Content Note: graphic self-harm, suicidal ideation, eating disorders

 

Monday

You read an article once that said suicides are higher in summer than winter. You weren’t trying to kill yourself, but you can understand why someone might. All the sun and fresh air and ice cream trucks slow-crawling through the neighborhood blasting circus music feels like laughter when you’re at your lowest.

Since Dad won’t risk playing the wrong song with Mom in the car, he jabs the preset for an AM station, and the drone of weather and traffic and mattress ads makes your family’s silence seem belligerent.

You went a long time without being spoken to back at Children’s too.

You sat on the edge of the hospital bed, splitting your attention between Dad stepping out of the room to answer work pages and Mom attacking forms and fielding medical history questions like a general, slipping into her familiar role as caregiver and flinching only a little when she talked about her sister.

In your hushed bubble, you wondered if your aunt had ever felt what you were feeling. You couldn’t name the emotion, but it reminded you of when you woke up too early, which was often, not suddenly but not slowly, to the hum of the A/C unit in your bedroom window and the sun low. A feeling you would’ve called calm, except it wasn’t real.

You become aware of your wrists itching underneath the bandages again. You try to distract yourself by looking through iron gates and unnaturally green trees for glimpses of McMansions, but the white cloth is so alien against your dark skin that your eyes are repeatedly drawn to it and the swarming sensation comes back worse than before. Eventually, you give in and rub your wrists on your thighs. Not vigorously enough to draw your parents’ attention, but you sigh and press your cheek against the sun-warmed window, staring past your reflection without really seeing anything.

You really weren’t trying to kill yourself. No one believed you, of course—not the camp counselor or the doctor or your parents. You couldn’t find the words to explain that there’s just something inside you that’s wrong, something that needs to be cut out.

It’s getting dark by the time you reach the psychiatric hospital. The four-story brick building and its small lot are at the end of a modest drive, tucked inside something smaller than a forest. Hidden.

As you cross the parking lot, the chittering and buzzing of insects fills the continued silence between you and your parents. At least one mosquito takes its fill of you while you drag your feet. You slap your thigh and tug your shorts lower, sucking in lungfuls of moist earth until your mother hisses your name, and you hurry to the door.

After twenty more minutes of not talking to one another in a neat, empty lobby, you and your parents are ushered into a narrow room to answer the same questions they asked at Children’s. The woman with the clipboard feels like an illusion against the off-white wall, only a few feet away, but you could walk for days and never reach her.

You lose track of the conversation envisioning alternate timelines where this isn’t happening. In one, you never get caught. In another, the girl in the neighboring stall doesn’t snitch to the counselor. She keeps your secret. She shares one of her own. And in another, the walls of this bland, narrow room crush you all Indiana Jones-style.

You’re hugging your parents, though you don’t remember standing or going back out to the lobby. Then a person with a dirty-blonde ponytail is leading you to an elevator. They take you to the third of four floors. There’s also an R for roof, but you suspect nobody’s taking you up there during your stay.

You follow your chaperone out of the elevator and straight ahead, toward glass double doors. Beyond the glass, the walls are rust-colored and the floors are checkered and dingy.

You think, What’s black and white and red all over?

So, you’re grinning like a weirdo when the skinny guy leaning on the nurses’ station looks over his shoulder in your direction. He’s about your age, with pale white skin, a wispy mustache, and Donald Duck pajama pants.

The nurse he’d been speaking to is headed your way now, brandishing a lanyard with a keycard at the end…

and your heart is a jet plane in your ears because you finally stop looking past the glass doors and you look at the glass doors and in their reflective surface you see something is right behind you, with your face, something you dismissed before as a weird brain trick, a doubling of your vision when you rushed past the mirror, out into the hallway, chasing the girl who’d been in the stall next to you when your box cutter hit the tiles with a shattering sound, and then your whole life was shattering and you were headed for the emergency room, even though there was no emergency, and you forgot the flicker in the bathroom mirror back at camp, but now it’s so close it’s stepping on your heels, nearly stripping off your sneaker, and you can feel its swampy heat against your back and you don’t catch what your chaperone says but they place a heavy arm across your shoulders and push you forward and as you cross the threshold, the thing with your face passes through the closed half of the glass double doors without missing a step.

