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Claire gestures toward the empty spot next to me and invites her to sit down. The girl slides into the chair, then grabs the seat, scraping the legs back and forth on her little patch of floor, trying to get settled. Her chair bangs into mine. The impact reverberates all through me.

“Oops,” she says.

Claire asks if anyone is willing to make the introductions, but it seems like everyone has suddenly gotten shy. So Claire goes around the circle giving names but not issues.

The new girl says her name so quickly I can’t tell if it’s Amanda or Manda. Then, when no one says anything, she says, “Jesus Christ, it’s hot in here.”

Claire asks Amanda/Manda if she wants to tell us why she’s at Sick Minds. Amanda/Manda pulls off her sweatshirt; I feel every movement through my chair.

There’s a gasp from across the circle. Debbie’s hand is clapped over her mouth and the other girls are staring at the new girl.

Her sweatshirt is on the floor and she’s sitting there in a little white undershirt holding her arms out so everyone can see a geometry of scars crisscrossing her inner arm: scars in parallel lines running up to her elbow, bisecting lines, obtuse angles. Scratched into the skin above her wrist are words. In pink scar tissue on one arm it says “Life.” On the other it says “Sucks.”

I pull my sleeves down around my thumbs and pinch the fabric tight.

“I don’t really need to be here,” she says. “Some dogood English teacher thought I was trying to kill myself.”

There’s scattered fidgeting, then silence. “You’re not?” Sydney finally says.

“As if,” Amanda/Manda says.

“Then why do you do it?”

“Beats me,” she says. Then, right away, “Low selfesteem. Poor impulse control. Repressed hostility. Right?” She addresses all this to Claire.

Claire doesn’t answer, so Amanda/Manda turns back to Sydney. “Listen, I don’t see how what I do is so different from people who get their tongues pierced. Or their lips. Or their ears, for Chrissakes. It’s my body.”

She glances around the circle; no one budges.

“It’s body decoration. Like tattoos.” She keeps talking, like she’s been in the middle of a conversation that everybody else happened to walk in on. Like we’re new, not her. “It’s better than people who bite their nails till they bleed. I mean, they’re actually eating their own flesh. They’re like cannibals.”

Tiffany, who bites her nails until they bleed, tucks her hands under her thighs.

“I mean, why is everyone so upset? It’s freedom of expression, right?”

I grind the hem of my sleeve between my fingers. The frantic barking of a dog rings in the distance. Amanda/Manda is saying something about an article she read in a magazine. I turn my head ever so slightly to catch the words.

“You know, they used to bleed people all the time back in the old days,” she says. “When they were sick. It’s an endorphin rush.”

“And …” All heads swivel in the direction of Claire’s voice. “Does it make you feel better?” Claire says.

“Absolutely.” Amanda/Manda shifts in her chair. “It’s a high. I mean, you feel amazing. No matter how bad you felt before. It’s a rush. Like suddenly you’re alive.”

“And you want to do it again, don’t you?” Claire says.

My fingers are numb from pinching my shirtsleeve.

“Yeah. So?”

“Let me rephrase that,” Claire says slowly. “You need to do it again.”

The new girl leans forward in her chair, her dark eyes blazing. “Not me,” she says. “I can control it. I always control it.” She folds her arms across her chest; her elbow nudges mine. I jump.

“What about you, Callie?” Claire’s voice is loud. “Can you control it?”

The room is dead quiet. Debbie stops cracking her weight-control gum. Even the dog stops barking. Far off, down the hall, a phone trills, once, twice, three times. It’s answered by an invisible voice.

“Callie?”

I feel the new girl turn to regard me.

I nod.

And I can feel the rest of the group exhale.

I spend the rest of the session counting the stitches on my sneaker and hating this Amanda/Manda person, hating Claire, hating this whole stupid place. Because now everybody knows why I’m here.

I’m at my usual place at dinner that night, at the far end of the long rectangular table, trying to make each mouthful last for twenty chews. That way, it takes me just as long to eat as it does for everybody else to eat and talk. The other girls are turned away, discussing some kind of petition. Sydney says she wants pizza. Tara suggests lowfat yogurt. The petition, I deduce, must be about the food. Becca says she wants croutons without gluten, whatever that is.

“How about an ice cream bar?” Debbie says. “Like a salad bar. You can go back as many times as you want.”

