Cut

I

You say it’s up to me to do the talking. You lean forward, place a box of tissues in front of me, and your black leather chair groans like a living thing. Like the cow it used to be before somebody killed it and turned it into a chair in a shrink’s office in a loony bin.

Your stockinged legs make a shushing sound as you cross them. “Can you remember how it started?” you say.

I remember exactly.

It was at the last cross-country meet, right around the four-mile mark. Everybody had passed me, just like the week before and the week before that. Everybody—except a girl from the other team. We were the only ones left in the last stretch of the course, the part that winds through the woods and comes out behind the school. Our shadows passed along the ground slantwise; slowly they merged, then her shadow passed mine.

The soles of her sneakers swam up and down in front of me, first one, then the other, a grid of ridges that spelled out the upside-down name of the shoe company. My steps fell in time with hers. My feet went where her feet had just been. She leaned in around a corner, I leaned in around a corner. She breathed, I breathed.

Then she was gone.

I couldn’t even picture her anymore. But what scared me, really scared me, was that I couldn’t remember the moment when I’d stopped seeing her. And I knew then that if I couldn’t see her, no one could see me.

Sounds from the track meet floated by. A whistle trilling. Muffled applause, the weak sputtering of gloved hands clapping. I was still running, but now I was off the path, heading away from the finish line, past the cars in the parking lot, the flagpole, and the HOME OF THE LIONS sign. Past fast-food places and car repair shops and video stores. Past the new houses and the park. Until, somehow, I was at the entrance to our development.

It was starting to get dark now, and I slowed down, walking past houses with windows of square yellow light where mothers were inside making dinner, past houses with windows of square blue light where kids were inside watching TV, to our house, where the driveway was empty and the lights were off.

I let myself in and flipped the light switch. There was an explosion of light. The kitchen slid sideways, then righted itself.

I leaned against the door. “I’m home,” I said to no one.

The room tilted left, then right, then straightened out. I grabbed hold of the edge of the dinner table and tried to remember if we stopped eating there because it was piled with junk or if it was piled with junk because we stopped eating there.

On the table there was a roll of batting, a glue gun, a doily, a 1997 Krafty Kitchens catalogue. Next to the catalogue was a special craft knife with the word EXACTO on the handle. It was sleek, like a fountain pen, with a thin triangular blade at the tip. I picked it up and laid the blade against the doily. The little knots came undone, just like that. I touched the blade to a piece of ribbon draped across the table and pressed, ever so slightly. The ribbon unfurled into two pieces and slipped to the floor without a sound. Then I placed the blade next to the skin on my palm.

A tingle arced across my scalp. The floor tipped up at me and my body spiraled away. Then I was on the ceiling looking down, waiting to see what would happen next. What happened next was that a perfect, straight line of blood bloomed from under the edge of the blade. The line grew into a long, fat bubble, a lush crimson bubble that got bigger and bigger. I watched from above, waiting to see how big it would get before it burst. When it did, I felt awesome. Satisfied, finally. Then exhausted.

I don’t tell you any of this, though. I don’t say anything. I just hug my elbows to my sides. My mind is a video on fast-forward. A video with no soundtrack.

And finally you sigh and stand up and say, “That’s all we have time for today.”

Twice a day we have Group. Group therapy according to the brochure, they give you at the admissions office, is the “keystone of the treatment philosophy” here at Sick Minds. The real name of the place is Sea Pines, even though there is no sea and there are no pines. My roommate, Sydney, who has a nickname for everything, calls it Sick Minds. Her nickname for me is S.T., for Silent Treatment.

We, by the way, are called guests. Our problems are called issues. Most of the girls are anorexic. They’re called guests with food issues. Some are druggies. They’re called guests with substance-abuse issues. The rest, like me, are assorted psychos. We’re called guests with behavioral issues. The nurses are called attendants. And the place is called a residential treatment facility. It is not called a loony bin.

There aren’t assigned seats in Group, but people tend to sit according to issues. The food-issue guests—Tara, a really skinny girl who has to wear a baseball cap to cover a bald spot where her hair fell out, and Becca, another really skinny girl who wears white little-girl tights that pool around her ankles and who came straight here from a hospital after she had a heart attack, and Debbie, a really, really overweight girl who says she’s been here the longest—sit in a cluster of orange plastic chairs next to Claire, the group leader. The substance-abuse guests—Sydney, who says she’s addicted to every drug she’s ever tried, and Tiffany, who seems normal but is here instead of going to jail for smoking crack—sit together on the other side of Claire’s chair.

I sit by myself. I pick the chair the farthest from Claire and closest to the window, which they never open, even though it’s always about a hundred degrees in here. Today, when Claire invites someone to start off, I decide to work on memorizing the order of the cars in the parking lot. Brown, white, white, blue, beige. Brown, white, white, blue, beige.

“All right, ladies,” says Claire. “Who wants to go first?” Claire makes a little tent with her fingers and waits. I lean back in my usual spot in the circle, out of her line of vision.

Tara tugs on her hair, Debbie smoothes her sweatshirt over her stomach, and Becca slides off her chair and sits on the carpet at Debbie’s feet, her legs tucked underneath her, Girl Scout style. No one answers.

Debbie cracks her weight-control gum. Tiffany, who for some reason wears a purse strapped across her chest at all times, fiddles with the latch.

“Ah, come on,” Claire says. “Yesterday was visiting day. Surely somebody has something to say about that.”

I add new cars to my list. Brown, white, white, blue, beige, green, red. Brown, white, white, blue, beige, green, red.

“OK, OK.” Debbie says this like everyone was begging her to talk. “I might as well go first.”

There’s scattered squirming. Tiffany rolls her eyes. Tara, who’s so weak from not eating that she dozes off a lot during Group, leans her head against the wall; her eyes droop shut.

“It was terrible,” Debbie says. “Not for me. But poor Becca.” She gives Becca’s thin shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Wait till I tell you what—”

Tiffany sighs and her enormous chest rises and falls. “Not for you, Debbie? Then how come I saw you at the nurses’ desk last night begging for an escort to the vending machine?”

Debbie turns red.

“How come you’re always so willing to talk about everyone else’s problems?” Tiffany says. “What about yours? What happened at your visit, Debbie?”

Debbie regards her. “Nothing really.”

“Really?” Sydney says, not unkindly.

“Really,” says Debbie.

“That’s crap,” says Tiffany. Little drops of spit fly out of her mouth.

For Debbie this is a swear. She hates it when people swear. The temperature goes up to about 110 degrees.

“Debbie,” Claire says gravely, “how do you feel about what Tiffany’s saying?”

Debbie shrugs. “I don’t care.”

Sydney points a shaky finger in Debbie’s direction. “You do so,” she says. “You’re pissed. Why don’t you admit it, Debbie?”

Everyone waits.

“Well, I’d rather that she didn’t swear.” Debbie addresses this comment to Claire.

“Why don’t you look at me?” Tiffany says. “Why don’t you say, ‘Tiffany, I don’t like it when you say crap. Could you please watch your goddamn mouth?’”

Tara giggles. Sydney tries not to.

Debbie’s mouth stretches into a tight smile, then her chin starts to quiver; I wipe my palms on my jeans.

“I know you all hate me because I’m not like the rest of you,” she says. The effort of trying not to cry is making her face very red.

“I don’t hate you,” Becca says, craning her neck up toward Debbie.

“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I want to graduate,” Debbie says. “I don’t want to just sit around here listening to people complain about their rotten childhoods.”