You’ve been assigned a room with two empty beds. They tell you not to get used to it, that you’ll eventually get a roommate.

In your bedroom, the checkered linoleum has been mercifully swapped for faux-wood. The rust-red walls, however, press on. Taking in the accommodations, one of your word-a-day words pops into your head: spartan. But Dad promised to bring essentials and other things from home to make your stay more comfortable. Mom had rolled her eyes and told him this wasn’t meant to be a spa.

The bed has a wooden frame with pull-out drawers and a skinny, plastic-covered mattress. The thin sheets have the texture of a potato chip bag.

It’s hard to fall asleep. It doesn’t help that it’s only 9 p.m., when you usually stay up ‘til midnight. It doesn’t help that you’re not home, under your sun-and-moon comforter, listening to CDs, staring at the stars on your ceiling until you feel untethered. It doesn’t help that you were admitted hours after dinner was served to the ward and your stomach is eating itself. It doesn’t help that, every fifteen minutes, a nurse opens your cracked door, flooding the room with light, to make a checkmark on her clipboard, and when she pulls the door partially shut again, she does it so quietly, it’s insulting.

And it really doesn’t help that the Other sits at the foot of your bed in a padded chair with metal arms. Her eyes reflect the moonlight coming in through the curtains.

Don’t you feel better? she says.

You cringe at the sound of her voice. It’s resonant in a way yours isn’t. Full-bodied. Sultry. Wrong. And she sounds so pleased to have coaxed you into scratching your inner thigh, where the mosquito bit you.

At first, you did it to relieve the itching, but then she told you not to stop and you couldn’t, your fingernail peeling away layers of skin until you saw white and the wound wept clear, serous fluid.

You wipe your hands clean on the thin sheets and curl onto your side. You rub your arm, trying to get warm, incidentally strumming old scars. 

There’s a shiver up your spine and into the hairs at the back of your neck before you register the cause: the Other humming a song you know.

“The Quiet of Drowning” is about the death of the singer Deo’s father, “one of the good ones, the last of the old ones” and it’s a cruel choice, because this song always breaks you…

But she only hums the chorus, repeating the same notes over and over, sparing you the marrow of Deo’s grief, never touching the lines that take you back to that moment in Dad’s car, with the heater on high and your eyes drifting across the icy parking lot to school, still in session for other kids, kids who hadn’t just lost the only warm, glowing thing left in their lives.

Humming the song is nonetheless cruel, but the repetition is soothing, almost. You sink into it and sleep for a few hours.

 

Tuesday

They serve fruit cups and oatmeal for breakfast, which no one else seems to mind, but you have to force down the oatmeal, trying to swallow mouthfuls of the honeyed, wet scabs without tasting them.

There are seven girls in the teen ward, including you, and three boys. One of the girls asks you how old you are and you follow up your answer—sixteen—with “What about you?” and this gets everyone sharing their ages, except one of the girls, the only black  kid besides you. She looks young, about twelve, and doesn’t speak the entire meal.

Donald Duck, seventeen and almost aged out of the teen ward, is no longer wearing his pajama pants. Now, he’s drowning in a black hoodie with neon-green stripes and a pair of denim JNCOs. The baggy allover look, especially with the pants scraping the ground and grimy, isn’t your style, but at least it’s a style. You’re still stuck in the gospel camp uniform you wore yesterday.

One of the nurses offered to let you hunt in the lost and found for clothes, but Dad is supposed to bring yours this afternoon. And this way, you won’t be bleeding on someone else’s clothes. Every time you move, the soft fabric of your shorts rubs the weeping scratch like steel wool.

