Girl in Pieces (3 page)

Jen S. is a nicker: short, twiglike scars run up and down her arms and legs. She wears shiny athletic shorts; she's taller than anyone, except Doc Dooley. She dribbles an invisible basketball up and down the beige hallway. She shoots at an invisible hoop. Francie is a human pincushion. She pokes her skin with knitting needles, sticks, pins, whatever she can find. She has angry eyes and she spits on the floor. Sasha is a fat girl full of water: she cries in Group, she cries at meals, she cries in her room. She'll never be drained. She's a plain cutter: faint red lines crosshatch her arms. She doesn't go deep. Isis is a burner. Scabby, circular mounds dot her arms. There was something in Group about rope and boy cousins and a basement but I shut myself off for that; I turned up my inside music. Blue is a fancy bird with her pain; she has a little bit of everything: bad daddy, meth teeth, cigarette burns, razor slashes. Linda/Katie/Cuddles wears grandma housedresses. Her slippers are stinky. There are too many of her to keep track of; her scars are all on the inside, along with her people. I don't know why she's with us, but she is. She smears mashed potato on her face at dinner. Sometimes she vomits for no reason. Even when she is completely still, you know there is a
lot
happening inside her body, and that it's not good.

I knew people like her on the outside; I stay away from her.

Sometimes I can't breathe in this goddamn place; my chest feels like sand. I don't understand what's happening. I was too cold and too long outside. I can't understand the clean sheets, the sweet-smelling bedspread, the food that sits before me in the cafeteria, magical and warm. I start to panic, shake, choke, and Louisa, she comes up very close to me in our room, where I'm wedged into the corner. Her breath on my face is tea-minty. She cups my cheek and even that makes me flinch. She says, “Little one, you're with your people.”

The room is too quiet, so I walk the halls at night. My lungs hurt. I move slowly.

Everything is too quiet. I trace a finger along the walls. I do this for hours. I know they're thinking about putting me on sleep meds after my wounds heal and I can be taken off antibiotics, but I don't want them to. I need to be awake and aware.

He could be anywhere. He could be here.

Louisa is like the queen. She's been here, this time, forever. She tells me, “I was the very first fucking girl here, back when they opened, for God's sake.” She's always writing in a black-and-white composition book; she never comes to Group. Most of the girls wear yoga pants and T-shirts, sloppy things, but Louisa dresses up every day: black tights and shiny flats, glamorous thrift-store dresses from the forties, her hair always done up in some dramatic way or another. She has suitcases stuffed with scarves, filmy nightgowns, creamy makeup, blood-red tubes of lipstick. Louisa is like a visitor who has no plans to leave.

She tells me she sings in a band. “But my nervousness,” she says softly. “My
problem,
it gets in the way.”

Louisa has burns in concentric circles on her belly. She has rootlike threads on the insides of her arms. Her legs are burned and carved in careful, clean patterns. Tattoos cover her back.

Louisa is running out of room.

Casper starts every Group the same way. The accordion exercise, the breathing, stretching your neck, reaching to your toes. Casper is tiny and soft. She wears clogs with elfish, muted heels. All the other doctors here have clangy, sharp shoes that make a lot of noise, even on carpet. She is pale. Her eyes are enormous, round, and very blue. There are no jagged edges to Casper.

She looks around at us, her face settling into a gentle smile. She says, “Your job here is
you.
We are all here to get better, aren't we?”

Which means: we are all presently shit.

But we knew that already.

Her name isn't really Casper. They call her that because of those big blue eyes, and the fact that she's so quiet. Like a ghost, she appears at our bedsides some mornings to take Chart, her warm fingers sliding just an inch or so down the hem of my bandages to reach my pulse. Her chin doubles adorably as she looks down at me in bed. Like a ghost, she appears suddenly behind me in the hallway, smiling as I turn in surprise:
How
are
you?

She has an enormous tank in her office with a fat, slow turtle that paddles and paddles, paddles and paddles, barely making any headway. I watch that poor fucker all the time, I could watch him for hours and days, I find him so incredibly patient at a task that ultimately means nothing, because it's not like he's getting out of the fucking tank anytime soon, right?

And Casper just watches me watch him.