Tiffany lifts her palms to the ceiling, charade for “I give up.”

“Anyone else care to comment?” Claire says.

I hold very still. Claire’s a hawk for body language. Biting your nails means you want to talk. Leaning forward means you want to talk. Leaning back means you want to talk. I don’t move.

Sydney clears her throat. “I don’t care if we talk about my visit,” she says.

People exhale.

“My mom kept spritzing her mouth with Bianca but she’d had a couple of pops before she got here. My dad kept checking his watch and making calls on his cell phone and my sister sat there doing her math homework.”

The formula for converting Fahrenheit into Celsius enters my head uninvited. I try to calculate what 110 degrees Fahrenheit equals in Celsius.

“For my family…” Sydney taps the end of a pen, flicking an imaginary ash off the end of her imaginary cigarette. “…that’s quality time.”

People laugh, a little too hard.

“How did you feel when they were here?” Claire says.

“Fine.” The smile on Sydney’s face wilts slightly. “I mean, it’s just like home.”

This is a joke. No one laughs. Sydney surveys the group.

“Look. I have a strategy. Why expect anything? If you don’t expect anything, you don’t get disappointed.”

Tara raises her hand. “Were you?”

Sydney doesn’t understand. “Was I what?”

“Disappointed?”

Sydney still looks lost.

“I mean, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,” Tara says. “But a minute ago you accused Debbie of pretending not to be pissed. Well, I think maybe you’re pissed. At your mom and your dad and your sister.” Tara sinks back in her chair; she gets tired just talking.

“I’m not mad at my sister,” Sydney says. “It’s not her fault. I mean, how would you like to spend your Saturday afternoon with a bunch of freaks?” She claps a hand over her mouth. “No offense or anything. I mean, we spend all our time with freaks, but that’s different. We are freaks.”

A couple of people laugh.

Sydney goes on. “I don’t care about my mom. I mean, what do you expect? That she’d wait till she got out of here for happy hour? Yeah, right. But my dad…”

I unfold and refold my arms across my chest. Bad move. Claire notices. Luckily, Sydney keeps talking.

“I don’t know. He’s not very good at stuff like this…” Sydney wrings the hem of her sweater; her hands are really shaking now. She laughs, sort of. Then, with no warning, she’s crying. “I’m not pissed,” she says. “It’s…I’m just… I don’t know, disappointed.”

I squeeze my arms to my chest and feel embarrassed for Sydney, the way I used to in grade school when someone wet their pants. I hate Group. People always end up saying things that make them look pathetic.

“At least they came,” says Tiffany. “My dad didn’t even show.”

Something else comes into my mind uninvited. It’s an image of a dad walking up the sidewalk on visiting day, his hands stuffed in his jacket, his head tucked down against the wind. I tap on the window in the reception room. He glances up and I see that he has glasses and a red face and he’s not my dad at all; he’s someone else’s dad. I go back to memorizing the cars in the parking lot.

“How do you feel about that?” Claire says to Tiffany.

“Screw him. That’s how I feel.”

I cross and recross my arms.

Claire pounces. “Callie.”

At the sound of my name the heat closes in on me. I squint my eyes like I’m trying to make out something totally fascinating in the parking lot and think Brown, white, white, blue, beige. I lose my place and have to start again.

“Callie?” Claire’s not giving up. “Do you want to tell us about your visit yesterday?”

There’s a fly caught between the window and the screen. He seems sort of surprised each time he bangs into the glass. But he just staggers away, then rams into the glass again.

“Callie?”

I pull a curtain of hair down in front of my eyes and wait. After a while, someone from the other side of the circle starts talking. I can’t really make out what she’s saying, though. All I hear is the zzzzzt-zzzzzt of the fly banging into the window.

There’s a burst of chatter as everyone files out of Group. I hang behind the other girls, then go down the hall and check out the chalkboard next to the attendants’ desk. On the board is a list of everyone’s names and the treatments they go for after Group. Tiffany goes to Anger Management. Tara goes to Relaxation Therapy. Sydney and Tiffany also go to the infirmary for urine tests—to make sure they aren’t taking anything. Becca, Tara, and Debbie go too—to make sure they are taking things: vitamins and food supplements for Tara and Becca, heart medicine for Becca, Prozac for Debbie. After that, Debbie goes to an exercise room where a trainer puts her on the treadmill. Tara and Becca get taken on a slow walk around the grounds to make sure they don’t get on the treadmill.

There’s nothing on the board next to my name. I don’t get taken anywhere.

I duck around the corner before anyone can see me checking the board, because the other day I overheard Debbie, who spends a lot of time hanging around the attendants’ desk, telling Becca that the people at Sick Minds were still trying to figure out what to do with me.

When you’re a Level One (a new guest, or a guest exhibiting Inappropriate Behavior), you aren’t allowed to go anywhere unsupervised. Level Twos (anybody who’s accumulated ten points for Appropriate Behavior) are allowed to go to the dayroom and to their appointments on their own, but they have to get escorts to go to the laundry room or the vending machine. Level Threes (people who are about to graduate, like Debbie) are the escorts. But even Level Threes with food issues have to get attendants or other Level Threes to escort them to the vending machines. It’s complicated learning the Sick Minds system. It’s easier being a Level One, if you ask me.

Since I’m a Level One, the only place I can go while everyone else is at treatment is Study Hall. It’s supervised by an attendant named Cynthia, who sits in the front of the classroom answering multiple-choice questions in a big workbook. The only good thing about afternoon Study Hall, besides the fact that I’m usually the only one here, is that it’s quiet. There are signs all over the place politely reminding us guests to respect each other’s needs for silence; at least in here, I’m actually displaying Appropriate Behavior.

The walls are lined with cork board that other guests have covered with graffiti. I spend a lot of time reading their messages—names and comments like “This place sucks,” or “Mrs. Bryant is a bitch.” (Mrs. Bryant is either the lady who works in the admissions office or the head of the place, I’m not sure.) Mostly I listen to the rustling of paper as Cynthia turns the pages in her workbook.

I take my favorite seat in the back of the room, in the corner farthest away from Cynthia, and pretend to do the geometry assignment that my school faxed in. Really, I watch the dog who lives next to the maintenance shed. All he does is sleep and pace. Mostly he sleeps, but right now he’s pacing back and forth in front of his doghouse. He’s barking like mad at a delivery truck that’s coming up the driveway. He trots to the end of his chain, barks, then turns and trots back. Then he turns around and does the same thing all over again. He’s gone back and forth so many times, he’s worn a dirt path in front of his house.

I sit there watching the dust fly as he paces back and forth, back and forth, while nobody pays attention to him. After a while I get up and move to a desk facing the wall.

Ruth, a Level Three from another group, arrives at the door, on time as always, to escort me to Individual. Ruth is this very shy girl with bad skin and a way of ducking her chin inside her turtleneck; she just appears at the door every day at the same time, waiting for me to notice her. She looks so uncomfortable with her chin jammed into her chest and her hands shoved into her pockets that I always just get up and go with her.

The truth is, I don’t mind being escorted by Ruth. I sort of like listening to our sneakers squeak along the hallway and not worrying that Ruth is going to try to make me talk. And I have a feeling that maybe Ruth doesn’t mind escorting me either, because when we get to the waiting area outside your office, sometimes she hangs around a while, even though technically she doesn’t have to.

