A Danger to Herself and Others(42)
No. Not alone. Lucy is here. I manage to flop my neck to the side so I can see my roommate sitting on her own bed. She’s holding a book—a romance novel we’ve both read three times each—and looking at me.
Does Lucy believe Dr. Lightfoot? Does she think that Jonah was nothing more than a hallucination?
“I’m sorry,” Lucy says “I thought if I tried to stop them, it would’ve made things worse.”
She’s right. They might have sedated her too. Maybe they would’ve separated us.
At least the look on Lucy’s face is nothing like the look on Lightfoot’s. She doesn’t pity me. She hates this place as much as I do.
Lucy doesn’t believe Dr. Lightfoot. She believes me.
twenty-nine
Hours later, after lights-out, the sedative is still coursing through my veins, but my muscles feel less like soup and more like Jell-O. I imagine them jiggling all on their own, my organs like pieces of fruit suspended in the gelatin. My tongue feels sticky, one size too large for my mouth.
My limbs might be rubber, but my brain is still my own. I control my brain. I am my brain. My brain is me. That’s all we are, right? Everything we think and feel, every habit and movement, every personality trait and quirk: It’s all a result of our brains. Maybe it’s nature, maybe it’s nurture—but whoever we are, we are because our brains are what they are. People talk about their hearts (my heart broke, my heart sank, my heart healed), but our brains are in control. When we fall in love, it’s a chemical reaction in our brains, not our hearts. The heart’s just a muscle. Even when our hearts pound because we’re scared or nervous or excited—that’s our brains telling our hearts to do that. If a heart stops working, doctors can even replace it with another one, a transplant from a stranger’s dead body. When a heart won’t beat, EMTs can perform compressions or shock it back to life with electricity. But once a person’s brain-dead, there’s no coming back.
I know my brain. My brain wouldn’t invent a person.
Jonah was real. I felt the callus on his right thumb from his guitar-playing. (“It’s only a phase,” he promised me. “I’m not going to be one of those guitar-playing douchebags in college.”) I ran my fingers through his tawny hair, felt the crunch of too much hair gel, and convinced him to use less. I felt the weight of his body on mine, the press of his lips against mine, the stubble on his cheeks against my skin. I even fought with him.
Admit it. You care about Agnes more than you care about me. We were walking back from class together, careful to keep our voices down so passersby wouldn’t overhear.
Come on, Hannah. You know I care about her.
That infuriated me. He admitted to caring but wouldn’t say how much.
You care about her too, he added. If you didn’t care, you’d have told her about us. But you do, so you haven’t, just like I haven’t.
That’s some pretty serious sentence construction you’ve got there, I said. The sun was so bright I had to squint to look up at him. My mother would have scolded me for not wearing sunglasses; squinting was a surefire way to develop wrinkles. Jonah stopped walking, so I did too.
He smiled. You said that the day we met.
I smiled back. I know. We walked the rest of the way to the dorm in silence, the backs of our hands brushing against each other.
If Dr. Lightfoot thinks that was all a hallucination, then she’s the crazy one.
There’s got to be an explanation for everything Lightfoot said today. Maybe Jonah registered for the summer program under a different name—maybe Jonah is actually his middle name, so he was registered under his legal first name but never mentioned it because he’s always gone by Jonah. Or maybe after Agnes’s accident, he never went back to the dorms, and since he didn’t technically finish the program, they took his name off the registry.
Or maybe I had it right the first time: Lightfoot is lying just to mess with me.
My heartbeat is steady and slow, but my palms are sweaty and my hair sticks to the back of my neck. I’ve never wanted to pull my hair into a ponytail so badly. Not that I could, even if I had an elastic, with the sedative still in effect.
The bed squeaks. I exhale as the mattress dips under Lucy’s weight. She reaches up and brushes my hair off my face with her fingers, twists it into a bun on top of my head. She adjusts my pillow. I feel a breeze from the AC vent above on the back of my neck.
“I’m not crazy,” I manage to say. Thanks to the sedative, the words come slowly.
“I know that,” Lucy says.
“Jonah wasn’t a hallucination.”
It’s dark, but I can see Lucy nod. I exhale. Lucy understands. She’s locked up in this place too. “Maybe you should take the antipsychotics,” Lucy suggests gently, lying down beside me.
“What?” I can’t make my voice sound as angry as I want it to. I’m hot again. I hate being hot. I hate being so sedated that I can’t kick off the covers Lightfoot pulled over me before she left. I hate that a lump is rising in my throat, and I can’t swallow it away no matter how hard I try.
I’ve never felt so powerless.
“It’s not that I don’t believe you, but we both know she’s going to make you take them whether you want to or not. They make me take antidepressants even though I’m not depressed.”