Institutionalized

“So…tell, tell! How has your first day been thus far, dearie?” Trinity was staring at me with bright eyes as I joined her in the line for lunch.

I shrugged and grabbed a tray. “Well, Kevin was right about Woodson,” I replied. “The guy’s creepy. The way he talks…it’s like he’s a robot who wasn’t programmed for human interaction.”

Trinity stopped walking forward. I bumped into her and quickly stepped back. She stared at me (or at least, I think she was—she might have been staring off into space) and let her lips quirk up into a small smile.

“Well,” she said slowly, “that’s an interesting way of putting it.” She covered her mouth and giggled quietly.

For reasons I couldn’t explain at the time, I laughed along with her, and something in my abdomen wiggled at the sound of her laugh.

That’s weird, I thought. Ah, well, I’m probably just hungry. After my dismissal, I followed Trinity to the table where Kevin was already sitting and plunked down next to her.

“So, how was Woodson?” he asked as soon as he saw me.

"Hey Kevin," I rplied, rolling my eyes. "Good to see you too."

He grinned sheepishly. “Sorry. But for real, how was he?”

“Well, I think Trinity was right about him—he’s not very good at his job. And I couldn’t really talk to him.”

“Everyone’s like that during their first session with a new therapist,” Rachelle interjected, taking a seat next to Kevin.

He rolled his eyes at her. “Sure thing, Rach.” His face lit up after his sarcastic statement. “There’s my princess!” He leaned over and grabbed Mikhail by the waist, pulling him in closer.

Mikhail’s face turned red at the sudden attention from both our table and the passers-by. “I’m not a girl!” he shrieked, trying to break free from Kevin.

“Soooooo? You’re skinny enough to pass for one.” That statement was met with a slap to the face. “No, I’m serious! Ladies, could he not put on a dress and pass for a slightly androgynous girl? Ow, sweetie, stop hitting me.”

Mikhail did not stop hitting Kevin.

Rachelle cleared her throat in an attempt to minimize the awkwardness. (It didn’t work.) “So! Did you enjoy the group therapy, Lilly?”

“Well,” I began, trying to tear my eyes away from the spectacle, “to say that I enjoyed it would be kind of a stretch…but it was pretty cool how Dr. Nakamura was so open about how she used to self-harm. And everyone else, too. Everyone was pretty open about the whole subject.”

Rachelle nodded. “So what about you? I mean, are you comfortable with talking about it in a big group of people?”

I shook my head. “Not really. I’m still not entirely secure with it.” I squirmed a little in my chair. “To be honest, I felt really out of place there. I didn’t really cut a lot. My suicide attempt was the most I ever cut. I mean, occasionally I did it, but I wasn’t addicted to it like some people are.”

Rachelle nodded again. “Well, I think suicide attempts are given self-harm therapy by default. You know, as a precaution.”

“What about you? What kind of self harming did you do?” I instantly regretted asking that. It was so personal, and I’d only met her a few hours before. The boys and Trinity picked up on the awkwardness that was bound to follow and started talking about books that Kevin had to read for school.

“Uhh…you don’t have to answer that question if it makes you uncomfortable at all. I’m sorry I asked, that was really out of line of me…” I mumbled, looking down at my tray.

Rachelle waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, pish-posh. Don’t worry about it.” She lifted her hand and showed me her wrist. There were several neat lines adorning the flesh below her palm. There were also a few smaller cuts near the inside of her elbow. I accidentally let a gasp escape my mouth.

She gave me a wry smile. “Yeah. That was everyone else’s reaction when they saw my scars. ‘Oh my god, Rach, why would you do that?’ ‘But you seem so normal!’” She paused and took a breath before she started talking again. “Well, I’m not. Not really. I’m obsessive-compulsive and a perfectionist. I had a lot of rituals that I did to calm myself down whenever I did something ‘wrong’—one of them was cutting. It was so awful,” she admitted, “but it did the trick. When my parents found out, they tried to get me some help by just getting me some therapy, but that didn’t work out. So they sent me here.”

I blinked and swallowed. “Wow.”

“That’s it?” she asked, raising both eyebrows. “Just ‘wow’?”

“Well, it’s surprising!” I cried defensively. Trinity glanced over and decided to enter our conversation, leaving Mikhail to deal with Kevin’s perverted advances on his own.

“I don’t mean to be rude by butting in,” she began, “and I don’t mean to undermine you, darling,” she reached over to pat Rachelle’s hand, “but if you think Rachelle’s story is bad, then you probably haven’t heard a lot of the stories here.” She pointed at a boy I recognized from group therapy. “See him? His name is Peter Baker. His parents are dead.”

She made eye contact with me and gave me an intense look. “They were shot, point-blank, right in front of him. He lived with his uncle and his aunt for a long time before they figured it out that he had PTSD. It wasn’t until they found him with a noose around his neck about to step off the table that they even knew he needed help. He was in a straitjacket for almost a week because he had an episode during his first month here. He tried to kill himself by cutting his wrists with a plastic knife he got from the cafeteria.”

She gestured to a girl laughing loudly at a table near ours. “That’s Anneliese Hoffman. She was bullied and didn’t have any friends, so she created a lot of imaginary friends. Those eventually developed into separate personalities. She’d do things like stealing, sneaking out—she even tracked down one of her bullies and attacked her with a tire iron. She never remembered any of it—that’s how bad her MPD was.

“And you’ve heard Kevin and the rest of us talking about Jacob Byrd.” She shuddered and continued. “That boy is truly insane—not just troubled, not a little unwell, no. If we were in the Victorian era, he would have had a lobotomy performed on him by now.” She smiled grimly and shook her head. “Sadly, the practice has since fallen out of fashion, but it’s probably the only way he’d ever calm down.”

I was shaking by the time Trinity finished telling me their stories. “Man. I feel…awful.”

Rachelle cocked her head and Trinity arched her eyebrows. “Why on earth do you feel bad?”

“Because all of them had such severe cases of their mental illnesses, and I…”

Trinity patted my hand reassuringly and I got that unexplained wiggly feeling in my stomach again. It was more intense this time, and I couldn’t focus on what Rachelle was telling me.

“…Lilly, are you alright? You seem kind of dazed…”

“Oh! Yes, I’m fine.”

Trinity smiled at me. “You don’t need to feel bad, dearie. Anneliese and Peter have made a lot of progress. They’re almost ready to be discharged.”

I nodded my head. “Yeah. They seem so normal…it’s hard to believe that they’re mentally ill.”

Trinity gave me a grave look. “Madness is a terrible disease,” she murmured, “and anyone can catch it. What you get from it is an entirely different story.”