After she goes, it’s just me and the little white plastic UFO on the floor outside your office. Mrs. Bryant, who gave me my tour on the first day and who I’ve never seen since, said that the UFO—which looks like a plastic party hat with a motor inside—is called a white-noise machine. She said all the therapists have them outside their doors so people in the hall can’t hear what the guests inside are saying. (The UFOs don’t, however, drown out the yelling or the crying.)

Since I’m not talking (or yelling or crying), you could turn the UFO off during our session; that way, Sick Minds could save a little on the electric bill. I think about telling you that, but of course that would require talking, which would require turning on the UFO.

You open your door and invite me to come in. I consider lying down on the couch, thinking how nice it would be to take a nap there for the next hour, but I sit in my usual spot, the corner farthest from you and your dead-cow chair. You sit down and ask about visiting day. “How was it for you?” you say.

I study your shoes. They’re tiny black witch’s shoes with silver buckles.

“What was it like seeing your family?”

Your shoes look like they’re made of fabric, like they’re too delicate to be worn in the real world.

“Is there anything you want to tell me?”

I consider saying something totally stupid. Something so boringly normal that you’ll finally give up and leave me alone. I think about telling you that my mom wore her good wool coat, the one she wears to church and to doctor’s appointments. Or about telling you that she looked tired, like the Before people in the Before and After pictures in her magazines. Or about how she started massaging her forehead as soon as she walked into the reception room.

Sam looked scared and excited all at once. He also seemed skinnier than ever; even though he was wearing a bulky red sweatshirt, his inhaler made a big bulge from inside his front shirt pocket. He let me hug him, then shoved a card at me. “I made this for you,” he said. The card had pictures of cats all over it. Cats dancing. Cats jumping rope. Cats drinking tea. Cats playing basketball.

Sam’s a really good artist for a third-grader, I imagine myself telling you, in a smart, sane voice. But his spelling really sucks. The card, which I hid under the mattress back in my room, says “Hop your feeling beter.” It’s signed by Sam and Linus.

Linus is our cat, I’d explain to you. You’d nod thoughtfully and I’d go on to explain that Linus has to live outside now, since the doctor said she was one of the things making Sam sick. I’d tell you that we named her Linus, even though she’s a girl, because she used to carry around a sock in her mouth when she was a baby. It looked like a security blanket, so we called her Linus, I’d tell you. You’d smile. We’d make small talk. Except that I don’t make talk, small or otherwise.

It was weird not saying anything to Sam when he handed me the card. I patted him on the head instead. Then my mom started sniffling, so I was able to walk away and get her a tissue from the coffee table. That’s one good thing about this place, I’d tell you. There are tissue boxes everywhere.

I steered my mom and Sam over to a couch in the reception room. Sam looked around, his mouth hanging open like it does when he watches TV. “Why is this place called Sea Pines?”

He was waiting for me to answer, I think, but I was too busy pulling on a loose thread on the seat cushion. I pictured the whole couch coming unraveled and the three of us sitting on the floor in a giant pile of couch thread.

My mom was rubbing her temples. “It’s just a name, Sam, like Pennbrook Manor, where Gram lived,” she said finally.

“Where Gram died, you mean,” Sam said.

“Well…” She gazed past Sam, around the reception room, trying to see what the other families were doing.

“That place smelled bad,” Sam said.

“Well, Sam, this is different,” my mom said. “This is a perfectly nice place.”

“But what is it? Why is Cal here, anyhow?”

“Lower your voice,” she said. “I already told you. She’s not feeling well.”

“She doesn’t look sick.”

“Shhh,” she said. “Let’s talk about something pleasant during the time we have, shall we?” She folded a tissue in her lap, then turned to me. “How’s your roommate? Is she a nice girl?”

I got up and stood by the window, scanning the parking lot for my dad. I saw a man coming up the sidewalk and I tapped on the window; he lifted his head and I realized he wasn’t my dad at all. The sliding doors opened and the man came in and gave Tara a big hug.

“If you’re looking for Dad, he’s not coming,” Sam said.

My mom blew her nose.

I kept looking out the window; I didn’t expect to see our car in the parking lot, since my mom doesn’t drive anywhere anymore. She’s terrified of big trucks and of missing her exit on the highway. She’s also terrified of E. coli in hamburgers, childnappers at the mall, lead in the drinking water, and, of course, dust mites, animal fur, molds, spores, pollen, and anything else that might give Sam an asthma attack. I don’t know what I expected to see in the parking lot. But I kept watching.

“Mommy,” said Sam, “can I get some candy?” He was pointing to the vending machine.

My mom said yes and I thought about how Sam could just walk over and buy himself a Snickers, without an escort. My mom gave him a bunch of quarters, and he skipped, actually skipped, over to the vending machine.

“Daddy’s putting in some extra hours,” my mom whispered when Sam was out of earshot. “He’s trying to make a little extra money.”

She folded her tissue into a neat square, then a smaller one, then an even smaller one. Keeping track made me dizzy.

“We got a letter from the insurance company.” She was speaking so quietly, I had to lean in to hear her. “They won’t pay for your… your treatment here.”

The reception room lifted off the foundation, floated for a second, then became solid again. I checked to see if my mom noticed.

“They say they won’t pay because this thing you do, you know, cutting yourself, they say it’s self-inflicted. They don’t cover things that are self-inflicted.”

The room hovered in the air again, then the floor slid away and I was on the ceiling looking down at a play. The character who was the mom was still talking; the one who was me was fiddling with a piece of thread from the couch. Offstage, a Snickers bar clattered down the insides of a vending machine. I tried to concentrate on what the mother was saying. Something about seeing friends at the mall. “I told them you were under the weather,” she said. The tissue, now a tiny, tiny square, wobbled in and out of focus. “Are you keeping up with your schoolwork?”

The mother’s mouth was moving, but the character who was me was walking away, through the maze of sofas and coffee tables and more sofas until finally I was in the visitors’ restroom, rubbing my wrist along the teeth of the paper towel dispenser. It was like my whole body was just this one spot on my arm that was begging to be scratched, carved, cut—anything, anything—for relief. There was a jab, bright beads of blood, and finally I was OK. I pulled my shirtsleeve down, pressed my cheek against the cool tile wall for a minute, then walked back into the reception room like everything was fine.

Except that the reception room was practically empty. I’d been in the restroom only a minute, I thought, but my mom and Sam and just about everybody else were gone. I made my way through the grid of sofas and coffee tables, forcing myself to concentrate, to slow down, so I didn’t break into a run.

I finally found Sam down the hall, sitting by himself in the game room, this dark little library-type place where they keep board games and cards that nobody ever plays. The game room is my favorite place here; I go there just about every night during free time to get away from the fake laughter from the TV in the dayroom, and the fake applause from the TV at the attendants’ desk, and all the radios and the blow dryers in the dorm. When I came in, Sam turned around and grinned, showing off his big, new rabbity front teeth.

“Cal! Look what game they have,” he said. “Connect Four.”

Connect Four, a kind of tic-tac-toe where you have to get four checkers in a row in a plastic stand, is our favorite game to play together. We started playing it when Sam first got sick and he wasn’t allowed to run around anymore. In the beginning I let him win, because he was younger and because he was sick. Now he beats me every time.

I don’t know how he does it, but Sam has this way of seeing two or three ways to win. Meanwhile, I use up all my moves trying to block him—or trying to get four in a row in a straight, up-and-down line—until Sam yells “Gotcha,” and points to some diagonal row I completely overlooked.

“Wanna play?” he said.

