Girl in Pieces

My photographs are what I’m doing when Jen S. comes to find me the night after the toe incident: thumbing through them, greedy like I always am when I let myself think of Ellis, poring over the black-and-white images of the four of us in the graveyard, posing stupid like rock stars, cigarettes in the corners of our mouths, DannyBoy’s harelip almost invisible, Ellis’s acne hardly noticeable. DannyBoy always said people looked better in black-and-white and he was right. The photos are small and square; the Land Camera was old, something from the sixties, the first kind of Polaroid. My grandmother gave it to me. It had bellows and made me feel cool. We found some film at the camera store by Macalester College. It was a cartridge, and you slipped it into the camera, took the picture, ripped the film strip from the side, and set the little round timer. When it buzzed, you peeled back the film and there we were, old-timey and neat-looking in black-and-white, Ellis so beautiful with her black hair. And there was me, dumb little me, arms folded across my chest in my holey sweater and my hair all ratty, dyed red and blue in the real, color world, but muddy-looking in black-and-white. Who could look anything but gross next to Ellis?

“Cool.” Jen S. reaches down, but I wrap the photos back up in the linen and slide them under my pillow.

“Dude,” she sighs. “Okay, whatever. Come on, then, Barbero’s waiting in Rec. We’ve got a surprise for you.”

In Rec, the smell of popcorn clings to the room from the movie we watched earlier; the empty bowl rests on a circular table. Jen licks her finger and swipes the bowl, sucking off salt and bits of congealed butter. She makes oinking sounds. Barbero’s floppy lips curl. “Schumacher,” he says. “You kill me.” She shrugs, flicking her wet finger against the hem of her baggy green T-shirt.

She digs in one of the several “everything” bins, looking for her favorite deck of cards. The colorful bins are stacked on top of each other against the ivory walls of Rec. They hold playing cards, frayed boxes of crayons, markers, games.

A bank of three computers is tucked against one wall. Barbero fires one up and shoos his fingers at me while he enters the password.

“Here’s the deal, crazy.” Barbero flings a booklet at me. I have to bend to pick it up. He starts typing. ALTERNA-LEARN. THE RIGHT PLACE FOR YOU pops up on the page. “The good doctor thinks you need something to do to curb your anger issues, of which there are apparently many, and also your weird habit of not sleeping. So, looks like it’s back to school for you, dumbass.”

I look over at Jen S., who grins wildly while shuffling the cards. “I get to be your teacher,” she giggles.

Barbero snaps his fingers in my face. “FO-CUS. I’m over here! Here.”

I glare at him.

Barbero ticks off his fingers. “Here’s the deal: don’t look at anything but the school site. Don’t look at your Facebook, your Twitter, your email, anything at all but the school pages. Your friend Schumacher here has volunteered to be your teacher and she’ll check your quizzes and all that shit when you finish a lesson.”

He looks at me. I stare back. “You don’t wanna do it,” he says, “the good doctor says you have to start taking meds at night to sleep and I have a feeling you don’t wanna do that. She’d rather have you in here than creeping down the halls like you do. Because that’s fucking weird.”

I don’t want drugs, especially at night, when I’m most scared and need to be alert. Doctors filled me up from the time I was eight until I was thirteen. Ritalin didn’t work. I bounced off walls and stabbed a pencil in the cloudlike flab of Alison Jablonsky’s belly. Adderall made me shit my pants in eighth grade; my mother kept me home the rest of the year. She left lunch for me under plastic wrap in the refrigerator: spongy meat loaf sandwiches, smelly egg salad on soggy toast. Zoloft was like swallowing very heavy air and not being able to exhale for days. Most of the girls here are doped to the gills, accepting their pill cups with pissy resignation.

I sit in the chair and type my name in the YOUR NAME HERE box.

“Good choice, freak.”

“Jesus, Bruce,” Jen says, exasperated. “Did you skip that day in nursing school when they explained bedside manner?”

“I got bedside manner, baby. Let me know when you wanna try it.” He flops on the creaky brown Rec couch and pulls his iPod from his pocket.

One whole wall of Rec is a long window. The curtains have been opened. It’s dark outside, after ten o’clock. Our wing is four stories up; I can hear the whoosh of cars in the rain down on Riverside Avenue. If I do school, it will make Casper happy with me. The last time I was in school, I was kicked out the middle of junior year. That feels like a lifetime ago.

I peer at the screen and try to read a paragraph, but all I can see are the words fucker and pussy bitch scrawled on my locker door. I can taste the tang of toilet water in my mouth, feel myself struggling to get free, hands on my neck and laughter. My fingers tingle and my chest feels tight. After I got kicked out of school, everything went haywire. Even more than before.

I look around Rec. Like a fussy little mouse, thoughts of who’s paying for this nibble at my brain, but I push them away. My mother cooked meat loaf with onions and ketchup and hills of mash on the side, in a diner for years, before even that went away. We aren’t people with money; we’re people who dig for change at the bottoms of purses and backpacks and eat plain noodles with butter four nights a week. Thinking about how I’m able to stay here makes me anxious and afraid.

I think, I’m inside and warm and I can do this if it means I get to stay. That’s what matters right now. Following the rules so I can stay inside.

Jen’s fingers shuffle and flutter the cards. It sounds like birds rushing to empty a tree.