Hollow (Perfect Little Pieces) (4 page)

“You’ve showed up to enough meetings to earn you points for this phone call.” Elias grinned as he motioned to one of the tables. “You have ten minutes. Then I’ll take you to dinner.”

I stared at the empty seat, unsure. On the other end of that phone sat someone from my past. I didn’t know if I wanted to talk to them.

“Come on, sit.”

I did as Elias instructed. He patted me on the back and moved away, presumably to get a different patient for another phone call. I moistened my lips and turned back to the receiver as questions filled my head.

Who on Earth could be calling me? It couldn’t possibly be my mother. She’d make some big show out of seeing her daughter. What was the point in visiting if she couldn’t broadcast her good deed on the evening news? No, it had to be someone else, but who?

I wiped the sweat from my palms on my jeans and picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Hey Lucy, it’s Mia. How’s it going?”

“Fine.”

“Are you up for a visit?”

I glanced around at the other patients, murmuring into their phones. “Not yet.” I wasn’t sure if I could handle Mia coming here. She and Bethany were my best friends, and a part of my old life.

“Oh,” she sounded disappointed, and I felt bad for refusing her visit. Still, I didn’t think I was ready to face her just yet. After the accident, Mia had grieved and put the whole incident behind her. I was jealous of how she managed to hold everything together and live her life. Then again, she wasn’t there that night. She didn’t know what really happened. I did.

“Perhaps some other time, then.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you have time to talk?”

“A little.”

She updated me on Jack and Kirsten, Molly, Derek and Denise. As she chatted about their love lives, jobs, vacations and accomplishments, I felt an odd sense of detachment.
This would have been my life, if not for the accident.

The hollowness in the pit of my stomach returned. If Kyle was still alive, would we have been living together after graduation and starting our new life together? How different things would have been if my greatest concern was passing anatomy class and not being trampled by mental patients in the middle of a psychotic episode.

I had lost so much that night, so damn much.
At least you’re not dead.

I might as well be dead. To this day, I don’t know why the fates chose to take Kyle and Bethany and not me. Why not me?

A lump formed in my throat as I realized the life I once had was gone. There was nothing more to live for.

“…and so that’s how I ended up in the psyche department.”

Mia’s words snapped me back to the present. “What?”

There was a brief moment of silence. “Is something wrong?”

“What? No. Of course not.”

“Oh, have you heard anything I’ve said at all?”

“Sort of.” Mia meant well, but her words felt like a knife in my chest. It was too painful to hear about how well everyone was doing. It was as if all of my former friends had moved on. I was but a hiccup in their lives. Kyle and Bethany’s death had meant nothing.
I
had meant nothing.

“I-I’m in med school now. I want to be a psychiatrist.”

A psychiatrist? Good Lord. Mia had always been flighty. Back when we were freshmen, she had changed her major three times before settling on biology. Then, when they had to dissect a frog for physiology, she was sick for a week. Soon after that, she switched to sociology. She never struck me as the type who would voluntarily go to graduate school. She always seemed anxious for the whole college ordeal to be over with.

Now she wanted to become a psychiatrist. Fantastic.

“I took the MCATs last summer. I didn’t tell you because…you know.”

Yeah, I knew. I was in the hospital, getting the last of my father’s Vicodin pumped from my stomach.

“And you passed?” I asked.

“Don’t sound so shocked.” Mia laughed. “It’s incredible, isn’t it? I feel like I’ve found my true calling.”

Lovely. Just…lovely. While I’ve been popping antidepressants like candy, Mia not only got her life back together, but found her ‘true calling’. I didn’t think it was possible to feel more depressed than I did during Rec Therapy. I was wrong.

“So I’m taking the usual med school classes. It’s amazing how much schooling you need to go through.”

I half-listened to her talk about med school, residency and certification, until something she said gave me pause.

“Can you say that again?”

Mia hesitated. “Lucy, is something going on? You can tell me.”

