A Danger to Herself and Others(16)

As for me, that was the night I tried oysters for the first time. When I asked for seconds, my father beamed proudly. The other couple stared at us incredulously. Did they feel inadequate, like my parents were superior parents? Or did they think I was simply a superior child?

“I was excited, you know, about having a roommate. It was one of the reasons I wanted to go to summer school.”

That’s not exactly a lie. I didn’t have any anxiety about sharing my space—about negotiating who got to play her music when, or waking up in the middle of the night because of someone else’s tossing and turning, that sort of thing. And Agnes certainly didn’t. She had two little sisters and hadn’t had a room to herself since the first one arrived when she was two years old. Agnes used to complain that her parents weren’t the only ones who woke up for feedings three times a night.

When I have kids, I’m only having one, she told me.

I’m never having kids, I answered.

Agnes looked as though the possibility of not having children hadn’t actually occurred to her before. Even better, she said. I already practically raised my sisters. It’s not like I’d be missing out on the experience.

You’ve already missed out on so much.

What do you mean?

I mean, like a childhood of your own. Your parents had you taking care of your sisters your whole life. You had to play grown-up instead of being a kid.

Agnes didn’t say anything, but the expression on her face said it all. She’d never been so angry at her parents before, never before resented her sisters for being born.

Now, I tell Dr. Lightfoot, “We loved staying up late, telling each other secrets. Trying to keep our eyes open even after we were half asleep because there always seemed to be more to say. Agnes and I used to turn on the lights to try to make ourselves stay awake longer.” I pause. “You can’t do that here, though.”

I gesture toward the fluorescent lights on the ceiling with their preordained schedule. There isn’t actually a light switch or an electrical outlet anywhere in this room.

“No,” Lightfoot agrees. “You can’t do that here.” She blinks when she speaks. Her contacts must be bothering her.

Planted in the doorway, Stephen clears his throat. Unlike Dr. Lightfoot, he wears a watch. (Another thing that could be used as a weapon if a patient moved quickly and was ambitious enough.)

I smile. “Guess our time is up.”

She nods. “It is. But that was some really nice work today, Hannah. Thank you for opening up to me.”

“Thank you,” I answer. Stephen holds the door for Dr. Lightfoot. When it clicks closed, the magnets that lock it in place sound a little less loud than they did the last time I was left in this room alone.

I smile again, this time for real. It was so easy when I was five, to manipulate my parents’ friends into being ashamed of their own children, into thinking I was so much better.

It’s still so easy.





twelve


The next day, when the attendant comes to open the door of my room—our room, a good friend would say this room belongs to both of us—at lunchtime, he isn’t holding a meal on a tray. He gestures for me to leave the room with Lucy.

And just like that, I’ve earned my first privilege.

The hallway looks exactly how I remember it when they first brought me here: the same vomit-green walls and scratched, gray linoleum floors. Lucy walks a few steps ahead of me, the attendant a few steps ahead of her. We walk toward the stairs. I hear voices as we descend. We stop on the second-floor landing.

I was right, by the way. The cafeteria is on the second floor.

The landing opens into a large room, though the ceiling is no higher than it is upstairs, creating the illusion that the room is smaller than it probably is. There are long tables with benches attached on either side. (No chairs to toss.) The walls are made of that same oversized brick but instead of green, they’re painted a sticky, fake sky blue. Baby-boy blue for a room full of girls except for a few male attendants, most of whom are as muscular as Stephen, leaving no question as to why they’re here. The floors are the same drab gray. Lucy takes off for a table on the right side of the room, and I begin to follow but the attendant stops me.

“This way,” he says, leading me to the left side of the room.

“There’s assigned seating?”

“You can sit at any of the tables on this side of the room.” He leads me to an empty bench. There are two girls already sitting on the other side.

I wonder if they used to be considered a danger to themselves and others too.

I sit. The attendant backs away, planting himself at the foot of our table. He’s here to keep an eye on us. On me.

They bring us our food. It’s the same sort of thing I got in the room upstairs: lukewarm chicken noodle soup (too cool to burn our fellow patients if we wanted to), packets of crackers, and a sandwich (no forks, no knives, not even plastic ones). They hand out flimsy paper napkins, incapable of giving so much as a paper cut.

The cafeteria smells. Not only because of the food—it’s so bland it doesn’t give off that much of a scent to begin with—and not just because some of us still don’t have shower privileges. (Even those of us who do aren’t exactly given baby powder and deodorant to stay fresh.) Really, the cafeteria smells like Girl with a capital G, some odor coming from inside us that can’t be helped, like if you lock a bunch of us in a room, it does something to our hormones or pheromones or some other bodily-mones that creates an unmistakable scent. Even the cafeteria at my all-girls’ school in the city smelled like this from time to time, but there, the scent commingled with perfume and expensive shampoo and real food until it was barely perceptible.