my back and count the seconds, praying for herto fall asleep, so I can hear the sound ofher steady in-out breathing—so I can fall asleep.
She rolls over, facing my direction.
“Callie?” she whispers. The space between our twin beds is only a foot or two.
I hold my breath and try to pretend I’m asleep.
“Callie? Callie,” she says. “Do you still do it?”
I hold very still.
“I mean, are you still, you know, cutting yourself?”
From down the hall comes the faint squeaking of Ruby’s nurse’s shoes as she makes her rounds. From the sound of it, Ruby’s still four doors away. I think of it as a problem on a standardized test: if Ruby’s shoes squeak every 2.5 seconds and she’s four rooms away, how long till she reaches our door?
“Lookit, Callie.” Sydney blows out a gust of air, the way she does when she’s smoking an imaginary cigarette in Group. “It’s OK with me if you don’t want to talk.”
Just a few squeaks until Ruby’s at our door. People who aren’t asleep when Ruby comes around have to take sleeping pills. Everyone is afraid of those pills—even the substance-abuse guests.
Sydney sighs. “Just don’t, you know…please don’t hurt yourself.”
Tears, warm and sudden, sting the corners of my eyes, but I don’t cry. Sam cries. My mom cries. I don’t cry. I roll over as Ruby passes by. She pauses outside our door a minute, a brief interruption in the steady squeak, squeak of her shoes. Then she moves on. And after a while I figure Sydney must have fallen asleep, because finally I can hear the steady in-out of her breathing.
On the way to your office the next day Ruth clears her throat. She puts her hand over her mouth, then says she has something to tell me, that this is the last day she’ll be my escort. Her voice is small, unsteady. “I’m graduating,” she says. “Tomorrow.”
She smiles a practice smile, and one of my dad’s favorite dumb jokes comes to mind. The joke is about a family riding along in a brand-new convertible. The car hits a bump, and one of the kids, a girl named Ruth, falls out. But the family keeps on driving. Ruthlessly. “Get it?” he would say, grinning. “Ruthlessly?”
Sick Minds will be a Ruthless place once she’s gone. I would like to tell Ruth this, give this joke to her as a graduation gift. But then she is gone and I’m sitting next to the UFO—Ruthlessly—and wondering how she got better without looking any different.
You furrow your brow and ask me to please look at you a minute. I look past you, out the window, at a squirrel sitting on the end of a branch.
“Callie,” you say softly. “I want you to think about whether you want to continue coming to see me.”
The squirrel nibbles on his acorn, looks around suspiciously, then goes back to his lunch.
“This—the two of us sitting here every day, with me watching you count the stripes on the wallpaper—isn’t helping you.”
The squirrel freezes; the branch quivers as another squirrel scrambles toward him.
“And Callie…I believe you want help.”
The squirrels are gone, but the branch is still quivering. I steal a glimpse at you; you’re pretty, I realize, and youngish. You wrap your hands around your knees, like we’re two girlfriends, just hanging out, talking. I go back to counting the stripes on the wallpaper.
After a while, I hear your dead-cow chair groan. You sigh. “OK,” you say. “That’s all for today.”
The clock says we still have fifty minutes left. But you’ve already capped your pen and closed your notebook.
I keep my hand on your doorknob a minute, standing in the waiting area outside your office, wondering what I’m supposed to do now. There’s no one to escort me and there’s no place to escort me to.
I picture you on the other side of the door, closing the manila file with my name on it, all the empty sheets of notebook paper, from all the days I came and sat in your office counting the stripes on the wallpaper, spilling into the trash. And it occurs to me that I’m alone—really alone—for the first time since I got here.
I let go of the knob and move away from your door, slowly then faster, down the hall, not really knowing where I’m going, just going. I pass a supply closet, then a door with a large red bar and a metal flag on it marked “For Emergency Use Only,” and I wonder if an alarm really would ring if I opened it, if it would be like a prison escape movie, if Rochelle would throw down her magazine and come running, if Doreen would drop her linens and man the searchlight, if the other girls would stumble out of their rooms and ask what was going on. But my feet carry me past the Emergency Use Only door, back the way I came with Ruth a few minutes ago, back to Study Hall.
The door is closed, though. There’s no sign or anything. Of course it’s closed; Study Hall is over. Everyone is at Individual or Anger Management or Art Therapy. Everyone except me.
Down the hall I hear keys jingle. Marie, the daytime bathroom attendant, is taking up her post on the orange chair. I walk in her direction, trying to act normal.
She barely notices as I go past; she doesn’t ask me what I’m doing here without an escort or why I’m here when I’m supposed to be somewhere else.
I pick a stall down at the end and stand inside facing the toilet. I put my hand on the handle and imagine myself imitating the man on the radio, the man who says, “Testing. Testing. One. Two. Three.” The handle is cold and wet with condensation; I wipe my hand on my jeans and pray that the sound of the toilet flushing will be loud enough. “This is a test,” the man says. “This is only a test.”
I clear my throat and jiggle the handle.
“Everything OK in there?” Marie calls out.
I grip the handle.
“I said, is everything OK in there?”
I can hear the scrape of Marie’s chair on the tile floor as she stands up.
I push on the handle. A great roar comes up from the toilet bowl. I lean over like I’m going to be sick, but nothing comes out.
Forty-five minutes is a long time. You can divide it into nine five-minute segments, five nine-minute segments, three fifteen-minute segments, fifteen three-minute segments, or two twenty-two-and-a-half-minute segments. That’s if you have a watch. If you have to spend it hiding in the laundry room listening for the sounds of footsteps overhead telling you that people are finished with Art Therapy or Anger Management or Individual, you have to time it just right so you come upstairs not too early, not too late, so that you can slip into Group right on schedule without anyone even noticing that you were gone.
As I’m leaving Study Hall for dinner, Tara’s coming toward me carrying a bouquet of tulips. The flowers, which are gigantic in her thin, little-girl arms, are dripping, even though she’s cupped her hand under the stems.
I consider turning back, pretending I left something in Study Hall, but Tara calls out to me. “Can you believe it?” she says. “They took the vase away at the front desk. Glass.”
Here at Sick Minds we guests are not allowed to have any “sharps”—glass or thumbtacks or CDs or ballpoint pens or razors. Sydney keeps making a joke about how there’s only one difference between the employees here and the guests; the guests, she says, are the ones with hairy legs.
Tara stops a few feet in front of me. My feet drag to a stop, too. “Here,” she says. She disentangles one flower from the bunch and holds it out toward me, the way Sam did when he gave me the “Hop your feeling beter” card. Then, before I can take it or not take it, she places the flower on top of my geometry book.
She breezes past, humming. It takes an enormous effort for me to start walking again.
Sydney and I are sitting on our beds after dinner studying when the new girl knocks on our doorless door frame. She’s wearing a tank top, cutoffs, and flip-flops; I feel cold just looking at her. “It’s for you,” she says, cocking her chin in my direction.
I don’t understand. Is her outfit for me? To make me look at her? To make me feel cold?
“The phone,” she says. “It’s for you.” She turns to go, then pauses. “Hey, how do you give someone the silent treatment over the phone? I mean, how do they know if you’re even there?”
My cheeks flame. I put down my geometry book, get up from my bed, and follow her down the hall, counting the number of times her yellow flip-flops thwack against the glossy green linoleum.
She pauses a moment before turning in to her room, which is right next to the phone booth. “Don’t worry,”
