How long will she sleep now?” Jordan asks. He isn’t outside Hannah’s door anymore, but he can’t stop thinking about her. Worrying about her.
Nurse Amy is busy logging everyone’s vitals from the morning. She shrugs. “No telling. She was agitated again last night.”
“Will she be better when she wakes up?”
Amy glances up from her work. “What if I give you the exact same answer again? You know, ‘no telling’?”
“I was kind of hoping you’d have a different one,” he admits.
Amy smiles benevolently at him. “You’re new,” she says. “You’re eager and optimistic and all of that stuff. It’s cute.”
Jordan rolls his eyes. He resents being called cute.
“Hey now, don’t make that face. We need people like you,” Amy says earnestly. “I mean, deep in our hearts, we know there’s hope for these patients. But it’s so hard here. Last month there was a sixteen-year-old so charming and amazing that I couldn’t understand what she was doing here. Then one night she took out a smuggled razor blade and made so many slashes on her thighs it looked like she was wearing goddamn red plaid pants.” Amy’s brow wrinkles. “Things like that can break you if you let them.”
Jordan lets this awful story sink in for a minute. Then he asks, “Do a lot of patients here try to self-harm?” Does Hannah?
“Some definitely struggle with urges,” Amy says. “That’s why we don’t give patients pens with sharp tips or actual silverware. But for some of these kids, it’s not about them hurting themselves. It’s more about who hurt them.” She sighs. “Like Hannah, for example.”
A chill runs up Jordan’s spine. “What do you mean?”
“Hannah hasn’t ever tried to hurt herself,” Amy says. “I think she was the one who was hurt.” She shakes her head. “Something really bad happened to Hannah before she came to us, that’s what I think. But we can’t get her to talk about it. Sometimes I’m not even sure that she could, even if she wanted to.”