Hello, I Dislike You Intensely. Have a Nice Day.

Today I did something that surprised me - I skipped school to visit Alex's mom at the home.

It'd suddenly hit me when I woke up in the middle of the night. I still had the address imprinted in my mind, and a Google Maps search on my computer revealed that it was a manageable distance by bus. I plotted the routes and transfers I'd need, found $4 in ones and quarters ($1.50 extra), then turned off my computer and lay back in bed. My insides were cold and electric with excitement and I felt like a character in a book; or at least someone with an exciting and purposeful life. Probably most important, I felt normal. Everything will probably be fine. Yesterday morning was an anomaly, and I won't dwell on the past.

It was easy for me to wait til my mom drove away from the school, then walk out the gates and take 3 buses uptown to the general area of the Hargraves Psychiatric Home. A few more blocks walking, and I was there. I loitered for a while outside the building, for which I have a threefold reason behind. Partially because I wasn't looking forward to finding out things I might not want to know, partially to observe the building, and partially for the ironic value because there was a very succinct and obvious No Loitering No Soliciting sign nailed to the front wall.

The building, like most psychiatric homes I've read about in books, did not really have the appearance of one from the outside. It looked instead like a sprawling, stately house, with its neat red bricks and wide porch. The front yard was lined by flower bushes with a lawn running up to the house. No bars over the windows. No suspicious noises from within. I cautiously walked to the wooden double doors, pulled the handle, and went inside.

Immediately the air became darker when I stepped into the lobby. All the shades were drawn and the only light came from a pair of waning greenish fluorescent ceiling fixtures. A lady who was rather greenish herself looked up from her desk, frowned slightly, and said, "May I help you?" "Yeah," I said, then hated how high and quavery my voice sounded. "I'm Coralie Hatfield's niece," I tried again, trying to sound convincing and natural. "I'm here to visit."

The lady eyed me up and down with her jaundiced-looking eyes. "And you're here by yourself?"

"Yeah. My parents are working and, you see - " Suddenly a story sprang to me from nowhere. "They don't want to associate with my aunt. They think she's marring the family name, and so they'd rather just pretend she doesn't exist. So I possibly couldn't tell them I was planning to visit."

"I see. Sign in," the lady said shortly, handing me a clipboard. I breathed an internal sigh of relief and signed in, feeling utterly happy to have been a Drama kid. Meanwhile she picked up the receiver of a phone on her desk, pressed a button and said, "Lorraine, I got one for Hatfield."

Soon another woman came down the hall leading to the lobby. She was less green than Front Desk Lady and one of those odd people who could be either 20 or 40 but nowhere in between. Lorraine was wearing a cardigan with cats on it and an annoyed expression - both of which intimidated and off-put me. But I couldn't back out at that point. So as a coping mechanism I imagined the reason she looked so pissed was because she'd been interrupted whilst having hot sex with the janitor in a hall closet. Which I've heard is a real bitch - with anyone, anywhere.

"It's morning break," Lorraine said in a very clipped (read: sex-deprived) tone. "So she'll be out back." At the end of the hall, she pushed open the back door, revealing a grassy yard bounded by a sturdy, alarm-equipped fence. In the yard, several people were roving around, most in odd ways, a few were sitting on the grass staring straight ahead, and one man in a striped shirt was lying motionless facedown on the ground. "Okay," I said. "Great. Thanks." "Mrm," Lorraine said vaguely, then hurried back inside to her smokin' hot janitor.

I now had a problem. I had no idea what Coralie Hatfield looked like. There was a guy on patrol by the door, buff and indifferent, but I didn't want to ask him. His fingers fiddled with an unlit cigarette and he was shifting his weight slowly from foot to foot - both movements I deemed to be arrogant and solipsist. How I connected solipsism into there I don't quite know, but it gave me confidence. Arrogant was bad, but solipsist was a real burn. Well, at least I had Alex, I figured - I could look for his features in the faces of the patients.

It turned out even if Coralie had looked nothing like Alex, I would have recognized her anyway. She was standing by the fence at the back of the yard, peering through a hole in the fence, and singing Octopus' Garden under her breath. She was also wearing a white sundress with tiny green crocodiles on it, and her feet were bare. For a long time I stood staring at the dress, wondering where one could possibly procure such an article of clothing. When she finally whirled around to stare at me, the first words from my mouth were, "Your dress. Where'd you get it? Hi." I hoped she wouldn't notice the irregular placement of the greeting in the sentence.