I checked to make sure no one was around. Sure, I wanted to say. Sure. I willed my myself to speak, but nothing happened. I sent commands from my brain to my mouth. Nothing. I wondered if a person’s voice muscles can forget how to work if they’re not used for a long time.

I stared out the window for a while, like the answer might be out there. I nodded.

Sam took the black checkers, I took the red. That’s the way it always is. We don’t even have to discuss it. The only sound, as we sat at the card table playing, was the click of checkers dropping into their slots. I imagined myself saying chatty, big-sister things—about Linus, about Sam’s hockey card collection—but just thinking about talking was exhausting.

Sam plunked a checker into the plastic stand; he pointed to a row of four blacks that seemed to appear out of nowhere.

“Gotcha,” he said. “Wanna play again?” He didn’t wait. “OK,” he answered himself.

It dawned on me then that Sam understood. Somehow, he knew—in his weird, wise, eight-year-old way—that I wasn’t talking. So he talked for both of us. I answered by putting a red checker in the center slot. It was my favorite opening move.

“Cal,” he said, shaking his head, an old, tired Sam who pretended to be disappointed in me. “You need to think laterally.”

I watched while he put a black checker in the last row.

“That means seeing things a couple of different ways,” he said. “Mr. Weiss says I’m good at that.”

I put another red checker above the first one and wondered who Mr. Weiss was.

“He’s my tutor.” Another black checker went in, blocking my row. “He comes to the house.”

That meant Sam was too sick to go to school again. Which meant my mom must be more upset than ever. Which meant my dad would be spending more time than ever at work—or more time out with customers, or people he hoped would be customers but somehow never turned into customers.

“Don’t worry,” said Sam. “We don’t have to pay for it. School pays for it.”

I had no idea where to put another checker, so I tried to start another row from the bottom.

“Gotcha!” Sam pointed to a diagonal row of black checkers. “Lateral thinking, Cal.”

He set up the game so we could play again.

“Mom went to talk to one of your, you know, your teachers.” Something about the way he said that, something about how it was such a little-kid thing to say, made me feel bad.

He put a black checker in the last row. “She went to find her when you were in the bathroom.”

I put a red checker in the center slot again. I didn’t have the energy for lateral thinking.

Sam held his checker in the air, poised to move. “When are you coming home, Cal? No one will tell me anything.”

We sat there a while, I couldn’t tell how long. Sam’s face went from hopeful, to serious, to worried, to something I couldn’t quite read.

“It’s OK,” he said finally. “It’s just that Linus misses you.”

I look up and take in the sight of you, still sitting there, your ankles crossed, your notebook in your lap. I hate that notebook because I know some random thing—like your chair reminding me of a dead cow—could end up in there, proof that I’m crazy. But what I really hate is how every day when I come in, you turn to a fresh page and write in the date, and how every day when I leave and you walk me to the door, I can see that the whole page is empty.

You cap your pen and stand up. It must be time to go.

The cafeteria here has a humid, steamed-vegetable smell that’s enough to give anyone food issues. What’s worse than the smell, though, is the noise. Sometimes, like when I’m in Study Hall or the game room, I can pretend that this place is a boarding school, but when all the guests from all the other groups are together in the cafeteria shouting and laughing and arguing and eating, you know you’re in a loony bin.

Our group has to sit together at meals. Sydney sets her tray down in the empty space next to me.

“I’ve figured out the Sick Minds food philosophy.” She says this to the table at large.

The food-issue people lean in attentively. I twirl my pasta around and around my fork until it slips off.

“There are four basic food groups here: pasta, purees, puddings, and potatoes,” she says. “They only serve things that begin with a p.”

Debbie sighs.

“Seriously,” Sydney says, “have you ever noticed?”

“I’m sick of pasta,” Tara says. “All those carbohydrates are an issue for me.”

“Yeah,” says Tiffany. “This stuff is crap.”

“We had chicken last week,” says Debbie.

“Yes, Debbie, we remember,” says Tiffany. “It was the high point of your life.”

Because we guests can’t be trusted with real silverware, the food usually has to be mushy enough to eat with plastic spoons. Last Thursday, though, we had chicken à la king, and since Debbie’s the only Level Three in our group she got to hand out stubby plastic forks and knives. She also got to collect them at the end of the meal. “It’s sort of like being on a picnic,” she said.

Sydney changes the subject. “Look,” she says, pointing across the room. “It’s the Ghost.”

A woman with a gray braid down to her waist is waltzing around the salad bar. She’s wearing a long white dress and her arms are stretched out like she’s got an imaginary partner.

“She’s from Humdinger,” says Sydney.

“What’s that?” asks Tara.

“The wing where they keep the real psychos.”

“You mean Hammacher,” Debbie says.

“Humdinger,” says Sydney. “You have to be a real humdinger to get in.”

People laugh.

“Once you get in, you never get out.”

No one laughs this time.

Dinner doesn’t take long. That’s because the first person back to the dayroom gets the remote control. Tonight, though, there seems to be a delay; I pick up from the chatter that something special is going on.

“That’s great,” Debbie coos to Becca “You’re doing really great.”

Becca lowers her lashes and picks a crumb off the corner of her brownie. Then she puts the crumb on her plate and cuts it in half with her plastic spoon.

“You’re going to eat the whole brownie, right?” Debbie says this loudly, for everyone’s benefit.

Becca nods demurely. “C’mon,” she says, giving Debbie’s arm a nudge with her thin little elbow. “You know I can’t eat if you’re all watching.”

“OK, OK,” Debbie announces. “No one look at Becca.”

Sydney pinches her thumb and index finger together, giving Becca the A-OK sign. Then everyone makes a big show of looking away. I push my chair back, finger the metal strip around the edge of the table, and stare underneath at people’s feet. The din of plates and cups clattering and people shouting ebbs, then picks up, louder than ever. That’s when I see Becca slide the brownie off her plate into her lap. She wads it up in her napkin, mashes it flat, and stuffs it in her pocket.

After a while Becca says it’s OK for people to look again. There are oohs and ahhs. Three chimes sound, signaling the end of dinner; Debbie says we should let Becca be in charge of the remote control that night.

Later, while the other girls are in the dayroom watching Jeopardy, I hide in a nook near the attendants’ desk, holding a pile of laundry and waiting until the coast is clear. I have to do laundry every couple of days because just about all my mom packed for me is pajamas. Nightgowns, actually Brand-new ones with daisies and bows.

I watch for Rochelle, the bathroom attendant, to leave the desk and take her post on the orange plastic chair between the toilets and the showers. Then I inch up to the desk and wait for Ruby to notice me.

Ruby’s skin is indigo and her hair is the silver of an antique teapot. But the thing about Ruby is her shoes: they’re old-fashioned white nurse’s shoes. Unlike the other attendants, who dress like they’re going to an office or to the mall or something, Ruby wears thick white stockings and real nurse’s shoes. The first night I got here, the only way I was able to fall asleep was listening for the squeak of her footsteps on the slick green linoleum as she made her rounds. I can’t say why exactly, but I trust those shoes.

Ruby’s sitting down, knitting, something pink, maybe a baby blanket. As I watch her knobby hands fly over the yarn in time with the whish and click of the knitting needles, I wonder what Ruby does when she’s not at Sick Minds. If she’s somebody’s grandmother, maybe, or somebody’s next-door neighbor.

She smiles when she sees me. “Need an escort to the laundry room?” she says.

I keep my gaze locked on the pink thing unfurling beneath her knitting needles.

“Yes, indeedy,” she answers herself. “Give me a sec. OK?” She doesn’t wait for me to respond. “OK,” she says.

