Girl in Pieces (5 page)

And while it's true that my clothes are from the lost and found, it isn't entirely true that I have nothing, because I
do
have something, they just keep it from me. I saw it once, when Doc Dooley told me to stop watching the movie during Entertainment and come to the nurses' station. When I got there, he pulled a backpack,
my
backpack, from beneath the desk. Doc Dooley is super tall, and handsome, the kind of handsome where you know he knows how handsome he is, and that his life is that much easier for it, and so he tends to be kind of easygoing with the rest of us, the unhandsome. So when he said, “Two boys dropped this off. Does this look familiar to you?” I was momentarily blinded by the whiteness of his teeth, and fascinated by the velvety quality of his stubble.

I grabbed my pack and sank to my knees, unzipping it, shoving my hands inside. It was there. I cradled it, sighing in relief, because Doc Dooley said, “Don't get excited. We emptied it.”

I took out my tender kit, the army medical kit that I'd found when I was fourteen and trolling the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store on West Seventh with Ellis. The metal box was dented, the large red cross on the front was scratched and losing its paint.

My tender kit used to hold everything: my ointment, my gauze, my pieces of broken mason jar in a blue velvet pouch, my cigarettes, my matches and lighter, buttons, bracelets, money, my photos wrapped in linen.

The box made no sound when I shook it. I dug deeper in the green backpack, but it, too, was dark and empty. No extra socks and underwear, no rolls of toilet paper, no film canister filled with panhandled cash, no pills in a baggie, no rolled-up-tight wool blanket. My sketchpad was missing. My bag of pens and charcoals was gone. My Land Camera, gone. I looked up at Doc Dooley.

“We had to take everything out, for your safety.” He offered his hand to me, and even his hand was handsome, with slender fingers and buffed nails. I ignored it, standing up by myself, clutching my tender kit and the backpack tightly. “You have to give the bag and the box back. We'll keep them for you until you're discharged.”

He reached out and tugged the backpack away, slipped my tender kit from my hand. He put them behind the desk. “But you can have these.”

Doc Dooley pressed the square of linen into my hands. Inside, protected by the soft fabric, are photographs of us: me and Ellis, Mikey and DannyBoy, perfect and together, before everything blew to hell.

As I walked away, pressing the photographs to my chest, Doc Dooley called out, “Those boys, they said they were sorry.”

I kept walking, but inside, I felt myself pause, just for a second.

My photographs are what I'm doing when Jen S. comes to find me the night after the toe incident: thumbing through them, greedy like I always am when I let myself think of Ellis, poring over the black-and-white images of the four of us in the graveyard, posing stupid like rock stars, cigarettes in the corners of our mouths, DannyBoy's harelip almost invisible, Ellis's acne hardly noticeable. DannyBoy always said people looked better in black-and-white and he was right. The photos are small and square; the Land Camera was old, something from the sixties, the first kind of Polaroid. My grandmother gave it to me. It had bellows and made me feel cool. We found some film at the camera store by Macalester College. It was a cartridge, and you slipped it into the camera, took the picture, ripped the film strip from the side, and set the little round timer. When it buzzed, you peeled back the film and there we were, old-timey and neat-looking in black-and-white, Ellis so beautiful with her black hair. And there was me, dumb little me, arms folded across my chest in my holey sweater and my hair all ratty, dyed red and blue in the real, color world, but muddy-looking in black-and-white. Who could look anything but gross next to Ellis?

“Cool.” Jen S. reaches down, but I wrap the photos back up in the linen and slide them under my pillow.

“Dude,” she sighs. “Okay, whatever. Come on, then, Barbero's waiting in Rec. We've got a surprise for you.”

In Rec, the smell of popcorn clings to the room from the movie we watched earlier; the empty bowl rests on a circular table. Jen licks her finger and swipes the bowl, sucking off salt and bits of congealed butter. She makes oinking sounds. Barbero's floppy lips curl. “Schumacher,” he says. “You kill me.” She shrugs, flicking her wet finger against the hem of her baggy green T-shirt.

She digs in one of the several “everything” bins, looking for her favorite deck of cards. The colorful bins are stacked on top of each other against the ivory walls of Rec. They hold playing cards, frayed boxes of crayons, markers, games.

A bank of three computers is tucked against one wall. Barbero fires one up and shoos his fingers at me while he enters the password.

“Here's the deal, crazy.” Barbero flings a booklet at me. I have to bend to pick it up. He starts typing.
ALTERNA-LEARN. THE RIGHT PLACE FOR YOU
pops up on the page. “The good doctor thinks you need something to do to curb your anger issues, of which there are apparently many, and also your weird habit of not sleeping. So, looks like it's back to school for you, dumbass.”

I look over at Jen S., who grins wildly while shuffling the cards. “I get to be your
teacher,
” she giggles.

Barbero snaps his fingers in my face. “FO-CUS. I'm over here! Here.”

I glare at him.