I rolled my eyes. The last thing I needed was for Mia to practice all of her psychology mumbo jumbo on me.

“I’m fine.” I glanced around. “Just a little distracted.”

“Oh, well. Okay. As long as you’re sure you’re all right.”

“I’m sure.”

Mia sighed. “So, as I was saying, I need some work experience for my degree program. Newton Heights runs an internship program and I was wondering if you could put in a good word for me with Dr. Polanski.”

I tightened my grip on the phone until my knuckles turned white. Was that all this phone call was? A plea for an internship?

“It would really help me out a great deal. We could hang out and have fun, like old times.”

“It’s not like that here. There are schedules and rules.” Mia was part of my past. Having her here would be a constant reminder of everything I had lost.

“Oh, I know about the schedules and stuff. But I thought…I don’t know. I’d get to fulfill some of my credits without taking classes and we could see more of each other.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She didn’t care about me, she wanted a
fucking internship
.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.

The silence was deafening. “Why do you keep pushing me away? I thought we were friends.”

“I have to go.” Tears filled my eyes. I blinked them back and started to lower the receiver. “Dinner and all.”

“Okay. It’s just—Lucy?”

The crack in her voice gave me pause. I placed the receiver back at my ear. “Yeah?”

“You aren’t the only one hurting, you know.”

The line hung up, and the dial tone filled my ear. I replaced the receiver and stared at the small, red phone, not quite believing what I had just heard.
An internship.

She was lying, she had to be. How could Mia be hurting when she had everything so together? She wasn’t even there. The night of the fraternity party, she had the flu and was puking in our dorm room. She didn’t see what I had seen. God, those memories, all of that blood… It would haunt me for the rest of my life.

Mia couldn’t possibly know what I was going through. She was manipulating me for that internship, that’s all. She’d do anything to get ahead—just like my parents. In fact, all of my friends had been the same. Nothing about our lives was real. Everything was a game to get a better job, more money or more status. It was disgusting, and made me realize just how empty my life had been.

It also made me aware of just how alone I was in the world.

Tears streamed down my face as I looked up from the phone to see the big, burly patient staring at me. He looked so intense and frightening. What the hell was his problem, anyway?

I got up from my table and rushed back to my room. I didn’t care about dinner anymore. All I wanted was to get out of this place, to run far away and never come back.

But I was never getting out, was I? It was too convenient for my parents to leave me here to rot. As long as I stayed behind the hospital doors, I’d be out of the headlines. They could continue their lives uninterrupted and unhindered. Their daughter would cease to be an embarrassment.

Oh God, I was never going to leave this place, ever.

Fresh tears flowed down my cheeks as I stumbled into my room and slammed the door. Memories flooded my mind of the night it all started, the night I had lost two of my best friends in the world.

Now I had lost Mia, too.

Chapter Three

The next afternoon, I was back in the common area, joining all of the other good worker bees for our daily ‘Recreational Therapy’. Part of me considered blowing it off, but then I remembered that I was supposed to meet Jayden after the session and changed my mind. His calming presence was just what I needed after the phone call with Mia.

It was eerie how much everything was the same as yesterday. My old bench had been replaced with a new one, and Dr. Polanski’s color of the day was pink instead of purple, but other than those two things, not much had changed.

Jayden wasn’t there, of course. It was almost as if he, Flynn and Nesto had never existed.

Patients milled about and chatted in low voices, waiting for the session to start. The big, burly patient with wild eyes was walking laps around the perimeter of the room with another patient. He didn’t seem to notice me, thank goodness. I watched him and his friend out of the corner of my eye. There was something about him that scared the daylights out of me. It was almost as if some animal was living inside of him, and every so often it would try to get out.

I pressed my body closer to the wall as the pair approached. Thankfully, big and burly was too caught up in the conversation to notice me. I overheard some of their words they passed.

“Did you hear? Martinez got put into the Confinement Ward yesterday.”

“Damn shame. I suppose we won’t see him for a while, then.” Big and burley’s low rumble set my nerve endings on edge.

