Never Alone

Chapter 10

Chapter Ten

I'd never been an inpatient at a psychiatric hospital before, but something about that place didn't feel right. The food was hospital food, but the staff was too intimately aware of our cases. The loudspeaker in the hall rang out with announcements and pages just like in any other hospital, but the kids wandered with a freedom I couldn't imagine was normal. And perhaps most perplexing was that all the other patients seemed to know we were part of Dr. Crimm's group, and therefore they moved around us the way water repelled oil in a dish. We didn't fit in and it seemed like no amount of smiling or trying was going to make us blend. Then again, I never did see any of us trying.

We sat together again at breakfast, most of us pushing our food around on our plates, Aideen not attempting to eat a thing from hers. Her hand trembled so badly she could barely hold her Spork. I took the time to look around the crowded room, not just glance, but really study the people here like I hadn't had the wherewithal to do the day before. I was expecting to see severely disturbed individuals—after all, this was a cutting-edge medical facility that focused on saving people from suicide.

But there was no one rocking in the corner, no one yelling to themselves or lashing out at someone nobody else could see like the man from my neighborhood who walked miles each day, shaking his fist and shouting as if having a heated argument with an invisible adversary beside him. There wasn't anyone who required restraints, or anyone slumped over in their chairs, heavily sedated from their need to be medicated to an extreme level. No, this was a room full of teenagers that could have been any lunchroom in any cafeteria across the United States. My eyes raced around each table, trying to read something that would convince me they were unwell.

"What do you think is wrong with the others?" I whispered to Shima as she stabbed at a cubed potato on her plate, dragging it through the ketchup and lifting her eyes to look around.

"I don't know." She paused her movement, looking at a group of girls at a table not far from us. They were laughing about something we couldn't hear. Her eyes moved from them to Aideen, who had her arms folded over her chest and was rocking slightly back and forth, biting her lip as if in pain. "We don't always show our scars on the outside, I guess."

She was right. I had been the picture of perfect before my world fell apart. Didn't I know peers who had scars on the inside? I had friends who lied, said vile, untrue things about a person they once were close to, people who stood together as a group to shred apart any dignity they could get ahold of just to get a laugh, or maybe out of fear or misunderstanding . . . I even knew a boy who hated his sister. I tucked my chin and let my eyes drop back down to my food, never more disgusted with the idea of eating than at that moment.

The worst part of my anxiety those last few months had been the depersonalization. I didn't mind the fear of heart attack. I welcomed that. Let me die. Let my heart explode inside my chest, or my lungs burn up and rob me of my ability to take in oxygen, but don't let my mind disconnect from my body. Don't let me lose control. I felt it just then; I could see my hands gripping the edge of the table, but I couldn't feel the way the rough plastic edge should have been biting into them. It was like watching the whole thing from the back row of a movie theater. I simply wasn't there.

Damien was tapping the end of his Spork on the tabletop in a fast-paced Morse code rhythm. Tap-tap-tap-tap. Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh. The soundtrack grew louder as Damien's tapping blended with the ever-present whoosh of my blood pumping insistently through my too-narrow veins. I was trapped. I couldn't get out. I couldn't get away or move or . . .

"Koralee." My name was a command. I heard it like an echo from my left, but the male who had said it was outside the field of my tunnel vision. He tried again. "Koralee."