A Danger to Herself and Others(43)

“They do?” I’ve never seen her take a pill.

Lucy nods. “Every day at lunch. They make all the E.D. girls take them.”

“Why?”

We’re lying so close that I can feel Lucy’s shoulders rise and fall when she shrugs.

“They think everyone with an eating disorder is depressed. Like the E.D. is a symptom of a larger problem. They never believe me when I tell them I just want to be skinny enough to dance.”

“They don’t understand anything.”

“No,” Lucy agrees. “They don’t.”

“And they don’t listen to us.” Vaguely, I remember reading about a study where a group of perfectly sane physicians had themselves committed so they could better understand what their patients went through. The doctors and nurses and orderlies didn’t believe the physicians when they claimed to be sane; they were treated just as badly as the real patients.

I sigh heavily. “Like you said, she’s going to force the medication on me no matter what I say.”

“But if you take the pills voluntarily,” Lucy counters firmly, “it will show Lightfoot that you’re not afraid of her and her theories about you. It will show her that you’re confident. That you know your own mind better than she ever could.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way. But I don’t want them to change my brain. I think of the girls in the cafeteria, silently nodding along to Queen Bee’s decrees. “I don’t want to become one of those zombie-girls.”

Lucy puts her arm around me. “I’m willing to bet there’s not a pill in the world strong enough to turn you into one of them.”

I try to smile, but I can’t—and not because of the sedative. It’s because I know Lucy’s lying and she does too. She squeezes me tighter.

“Anyway, that’s not the kind of pill they’re going to give you, right?”

“Right.” I close my eyes and try to imagine it: a nurse handing me a paper cup filled with pills. (How many? Two? Three? One jagged half? I have no idea what my dose would be.) What color are the pills? What shape will they be? I gulp and imagine a pill sliding down my throat. Will they be easy to swallow or will I almost choke? Will they feel like the lump I get in my throat when I’m trying not to cry?

“Go on the antipsychotics,” Lucy urges. “Prove Lightfoot wrong.”





thirty


When I agree to take the antipsychotics, Lightfoot looks pleased, like I’m a puppy who learned to go to the bathroom outside after months of accidents on the living room carpet.

She hands me two pills and explains that she’s starting me on a low dose. She had the medication with her, so clearly she was planning on giving it to me whether I offered to take it or not.

I want to ask her if the low dose means she thinks I’m only mildly psychotic, but I don’t. I go on being a good puppy, put the pills in my mouth, and swallow them with the water she hands me. (She brought that along with her too. I wonder what else she keeps in her pockets. Probably a syringe filled with more sedatives and another with the antipsychotics in case I put up a fight over taking them orally. Isn’t it foolish to keep stuff like that in your pockets when you’re in a room with a girl you think may be a danger to herself and others?)

“These will take a few days—even a few weeks—to kick in. It might take some time to feel the full effect.” Lightfoot smiles at me, that same pitying smile from yesterday. If I still had water in my mouth, I’d spit it right in her face to get that stupid look off it.

After Lightfoot leaves, I stare out the window. Lucy isn’t here. She’s at art therapy. That means it’s a Monday. Or a Wednesday. Or a Friday. It doesn’t matter. For thousands of years, human beings lived without keeping track of the days of the week. In fact, when they did introduce days of the week, it was probably for religious purposes, so they’d know when Sunday was to take a day of rest. Or Saturday, if you’re Jewish, which I am, though my family isn’t very religious, so we never observed the Sabbath from sunset on Friday until sunset on Saturday.

Anyway, the point is, for hundreds of years, human beings would have tracked the passage of time by the change in the weather, the summer fading into fall, into winter, into spring. They knew when one day ended and another began because of the sunrise and sunset, not because they were charting dates on a calendar.

Of course, years ago, people also didn’t know that it wasn’t the sun rising and setting that caused daylight and darkness, but the Earth spinning on its axis. They probably thought that people who saw things that weren’t really there were witches and wizards. Instead of medicating them, maybe they venerated them. Or maybe they shunned them.

I rest my chin on the windowsill. It’s not really a sill, just a frame around the square-shaped window that’s only about twice the size of my head. Lucy’s bobby pin is still here, so small and plain that you’d never notice it unless you knew it was there. I gaze outside and wonder what the hell is going on inside my head.

At least for a few more days—even a few weeks—my brain will stay the same.

The leaves are changing color. Unlike back home, the leaves here turn brown instead of bursting into color. It looks like everything is dying.

Dr. Lightfoot didn’t say how we’d know when the meds kick in. Jonah isn’t here, so it’s not like he could—poof!—vanish into thin air.