“Yeah, right,” says Tiffany “That’s just what you need.”

“I was kidding,” Debbie says.

“What do you want?” It’s a voice I don’t recognize right away the new girl’s.

When I look up, two rows of heads are turned in my direction. This reminds me, suddenly, of a book my Gram gave me when I was little, about Madeline, the little French girl who lived with twelve little girls in two straight lines.

I pick up my plastic spoon and sculpt my mashed potatoes into a little hill.

“We don’t know about her,” I hear Debbie say. “She doesn’t talk.”

I make a little mashed potato ski slope, then flatten it with my spoon. The other girls go back to talking about the petition and I decide that dinner’s over for me, that it’s time to bring my tray up to the conveyor belt that takes all the dirty dishes and cups and leftover food through a window into the dish room, where they disappear.

I stand and try to squeeze between the chairs at our table and the ones behind us. The space is tight and I hold my tray high so I don’t bump into anybody. I pass safely behind Sydney, then Tara When I get to the new girl, she rocks back; my toe stubs the leg of her chair. Milk sloshes out of my glass and down the back of her sweatshirt.

“Jesus!” She practically spits out the word. “Why don’t you watch what you’re doing?” She’s wiping her sweatshirt with a paper napkin. They all look at me, six sick girls in two straight lines, waiting for me to do something.

Somehow I navigate through the sea of tables and chairs and more chairs until I’m finally at the conveyor belt.

The lunchroom attendant, a heavy woman who sits guard over the trash cans to keep track of how much food the anorexics throw out, gives me a bothered expression, then goes back to her paperback.

Across the room, a dish explodes on the floor; there’s the obligatory smattering of applause. The attendant gets up, turns her book face down on her chair, and brings a broom and dustpan over to the girl who dropped her dish.

I stand in front of the blue trash can marked “Recyclables” and finger the edge of my aluminum pie plate, aware that no one’s watching me, that all I’d have to do is rip the pie plate in half to get a nice sharp cutting edge. The clatter of dishes and conversation dims to a hush as I slip the thin, impossibly light disk of aluminum into my pocket. I’m calm, finally, because I know that even if I don’t use it right away, I have what I need.

That night, Sydney tosses and turns and fusses with her blankets for almost an hour after lights out. I lie on my back and count the seconds, praying for herto fall asleep, so I can hear the sound ofher steady in-out breathing—so I can fall asleep.

She rolls over, facing my direction.

“Callie?” she whispers. The space between our twin beds is only a foot or two.

I hold my breath and try to pretend I’m asleep.

“Callie? Callie,” she says. “Do you still do it?”

I hold very still.

“I mean, are you still, you know, cutting yourself?”

From down the hall comes the faint squeaking of Ruby’s nurse’s shoes as she makes her rounds. From the sound of it, Ruby’s still four doors away. I think of it as a problem on a standardized test: if Ruby’s shoes squeak every 2.5 seconds and she’s four rooms away, how long till she reaches our door?

“Lookit, Callie.” Sydney blows out a gust of air, the way she does when she’s smoking an imaginary cigarette in Group. “It’s OK with me if you don’t want to talk.”

Just a few squeaks until Ruby’s at our door. People who aren’t asleep when Ruby comes around have to take sleeping pills. Everyone is afraid of those pills—even the substance-abuse guests.

Sydney sighs. “Just don’t, you know …please don’t hurt yourself.”

Tears, warm and sudden, sting the corners of my eyes, but I don’t cry. Sam cries. My mom cries. I don’t cry. I roll over as Ruby passes by. She pauses outside our door a minute, a brief interruption in the steady squeak, squeak of her shoes. Then she moves on. And after a while I figure Sydney must have fallen asleep, because finally I can hear the steady in-out of her breathing.

On the way to your office the next day Ruth clears her throat. She puts her hand over her mouth, then says she has something to tell me, that this is the last day she’ll be my escort. Her voice is small, unsteady. “I’m graduating,” she says. “Tomorrow.”

She smiles a practice smile, and one of my dad’s favorite dumb jokes comes to mind. The joke is about a family riding along in a brand-new convertible. The car hits a bump, and one of the kids, a girl named Ruth, falls out. But the family keeps on driving. Ruthlessly. “Get it?” he would say, grinning. “Ruthlessly?”