When you woke up the second time this morning, you kept your eyes shut, hoping it had all been a nightmare—getting caught at camp, being admitted to the psych ward, the girl with your face—but the light in the room was wrong and your thigh was burning, and you opened your eyes to find her in the bed opposite yours, lying on her side, in a matching nightgown, watching you.

Now she sits on the boxy radiator behind the orderly, wearing khaki shorts and a baby-blue camp t-shirt. She seems to be reading the newspaper over the man’s shoulder, and as you watch, he curls further and further into the corner, unconsciously putting distance between himself and the Other.

Someone shrieks, and a yellow river gushes out of a toppled bottle of nutrition shake. You jump up to avoid it pooling in your lap.

In the chaos of complaints and apologies and the orderly fetching paper towels, the Other finds her way to you. She stands behind you, whispering, Pocket the spoon, pocket the spoon, in a sing-song tone.

You want to say it’s not a spoon, it’s a spork. You’re guessing they don’t allow forks in the psych ward and it’s probably cheaper to just buy all sporks rather than sporks and spoons. You think that would make a good band name, Sporks and Spoons. You try to come up with other band names, but her idea is like an earworm.

Even once you’re seated and swallowing oatmeal again, you fall away from the chatter around you to consider how easy it would be to smuggle a utensil out of here.

Because it’s summer, there’s no class, and without camp and chores and summer reading, you suddenly have a lot of free time. It would be relaxing if you weren’t worried about falling behind.

They’ve corralled you all into a big room that smells like rotting lemons. It has bad chairs, not-quite-a-collection of books and games, and a boxy, wall-mounted television tuned to Channel 3. Maury is coming on—someone cheated blah blah blah, a paternity test will reveal blah blah blah—but either the staff watching over you doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. Some of the kids huddle together and talk with a level of congeniality that makes you jealous…and fearful. How long would you need to be here to make friends?

You’ve just come from group therapy, where you all sat in a circle and talked about your feelings, just like in the movies. At least they didn’t make you talk if you didn’t want to.

“It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” you tell Donald Duck.

He’s taken the mustard leather armchair across from you. There are yards of thin, gray carpet between you, an awkward, vacant space that screams for a coffee table. He nods, gangly legs stretched out in a futile attempt to bridge the gap. “Yeah.”

He doesn’t sound like he wants to talk about it, so you ask him what kind of music he likes instead. When he mentions Bye-Bye Pretty Boy, you suck in a breath. Your friends always complain that you talk about them too much and say, “Aren’t they lesbians?” even though you’ve told them at least a dozen times that they only kissed as a publicity stunt and, “Would it matter if they were lesbians?”

“That’s so cool you like them!” A few of the other teens glance over at your squeal, but for a change, you don’t care. No one but your aunt has ever appreciated your taste in music. You grin at Donald Duck. “Have you heard their new CD?”

“Yeah, I mean… It’s not their best…”

“Yes, yes, Blush was so much better! Did you like—”

And on it goes, the conversation and time blurring in a comfortable way. It’s such an unfamiliar feeling, you find it unsettling. It’s a relief when an orderly pulls you away for your first one-on-one therapy session.

You don’t mean to say anything substantial, nothing anyone could use against you, but a few questions in, it rushes out like puke:

Your grades, your friends, the boys. Not being able to talk about your aunt. That time your parents claimed Dad was on a business trip for two months when him and Mom were really taking time apart. The way hurting yourself is sometimes the only thing that makes your brain stop slamming itself against your skull and you know it’s not normal and it’s not like you never tried other coping mechanisms, but sometimes it’s the only thing that helps.

Dr. C., a woman with white hair in her mid-40s, takes furious notes on a pad of lined yellow paper and says, “What I’m hearing is that you’re under a lot of pressure.”

“I guess…” you and the Other say in unison. She gives you a razor-edged smile from the far side of the couch. Her cushion is more worn and sunken than the one you chose, probably favored for its two feet of extra distance from the therapist.

