I can never win with this body I live in.

—Belly, “Star”

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Like a baby harp seal, I’m all white. My forearms are thickly bandaged,

heavy as clubs. My thighs are wrapped tightly, too; white gauze peeks out

from the shorts Nurse Ava pulled from the lost and found box behind the

nurses’ station.

Like an orphan, I came here with no clothes. Like an orphan, I was

wrapped in a bedsheet and left on the lawn of Regions Hospital in the

freezing sleet and snow, blood seeping through the flowered sheet.

The security guard who found me was bathed in menthol cigarettes and

the flat stink of machine coffee. There was a curly forest of white hair

inside his nostrils.

He said, “Holy Mother of God, girl, what’s been done to you?”

My mother didn’t come to claim me.

But: I remember the stars that night. They were like salt against the sky,

like someone spilled the shaker against very dark cloth.

That mattered to me, their accidental beauty. The last thing I thought I

might see before I died on the cold, wet grass.

The girls here, they try to get me to talk. They want to know What’s your

story, morning glory? Tell me your tale, snail. I hear their stories every day

in Group, at lunch, in Crafts, at breakfast, at dinner, on and on. These words

that spill from them, black memories, they can’t stop. Their stories are

eating them alive, turning them inside out. They cannot stop talking.

I cut all my words out. My heart was too full of them.

I room with Louisa. Louisa is older and her hair is like a red-and-gold noisy

ocean down her back. There’s so much of it, she can’t even keep it in with

braids or buns or scrunchies. Her hair smells like strawberries; she smells

better than any girl I’ve ever known. I could breathe her in forever.

My first night here, when she lifted her blouse to change for bed, in the

moment before that crazy hair fell over her body like a protective cape, I

saw them, all of them, and I sucked my breath in hard.

She said, “Don’t be scared, little one.”

I wasn’t scared. I’d just never seen a girl with skin like mine.

Every moment is spoken for. We are up at six o’clock. We are drinking

lukewarm coffee or watered-down juice by six forty-five. We have thirty

minutes to scrape cream cheese on cardboardy bagels, or shove pale eggs in

our mouths, or swallow lumpy oatmeal. At seven fifteen we can shower in

our rooms. There are no doors on our showers and I don’t know what the

bathroom mirrors are, but they’re not glass, and your face looks cloudy and

lost when you brush your teeth or comb your hair. If you want to shave your

legs, a nurse or an orderly has to be present, but no one wants that, and so

our legs are like hairy-boy legs. By eight-thirty we’re in Group and that’s

when the stories spill, and the tears spill, and some girls yell and some girls

groan, but I just sit, sit, and that awful older girl, Blue, with the bad teeth,

every day, she says, Will you talk today, Silent Sue? I’d like to hear from

Silent Sue today, wouldn’t you, Casper?

Casper tells her to knock it off. Casper tells us to breathe, to make

accordions by spreading our arms way, way out, and then pushing in, in, in,

and then pulling out, out, out, and don’t we feel better when we just

breathe? Meds come after Group, then Quiet, then lunch, then Crafts, then

Individual, which is when you sit with your doctor and cry some more, and

then at five o’clock there’s dinner, which is more not-hot food, and more

Blue: Do you like macaroni and cheese, Silent Sue? When you getting those

bandages off, Sue? And then Entertainment. After Entertainment, there is

Phone Call, and more crying. And then it’s nine p.m. and more meds and

then it’s bed. The girls piss and hiss about the schedule, the food, Group,

the meds, everything, but I don’t care. There’s food, and a bed, and it’s

warm, and I am inside, and I am safe.

My name is not Sue.

Jen S. is a nicker: short, twiglike scars run up and down her arms and legs.

She wears shiny athletic shorts; she’s taller than anyone, except Doc

Dooley. She dribbles an invisible basketball up and down the beige hallway.