Like Sam, Ruby doesn’t expect me to say anything. She’s happy to do the talking for both of us. I lean against the desk and watch while she sweeps the yarn around her finger and finishes off a few more stitches. Then she puts her knitting on the desk and hoists her short, dense body out of her chair. Her keys jingle and she says, “OK, baby. Let’s go.”

I try to figure out the right amount of space to keep between us as we walk down the hall. At first I stay close to the wall. But that feels wrong, so I move closer and try to match my stride to Ruby’s; I bump into her, then veer away. After that, I stay next to the wall. When we get to the stairs, Ruby holds the door open, then lets it fall shut behind us. We’re in our own small world now, the hushed world of the stairway, where all the noise from the dorm—the constant music and talking and TV voices—doesn’t exist.

She stops a second and holds out her hand. In it is a small butterscotch candy, the kind my Gram used to keep in a dish in her living room.

“Go on, take it,” she says. “It’s all right. You’re not one of those food-disorder girls, right?” She tucks the candy into my hand. “Right.”

“Besides, a little something sweet never hurt anybody,” Ruby says. “I may not have a degree in psychology, but I know some home truths.” She taps the space between her breasts, as if that’s where home truths might be stored.

When we get down to the laundry room, Ruby unlocks the cupboard where the detergent is kept; then she leans against the wall and watches as I put my jeans and shirts in the wash, measuring and remeasuring the soap powder, arranging and rearranging the clothes, and hoping Ruby will say more about her home truths.

But she doesn’t. All I hear is the sound of plastic crinkling as she unwraps a butterscotch candy for herself. “All right, baby,” Ruby says when I close the lid of the washing machine. “Let’s get ourselves back upstairs.”

On the way back up, we pass a fire exit sign with a diagram and a big red arrow next to the words YOU ARE HERE.

And I wonder, if Sick Minds was on fire or something, would I be able to scream?

There’s a lot of crying here at night. Since there are no doors on any of the rooms, the crying—or moaning, or sobbing—floats out into the hallway. Sometimes I lie in bed imagining a river of sobs flowing by, leaving little puddles of misery on each threshold.

When I first got here, I spent a lot of time trying to identify the crier by voice and location. Someone nearby mews like a kitten. That, I think, is Tara. Someone down the hall has a choppy cry that starts out sounding like laughing. That, I’m pretty sure, is Debbie. But after a while I decided that trying to guess which crying went with which girl just made it harder to fall asleep.

So I came up with a game that helps take my mind off the crying.

It’s simple. I lie there and focus all my attention on the sound of Sydney’s breathing. Sydney, who falls asleep right after lights out, sleeps on her back, her mouth wide open. If I listen hard enough, I can hear her breath go in with a slight ahh sound, and out with a hah sound. And if I try really hard, I can tell the exact moment when the inhale turns into an exhale.

Today, when Ruth walks me to your office, she hangs around longer than usual, kicking the toe of one sneaker with the other. I kick the toe of one sneaker with the other, notice that we’re doing the same thing, and stop. Ruth stops too, then takes her hands out of her pockets one at a time, and clasps them in front of her. Slowly she lifts her chin, until finally, after a lot of effort, she’s looking at me straight on. Then she smiles.

A smile seems out of place on Ruth’s blotchy red face, like it’s something she doesn’t do very often, like it’s something she’s practicing.

And I try to let her see, by not looking away, that I don’t mind if she practices on me.

Then she’s gone and I’m listening to her shoes squeak back to the ward.

You lean forward in your dead-cow chair; I pull back.

“I have a theory,” you say.

I decide then that I want to know exactly how many stripes there are on your wallpaper. Tan, white. Tan, white, tan, white.

“It’s just a hunch,” you say.

Tan. White. Tan. White.

“I don’t know why you’re not speaking to anyone…”

The stripes turn faint and it’s hard to see where the tan stops and the white starts.

“But I would guess that not talking takes an enormous effort.”

I picture myself running after school, something that takes a lot of effort, at least at first. After about the first mile, though, the white-out effect would kick in. I’d stop noticing the trees, or the road, or whether it was cold, or even where I was going. It was like someone came along with a giant bottle of white-out, erasing everything around me. Sometimes I’d even forget I was running and all of a sudden I’d see a building or a road I’d never seen before and I’d realize I’d gone too far. The white-out effect had stopped. I’d turn around and run home then, wondering if I’d have the energy to make it.

“It must take a lot of energy,” you say.

I blink.

“Not talking. It must be very tiring.”

I watch granules of dust slowly drift through a shaft of afternoon sun, and all at once I am tired. Something inside me sags, like a seam giving way. But my brain fights back.

My mom’s the one who gets tired. My mom and Sam. My mom gets tired washing everything with antibacterial spray and making special food for Sam and scrubbing the lint out of all the filters and air-vent covers to keep Sam from having an asthma attack, so tired that sometimes she has to rest all day. And Sam sometimes gets so tired just getting ready for school that he has to go straight back to bed.

Which means staying absolutely quiet when I get home from school so they can rest. Which could be for ten minutes or ten hours. Which means it’s up to me to do the spraying and cleaning. Which still doesn’t stop Sam from having an attack. Which means he could be in the hospital for a couple of hours or a couple of days. Which means my mom will stay there around the clock, until she gets so tired she has to come home and rest. Which means it’s up to me to do more spraying and cleaning. Which means I just don’t get tired.

“…you’re in a situation here where a lot of things are beyond your control.”

I look up and it occurs to me that you’ve been talking all along.

“Just about everything you do here is determined by forces outside your control—what time you get up, how often you go to Group, how often you come to see me. Am I right?”

I understand now that you’re talking about Sick Minds; I go back to counting the stripes on the wallpaper.

“Sometimes when we’re in situations where we feel we’re not in control, we do things, especially things that take a lot of energy, as a way of making ourselves feel we have some power.”

The tan and white stripes melt together.

“But Callie.” Your voice is so quiet, I have to stop counting a minute to hear it. “You’d have so much more power… if you would speak.”

Usually I try to be the last one to use the bathroom in the morning. That way, I don’t have to see the other girls looking all soft and sad the way people do after they’ve been dreaming. This morning, though, when I walk past Rochelle, the bathroom attendant, I see Tara standing at a sink in her nightgown and baseball cap, putting on makeup. I pick the sink farthest away and make a big deal out of putting toothpaste on my brush.

After a while I stand back at just the right angle so I can see, down the row of mirrors, a dozen reflections of Tara. Tara taking off her baseball cap. Tara touching a comb gingerly to her head. Tara arranging thin, colorless strands of hair around a bald spot. Something about that bare patch of scalp makes me feel so bad I have to turn away.

“Think we’ll make it in time for breakfast?”

I study the column of water streaming out of the faucet. From the corner of my eye, I see that Tara has put her baseball cap back on; she’s talking to me.

“We better hurry,” she says. “Debbie says we’re having pancakes.” Tara’s voice is surprisingly deep and womanly, considering she weighs only 92 pounds. Last week in Group she announced that this was a new high for her. A couple of people clapped. She cried.

I turn up the water full blast and stare at it like something about it is very, very important. I can’t see Tara, but I can feel her standing a few sinks away watching me and suddenly I feel bad giving the silent treatment to someone who weighs only 92 pounds and has to wear a baseball cap to cover up a bald spot.

The rushing water gets louder, then softer, then louder Tara moves toward the door where Rochelle is sitting on the orange plastic chair, reading People magazine.