“It sounds like you expect a lot of yourself. Better than average grades, several extracurriculars…” You start to say that that’s normal, but Dr. C. continues like she didn’t hear you. “It also sounds like you have concerns about your parents’ relationship.”

“Their relationship isn’t—”

“They fight sometimes,” the Other interrupts.

When your therapist asks, “How often would you say they fight?” she briefly eyes the side of the couch where the Other sits.

“Dr. C.?” you whisper. “Excuse me?” But she doesn’t hear you.

For the next seventeen minutes, the Other discusses your life for you. She tells a simple story about stress and family drama, and ends on her—your—desire to get well. Dr. C.’s pen races over her notepad, filling it with what appears to be nothing but cursive, lowercase Ls.

In the hallway, with the door at your back and the therapist’s parting words to the Other flowing over and beyond you, you wait to feel afraid. But you only feel that soggy relief that comes after turning in a test you know you failed. At least it’s over. 

When the nurse comes by to change your bandages, he tells you you’re on day two of an estimated eight-day stay. He also hands you a small paper cup with water and an even smaller paper cup holding three pills—one oblong and beige, one round and blue, and one a shiny half-white, half-green capsule.

“What is this?” you ask.

“Someone should’ve explained the treatment plan to you,” the nurse says. Still, he points at each pill and tells you the name. You don’t know what any of them do, though one of them sounds like a sedative you’ve seen commercials for. You did tell the doctor you have trouble sleeping sometimes…

“Don’t my parents need to sign off on this?”

“They know about your treatment plan.” He frowns. “Do you want me to page the on-call psychiatrist?”

His voice isn’t unkind, but you find yourself saying, “No. That’s okay.”

He hesitates, then hands you the cup of water and watches you swallow the pills one at a time.

After getting in bed, the last thing you remember is the Other covering you with the sheets, pulling them up to just below your eyes.

 

Wednesday

Dad finally dropped your things off after you went to sleep, so it’s a little like Christmas when you wake up.

You have your books and mp3 player and fresh laundry. You pull on a t-shirt from the Seven Lakes concert your aunt snuck you out to. It was way too big four years ago when you first got it, but now it’s as snug as your hip-huggers.

With an entire night’s sleep bolstering you, you feel more like yourself than you have in months.

After a decent breakfast—hard potatoes and dry sausage are still potatoes and sausage—you and a few of the other teens scatter yourselves around the common room. The Little Rascals is on, and you wish you could pay attention because it was one of your favorite movies when you were little…

But you’re staring at the clock, which is off, though you don’t know by how much and you’re scared to ask the nurse, so you can’t track the time you’re losing in here and you’re very aware of how fast your breathing is and you try to count

In, two, three, four

Out, two, three, four

like the instructor at gospel camp taught you, but breathing gets harder the more you think about it, the kind of thing you can’t watch while it works and your fucking t-shirt collar is too tight and

slender arms slide over your shoulders, crossing at your collarbones. The Other bends low over the back of your armchair, and you wonder if she always had a shadow, before you remember you can’t breathe.

At first, her presence makes things worse. You haven’t seen her since before breakfast and you were hoping, like you do every time she leaves you alone, that she was gone for good.

You remember the orderly trying to get away from her at breakfast, Dr. C. listening to her, and one of the nurses passing you in the hallway and watching her. For some reason, this helps you relax into her arms, even though it’s not necessarily better for her to be real.

Her fingers are very warm on your stomach, the white bandages on her wrists blending in with the white of your t-shirt. When you speak, you speak so quietly you barely hear yourself. “Why are you being nice to me?”

I’m not being nice. I’m helping you.

“Why are you helping me then?”

It’s what I do. Her tone is indulgent, as if your questions are silly.

Having finally earned the privilege of being alone in your room in the daytime, you lie in bed after dinner and listen to music through the mp3 player’s built-in speaker because they wouldn’t let you have your headphones with the cord. You stare at the ceiling, trying to put the stars from your bedroom in their proper places.

