Forest View

"Do you remember how you came about starving yourself?" he asked.
She shook her head.
"No?" his voice raised in a peak of interest.
"No," she said bitterly.
There was a pause. She shoved her cigarette back in between her lips and stared out the window. Dr. Peterson studied her intensely, she could see him scirbbling God-knows-what down in that notebook of his out of the corner of her eye.
He opened up a fresh page. She turned sharply, glaring at him. He grinned, and she blew a puff of smoke in his face in return.
"Well, Sierra, I must say it's rather unusual that you don't remember how you became an anorexic-"
"I am not an anorexic," she hissed.
"You aren't?" he questioned.
"No, I'm fuckin' not, okay?" she roared.
He raised his eyebrow.
"What? It's that too fuckin' hard for you to understand? Can't you get your giant ass head wrapped around the idea that I might actually not be insane, that I might not actually belong here? Huh?"
"I believe I could, if it were a valid idea."
"A valid idea?"
"Yes, and it isn't. You are an anorexic, and you are here for a reason."
"To hell I am!"
"Then what would you say, Ms. Monroe? You've dropped ten pounds in the past two months!"
"So your food is a little disgusting, how-"
"I think we're done for today."
He closed his notebook and nodded towards the tour. She rolled her eyes and got to her feet. With a fake smile on her face, she put her cigarette out on the edge of his desk, flicked it into the wastebin, and left his office.
The door flew open and she stormed out. She hated talking with her therapist. He never listened to what she had to say, only shoved his warped theories about her life down her throat. It's what he had done since day one. What kind of a therapist is that?
She realized that the people at Forest View did not like it when their "patients" talked. It was a hospital for the mentally ill, and they failed to let them express themselves. They called it a "temporary lapse of proper behavior".
Proper behavior?
They were all psychos!
You can't expect a kitten to pull a horse's weight, so why try to force crazy people to act like norms? Of course, the hopes of the institution were that all of their patients would come in crazy and leave normal and well.
But you have to wean someone into normality.
It was like teaching a child to swim. You don't just throw them in the water, you have teach them that it's not their enemy. You have to allow them to get accquainted. And Forest View forced friends.
For that reason, they often had patients that would come back after a brief period of freedom. They were scared of the real world, the normal world, because they had never really been taught how to live in it. It was still seen as their enemy.
"Luke, how come every staff member but you is an asshole here?" Sierra asked him as painted and sat crossed-legged on the floor, fresh off from her session with Dr. Peterson.
He smiled, "I wouldn't say that's true," he answered.
"Yes huh," she replied, "Everyone else I meet are mean to me."
"Well, you're a very difficult person to work with," he told her.
"Really? I don't think I'm that hard to get along with," she said.
She looked down at her paper and made several strokes with the paint brush.
"So, are you going to eat today?" he asked, leaning back on his palms.
"It depends," she answered, "What's on the menu?"
Luke laughed and stood up. She continued painting. The picture was a scene of spring time, which represented her undying want to get out of Forest View. She had only been there two months, but it seemed like forever.
The day before she ate part of her breakfast and her entire dinner. Luke had conned her into "just a few bites" of her breakfast, and she herself had chosen to eat her dinner. It was the most she'd ever eaten in years.
"Dude, check this out!" someone said.
Sierra turned her head and looked at Tracey's painting. It was a flower with rain drops rolling down the side. It was a lot better than her's. She grinned.
"That's beautiful," she told her.
"Wanna know what it means?" she asked.
Sierra nodded.
"It's my inner-self," she said smugly, "The flower is my heart and soul, bright and big, but covered in sadness inflicted by the outside world."
"...Wow. That's really cool," she praised.
Her friend smiled and returned to her work. Tracey was eighteen. She had run away from home to check herself into the hospital, and often got called "without a Trace" because of it. She had seasonal affective personality disorder and bulimia. Unlike Sierra, her main goal was to overcome her problems.
Aside from Tracey, Ms. Monroe had made several other friends. There was a girl named Sara M. who smoked pot and did cocaine, another girl they called Kai-Kai who was both an anorexic and a dysthymic depressive, and a boy named Mikey Z. who cut himself.
They all had one thing in common; they were troubled teenagers who needed help. Their ages may have varied, but their hearts wanted the same thing. They wanted to be understood.
