The lounge was mayhem. An episode of America’s Got Talent was playing at near-full volume on the giant TV, and Michaela was freaking out. Andy was rocking by the window with his hands over his ears, and “I don’t belong here” Sean was standing there with his mouth hanging open, an expression of shock on his face.
At first I had no idea what was going on. Then I saw what Sean was staring at.
In a corner of the room lay Sophie. She was curled in a ball on the floor, clutching at her wrist, and kicking Nurse Amy away from her. “No!” she was crying. “Don’t touch me! No no no!”
“Sophie, let me help,” Amy yelled, but Sophie wasn’t listening. Blood seeped through her fingers. Blood was on Amy’s shoes, and it was smearing across the shiny white floor.
“Sophie!” I screamed.
My roommate looked up at me from where she lay, and her eyes were huge and scared. She said, “Oh, it’s my friend! Hannah, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—Oh, shit—”
She couldn’t get a full sentence out. She was scared by the blood, I could see that, and so was I.
I tried to run to her, but suddenly it seemed like the entire staff of Ward 6 had appeared out of nowhere, and they got in between me and my roommate. They surrounded her, making a wall of hospital scrubs that blocked my view. I could feel waves of panic building in my chest as I tried to see through them. I dropped down low, trying to get a better look at what was going on.
“Sophie!” I kept yelling. “Sophie!”
I was crawling toward her on my hands and knees when someone grabbed me by my shoulders and started pulling me back. I fought against whoever it was, but then I heard Indy’s voice in my ear.
“Let them do their thing, babe,” he said. “They’re trying to help her.”
I tried to push him away, but he was too strong. When I gave up, Indy half dragged me toward the edge of the room, propped me against the wall, and smoothed the hair from my forehead.
“It’s okay,” he was saying soothingly, “it’s going to be okay.”
I was shaking, my teeth chattering, adrenaline coursing through me. I could hear Michaela’s screams fade as someone hurried her away down the hall.
“What’d Sophie do,” I said to Indy. “What’d she do?”
Indy grabbed my hand and squeezed it between his—no one was going to tell us not to touch each other right now. “She hurt herself, but she’s going to be fine.”
His voice trembled as he spoke. How did he know? Did he have any idea what he was talking about? Or was he just telling me what we both wanted to hear?
The knot of aides around Sophie finally broke up, and I saw Mitch and Amy lifting her from the floor. She wasn’t fighting them anymore. They were carrying her away, her body limp and helpless.
“Sophie!” I yelled again, but she didn’t acknowledge me at all.
Then they were gone, and there were half a dozen stunned patients alone in the lounge, and there was blood smeared all over the floor.
Beatrix and Jade were standing side by side, just staring at where Sophie had been. Sean had started scratching at his cheeks, which he did when he was upset, but there was no one to tell him not to, and Andy was still rocking back and forth by the window and moaning.
Then our group therapist, Lulu, came rushing in, followed by a couple of aides, and they started tending to everyone like we were victims of a train derailment or something. Their voices were calm but urgent. “Let’s go back to your rooms,” I heard Lulu saying to Beatrix and Jade. People took Sean and Andy away, but no one came for us.
A shocked silence had descended. I couldn’t stop staring at the blood. It was drying. Darkening.
Indy was still holding on to my hand. “I remember the day I broke,” he said. “I was in my basement—just a regular guy playing a video game. And then, I don’t know, it was like I’d been shot with a poisoned arrow. I was in the video game, and the game was controlling me. I suddenly realized that all that time, the game had been trying to send me messages, and the messages were telling me that I needed to die. I hadn’t been able to hear them before, but now I could. The game wanted me to kill myself.”
Indy’s hand was growing sweaty in mine. “What did you do?” I whispered.
“I ran upstairs to the second floor of my house and I jumped out the window,” he said.
“I wasn’t hurt,” he said.
“But you were,” I said.
He smiled grimly. “Right. Just not physically.”
I thought about meeting Sophie for the first time, and how she hadn’t been able to stop talking. She hadn’t needed any sleep, and she said that food tasted like ashes in her mouth. That was mania. But how had it shifted so quickly? One day she was talking about how amazing she was—and the next thing we knew, she’d sliced her own perfect, God-given wrists.
A custodian wheeled his cart into the room, and he started mopping while some little kid on the TV was singing Frank Sinatra at the top of his lungs.
I said, “Maybe Sophie wasn’t really trying to kill herself. Maybe that was just the cry for help.”
Indy pulled his hand away and wiped it on his pants. “I think the cry for help was coming here. This—this might be a cry that says I don’t think I can be helped.”