Blearily, I open my eyes.
Plaster stretches above me, cracked and discolored from years of water damage. It’s not the ceiling in my dorm room—I notice that right away. The cracks are different from the ones I’ve memorized over the last six weeks. Unfamiliar.
I turn my head to the side, releasing a groan. This small movement feels impossibly difficult. The room looks like my dorm room, except there’s only one bed and no windows. None of my stuff is here. I’m alone, lying on my back.
I try to turn, to study the rest of the space, but I’m still under sedation. My head feels too heavy, the muscles in my neck not strong enough to lift it. I try to push myself to a sitting position, but thick fabric cuts into my wrists and chest, holding me. Restraints.
I was in solitary for a month, I remember Sofia telling me. That must be what this is. They’ve deemed me too crazy for the crazy house, so they dumped me here.
Just a few hours ago, I thought I was going home.
Tears form in my eyes, but I blink them away. I want to be unconscious again, to drift back to whatever drug-induced dream world I was in before. Anywhere is better than this strange, empty room.
I clench my eyes shut—tight—and wait to fall back asleep.
You don’t spend a lot of time awake when you’re this medicated. I learn this over the next few days, in the brief moments when I’m able to keep my eyes open for more than a minute or two.
Tayla and I got mono in seventh grade, one after the other. The doctor thought we both caught it by drinking from the same soda bottle. That was the only other time in my life when I’ve spent full days in bed, too tired to lift my head, staring up at the ceiling. Only then, I had Tayla going through it with me. We’d FaceTime when we were both awake for more than a couple of minutes, tell each other about all the dumb things we’d dreamed, complain about how boring it was to be sick, or wonder whether Jackson Phillips (our mutual crush) noticed that we weren’t in school. When we started feeling better, we’d watch the same crap TV—her in her bed, me in my own, phones pressed to our ears so we could hear each other laugh.
There’s no one with me in this cold, dark room. Tayla is dead and gone. The flickering overhead hurts my eyes. The voices echoing from the hallway make my head pound. Those are the worst parts—when I’m awake.
Sleep is a luxury. Black and dreamless.
They remove the restraints from my wrists after twenty-four hours, but I’m not allowed into the cafeteria or any of the other public areas. Food is brought to me on a cold metal tray, and I don’t know what it is, exactly, only that it tastes like mush and I have to work hard to keep it down. My mom used to make me pancakes when I felt sick. Waffles. French toast drenched in real syrup. She’d make faces with berries and whipped cream. The medicine makes my mouth feel numb. I don’t even know if I’d be able to taste the sugar in the syrup.
If I don’t eat everything, the nurse who comes to collect our plates and utensils gives me a dirty look before scurrying away.
“They make a note of your appetite in your chart,” she warns me after breakfast on the second day, when I barely touch the soft, sludgy food they served me. “Not eating is a sign of passive aggression.”
I knew that. I feel stupid for forgetting.
After that, I lick my tray clean every meal.
I’m released after three days (has it only been three days? It felt like weeks and weeks). They’ve lowered my meds, but I still feel like my head is filled with packing peanuts. The tips of my fingers tingle.
My canvas slip-ons scuff over the concrete floors in the hallway. Scuff. Scuff. The sound makes me think of zombies stumbling around on half-dead limbs, their hands grasping in front of them. I walk past Lara sobbing in the corner. And Genie, who winds a lock of brown hair around her finger and pulls. A cockroach climbs up the wall behind her, disappearing through a crack in the plaster.
The hall leading to my room feels ten degrees too cold. Goose bumps crawl up my arms, making the tiny brown hairs stand straight up, like soldiers called to attention. I stop outside my room, but I don’t open the door.
I don’t want to face that room. I don’t want to see that someone’s unpacked my suitcase, placing all my things back where they belong. T-shirts folded and tucked inside dresser drawers. That ugly hippopotamus sitting in the middle of my bed.
But it’s not like I have a choice. I take a deep breath. Turn the doorknob.
