Tiffany whips around in her seat; everyone goes back to what they were doing.
Debbie’s stunned. She pulls back the tracing paper and studies the model in the magazine. Then she thumbs through her notebook. Pictures of tall, slender women in fancy clothes go by. She gets to the last page and looks up. No one sees but me. Debbie has tears in her eyes.
I turn away, quickly, but Debbie knows I saw. When I look back a few seconds later, she’s draping her sweater over Becca, tucking the fabric around her, the way a mother would. When I first got here, Debbie tried to talk to me; she even offered me a piece of cake her mother sent her. By now, though, I’ve probably scared her away.
Debbie pulls the sweater up around Becca’s neck, which is unbelievably white and fragile, closes her notebook, and stares into space until the attendant says we can go.
Rochelle, the bathroom attendant, is bent over her magazine when I go in to brush my teeth that night. Someone in the toilet stall behind me jiggles the handle. The toilet wheezes, then roars. T
he sour smell of vomit fills the air.
Becca comes out of the stall, wearing a bathrobe with puppies printed on it and brown furry slippers that are actually shaped like puppies. The stall door bangs in her wake. Then her face is next to mine in the mirror. She dabs the corner of her mouth with toilet paper.
As Becca breezes out, I watch Rochelle out of the corner of my eye. Her lips are moving as she reads; she doesn’t even register Becca going by.
Amanda’s missing at breakfast the next day. This is a big deal because meals are mandatory, even if you’re not a food-issues person. Debbie’s gone over to the cafeteria attendant to find out what’s going on.
“Debbie should butt out,” says Tiffany
“She’s just trying to help,” says Becca
Tiffany rolls her eyes; I run my finger along the metal strip at the edge of the table and notice that it’s ever so slightly loose.
The chimes sound; breakfast is over. There’s a lot of clattering and complaining as people nearby get up to go wherever they’re going. Our group stalls, waiting for Debbie. She hurries back to our table and everyone leans in to hear what she has to say.
“She got caught,” Debbie whispers. “Cutting.”
My cheeks flame. I pull my sleeves down and stare at my lap.
“Eeuww,” says Becca “That’s so gross.”
“Shut up,” says Sydney I don’t look up, but I think she said that for my sake. “So where is she?”
“Hammacher, probably,” says Debbie.
“How do you know?” says Sydney.
“I heard she had to get a shot,” says Debbie. She lowers her voice dramatically. “A sedative.”
The cafeteria attendant comes over and tells us we better get moving, that she’s handing out demerits today. We gather up our trays and head toward the dishroom. I’m by myself, as usual, tagging along behind Tiffany and Sydney.
“They say we’re nuts because we like to get wasted,” Tiffany says, shaking her head. “What that new girl, Amanda, what she does, is crazy.”
Sydney turns around to see if I’ve heard; I turn back to the breakfast table, pretending I’ve forgotten something. Getting a demerit for being late would be better than having to see the worried look on Sydney’s face.
You sit down in your chair, a fresh sheet of paper at the ready.
“I don’t feel like talking today,” I say
You nod. “All right,”you say.
We sit there a while, me studying a shaft of weak winter sunlight, you studying a file.
“Is that mine?” I say.
“Yes.”
I go back to looking at the patch of sun; I decide it’s a rhomboid. “What’s it say?”
“Your file? Not a lot.”
I sit very still.
“There’s some basic information about you, an intake evaluation, a school report.”
A cloud passes by outside; the rhomboid disappears.
“Who wrote the school report?” I say.
You open the file. “A Miss Magee,”you say. “The school nurse.”
“She was a sub.”
“Oh.”
Sun pours in through the window again; the rhomboid is now just a basic parallelogram.
“She was the one who discovered that you were cutting your arms, wasn’t she?”
“She called me sweetie,” I say. Immediately I wish I hadn’t said this.
“Sweetie?”
“Never mind.”
I look for the rabbit crack on the ceiling, but I can’t quite find it.
“She wore socks and sandals,” I say.
“What else do you remember?”
“She said her regular job was at a drug rehab. She said, ‘We let it all hang out there.’She was sort of a hippie.”
You wait to see if I’ll say more.
“I used to get these stomach aches. The regular nurse always sent me back to class.”
“And this substitute nurse? This Miss Magee?”
“She said, ‘Is something bothering you, sweetie?’”
You smile ever so slightly.
“I just kept staring at the eye chart behind her after that. I can still remember the first line: E F S P D.”
You smile a little more.
“She made me sit on the examining table. She felt my forehead. She took my pulse. Then she dropped my arm and said, ‘Oh wow.’ She said she’d be right back. I lay down on the table and the next thing I remember, she was shaking my shoulder to wake me up. My mom was standing there, pressing a tissue to her lips.”