“Do you really want us to ignore you?” There’s nothing mean about the way Tara says this; there’s nothing in her voice except curiosity

I waste as much time as I can brushing my teeth. Eventually, she’s gone.

Today is linen-exchange day. All of us guests have to line up in the laundry room and hand in our old sheets and towels and get new ones. Everyone displays Appropriate Behavior during linen exchange, probably because Doreen, the custodial worker in charge, takes it very seriously Each week she hangs hand-lettered signs all over the laundry room, signs with lots of capital letters and exclamation points. “Line forms to the right of the Attendant!” says one. “Please have your linens ready for Presentation to the Attendant!” says another.

I’m standing in line—to the right of the Attendant, with my linens ready for Presentation—when Sydney and Tara come up behind me. I can tell from the cigarette smell that they’ve just come in from the smoking porch, where everyone else hangs out between sessions.

“Hi, S.T.”

Heat creeps up my cheeks. I feel bad not talking to Sydney, since she always says hello to me like I’m a normal person. I hold myself rigid and wait.

“These signs crack me up,” Sydney says after a while. I relax a little, once I figure out she’s talking to Tara “This one’s my favorite.”

I can’t help but listen in.

“‘Guests are kindly requested to refrain from removing their mattress pads at the end of their stay.’” Sydney reads Doreen’s sign in a deep, official-sounding voice. “Like someone’s going to say, ‘Hmmm. What souvenir can I bring home from my stay at Sick Minds? Oh, I know! A mattress pad!’”

I picture Doreen, suddenly, in a tug-of-war with someone over a mattress pad. I can see Doreen pulling the emergency alarm, then rolling around on the floor trying to wrestle one of her beloved mattress pads away from a guest. A giggle creeps up my throat. I swallow. A fullfledged brawl is raging in my mind’s eye, with guests and attendants slugging it out over mattress pads. I bite the insides of my cheeks. I dig my nails into my palms. It’s no good. I bolt out of line and run for the steps.

“Where are you going?” Doreen yells. “That’s a violation, you hear?”

The door swings shut behind me and I’m in the cool, muffled world of the hallway. I take the steps two at time, stomping so hard that the echo drowns out the strange, stifled sound of me trying not to laugh.

The attendant in the game room that night is one I’ve never seen before, young, smily and obviously new. She says hi and asks if I want to play Scrabble. “How ‘bout Trivial Pursuit?” she says. “I’m really good at that.”

I get out the Connect Four box and sit down with my back to her. Then I start playing against myself. I imitate Sam’s lateral thinking strategy, making moves all over the place, instead of starting with the same opening move and the same boring way of trying to build an obvious straight line. After a while the smily young attendant gets up and leaves to talk to another attendant at the desk, keeping an eye on me through the window.

Soon the Connect Four grid is a hopeless mess of red and black checkers; there are blocked rows everywhere and no way to make a straight line. I’m staring at the game when a shadow comes over the table.

You’re standing next to me suddenly, in a long blue coat and scarf, holding a purse and keys. I sit up—and wait for you to tell me, in your real-life clothes, with your car keys and your house keys, that you’re leaving, that you’re quitting, that you’re giving up on me.

But you don’t say anything. The room gets warmer and warmer and the minutes stretch out and fold back on themselves the way they do in your office and you just stand there, tapping your upper lip with your index finger and studying the game. I decide to pretend I don’t care that you’re there.

I pick up a red checker, hold it a minute, poised to drop it into the center slot, then pull back, seeing right away that this would be a dumb move. I move the checker, hold it above another slot, study this possibility, and see that it would be a mistake, too. Finally I put the checker on the table, lean back, and hide inside my hair.

You shift your weight from one foot to the other and I catch a hint of fragrance. It’s a cool, familiar smell, sort of like the lavender sachets my Gram used to make.

You pick up the red checker and drop it into a slot on the end. All at once a diagonal row of four checkers appears—surprising and obvious at the same time.

“There you go,” you say. “I think that’s the move you were looking for.”

You rest your hand on my shoulder for just a second, and I feel sleepy suddenly, the way I did in your office this afternoon. Then you’re gone. I don’t play another round. I just sit in the game room until the last trace of lavender evaporates.

The next day, after everyone else comes in from the smoking porch and we take our regular seats in Group, Claire announces that a new girl is joining us. She asks if someone will get an extra chair. “Put it there, please,” she tells Sydney. “Next to Callie.”

I sit very, very still.

The door squeaks open and the new girl comes in. She’s tiny, with dyed black hair held back in kiddie barrettes, red lipsticked lips, and the palest, whitest skin I’ve ever seen. She’s wearing ripped jeans and a sweatshirt.

Claire gestures toward the empty spot next to me and invites her to sit down. The girl slides into the chair, then grabs the seat, scraping the legs back and forth on her little patch of floor, trying to get settled. Her chair bangs into mine. The impact reverberates all through me.

“Oops,” she says.

Claire asks if anyone is willing to make the introductions, but it seems like everyone has suddenly gotten shy. So Claire goes around the circle giving names but not issues.

The new girl says her name so quickly I can’t tell if it’s Amanda or Manda. Then, when no one says anything, she says, “Jesus Christ, it’s hot in here.”

Claire asks Amanda/Manda if she wants to tell us why she’s at Sick Minds. Amanda/Manda pulls off her sweatshirt; I feel every movement through my chair.

There’s a gasp from across the circle. Debbie’s hand is clapped over her mouth and the other girls are staring at the new girl.

Her sweatshirt is on the floor and she’s sitting there in a little white undershirt holding her arms out so everyone can see a geometry of scars crisscrossing her inner arm: scars in parallel lines running up to her elbow, bisecting lines, obtuse angles. Scratched into the skin above her wrist are words. In pink scar tissue on one arm it says “Life.” On the other it says “Sucks.”

I pull my sleeves down around my thumbs and pinch the fabric tight.

“I don’t really need to be here,” she says. “Some dogood English teacher thought I was trying to kill myself.”

There’s scattered fidgeting, then silence. “You’re not?” Sydney finally says.

“As if,” Amanda/Manda says.

“Then why do you do it?”

“Beats me,” she says. Then, right away, “Low selfesteem. Poor impulse control. Repressed hostility. Right?” She addresses all this to Claire.

Claire doesn’t answer, so Amanda/Manda turns back to Sydney. “Listen, I don’t see how what I do is so different from people who get their tongues pierced. Or their lips. Or their ears, for Chrissakes. It’s my body.”

She glances around the circle; no one budges.

“It’s body decoration. Like tattoos.” She keeps talking, like she’s been in the middle of a conversation that everybody else happened to walk in on. Like we’re new, not her. “It’s better than people who bite their nails till they bleed. I mean, they’re actually eating their own flesh. They’re like cannibals.”

Tiffany, who bites her nails until they bleed, tucks her hands under her thighs.

“I mean, why is everyone so upset? It’s freedom of expression, right?”

I grind the hem of my sleeve between my fingers. The frantic barking of a dog rings in the distance. Amanda/Manda is saying something about an article she read in a magazine. I turn my head ever so slightly to catch the words.

“You know, they used to bleed people all the time back in the old days,” she says. “When they were sick. It’s an endorphin rush.”

“And…” All heads swivel in the direction of Claire’s voice. “Does it make you feel better?” Claire says.

“Absolutely.” Amanda/Manda shifts in her chair. “It’s a high. I mean, you feel amazing. No matter how bad you felt before. It’s a rush. Like suddenly you’re alive.”