“Hey.”

You look over to see Donald Duck in your open doorway. You press pause with mild relief. Lonesome Newsom’s sound can be tinny even before it’s filtered through a low-quality speaker.

“You wanna see something?” Donald Duck’s voice is uncharacteristically urgent.

You raise an eyebrow then shrug. You tuck the mp3 player into your pocket and join him out in the hallway. He leads you past a bunch of open bedroom doors and the boy’s restroom and stops at an unmarked, windowless door with a keypad above the handle.

“We have like, twenty minutes before he finishes his smoke break,” says Donald Duck, punching in a sequence of numbers. “He’s only supposed to take a fifteen, but he always procrastinates.”

You nod like any of this makes sense.

The door beeps, and he pushes it open, revealing a stairwell. He starts jogging up, but stops when he realizes you aren’t following.

“We’ll get in trouble,” you say, keeping the door open with your foot.

He’s poised to continue climbing. “Dude, we’re in a psych ward.”

He has a point. Your sneakers squeak on the stairs as you race behind him.

“They have this dumb, rotating system for the code,” he says, taking the steps two at a time with his mile-long legs. “And it’s the same for most of the doors.”

“How do you know?” you ask, joining him at the top, where there’s another keypad.

He shrugs. “I’ve been here on and off a lot the last few years. I’ll explain it to you, but like, only if you promise to use it responsibly.”

You’re only half-listening because he opens the door onto the roof, and the light is a shock.

“We can’t do anything stupid or no one’ll be able to come up here again, ya know?”

You step outside for the first time in two days. Gravel crunches under your feet.

“Okay?”

You hadn’t realized you could miss the sun. You close your eyes to face it, the orange light cooking your eyelids.

“Okay?”

A hand grips your shoulder and shakes.

You open your eyes, expecting it to be her. You squint like the sun is bothering you to cover up your disappointment. “What?”

“Promise you won’t do anything stupid up here, okay? And don’t get caught. And don’t tell anybody else.”

“Okay.”

His cheekbones jut out when he grins. “Tight. Come on.”

On the other side of the stairwell, the two of you find shade and sit on the raised wall of the roof, your legs dangling.

Below are the grounds behind the hospital, the trees forming a shaggy stretch of land, like a furred beast. Occasionally, a bird shakes loose or the whole thing shivers in a breeze, but for the most part, it lies dormant.

“So, what do you think?” he asks.

“It’s cool,” you say, thinking it’s more creepy than anything.

“You don’t think it’s creepy?”

You chuckle. “I mean, it’s also creepy.”

You see him nodding in your peripheral vision. For a few minutes, you sit in silence, but it’s not uncomfortable.

Of course, you think about jumping. It would be so easy to tip over onto the back of that beast—certainly one way to get out of here—but you couldn’t do that to Donald Duck.

“Dr. C. had me do this drawing thing in therapy,” he says.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, it wasn’t good or anything, but like, I told her it was about recovering…”

You can tell he’s been waiting to share this with someone.

“It’s all anyone wants to hear, that I wanna recover. But like, what if I don’t? What if I just want to be thin?”

You try to imagine his wrists thinner, his skin paler. You don’t think it’s the correct way to respond, but you roll up your short sleeves to show him the stacks of swollen, discolored lines. To you, they look like marks for tallying a score.

Even though he’s seen your bandages and heard about your issues in group, you brace for shock or disgust.

He raises a tentative hand. “Can I touch?”

Next to him, the Other stops kicking her feet. You feel her attention shift up from the trees to you. You glance past Donald Duck, expecting to see disapproval, but she just seems curious. You give him a nod.

His finger is feather-light as it travels from row to row. The scars are so thick, you almost don’t feel it. He looks up at you, eyes wide.

“Holy shit. You might be as fucked up as I am.”

Your burst of laughter spills out over the little forest and he shushes you, but not seriously.

