A Danger to Herself and Others(8)

I didn’t think it was fair that I’d get first dibs just because my parents drove me here faster than yours did.

My parents didn’t drive me here. I took a cab from the airport.

You flew here alone?

I shrugged like it was no big deal, but I could tell Agnes was impressed. Maybe she’d never been on a plane before. (I found out later that she had, but only twice.) She was wearing a white T-shirt over denim shorts. Her skin was fair but dotted with freckles in odd places (not across her cheeks like Lucy’s): a smattering on one cheek, on the back of her left hand, behind her right ear. She was wearing pink lip gloss; coral would have looked better with her complexion, but there would be plenty of time for me to teach her that.

Lucky for you, I do believe in first dibs. You got here first, so you should get to choose your bed.

But that’s not fair! When Agnes was upset, her blue eyes got so wide she looked seven instead of seventeen. We should at least flip a coin.

I shook my head, my smile still wide on my face. I already knew I wanted Agnes to be my new best friend.

Your choice.

Agnes hesitated, and in the end, I agreed to flip a coin. I wonder if she ever regretted having been so considerate.

Now, Lucy turns to face the window, though there’s even less of a view from that side of the room. She’s several inches shorter than I am. She probably won’t be able to see out the small square of glass even if she stands on her tiptoes. The beds are bolted to the floor, so she won’t be able to drag it over and stand on top of it in hopes of getting a better look.

I saw a movie that took place in prison once, and when a new inmate arrived, they all went around the table in the cafeteria and took turns saying what they’d done—or been found guilty of doing—to get sent there. They talked about what their lives had been like on the outside. Just like new roommates getting to know one another. Just like Agnes and I did not so long ago.

Agnes sat on her second-choice bed (I won the coin toss) and told me she was from a small town near Fargo, North Dakota.

I’ve never met anyone from North Dakota.

I thought people from New York knew people from everywhere.

I shook my head. Almost everyone I knew was from New York. Why’d you think that?

Isn’t that where everyone goes when they want to escape where they came from?

I smiled and shrugged. Personally, I never thought about New York as an escape—it was where I was from, after all—but I knew plenty of people from other places saw it as a destination.

Agnes asked, What’s New York like?

My smile grew wider. You’ll find out when you visit me someday.

What makes you think I’ll visit you?

Can’t you tell we’re going to be best friends?

We’ve known each other for less than thirty minutes. What makes you so sure?

Agnes laughed before I had a chance to answer, as if she could already tell that anything I might say would be clever enough to deserve it.

I narrow my eyes and study Lucy’s face. Even through her veil of hair, I can see that her eyes are red. She was probably crying when they admitted her downstairs. Maybe (unlike me), she put up a fight when they sent her here.

Maybe they had to wait for her to calm down before they could bring her upstairs.





six


Despite the lack of prison-like confessions, it doesn’t take long to find out what Lucy did to get sent here—only until our next meal, which she finishes before I’m on my second bite, then immediately sticks her fingers in her mouth and throws up into the bedpan she pulls from beneath her bed.

(So much for my theory that she might be a medical student.)

“Aren’t you supposed to be secretive about that?”

Lucy wipes her mouth. I can see a barely chewed crust of bread in her bedpan. “What’s the point?”

“I don’t think they clean those all that thoroughly,” I say, as she curls over the bedpan for a second time.

“Looks cleaner than the gas station we stopped at on the way up here,” Lucy says when she finishes. She drops the bedpan onto the waxy linoleum floor, and some vomit splashes over the side. She nods at some crackers wrapped in shiny plastic on my tray. “You gonna eat those?”

I shake my head. They don’t give us food that requires a fork and knife. It’s a lot of soup and cereal and sandwiches. Lucy grabs the crackers from my tray like she’s stealing something. She lifts her thin mattress and slides them onto the plastic platform beneath it. For later, I guess.

I leave more than half my sandwich untouched on my tray. I can feel Lucy staring at it.

“You want?” I offer with a smile.

She shakes her head so slowly that it looks like it hurts.

Patient may pose a danger to herself and others.

We pile our plates—paper, flimsy, useless—by the door for the orderly to take away. Lucy leaves her bedpan there too, like she’s daring them to ask her about it.

Lucy lies back on her bed. I feel a tug of possessiveness as she stares at the ceiling.

Don’t be silly, Hannah. Dozens of girls probably lay on the beds in this room and memorized every crack and cranny on the ceiling long before you got here. I imagine the perfectly reasonable words in Agnes’s voice.

Lucy says she’s from Oakland, and she’s studying ballet. (That explains her perfect posture.) I wonder if she ever tried to starve herself in addition to purging, but of course, I’m too polite to ask. (I read a book once about a girl who vacillated back and forth between anorexia and bulimia. Maybe Lucy does, too.)