sure the world I used to live in has gone on without me. It’s like I don’t even matter. Right now, my friends are going to school. The same people are on my morning bus. FLOW 93.5 is playing the top seven at seven. Fortune is texting one of his many girlfriends. Eric is seeing a client. Jess is staring in a mirror, fixing her face for the zillionth time since she woke up. My mother is trying to squeeze on her size-six jeans and tie an elastic band around the waist button. Life goes on and on and on … and that tiny bump of me that existed inside the tiniest fold of time has already been smoothed over.
And maybe that’s why I don’t care about anything. Because I (all that I know as “me”) am dead and this body is just a facade of the person I used to be. If it were the old me, I’d be arguing and fighting and planning my escape. I’d erupt in anger if someone had to watch me shit and shower and dress and sleep. I should be sad thinking about what happened, or about my pathetic life, or about Michael. But now it’s like I’m here but not here. And this person they are watching over is only a mass of energy held together by skin. Like I’m caught in some unthinking place, before birth and after death, some realm of existence where not only do you not care about anything, you just “do not.”
My guard today, a pregnant lady with long black hair, suggests we go to the common room, where there are a TV and games. I don’t necessarily want to go, but I have no real reason not to, so I get out of bed and follow her. That’s where I see the others: three girls about my age watching music videos and two boys about ten years old playing a board game. In the hallway I had passed a couple more people: one really, really tall girl whose gown is like a miniskirt and a guy with bad acne.
I wonder if they’re all in here because they tried to kill themselves. They all look a little nuts, but maybe it’s just ’cause I expect them to be. I think of the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that we read in class. I imagine us escaping out a window and hijacking a bus. I’d be Jack Nicholson for sure. Or Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted. Except maybe not. Not anymore. Maybe, right now, I’d just be Chief ’cause I haven’t spoken to anyone basically in two days.
The pregnant lady makes me play cards with her. We play a mindless game called Skip-bo. And then she teaches me crazy eights. At some point, two staffers enter with a girl about my age. She looks like a wreck. It’s as if she was normal a while ago and then something really terrible happened. Anyway, they all take a seat and the staff talk to her like she’s a baby. They have a plate full of food on the table and they actually spoon-feed her. “Come on,Anna, just one more bite? Yeah! Atta girl. Great job!”
I can’t help but stare. It freaks me out how weird it is, how she can’t even feed herself. What the hell happened to her?
“Your turn,” the pregnant lady says, drawing me back to the game of crazy eights, which I suppose is a funny name for a game to play in a mental ward.
I slap down my last card, winning the game.
“Hey! You won!” she exclaims, but I really couldn’t give a shit.
Fifty-Three
I have a busy morning the next day. First I see the psychiatrist one more time. She asks me more questions about my mom and about living at home. And then we talk about Michael and Fortune and everything else, but I still don’t say anything about what happened with Giovanni. It’s an okay conversation, but really, what can she solve in one hour? At the end of the session she tells me about a psychiatrist appointment she’s set up for me once I’m out. I thank her, for what I don’t know, and then leave. Alexis is outside the door when I open it and escorts me to another office by the nurses’ station, where we wait for a “family meeting” with the ice queen social worker.
I lean up against the cold wall, far away from Alexis so that