That night, when she lies on top of your sheets and pets your hair, you only sweat a little before the sedative takes you under.

 

Thursday

Dr. C. puts her pen down, sits up straighter, and thanks you and your parents for attending family therapy. Then she lobs the grenade.

“I’m suggesting an early discharge.”

“What?” This is the first you’re hearing of this.

At the same time, Mom says, “Thank you, Jesus.”

And Dad asks, “When?”

Dr. C. nods, as if in answer to all of you. “I’m suggesting an early discharge because I believe your daughter when she says she’s not suicidal. The cutting, as we’ve discussed, is not an attempt to end her life, but a coping mechanism. So—”

“Again, a coping mechanism for what?” says Mom. You keep your eyes on the carpet, but you can feel her glaring at you.

Dr. C. starts saying that there will be time to go in-depth in outpatient therapy, but your mom talks over her, “What’s so horrible about your life?”

Dad leans forward, partially blocking Mom from view. “Is this about Simone, kiddo?”

The name is like rebar to the gut.

“Oh, come on,” Mom says, her voice rising the way it always does when someone brings up her sister.

Dad tries to pat her knee, but she pushes his hand away.

“What?” she says, glaring at him now. “It’s been three years.”

“When am I being discharged?” you ask, ignoring your parents and looking to Dr. C. 

“Two days,” she says, sounding relieved to get back on topic. “Well, two more nights and one full day. Discharges usually happen by 10 a.m., so the room can be cleaned.” A pause. She narrows her eyes at something over your shoulder. “I thought you were ready to leave?”

You turn to see the Other sitting against the wall behind you, like there’s a chair underneath her. She even has one leg crossed over the other.

I was, she says.

“But you aren’t now?”

For once, she seems unsure. She stares back at you, and you think she’s trying to answer the therapist’s question for herself.

Your body shakes under her dissecting gaze.

I don’t trust myself, she finally says. She comes to sit on the arm of your chair, her hip against your shoulder, bathing you in sluggish warmth and petrichor.

Dr. C. nods. “It’s normal to be anxious about the transition home, but you’ll have outpatient therapy, groups if you like. And your medications should stabilize over the next few weeks, though we can make adjustments if they don’t. You have a good support network, better than a lot of kids.”

You expect the Other to fill the silence, to plead your case, but she only gently squeezes your shoulder.

“And do you think she’s ready to return to camp?” Mom asks. “She’s supposed to start a new one on Monday.”

“That’s up to you,” says your therapist. “Though I do want you all to take things slow if you can.”

“Me and her father have to work. And now we can’t leave her home alone, so…”

You don’t think you can go back to it all.

Back to your parents and the teachers, who want to know why you aren’t meeting your potential, back to your packed schedule, to the stack of CDs covered in your aunt’s handwriting that you can’t make yourself listen to, to the girls who hate you, who poke at your eccentricities like bruised fruit, to the boys who are never satisfied, who push and want and need and you don’t know why you keep allowing them to touch you…

But you do, don’t you?

Because afterwards, there’s bloodletting. Then, the acts and the boys and even you, for a time, become special. And you can handle another day because at least you’re not nothing, and that’s what you’re really afraid of. More than failing a class or being called a slut or trusting something that can steal your voice or killing yourself like your aunt, you’re scared that underneath it all, you’re only a shell, shaped like a girl.

The Other listens patiently to your venting, sitting on the floor with her back resting against the bed across from yours, the one that was never occupied by the roommate you were promised. When you start having trouble breathing, she gets up and climbs into bed with you, slipping under the sheets.

You turn a little to see her face—your face. You’re groggy from the sedative, your body heavy, except for your chest rising and falling desperately. You think she’s going to say something cryptic or upsetting. Your shoulders tense. But she just brushes away a strand of hair stuck to your cheek with sweat and leaves a kiss in its place.

