Chapter Nine

I couldn't sleep at all. Aideen was restless, tossing and turning in her bed all through the night. She would kick off her covers one minute, only to pull them back over her body again the next. I could also hear people moving outside our bedroom door. Lorelei checked in on us every two hours. There was nothing in this room we could hurt ourselves with besides our sheets, but we would have to use them to hang ourselves, and there wasn't anything in the room we could hang from.

The anxiety I felt knowing our door could probably be opened by anyone on staff at R2L was too much for me to handle. Every little sound made me jump, my body folding in half until I was sitting up straight, my wide eyes focused on the door, waiting for someone to come in. They never did, unless it was Lorelei checking on us. At midnight, she came in one last time and whispered to me. "Still can't fall asleep?" I shook my head and lay back down. I tried to still my quickly beating heart. I could hear my pulse thumping rapidly in my ears. Hearing the door slowly slide open had done me in.

"I'll be okay," I told her. I was used to telling everyone that. I'd been doing it for months. I knew it wasn't the truth, but that didn't matter. Adults didn't always want the truth; they wanted the answer that made things easier. They wanted to hear whatever made them feel like they hadn't done anything wrong.

The first time someone cut my hair during class, I'd cut the rest myself at lunch. I thought maybe I could pretend I was in control. She'd chopped a large chunk from the back as I sat in third-period English, and laughed with her friends about it. I didn't cry until that night. My parents pretended to like it, but Luke had heard what happened. He stomped passed me and hissed, "You shouldn't have cut it!" I didn't have much of a choice unless I wanted to walk around with a large bare spot in the back. Now every noise made me jump.

"I'll be back tomorrow afternoon. If you want to take a nap after group I should be here. I'll sit on the end of your bed the whole time." Lorelei didn't ask any questions. She didn't poke around and try to figure out why I didn't like any sort of surprise. She just accepted it and moved on. Maybe that's why she was one of the few adults in a while I could tolerate. I nodded and tried to settle myself back into bed.

She checked on Aideen, flipping the washcloth again so the cool side was on her pale skin. She didn't look good, but she wasn't as miserable-looking as she'd appeared earlier.

When the door shut behind Lorelei, I knew I had another two hours before anyone came to check on us. I had to get some sleep. The more time that ticked by without the ability to quiet my thoughts, the more the darkness would seep in and I was already in that space where my mental health was causing my body physical pain. I couldn't take it much longer. I grabbed my pillow and the top blanket from my bed and made my way over to the floor in front of our door. It wouldn't be the comfiest place I'd ever slept, but at least maybe I'd be able to make the thoughts go quiet for a little while.

I dropped the pillow onto the floor and lay down on it, curling on my side so my back was pressed up against the door. If anyone tried to come in, I'd feel it immediately. I shook out the blanket the best I could and pulled it up over my shoulder, curling my body into the fetal position to keep myself warm and protected. My eyelids felt heavy, and I felt my breaths evening out, but my thoughts were still flitting around like butterflies on a breeze.

I thought of Luke. I wondered if he was better now that I wasn't at home. I wanted that for him. I wanted him to be okay. My eyes fluttered closed, sleep pressing in on me as I remembered my brother before all the darkness found us. I remembered all the light, the brightness of the sun rising on an early morning soccer game as he stood beneath the goal, all the golden-blond curls that flipped out from beneath his flat-billed hat as he sped away from me on his skateboard, and all the glowing candles as we celebrated his fifteenth birthday last year before everything had gone to shit.

I was sinking. Falling. Slipping deeper into sleep, my world going black. The brightness was gone and just like in my life this year, everything that had once been so bright and happy, became dark and devastating. I'd been fighting this for months now, which was why sleep was not always a relief for me. I tried to remember the brightness, but instead I remembered only sparks. The spark of Luke's anger as he slammed doors in our house, the spark of the lighter as he lit up to get high, the spark before the flame as he set fire to the boys' bathroom at school. The most painful one of all was the spark that was missing—the absence of any light in his eyes when he looked at me.

The door pressed against my back with force as it began to slide. It was still dark. My body slid along the floor as someone stepped over me and said, "You can't block the door."