Sofia looks up from the book she’d been reading, blinking at me like I’m a ghost. “Holy shit. You’re back.”
She leaps off the bed in a tangle of limbs, racing across the room to throw her arms around my shoulders. I close my eyes, gritting my teeth as I hug her back. Her arms are too thin. I can feel her bones poking through her papery skin, grating against my bones.
I know the feeling is exaggerated—leftover jitteriness from all the drugs I was on—but I squirm away from her anyway.
She frowns. “I was seriously freaked out. They wouldn’t tell me where they’d taken you.”
I sink onto my bed, pulling my knees to my chest. “Solitary.”
“Shit.” Sofia’s face falls. She lowers herself to the bed opposite me. “You don’t look great.”
“Think I can request a facial?” It’s supposed to be a joke, but my voice falls flat. Harper, Mara, and I used to text each other when we found deals for fifty-dollar facials at this cute place around the corner from Harper’s house. Now the idea of that much decadence seems ludicrous.
The corner of Sofia’s lip twitches. “Seriously,” she asks, “you okay?”
I wrap my arms around myself, pressing my fingers into my shoulder blades. I haven’t given much thought to whether I’m okay. The last few days have felt like a bad dream, one I’ve spent all my energy trying to wake up from. The life I used to have—the one with facials and pancakes with whipped cream faces and nail polish art—seems like it belongs to someone else.
Now that I know I’m awake, I just feel . . . numb.
Sofia scoots to the edge of her bed when I don’t answer her question. “What they did to you sucked. You were all set to go home, and they just decided to keep you here? That’s messed up.”
I swallow. After a moment I say, “That’s not exactly what happened.”
Another frown. “What do you mean?”
I roll my lip between my teeth. Part of me still doesn’t want to admit it out loud. But that’s always been my problem, hasn’t it? I won’t admit my sins. I’d rather make up some happy story than tell the truth.
“I lied. In therapy,” I say finally. “Dr. Andrews found out.”
Sofia blows air out through her teeth. “Shit,” she says again.
“I didn’t think it was a big deal . . .” I trail off, considering this, and then try again. “No, that’s not true. I knew it was a big deal. I just didn’t think she’d find out.”
Sofia doesn’t say I told you so, even though she has every right. She picks up her book and taps a finger against the spine. “What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know.” I close my eyes and press my fingers into the lids, rubbing in slow circles. I think of that cold, empty room, the restraints digging into my wrists, and I hold back a shudder. “I never want to go back there.” I open my eyes, blinking. “How did you survive a month?”
Sofia stares back at me, her face oddly vacant. “It was rough.”
“It was torture.”
“It’s not too late. Just tell Dr. Andrews what she wants to hear. Get the fuck out of here.”
I stare at Sofia’s twitching finger. Tap tap tap. Like she’s releasing a sudden burst of energy. I shake my head and look away. “You think?”
“When’s your next therapy session? Tomorrow?” I nod, and she says, “Do it then. Tell Andrews exactly what happened. She can’t keep you here forever.”
Exactly what happened. I think of Tayla, lining her eyes in wobbly black lines. Asking me if she can borrow a top for Mara’s big end-of-the-year party.
“You don’t have to go,” I’d told Tayla, annoyed. “I know you don’t want to.”
Her, answering with a shrug, “They’re my friends, too.”
But they weren’t, really. Not anymore. Harper and Mara were my friends. Tayla just hung out with us.
My mouth feels dry, but I make myself smile. “You make it sound easy.”
“The truth is never easy,” Sofia says. She leans back against the wall, feet dangling over the edge of her bed. “If it were, I’d be long gone by now.”
“You’ll get there,” I say, and my voice cracks. “Both of us will. We’re getting out of here and never looking back, I fucking swear it.”
Sofia scratches her tattoo. The scab had just started to heal, but the corner of her nail flicks against it, drawing blood. A drop falls onto her bed, blossoming on the white sheets like a flower.
She presses her thumb into the fabric, soaking it up. “I know we will,” she says.