“Poor Flynn. He and Martinez were close.”

“Poor nothing. That bastard’s guilty.”

“You think so?”

“You know what he’s like. Besides, no one else would be crazy enough to take something from Nesto. That boy’s a bomb waiting to explode.”

“Jayden would. That guy’s fearless…”

At that point they moved out of earshot. I sat forward, straining my ears for any nugget of information that might tell me who Jayden was, or what he was doing at the hospital. Unfortunately, they had moved too far away from me, and I couldn’t keep listening to the conversation without being obvious.

I let out a long breath and leaned back on the bench until my head rested against the wall. After everything that had happened, I still knew very little about Jayden. How did he know my name and where my bedroom was located? Why was he at the hospital in the first place?

Questions filled my mind as I turned back to the window and watched a reporter adjust his camera outside the fence. Within moments, a security guard appeared and shooed him away. As the reporter left, Dr. Polanski took her place at the front of the room and cleared her throat.

“Welcome, everyone. We are fortunate that the Howlistic Healers were able to meet with us again today…”

I scanned the volunteers and dogs as they entered the room, looking for Jayden. I was just about to give up looking when I saw him walking in with one of the dogs. He stopped with the other volunteers along the wall and scanned the room as if looking for something—or someone.

I let out a long breath and sagged against the bench.  
Damn.
So much had happened yesterday, I was hoping that I was mistaken about the Howlistic Healer emblem on Jayden’s shirt. If he was just some random volunteer, not part of my parents’ charity, then perhaps there would have been a chance for us.

But no. Jayden was just another one of my parents’ employees. Well, actually my mother’s employee, since my father had mostly retired and deferred to my mother in most things.

Jayden was probably assigned to send my parents information about me. That was why he took me back to my room yesterday. He was trying to gain my trust so that I’d confide in him. Then he’d tell my mother all my secrets, and she’d have what she needed to manipulate me into doing whatever she wanted. Fuck.

Disappointment stabbed my chest, and tears filled my eyes. Yesterday, Jayden’s presence had made me feel protected and cherished. Today his presence made me feel foolish. I should have known better than to trust him, to hope…

Damn you, Mother.
Planting spies in a mental institution was a new low. I was so sick of being used. It hurt too damn much. I glanced at the clock on the wall and frowned when I realized it was another ninety minutes until pill time. What I wouldn’t give to feel hollow once more…

Something cold and wet brushed against my fingers. I jerked back toward the wall and blinked at the golden fur next to my hand. It was one of the Howlistic mutts.
Lovely.
I frowned and glanced back at the circle. It had been disrupted. The same number of dogs was present today as yesterday, and patients stood in small groups with other staff members, petting and talking to the animals.

“Hey beautiful.” Jayden approached from out of thin air and sat next to me. He ran his hand along the dog’s back. “She seems to like you.”

His greeting took me off guard. Did he really think I was beautiful? His words filled the dark hole in my chest. My cheeks started to heat. Shit, was I blushing? Not cool. I quickly looked away from his gaze and glanced at his shirt. Sure enough, he was wearing the same logo’d polo that the rest of the volunteers wore. Part of me wanted to get up and storm away. He was my mother’s lackey, and anything I told him would be used against me. Another part of me wanted him to stay. He was so full of life. I was drawn to that like a moth to light. And he
did
save me from the chaos yesterday…

“Her name’s Spirit.” Jayden reached over and scratched Spirit behind the ear as if nothing had happened. And indeed, nothing
had
happened on the surface, but something in the air changed. There was this undercurrent of tension that I had trouble defining. I wanted to both hug him and slap him, to walk away and to stay.

Jayden winked. “I know this place seems rather daunting, but you get used to it soon enough. After a while, it feels a little like home.”

Home? Hardly. I doubted that anywhere would ever feel like home again. Home was for families who cared about one another. Nobody cared about me. Even Mia was using me to get a stupid internship.