Soon the pill they had me swallow makes it impossible to keep pretending. The pill makes the sleeping turn real. My head thickens with the quiet. The lost girls who’ve come out to visit with me slip under the bed to hide. Or they’ve gone somewhere else, behind the curtains maybe, where the shadows gather—all I know is I can’t see or hear them anymore. The next time my eyes close, I can’t get the lids to lift open. This is the psych ward of the hospital and I don’t know how many days I’ve been inside. — 50 — I don’t dream. I don’t wake up coughing, and I can’t smell smoke. I’ve been across the river, in the hospital’s adolescent psychiatric ward, for what feels like a week’s worth of nights, though it could be fewer and it could be more, I’m not sure. The sun streaming through the window feels like afternoon sun long left over from morning, or the dreary start to a new day. I’m in a long, narrow room, in a long, narrow bed against a wall. The bed on the opposite wall is empty.