Sick Minds will be a Ruthless place once she’s gone. I would like to tell Ruth this, give this joke to her as a graduation gift. But then she is gone and I’m sitting next to the UFO—Ruthlessly—and wondering how she got better without looking any different.

You furrow your brow and ask me to please look at you a minute. I look past you, out the window, at a squirrel sitting on the end of a branch.

“Callie,” you say softly. “I want you to think about whether you want to continue coming to see me.”

The squirrel nibbles on his acorn, looks around suspiciously, then goes back to his lunch.

“This—the two of us sitting here every day, with me watching you count the stripes on the wallpaper—isn’t helping you.”

The squirrel freezes; the branch quivers as another squirrel scrambles toward him.

“And Callie …I believe you want help.”

The squirrels are gone, but the branch is still quivering. I steal a glimpse at you; you’re pretty, I realize, and youngish. You wrap your hands around your knees, like we’re two girlfriends, just hanging out, talking. I go back to counting the stripes on the wallpaper.

After a while, I hear your dead-cow chair groan. You sigh. “OK,” you say. “That’s all for today.”

The clock says we still have fifty minutes left. But you’ve already capped your pen and closed your notebook.

I keep my hand on your doorknob a minute, standing in the waiting area outside your office, wondering what I’m supposed to do now. There’s no one to escort me and there’s no place to escort me to.

I picture you on the other side of the door, closing the manila file with my name on it, all the empty sheets of notebook paper, from all the days I came and sat in your office counting the stripes on the wallpaper, spilling into the trash. And it occurs to me that I’m alone—really alone—for the first time since I got here.

I let go of the knob and move away from your door, slowly then faster, down the hall, not really knowing where I’m going, just going. I pass a supply closet, then a door with a large red bar and a metal flag on it marked “For Emergency Use Only,” and I wonder if an alarm really would ring if I opened it, if it would be like a prison escape movie, if Rochelle would throw down her magazine and come running, if Doreen would drop her linens and man the searchlight, if the other girls would stumble out of their rooms and ask what was going on. But my feet carry me past the Emergency Use Only door, back the way I came with Ruth a few minutes ago, back to Study Hall.

The door is closed, though. There’s no sign or anything. Of course it’s closed; Study Hall is over. Everyone is at Individual or Anger Management or Art Therapy. Everyone except me.

Down the hall I hear keys jingle. Marie, the daytime bathroom attendant, is taking up her post on the orange chair. I walk in her direction, trying to act normal.

She barely notices as I go past; she doesn’t ask me what I’m doing here without an escort or why I’m here when I’m supposed to be somewhere else.

I pick a stall down at the end and stand inside facing the toilet. I put my hand on the handle and imagine myself imitating the man on the radio, the man who says, “Testing. Testing. One. Two. Three.” The handle is cold and wet with condensation; I wipe my hand on my jeans and pray that the sound of the toilet flushing will be loud enough. “This is a test,” the man says. “This is only a test.”

I clear my throat and jiggle the handle.

“Everything OK in there?” Marie calls out.

I grip the handle.

“I said, is everything OK in there?”

I can hear the scrape of Marie’s chair on the tile floor as she stands up.

I push on the handle. A great roar comes up from the toilet bowl. I lean over like I’m going to be sick, but nothing comes out.

Forty-five minutes is a long time. You can divide it into nine five-minute segments, five nine-minute segments, three fifteen-minute segments, fifteen three-minute segments, or two twenty-two-and-a-half-minute segments. That’s if you have a watch. If you have to spend it hiding in the laundry room listening for the sounds of footsteps overhead telling you that people are finished with Art Therapy or Anger Management or Individual, you have to time it just right so you come upstairs not too early, not too late, so that you can slip into Group right on schedule without anyone even noticing that you were gone.

As I’m leaving Study Hall for dinner, Tara’s coming toward me carrying a bouquet of tulips. The flowers, which are gigantic in her thin, little-girl arms, are dripping, even though she’s cupped her hand under the stems.

I consider turning back, pretending I left something in Study Hall, but Tara calls out to me. “Can you believe it?” she says. “They took the vase away at the front desk. Glass.”

Here at Sick Minds we guests are not allowed to have any “sharps”—glass or thumbtacks or CDs or ballpoint pens or razors. Sydney keeps making a joke about how there’s only one difference between the employees here and the guests; the guests, she says, are the ones with hairy legs.