When she pulls back, this time it’s her smile that catches the moonlight, her teeth glowing, and her eyes are so dark you can see yourself in them…

Then she pushes up your nightgown and you think it’s going to be like when the boys touch you, or maybe softer, like you’ve imagined another girl might touch you.

But, of course, your Other touches you the way you would.

She digs her nails into your thigh, into the sticky scratch you’ve reopened every day since the first. You have to bite your hand to muffle your cry and it’s almost enough…almost… But then she straddles you, producing a plastic utensil with the head snapped off.

With a slash that makes you flinch, she opens the skin below her own eye. She catches the tear-like trickle of blood on her finger and leans closer, her hair a curtain around her face. She rubs her bloody fingertip across your lips, and when you instinctively lick them clean, her own lips curl into a feral smile.

With her help, you unwrap the bandages on your wrists. She hands you your jagged, plastic instrument, and you don’t have to press hard to reopen the wounds that landed you here. You grit your teeth as nerves are thrown into a panic, and dig until the hot iron pain crests and crashes over you and the endorphins flood in and then you keep digging until your arms are too exhausted to move and you lie beside her, gasping and a little dizzy.

When you try to move, your arms stick to the sheets. It’s such a strange sensation that you giggle. And then you take a shuddering breath…

you stand
something shatters
you stumble
and the room is flooded with light
someone is shouting
while someone is whispering
help
into your palms
and the blood on your hands is colder
than the tile against your cheek as
something holds you down
and down
into the swirl of
black and
white

 

Friday

;

 

Saturday

Donald Duck waits for you by the nurses’ station, leaning on the counter like he did the first time you saw him. After a few awkward minutes of small talk, you say goodbye and wish him good luck, though you don’t know if you mean with his recovery or with his plans to starve himself to death. He gives you his number on a torn piece of notebook paper and wishes you luck too. He hugs you, his arms like wings, nothing but angles and fragile bone.

You don’t think you should call him.

When you leave the ward, your Other steps through the glass a second time. It’s disorienting. You’ve felt the ridged scars on her arms, the race of her pulse. She’s real. She’s unreal.

Down in the lobby, Mom offers to take your bags, but you wave her off. When you load your bags into the trunk and, again, when you lower yourself into the passenger’s seat, needles shoot all the way from the stitches in your wrists to a spot in your chest, next to your breastbone.

“I’m happy you’re coming home.”

For a moment, you think it’s her. When you turn, you’re surprised to see your mother is facing you and tearing up a little.

You know what she wants to hear. “Me too.”

She sniffs, then nods once like that settles it. She puts the car in reverse, and you fight the urge to look in the rearview mirror. When she reaches for the radio, you stare. When did she start listening to music again?

As Mom maneuvers the car around a pothole in the driveway, she taps her finger to a song that’s just started. Not one you know. The intro is long—lots of guitar fondling—but when the listless melody shifts to acoustic R&B and a scratchy, female voice comes on, you settle into your seat.

A minute in, you have a thought you know you should keep to yourself. Maybe therapy’s made you braver because you say, “This was her kind of music.”

It’s silent for a long time, except for the woman singing about a break-up, and you wish you hadn’t said anything.

“I…don’t blame you for thinking of only yourself

Eventually…there will be nobody else.”

You force your bouncing leg to be still, waiting for Mom’s grief to sharpen into anger…

She taps the steering wheel. “Mm.” She doesn’t seem to know what to say after that.

Neither do you.

As the car turns toward home, you finally give in and look in the rearview mirror. You catch the hospital vanishing into the trees before you focus on your Other in the backseat.

All of your scars, including your recently stitched wrists, are reflected on her rich brown skin. Not for the first time, you touch your own cheek and frown. The cut under her eye is vivid red, like she just made it, and unique to her. Every so often, a drop of blood slides down her cheek to join the pool in her collarbone.

She catches your eye and the hunger in her expression makes your stomach flutter with something that isn’t like butterflies, something wiry and desperate and nameless.

© 2023 Kel Coleman