A Danger to Herself and Others(25)
In this place, there is a raggedy towel waiting for me when I turn off the water, then the slap slap slap of my wet bare feet down the hall toward the room with the magnetic lock and the bulimic girl waiting on a bed with a mattress so thin you wake up feeling seventy instead of seventeen.
A group of four dry-haired girls wrapped in towels follows another attendant down the hall in the opposite direction. They’re on their way to shower together. I turn my head and watch them go.
This place makes you wish you were showering in a room full of girls instead of on your own.
This place makes showering with other girls seem more private than showering alone.
Stay in this place too long, and how can you help going crazy?
But crazy people don’t get to go back to school and earn the straight A’s they need to get into Harvard and Yale and Stanford.
And crazy people don’t get to hand in their college applications not just on time but early, because crazy people don’t get to control their own schedule.
Crazy people are told what to do by doctors and caretakers for the rest of their lives.
I’ve got to get out of here.
One way or another.
eighteen
“September eighth,” I announce when they close the door behind us after lunch the next day.
“What?” Lucy asks.
“Today is September eighth.”
“How do you know that?”
“Annie told me.”
“How did she know?”
I shrug. “Maybe they granted her calendar privileges.”
Lucy giggles, but I don’t feel like laughing. September eighth means I’ve been here for a month. It means Dr. Lightfoot is taking her sweet time with me, completely oblivious to the fact that she’s ruining my life.
It means I’ve missed the first day of school.
Okay, sure, plenty of kids miss the first day of school.
Maybe their camp session didn’t end in time or maybe their parents signed up for a tour of Italy without realizing that it overlapped with the start of the school year. People miss school for circumstances beyond their control. Maybe they were visiting someplace tropical that got hit with an unseasonably early hurricane and all the flights were canceled and they couldn’t get home for another week or two. I started kindergarten two weeks late, and it never kept me from being a straight-A student.
But fall semester of senior year is different. Those are the grades that colleges look at, the grades they scour for weakness, searching for any reason not to admit you.
My school has a strict attendance policy: miss a quiz without an excused absence and you get an F. One F is enough to drag down your entire GPA. And teachers love giving pop quizzes your first week back from school, to see how much you suffered from summer slide, words they repeat like they’re referring to a disease, the sort of thing mosquitoes carry for which there’s no inoculation.
I look at the pile of romance novels at the foot of my bed. I was supposed to spend this summer earning college credit, the furthest thing from summer slide imaginable. I’m supposed to be back home, starting Chaucer and Dickens with my English class. Instead, I’ve read these awful books so many times I can practically recite them. Maybe that’ll be the next phase of our book club: testing each other on how much we’ve memorized.
When Lightfoot comes, I can’t help myself. I don’t want her to know how much I want out, but I need to ask: “How much longer am I going to be here?”
I hold my breath, preparing for her answer. One week, two, and I can still make it home in time to make up for lost time and maintain my GPA. Three weeks, four, and my GPA will slip, but I can still get into my second-choice schools, right?
Any longer than that, and I can kiss even my safety schools goodbye.
Any longer than that, and they might actually hold me back for a year.
Lightfoot crosses her legs in her folding chair, her papery clothes crinkling beneath her. “I know you’re concerned about school,” she begins.
“Of course I’m worried about school!”
“But I want you to keep your focus on where you are today, not on where you’d rather be.”
I shake my head. I can’t possibly focus on where I am now any more than I already have. I’ve memorized every nook and cranny of these god-awful green walls. I know every bump of paint on the ceiling and every crack in the gray linoleum floor, and I’ve read every book they’ve given me at least twice. How much more focused could a person be?
“Don’t let this…” Lightfoot pauses, searching for the right phrase, “derail your progress. You’re doing so well. I’m going to send you to group shower in a few days, and perhaps you’ll be able to begin art therapy soon.”
I smile. Privileges like that are just a hop, skip, and a jump from being sent home, right?
“So maybe I won’t miss that much school after all?”
Lightfoot shakes her head. “I don’t want you focusing on that. We have a lot of work to do.”
“But you said so yourself, I’m doing so well.”
“Hannah, a date hasn’t been set for your hearing yet.”
“Why not?” Agnes’s fall was five weeks ago. (Now that I know the date, I know that too.)
Lightfoot shrugs like it’s no big deal, as if to say Backed-up legal system and all that.