I check to see if you are pleased with all these words. You look concerned.
“You know what?” I say. “I’ve thought about her a lot since I’ve been here.”
You tilt your head.
“About … what’s her name?” I say. “The substitute nurse.”
“Shelly Magee.”
“Yeah. I’ve thought about sending her a postcard.”
You raise an eyebrow.
“You know—‘Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.’”
“Are you?”
I don’t understand.
“Are you having a wonderful time?”
I pick a piece of fuzz off the couch, roll it between my fingers, flick it into the air.
“Do you wish she was here?”
“No.”
“Callie, let me ask you something.” You sit forward in your dead-cow chair. “How exactly did Shelly Magee see your scars?”
“She took my pulse.”
“You didn’t try to stop her?”
A sudden heat washes over me. I can feel my cheeks reddening, my throat getting tight. I pull my arms to my sides and sit very still.
“I’m glad you didn’t try to stop her.” Your voice comes across the space between us, gentle but sure.
I take in the sight of you in your leather chair, so calm, so normal, so pretty in your long green skirt.
“You don’t think I’m crazy?” I laugh.
You don’t laugh.
“You don’t think I’m insane for doing this?” I hold up my arm, my sleeve pulled safely over my bandage.
“No, Callie,” you say matter-of-factly “I don’t think you’re crazy at all.”
I blink.
“I think you’ve come up with a way to deal with feelings that you find overwhelming. Overwhelmingly bad, overwhelmingly frightening.”
I sink back into the cushions on your couch. It occurs to me that I sit up perfectly straight the whole time I’m in here, that my back has never actually touched the back of the couch.
“Really?” I say.
“Really.”
The clock says it’s time to go.
“So, can you make me stop?” I say.
“Make you? No. I can’t make you.”
“Well, then, can you, you know, help?”
You tap your lip. “Yes,”you say, “if you want to stop.” Then you stand up and say we’ll talk more tomorrow.
I say OK, but what I really want to say is that I’m not sure I can stop.
Everyone else must still be on the smoking porch because Claire’s the only one in the room when I get to Group. Her glasses are in her hands and she’s pinching the bridge of her nose; there are two red spots where her glasses usually sit. She looks up when she sees me at the door and smiles. I don’t exactly smile back, but I don’t not smile either. We sit there a while, me reviewing the new order of cars in the parking lot and Claire blowing on coffee in a paper cup, until the other girls file in.
The room is suddenly full of talking and laughing. Sydney is at the end of one of her stories. “That proves I’m the sanest one in the family,” she says, flopping down in her chair.
“Me too!” Tara practically cries out. Then she stops cold in the center of the circle: Amanda is back and she’s sitting in Tara’s seat.
Tara gives Claire a pleading look. Claire doesn’t respond; Sydney pats the seat of the chair next to hers, and Tara slips in beside Sydney.
Becca darts into the seat next to Tara Debbie huffs, then takes the last seat, the one next to me.
I draw my arms to my side to make room for her.
There’s a long silence. Somebody complains about the food. Then more silence. Somebody else complains about the bathrooms, then about how nosy the attendants are. More silence.
“So?” Sydney says to Amanda “Where were you?”
“When?”
Sydney looks around the group for help.
“At breakfast,” Tara says. “You weren’t at breakfast.”
Amanda smirks. “Room service.”
Tiffany laughs. No one else does.
“Seriously,” says Sydney.
“You really care?” says Amanda “That’s so co-dependent of you.”
Sydney looks confused, then hurt.
“I was in the infirmary,” Amanda says.
“Really?” says Debbie.
“Really,” Amanda says sarcastically.
“I heard you had to get a shot,” Debbie says.
Amanda arches an eyebrow.
“Didn’t they give you a sedative?” says Debbie.
Amanda laughs. “Tetanus,” she announces. Then she leans forward and winks at me. “Right?”
I can’t answer, but I can’t stand to have everybody looking at me either. I nod. Then I go back to looking out the window and wondering whatever happened to that fly that was caught between the glass and the screen.
After Group, Ruby waves to me from her desk. “You have a package,” she says. “Priority Mail.”
I know, as soon as I see it, it’s from my mother. The mailing box is covered with cat stickers, the address is written in calligraphy; I wonder what the Sick Minds postman must have thought.
I tuck it under my arm and start to head back to my room.
“Hold on,” says Ruby. “You have to open that under supervision. Standard operating procedure.”
Ruby uses a key to slice through the mailing tape. Inside, nestled in a sea of pink Styrofoam peanuts, is a quilted calico thing. She holds it up. It’s my name, in puffy calico letters.