“And you want to do it again, don’t you?” Claire says.

My fingers are numb from pinching my shirtsleeve.

“Yeah. So?”

“Let me rephrase that,” Claire says slowly. “You need to do it again.”

The new girl leans forward in her chair, her dark eyes blazing. “Not me,” she says. “I can control it. I always control it.” She folds her arms across her chest; her elbow nudges mine. I jump.

“What about you, Callie?” Claire’s voice is loud. “Can you control it?”

The room is dead quiet. Debbie stops cracking her weight-control gum. Even the dog stops barking. Far off, down the hall, a phone trills, once, twice, three times. It’s answered by an invisible voice.

“Callie?”

I feel the new girl turn to regard me.

I nod.

And I can feel the rest of the group exhale.

I spend the rest of the session counting the stitches on my sneaker and hating this Amanda/Manda person, hating Claire, hating this whole stupid place. Because now everybody knows why I’m here.

I’m at my usual place at dinner that night, at the far end of the long rectangular table, trying to make each mouthful last for twenty chews. That way, it takes me just as long to eat as it does for everybody else to eat and talk. The other girls are turned away, discussing some kind of petition. Sydney says she wants pizza. Tara suggests lowfat yogurt. The petition, I deduce, must be about the food. Becca says she wants croutons without gluten, whatever that is.

“How about an ice cream bar?” Debbie says. “Like a salad bar. You can go back as many times as you want.”

“Yeah, right,” says Tiffany “That’s just what you need.”

“I was kidding,” Debbie says.

“What do you want?” It’s a voice I don’t recognize right away the new girl’s.

When I look up, two rows of heads are turned in my direction. This reminds me, suddenly, of a book my Gram gave me when I was little, about Madeline, the little French girl who lived with twelve little girls in two straight lines.

I pick up my plastic spoon and sculpt my mashed potatoes into a little hill.

“We don’t know about her,” I hear Debbie say. “She doesn’t talk.”

I make a little mashed potato ski slope, then flatten it with my spoon. The other girls go back to talking about the petition and I decide that dinner’s over for me, that it’s time to bring my tray up to the conveyor belt that takes all the dirty dishes and cups and leftover food through a window into the dish room, where they disappear.

I stand and try to squeeze between the chairs at our table and the ones behind us. The space is tight and I hold my tray high so I don’t bump into anybody. I pass safely behind Sydney, then Tara When I get to the new girl, she rocks back; my toe stubs the leg of her chair. Milk sloshes out of my glass and down the back of her sweatshirt.

“Jesus!” She practically spits out the word. “Why don’t you watch what you’re doing?” She’s wiping her sweatshirt with a paper napkin. They all look at me, six sick girls in two straight lines, waiting for me to do something.

Somehow I navigate through the sea of tables and chairs and more chairs until I’m finally at the conveyor belt.

The lunchroom attendant, a heavy woman who sits guard over the trash cans to keep track of how much food the anorexics throw out, gives me a bothered expression, then goes back to her paperback.

Across the room, a dish explodes on the floor; there’s the obligatory smattering of applause. The attendant gets up, turns her book face down on her chair, and brings a broom and dustpan over to the girl who dropped her dish.

I stand in front of the blue trash can marked “Recyclables” and finger the edge of my aluminum pie plate, aware that no one’s watching me, that all I’d have to do is rip the pie plate in half to get a nice sharp cutting edge. The clatter of dishes and conversation dims to a hush as I slip the thin, impossibly light disk of aluminum into my pocket. I’m calm, finally, because I know that even if I don’t use it right away, I have what I need.

That night, Sydney tosses and turns and fusses with her blankets for almost an hour after lights out. I lie on 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,” she says. “I won’t listen to you not talking.”

I sit down on the little curved seat in the phone booth and reach up to close the door. But there is no door. I forget sometimes that there are no doors here. I pick up the receiver, still warm from the grip of the last person, and stare at the concentric circles of tiny holes in the mouthpiece.

My mother’s voice comes out of the other end, puny and hopeful. “Callie? Is that you?”

I hold my breath. There are kitchen sounds in the background, the thrum of the dishwasher, the closing of a drawer.

“Oh, dear,” she says, the volume in her voice slipping down a notch, as if she were talking to herself. “How do I know if you’re even there?”

My back stiffens; those were the same words the new girl used. I shift around on the little seat, then cough.

“Well, I hope you’re there, Callie, because I have something to tell you.” She waits a minute, then sighs. “OK. They say you’re resisting treatment.”

I switch the receiver to my other hand and wipe my palm on my pants leg.

“Oppositional something or other, they’re calling it. Oppositional behavior.”

Oppositional behavior. It sounds so premeditated, so on purpose.

“Are you listening?”

I forget not to nod—and forget my mom can’t see me nodding.

“They say they might send you home.”

The door frame of the tiny booth quivers. It narrows, then expands.

My mom is saying something about how the people at Sick Minds might want to give my bed to someone else. Someone who’s willing to work. Someone who wants to get better.

The floor of the phone booth pitches up, then swims away.

Now she’s saying something about school. “They won’t let you back in school either,” she says. “Not until you’ve had treatment.”

I hold the receiver away from my ear. My mother’s voice grows small, long-distance—costing us good money…going to give your father a heart attack…don’t understand why…—until finally the phone goes dead and all that’s left is a faint clicking in the wires.

The floor isn’t where it’s supposed to be when I step out of the phone booth; it’s like when you step off a curb without knowing it and put your foot down into thin air. I grab the door frame, then force myself to walk back to my room. But the hall shimmers like a paved road on a hot summer day. Slick green squares of linoleum heave up in my path, then sink away underfoot. There’s an incline, a linoleum hill, a surprisingly tiring hill that gives way, without warning, to a valley, a long, low trench in the hallway between the phone booth and my room.

The lights are out and Sydney’s already in bed when I finally get there. I climb straight into bed and pull the blanket up to my chin even though I’m sweating from the walk back from the phone booth. My shirt and pants bunch up under the covers. I wrestle my shirt back into place, give up on the pants. I listen for Sydney’s breathing. It’s no good. I roll over; my shirt gets twisted around my chest. I turn back the other way and yank it straight.

I roll one way, the room rolls the other. I picture my bed, the bed that Sick Minds wants to give to someone else, falling through a giant trapdoor.

Then I hear Ruby’s footsteps coming toward our door. The rolling stops, the furniture snaps back into place. Then she moves on.

Before the floor can start pitching again, I throw off the covers and crouch down next to the bed. I lift the mattress with one hand, grope around with the other. The mattress is surprisingly heavy. My arm shakes, bows under the weight of it. Then I feel it. Way down near the foot of the bed is the pie plate. I stretch, grab it, and let the mattress come down with a plop.

“Huh?” Sydney sits up in bed, her eyes half-open.

I freeze.

Sydney falls back onto her pillow, sighs, and settles into her steady breathing.

I get back into bed, moving calmly and efficiently now, lie on my stomach, and pull the covers over my head. Inside the dark blanket tent, I fold the pie plate in half, press it flat, bend it back and forth, back and forth, like I’m following a recipe, back and forth, until the fold is crisp. When I rip it, it gives way easily and I have two neat halves, each with a jagged edge.

I lay my index finger lightly on the edge of one half testing it. It’s rough and right.

I bring the inside of my wrist up to meet it. A tingle crawls across my scalp. I close my eyes and wait.