Barbero ticks off his fingers. “Here's the deal: don't look at anything but the school site. Don't look at your Facebook, your Twitter, your email, anything at all but the school pages. Your friend Schumacher here has volunteered to be your teacher and she'll check your quizzes and all that shit when you finish a lesson.”

He looks at me. I stare back. “You don't wanna do it,” he says, “the good doctor says you have to start taking meds at night to sleep and I have a feeling you don't wanna do that. She'd rather have you in here than creeping down the halls like you do. Because that's fucking
weird.
”

I don't want drugs, especially at night, when I'm most scared and need to be alert. Doctors filled me up from the time I was eight until I was thirteen. Ritalin didn't work. I bounced off walls and stabbed a pencil in the cloudlike flab of Alison Jablonsky's belly. Adderall made me shit my pants in eighth grade; my mother kept me home the rest of the year. She left lunch for me under plastic wrap in the refrigerator: spongy meat loaf sandwiches, smelly egg salad on soggy toast. Zoloft was like swallowing very heavy air and not being able to exhale for days. Most of the girls here are doped to the gills, accepting their pill cups with pissy resignation.

I sit in the chair and type my name in the YOUR NAME HERE box.

“Good choice, freak.”

“Jesus, Bruce,” Jen says, exasperated. “Did you skip that day in nursing school when they explained bedside manner?”

“I got bedside manner, baby. Let me know when you wanna try it.” He flops on the creaky brown Rec couch and pulls his iPod from his pocket.

One whole wall of Rec is a long window. The curtains have been opened. It's dark outside, after ten o'clock. Our wing is four stories up; I can hear the
whoosh
of cars in the rain down on Riverside Avenue. If I do school, it will make Casper happy with me. The last time I was in school, I was kicked out the middle of junior year. That feels like a lifetime ago.

I peer at the screen and try to read a paragraph, but all I can see are the words
fucker
and
pussy bitch
scrawled on my locker door. I can taste the tang of toilet water in my mouth, feel myself struggling to get free, hands on my neck and laughter. My fingers tingle and my chest feels tight. After I got kicked out of school, everything went haywire. Even more than before.

I look around Rec. Like a fussy little mouse, thoughts of who's paying for this nibble at my brain, but I push them away. My mother cooked meat loaf with onions and ketchup and hills of mash on the side, in a diner for years, before even that went away. We aren't people with money; we're people who dig for change at the bottoms of purses and backpacks and eat plain noodles with butter four nights a week. Thinking about how I'm able to stay here makes me anxious and afraid.

I think,
I'm inside and warm and I can do this if it means I get to stay.
That's what matters right now. Following the rules so I can stay inside.

Jen's fingers shuffle and flutter the cards. It sounds like birds rushing to empty a tree.

Casper asks, “How do you feel?”

Every day, she asks me this. One day a week, someone else asks me—Doc Dooley, maybe, if he's pulling a day shift, or the raspy-voiced, stiff-haired doctor with too-thick mascara. I think her name is Helen. I don't like her; she makes me feel cold inside. One day a week, on Sundays, no one asks us how we're feeling and that makes some of us feel lost. Jen S. will say, mockingly, “I am having too many feelings! I need someone to hear my feelings!”

Casper waits. I can
feel
her waiting. I make a decision.

I write down what it feels like and push the paper across Casper's desk.
My body is on fire all the time, burning me away day and night. I have to cut the black heat out. When I clean myself, wash and mend, I feel better. Cooler inside and calm. Like moss feels, when you get far back in the woods.

What I don't write is: I'm so lonely in the world I want to peel all of my flesh off and walk, just bone and gristle, straight into the river, to be swallowed, just like my father.

Before he got sicker, my father used to take me on long drives to the north. We would park the car and walk the trails deep into the fragrant firs and lush spruces, so far that sometimes it seemed like night because there were so many trees, you couldn't see the sky. I was small then and I stumbled a lot on stones, landing on mounds of moss. My fingers on the cold, comforting moss always stayed inside me. My father could walk for hours. He said, “I just want it to be quiet.” And we walked and walked, looking for that quiet place. The forest is not as quiet as everyone thinks.

After he died, my mother was like a crab: she tucked everything inside and left only her shell.

Casper finishes reading and folds the paper neatly, sliding it into a binder on her desk. “Cool moss.” She smiles. “That isn't a bad way to feel. If only we could get you there without hurting yourself. How can we do that?”

Casper always has blank sheets of paper on her desk for me. I write, then push it to her. She frowns. She pulls a folder from her drawer and runs her fingers down a page.

“No, I don't see a sketchbook on the list of items from your backpack.” She looks at me.

I make a little sound. My sketchbook had everything, my own little world. Drawings of Ellis, of Mikey, the little comics I would make about the street, about me and Evan and Dump.

I can feel my fingers tingling. I just need to draw. I
need
to bury myself. I make another little sound.

Casper closes the folder. “Let me talk to Miss Joni. Let's see what she can do.”