"Thrift store," she said, and it was almost unsettling how much I heard Alex in her voice. In addition, they had the same nose, the same hair, the same chin, and the same, sort of, build, if that isn't weird to say.

She ran a hand over the skirt of the dress, then rose up on her toes and spun airily around, letting the fabric rise up around her. "It's cute," I told her. She smiled. "Well, I think the skirt could be a little fuller. A few layers of tulle...and then a ribbon around the waist, that'd be magic." I was surprised, I hadn't expected she'd be this fashionable. In the silence of my surprise, Coralie started singing again. "I'd like to be, under the sea, in an octopus' garden in the shade. We would be warm, below the storm, in our little hideaway beneath the waves..." I had no clue how to broach the subject of Alex.

"I'm Dani," I said suddenly, hoping to innocently segue into the matter from that point. She looked at me strange for a second, then said, "Oh, right! Names. They're a funny thing, have you ever thought that? Hi, Dani. My name is Coralie." "I know your son," I told her, then braced for the worst. She only smiled and said brevitously (is that a word?), "Me too." "Alex. Yeah. He's in a few of my classes...Actually...I'm his girlfriend." "You're very lucky," she told me - and seemed sincere. I hadn't a clue how to go on from there. "He's...sorry," I murmured.

She smiled uncomfortably. I thought about the burn scars on his arm and wondered if I should mention any of that. I didn't. "Are you...mad at him?" I tried again, wondering if I was pushing it too far, if this was really my place to do. "My Alex," she said softly, enigmatically. "His middle name is Findlay, you know. For his grandfather." "I do know...do you miss him?" "He was born with a caul. He bit his tongue in half once." "Yes. He told me."

I then realized it would probably be pointless trying to extract a concrete answer from her. In a secret part of me, I was relieved. Did I really deserve to find anything out, sneaking around and being nosy and intruding as I was?

Suddenly I realized Coralie's eyes were pooling with tears. Sociopathically enough, my first reaction wasn't sympathy, it was awkwardness - I didn't know how to deal with crying people. "What is it?" I asked (awkwardly). She didn't answer but started humming Octopus Sea Garden again, tears straining against her voice. I stood there apologetically.

Soon a whistle blew from the opposite end of the yard. Slowly, the people in the yard started drifting toward the door. The man in the striped shirt lying facedown on the ground jumped up and started yelling incomprehensibly. Lorraine arrived shortly, put a hand on his arm, and spoke softly to him until he quieted down.

"You should go in," I suggested to Coralie.

"I hate that whistle," she said. "It makes me feel like a dog or a goat or something every time I hear it."

"I know. I'd feel that too."

Lorraine came up to us. "Coralie? Ready to go inside? What's the matter?" She cut her eyes at me like I had something to do with it, and that was more or less true.

"I just have something in my eye," Coralie said, her voice quavering. "I'm only 30. The Roman tyrant Caligula's name meant 'little boot'. A DNA molecule has over 3 billion base pairs."

"Come on, let's go in now," Lorraine coaxed. As she led her away, I heard Coralie say, "There's water on the moon."

I was left standing there, alone and awkward. Nothing had been found out for sure, and now I had to go back to school. For once, I had nowhere else I particularly wanted to be. The bus ride made me sad - bus rides always make me sadder or happier - but it allowed me time to think up a strategy to sneak inside with being suspicious. Once I was at school, I entered through the back door of the auditorium (where Drama II was practicing), pretending to look for something I'd lost; then randomly looked around backstage til the 3rd period bell rang.

In Computers, I ignored the lesson on web page design (something I'd been looking forward to all year) and instead thought about what I would say to Alex and what I would say to May. Alex had texted me asking why I wasn't in English and I made something up about a flat tire and then missing the city bus. Lies are harder to detect through the screen of a cell phone. I'm not going to see him at lunch (aka. now) because he has this weird thing I don't get where whether or not he has zero period determines which lunch period he has. So that gives me time. I will, however see May in World History, and Alex the period after, in Geometry. Lunch just ended now - without me having a chance to eat anything, so that only leaves me Bio to think over things. Oh, boy. I better go.