She shoots at an invisible hoop. Francie is a human pincushion. She pokes

her skin with knitting needles, sticks, pins, whatever she can find. She has

angry eyes and she spits on the floor. Sasha is a fat girl full of water: she

cries in Group, she cries at meals, she cries in her room. She’ll never be

drained. She’s a plain cutter: faint red lines crosshatch her arms. She doesn’t

go deep. Isis is a burner. Scabby, circular mounds dot her arms. There was

something in Group about rope and boy cousins and a basement but I shut

myself off for that; I turned up my inside music. Blue is a fancy bird with

her pain; she has a little bit of everything: bad daddy, meth teeth, cigarette

burns, razor slashes. Linda/Katie/Cuddles wears grandma housedresses. Her

slippers are stinky. There are too many of her to keep track of; her scars are

all on the inside, along with her people. I don’t know why she’s with us, but

she is. She smears mashed potato on her face at dinner. Sometimes she

vomits for no reason. Even when she is completely still, you know there is a

lot happening inside her body, and that it’s not good.

I knew people like her on the outside; I stay away from her.

Sometimes I can’t breathe in this goddamn place; my chest feels like sand. I

don’t understand what’s happening. I was too cold and too long outside. I

can’t understand the clean sheets, the sweet-smelling bedspread, the food

that sits before me in the cafeteria, magical and warm. I start to panic,

shake, choke, and Louisa, she comes up very close to me in our room,

where I’m wedged into the corner. Her breath on my face is tea-minty. She

cups my cheek and even that makes me flinch. She says, “Little one, you’re

with your people.”

The room is too quiet, so I walk the halls at night. My lungs hurt. I move

slowly.

Everything is too quiet. I trace a finger along the walls. I do this for

hours. I know they’re thinking about putting me on sleep meds after my

wounds heal and I can be taken off antibiotics, but I don’t want them to. I

need to be awake and aware.

He could be anywhere. He could be here.

Louisa is like the queen. She’s been here, this time, forever. She tells me, “I

was the very first fucking girl here, back when they opened, for God’s

sake.” She’s always writing in a black-and-white composition book; she

never comes to Group. Most of the girls wear yoga pants and T-shirts,

sloppy things, but Louisa dresses up every day: black tights and shiny flats,

glamorous thrift-store dresses from the forties, her hair always done up in

some dramatic way or another. She has suitcases stuffed with scarves, filmy

nightgowns, creamy makeup, blood-red tubes of lipstick. Louisa is like a

visitor who has no plans to leave.

She tells me she sings in a band. “But my nervousness,” she says softly.

“My problem, it gets in the way.”

Louisa has burns in concentric circles on her belly. She has rootlike

threads on the insides of her arms. Her legs are burned and carved in

careful, clean patterns. Tattoos cover her back.

Louisa is running out of room.

Casper starts every Group the same way. The accordion exercise, the

breathing, stretching your neck, reaching to your toes. Casper is tiny and

soft. She wears clogs with elfish, muted heels. All the other doctors here

have clangy, sharp shoes that make a lot of noise, even on carpet. She is

pale. Her eyes are enormous, round, and very blue. There are no jagged

edges to Casper.

She looks around at us, her face settling into a gentle smile. She says,

“Your job here is you. We are all here to get better, aren’t we?”

Which means: we are all presently shit.

But we knew that already.

Her name isn’t really Casper. They call her that because of those big blue

eyes, and the fact that she’s so quiet. Like a ghost, she appears at our

bedsides some mornings to take Chart, her warm fingers sliding just an inch

or so down the hem of my bandages to reach my pulse. Her chin doubles

adorably as she looks down at me in bed. Like a ghost, she appears

suddenly behind me in the hallway, smiling as I turn in surprise: How are

you?

She has an enormous tank in her office with a fat, slow turtle that paddles

and paddles, paddles and paddles, barely making any headway. I watch that

poor fucker all the time, I could watch him for hours and days, I find him so

incredibly patient at a task that ultimately means nothing, because it’s not

like he’s getting out of the fucking tank anytime soon, right?

And Casper just watches me watch him.