But nothing happens. There’s no release. Just a weird tugging sensation. I open my eyes. The skin on my wrist is drawn up in a wrinkle, snagged on the edge. I pull it in the other direction and a dull throbbing starts in my wrist.

I hold my breath and push down on the piece of metal. It sinks in neatly.

A sudden liquid heat floods my body. The pain is so sharp, so sudden, I catch my breath. There’s no rush, no relief. Just pain, a keen, pulsing pain. I drop the pie plate and grasp my wrist with my other hand, dimly aware even as I’m doing it that this is something I’ve never done before. Never tried to stop the blood. Never interfered. It’s never hurt like this before. And it’s never not worked.

I take my hand away a minute and wipe my wrist on my shirt; the blood pauses, then leaks out again. I go back to gripping my wrist and trying to ignore the throbbing and the pinpricks of sweat on my lip and forehead, then I look down and see blood seeping out between my fingers.

A sizzle of electricity white-hot energy, courses through me. And suddenly I’m up, out of bed, walking out of the room. There’s no thinking now, only walking. Down the hall, around the corner to Ruby’s desk. Holding my arm out, like an offering.

“Oh, child,” Ruby says when she sees me. “Oh, honey child.”

She goes into action, reaching up to the First Aid cupboard and taking my hand in hers, all in one swift motion. She unwinds a roll of gauze, wipes away the blood, then washes the cut with some kind of solution. It burns, but for a moment at least, the throbbing lets up. I can see then that the cut isn’t that deep, that it’s no worse than the others, and I wonder why it bled so much, why I showed it to Ruby.

“It’s a bleeder,” she says, pressing a square of gauze to the cut. “But it’s not deep. No need for stitches.”

She closes both her hands around my wrist, as if she were praying, and pulls them to her chest, so close I can feel it rise and fall as she breathes. She presses with such a sure, steady force that after a while the bleeding stops and the pain begins to drain away.

She lowers my hand finally, puts another bandage over the cut, wraps gauze around my wrist with a dozen or so quick twists, and secures it with a couple of pieces of tape. We stand there a minute regarding her work. Then Ruby lowers herself into her chair, using one arm to support her weight. She drops into the chair with a sigh.

My body feels light all of a sudden, so light it might float off. I imagine myself as a giant Macy’s Parade balloon, floating up, away from Ruby’s desk, high over Sick Minds. I have to sit down.

Ruby leans forward, takes my hands in hers, and pulls them into her lap.

“Scared yourself, did you?” she says.

In the brown-black center of Ruby’s eyes is a tiny, scared reflection of me.

“Why do you want to do a thing like that?” Our hands—ashy white and deep mahogany—are intertwined in Ruby’s lap, the fabric of her dress soft from so many washings.

“Hmmm?” she says, as if I’d said something she hadn’t quite heard. “Why don’t you tell us what’s bothering you?”

I consider pulling free of her grasp, but it would take too much effort and I’m tired now, very tired.

Ruby sighs. “Whatever it is, baby, it can’t hurt worse than this.”

Ruby walks me back to my room, her arm around my waist. This time, there’s no question of how much distance to keep between us; I let myself sink against her. She tells me I’m lucky, that the cut wasn’t deep, that I might have to get a tetanus shot, and that she’ll have to file an incident report. “Standard operating procedure,” she says. It occurs to me that I could be sent home or to Humdinger, and I wish Ruby would tell me one of her home truths or even just what standard operating procedure is, but when we get to my room she seems distracted. She lets go of my waist, reaches into the closet, and pulls out one of the nightgowns my mother bought.

“Put this on, child,” she says. “And give me those clothes to wash. I’ll be right out here waiting.” She steps out into the hall.

I change into the nightgown, gather up my clothes, and start walking to the door to give them to Ruby. Something holds me in place halfway between the bed and the door, some vague sense that that I’m forgetting something. Then I walk back to the bed, pick up the two jagged pieces of the pie plate, turn, and bring them to Ruby.

The green neon numbers on Sydney’s alarm clock say 6:04 a.m. Last time I checked, it was 5:21. I brace myself on my arm and a dull pounding starts in my wrist. There, at the foot of the bed, is a neat bundle of clean, folded clothes. Ruby must have put them there before her shift ended.

I push back the covers, get up quietly, put on my clothes, and slip into the still-dark hallway. I tiptoe toward the bathroom, sneak past Marie’s empty chair, past the phone booth, past the new girl’s room, past the dayroom, the Group room, down the hall, past the Emergency Use Only door, until finally I’m sitting outside your office waiting for you to come to work.

I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here, but finally you’re standing in front of me in your blue coat and scarf. You don’t look surprised. You don’t even say hello right away. You pull your keys out of your purse, bend down and turn on the UFO outside your door, and say, “Would you like to come in?”

I take my usual place on the couch while you hang up your coat and scarf, put your purse in a drawer, open the blinds. Finally you sit down.

“Callie?” you say. “Is there a reason why you’re here?”

I shrug.

“Can you tell me what’s on your mind?”

I start counting the stripes in the wallpaper. A dog barks in the distance. The sound rings in the air for a long time, then it’s quiet.

“I can’t.” My voice surprises me. It’s so puny.

“What? What is it you can’t do?”

I clear my throat, but it doesn’t do any good. Now there’s no voice in there at all. I shrug.

“Callie.” Your voice is firm. “Try to look at me.”

I sneak a peek at you. Your eyes are amber. Like Linus’s. I look away.

“What is it you can’t do?”

The radiator clicks on, drones for a while, clicks off.

“Talk.” The word, finally, comes out of my mouth.

Your chair groans and I notice then that you’ve been sitting on the edge of your seat. You lean back and tap your lip with your finger, the way you did the other night in the game room.

“Is it because you’re scared?”

I trace a square on the couch, nod yes, once, and watch, stunned, as a tear makes a small dark circle on my jeans.

You slide the tissue box across the carpet to me.

“Do you know why you’re scared?”

I shake my head.

“Callie.” Your voice comes at me from far away. “I think if we work really hard together, we may come up with some answers.”

I rip the tissue in my hand. It’s become a soggy useless mess. I grab another one.

“Would you like to try?”

I nod.

“Good.” You sound pleased, really pleased.

I blow my nose. “What will you do to me?” The words seem to come out on their own.

You smile; tiny wrinkles fan out around your eyes and I wonder if maybe you’re older than I thought. “To you?I won’t do anything to you. We’ll just talk.”

“That’s it?” My voice cracks. It’s a weak, unreliable thing.

“That’s it.”

I grab another tissue from the box. “I feel…” I clear my throat and will the words to come out. “I feel like I’ll be losing.”

“Like a game or a contest?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What do you think you’ll lose?”

“I don’t know.” I check your amber cat eyes for signs of impatience, but you don’t seem mad. Just curious.

“I’ll never make you tell me anything you don’t want to tell me,” you say. “But you are right, Callie. Sometimes it will feel like you’re losing something.”

I reach for another tissue. Wet, wadded-up tissues keep piling up in my lap.

“But Callie,” you say. “If we work hard, you’ll find something much better to take the place of whatever you give up. I promise.”

I nod. I’m tired now, awfully tired. I’ve got that headachy feeling I get in the summer when I step out of the dark, air-conditioned house into the too-bright sunlight.

I watch you as you stand up and say we’ll get started later on, at our usual time. Then you call for someone to escort me to the infirmary, where they give me a tetanus shot and make me sign a form. Then I go back to my room. And even though it’s still morning, I go back to bed. And sleep. And sleep.