"It's your favorite tonight, Sierra," said Luke as he returned with a menu in his hands.
"No way!" she gasped.
"Yup, chicken fingers and fries," he laughed.
"Yes!" she cheered.
She jumped up and gave him a hug.
"I take it you're going to eat tonight?"
"Oh, I guess."
And she sat back down.
The group of teens finished their artwork and it was finally time for dinner. Sierra, Tracey, Sara, Kai-Kai, and Mikey sat down at a table together. They teased each other playfully and Tracey and Kai-Kai complained about the meal. As far as she knew, Sierra was the only girl with an eating disorder that was actually eating. The nurses said she was getting healthy.
The meals were served to the five tables of five, each one of them seeming to have been filled by completely separate groups of people. It was a normal thing for humans to do, break off into packs of other humans who were most like themselves, and it didn't bother her at all.
"Dude, this food is repulsive," Tracey groaned.
"Just eat it," Mikey told her.
"But it's gross!" she protested.
"If you eat it I'll give my laxative so you can shit it out later," he promised.
Tracey nodded.
"Wait, that's not fair," Kai-Kai whined.
"Kai, it's chicken. It's good for you. Eat it," Sierra said.
"Stop preaching," she spat.
"Hey, hey, break it off," Mikey beckoned.
"Why don't you just go cut yourself, dickface?"
"Why don't you just go stuff your face, fat ass?"
"Shut the fuck up!"
Their voices got louder. Luke and another nurse, Aimee, approached the table. Tracey, Sara, and Sierra stared down at their plates. They tried not look up, but it was rather difficult.
"You're a fuckin' attention whore!" Kai screamed.
"Well, you're just a whore!" Mikey screamed back.
Kai-Kai took a swing at him. Luke grabbed her arms and pulled them behind her back as his partner called in a code green on her walkie-talkie. Great, now we have to go in our rooms, reflected Sierra, having experienced three code greens already during her stay at Forest View.
Luke and Aimee tried to break up the fight and the rest of the nurses on the ward shooed the crazies into their dorm-rooms. Sierra watched from the tiny window placed in her door, used to shine a light in and check up on her during the night.
She saw a wide-eyed, balding man wrap his arms around Kai's waist and drag her away from Mikey. She winced as another man, built for football, gave her a shot in the butt. Then she was hauled off to the isolation room and Mikey's bedroom door slammed shut.
It was dead silent.
-
"Kaila has been transferred to Ocean Crest. We're sorry for any friends of hers that were not able to say goodbye," Luke announced the next morning at breakfast, "But Kaila needs more help than what Forest View can offer, and she needs it fast."
"Where's Mikey?" Tracey asked.
"He was transferred to Millins ward," he answered.
Millins ward was a maximum security ward, much like the suicide watch cells you see at prisons.
"He will be coming back, eventually," he said.
The group of three looked around. It seemed empty without the bitter humor of Kai and the reasoning voice of Mikey. It was sad, in a way. But, as usual, breakfast commenced, and Sara and Tracey dug in to their pancakes. Having missed dinner the night before, everyone was starving.
Everyone except Sierra.
"Sierra, aren't you going to eat?" Luke asked.
"No," she mumbled.
"But you've been doing so well lately, you're back up to ninety-five," he told her.
"I don't want to eat," she said.
"Please, Sierra, don't do this," he begged.
"Don't do what?"
"Don't throw all your progress away because Mikey and Kaila made a stupid decision."
"That's not why I don't want to eat."
"Why is it?"
"...I don't want to get fat."
He sighed and rubbed his face. Relapse. He was wondering when this would happen to Sierra, it happened to everybody. You get better, you crash again, and you heal...Ideally.
"Just one bite?" he pleaded.
"Don't try that shit with me," she spat.
"Oh, come on, it's just one little-"
"I said don't fuckin' try it!"
Before she could think, she had hurled her plate at him. Tracey and Sara gasped. The dining room went silent, much like the night before. Luke heaved a sigh, looked up at the ceiling, and placed his hand on her arm.
"Come on, let's go," he whispered.
He yanked her up from her chair. As she was led away from the dining room like a prisoner and crammed into the isolation room, the entire ward watched. It killed Luke to lock the door and turn his back on her, but that's what he needed to do.