I stood up and grabbed my blanket from the ground. An angry, flustered nurse and a muscular security guard with a blank expression on his face stared at me. Something about the look on his face told me this was not an unusual occurrence. "I'm sorry," I said quickly.

The guard took a quick look around the room and then turned and headed off down the hall. It was still dark inside our room, but the lights in the hallway were dimmed so the staff could see to work. The nurse's expression softened when she saw my makeshift sleeping area. She rested one hand on her hip and breathed out in a huff. "This floor really is quite gross. I don't think it's the best for sleeping on. Is there anything we can do to prevent you from doing that again?"

I was shocked. I'd thought for sure I was going to get in trouble. After all, weren't we on some sort of suicide watch or something? For crying out loud, it only took me a few minutes to swallow that entire bottle of aspirin. Just imagine what I could have done if I had two hours. As if she read my thoughts, the nurse's eyes moved pointedly to the right corner of the room. A small camera was staring back at us.

"We can see you from the desk. The only place not watched is the bathrooms, which is why there is always a nurse at the door. We still have to check on you every two hours to make sure the cameras haven't been tampered with. I swear you kids get smarter each year." She picked up my pillow from the floor and took the blanket from my hand. "I'll get you new ones. Follow me."

We stepped out into the hallway and as we did I saw Marco standing in the doorway of his room. He looked sleepy and his hair was mussed as if he'd just woken up. His eyes narrowed on the nurse and then me. "Everything okay, Koralee?" He crossed his arms over his chest and spread his legs a little wider, leaning his weight back on his heels. The term 'posturing' came to mind. His voice was rough and laced with just enough warning that the nurse glanced toward the guard before I could even answer.

"It's fine. I'm fine." See? I told you I was good at that. It's fine, I'm fine, everything is fine.

"Just switching out her pillow and blanket. She might be allergic to the detergent on these. Thank you for your concern, young man, but I think we have it handled." The nurse had flat-out lied to protect me, to cover up my crazy. She lied to keep my secret and because of that I almost cried. My throat instantly felt too tight. I swallowed once, twice, and tried to clear the lump that was building there. She opened the door in front of us, revealing a closet full of pillows and blankets, and tossed the used ones into a basket before retrieving me a fresh set. When she turned back around she gave me a wink.

"Thank you," I said hoarsely.

I turned around and walked with her back to my room. I could feel Marco watching us, but he didn't say anything else. I crawled back onto my bed and shook the blanket out over my body. I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep anymore. My eyes moved up to the camera and I wondered if the footage was being recorded or just fed to a monitor somewhere for a guard to look over.

For the rest of the night I alternated between thinking about my brother and readjusting the rag on Aideen's forehead. She was awake with me before the sun came up. Her skin was a sickly pale color and she was still trembling, but her eyes didn't look as wild as they had yesterday. Her bucket had been abandoned sometime in the middle of the night when the vomiting had given way to the moaning.

"So it just hurts even though you haven't been injured?" I whispered from my bed.

"Yes," she said with a sniff, her nose running as if a cold had suddenly overtaken her. "It's my brain trying to trick me. It wants me to believe I'm in pain and need more pain medication. It will make me ache like this for a while. Long after the drug is actually out of my system."

"How many times have you done this?" I asked. Her face pinched in pain as she rocked herself from a fetal position under her covers.

"This is the third time. I tell myself every time I'll never do it again. It's that bad. When I get on the other side I always think I'll remember how bad this part is and won't risk having to go through it again, but it never lasts."

"When will you stop wanting it?" I didn't have much experience with abusing any substance, but over the last few months, I'd watched my brother start to go down that path. What seemed like a few innocent experiments with marijuana had turned into an everyday thing and before I'd left, I could tell he was doing more than that.

"Never," she answered honestly. "I'm never going to not want it. I like being high. There's nothing like it. But my body will be off of it soon. I won't need it to not be sick. But that won't stop my brain from telling me to do it again."

"Sounds exhausting," I told her honestly. Fighting myself was wearing me out, I couldn't imagine another vice on top of that.

"You don't know the half of it."

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