Girl in Pieces

I’m staying here, but I don’t know for how long. I’ve been released from individual sessions with Casper. My paperwork and discharge dates are being sorted out. They have another emergency stay from a judge while they work out an arrangement with my mother and with the halfway house.

Casper is still kind to me, but there is something else there now, between us, a distance that makes my heart ache. My sorrys start up again, but Casper just shakes her head sadly.

Vinnie checks the stitches on my forehead every morning, clucking his tongue. Blue calls me Frankenstein in a horror-movie whisper. I go where I’m supposed to go. At night, I just pretend to do my online classes. I’ve tried to message Mikey when Barbero is busy or napping, but the only response is an empty white chat box. I watch the Somali office cleaners at night, drifting across the windows in the building next door, pulling their carts of solutions and mops and cloths.

The sky is postcard dreamy now, the clouds less full of rain, the sun a little stronger every day. If I look farther out the window, between the towering, silvery buildings, I can see the endless terrain of the university and, beyond that, the snakelike wind of the river that leads to St. Paul, to Seed House and being hungry and dirty and hurt and used up, again, because I have nowhere else to go.

—

Sasha is making popcorn. Vinnie has brought in tiny canisters of powdered flavoring: butter, cayenne, Parmesan. He cooked a pan of brownies at home and Francie is helping frost them. The room phone rings. I’m blazing through the channels, one by one, until I hear my name. Vinnie wiggles the phone at me.

I listen to the breathing on the other end before I tentatively say hello.

“Charlie, you didn’t put me on the list!” Mikey.

I almost drop the phone. I grip the receiver in both hands to keep it from shaking.

“I told you I was coming! You were supposed to put me on a visitors’ list or something. I’m only here for one more day. I’m here for the show later tonight and then we go in the morning.”

“I did put you on the list!” My mind races frantically. Did Casper forget? Or did they just take him off since I’m going to be leaving? “Where are you? I need you. They—”

“Hang up, Charlie. Is there a window? I’m in the parking lot out front!”

I hang up and run to the window and press my face to the glass. A shock of orange catches my eye. He’s standing in the parking lot, waving an orange traffic cone in the air. When he sees me, he lets the cone fall.

Mikey looks the same somehow. He looks open and worried. And safe.

There’s a light rain, droplets glistening on his dreadlocks. He looks bulkier, though he’s still small. He holds out his hands, as if to say, What happened?

The glass is cold on my forehead. Vinnie is playing Go Fish with Sasha and Francie in the corner. Blue is on the couch, humming to herself.

My face is swimming with tears as I watch him in the falling rain, his mouth open, his cheeks red.

Vinnie says pointedly, “Charlie.” Blue stirs on the couch. She joins me at the window.

“A boy.” Blue’s breath makes a foggy circle on the glass. “A real live boy.”

Sasha and Francie throw down their cards.

The first time Ellis brought me back to her house in the fall of ninth grade, after we’d known each for about a week, she didn’t blink an eye to find an older boy already there, in the basement, reading comics with one hand and stuffing the other in a bag of salty pretzels. There were anarchy symbols Magic Markered on his sneakers. He looked up at Ellis, his mouth full of pretzels, and smiled. “Your mom let me in. Who’s this?”

He was wearing a Black Flag T-shirt. Before I could stop myself, I said, “I’m about to have a nervous breakdown.”

He put the comic book down. “My head really hurts,” he answered. He waited, his eyes gleaming.

“If I don’t find a way out of here!” I yelled, startling Ellis at the bar. She glared at me.

The boy laughed and yelled back, “I’m gonna go berserk!”

We sang the rest of the song while Ellis rifled through her parents’ mini-fridge. She was a little miffed, you could tell. She didn’t like that sort of music. She liked goth and mopey stuff, like Bauhaus and Velvet Underground. Nobody else at our school could recite the lyrics to “Nervous Breakdown,” I was sure of that.

But she shouldn’t have worried. Mikey always loved her more.

“Oh,” Sasha and Francie say in unison as they gather at the window.

I push up the sleeves of my sweater and press my arms to the window. Can he see my scars, all the way down there?

Mikey covers his face with his hands. I remember that gesture. He used to do that, a lot, when Ellis and I did things that overwhelmed him. “You guys,” he would say tiredly, “stop, already.”

Vinnie stands next to Blue and groans deeply. “Shit.”

“Girls,” he grunts. “Goddamn girls and boys.” He raps on the glass roughly, making Sasha jump back.

“Go!” He shouts to Mikey through the glass. To himself, he mutters, “Don’t make me call anyone, son.”

He turns to me. “You! Put down your damn arms.”

“It’s like that movie!” Francie exclaims. I’m waiting for Mikey to take his hands away from his face. His T-shirt is soaked from the rain.

Sasha starts to cry. “No one’s ever come to see me,” she wails. Vinnie mutters “Shit” again as he punches the buttons of his pager. Blue’s fingers are on my shoulder.

“Shut the fuck up.” Francie is getting agitated. “Nobody ever comes to freaking see me, either.” She picks at her chin with her fingernails, drawing tiny specks of blood.

Blue says, quietly, “Look.”

Mikey has opened his messenger bag and is furiously scrawling with marker back and forth on a notebook pressed against his knees. He holds it up. I squint through the glass, through the rain.

DON’T.

He drops the paper. It flutters and flattens on the wet ground, settling near his sneaker. He rips another page from the notebook.

YOU.

Nurse Vinnie raps his pager against the window as Sasha’s wailing grows.

Francie tells her, “Shut up.” Gives her a pinch that only increases the wailing.

“I have a situation here.” Vinnie is at the phone.

Mikey struggles with the next piece of paper; it’s stuck in the notebook’s rings. Two hospital orderlies amble across the parking lot. They shout to Mikey; his head shoots up at the same time the paper rips free and is caught in a pocket of wind. Running after it, he slips in a puddle and crashes down. Blue sucks in her breath. We look at each other. Her eyes are glittering.

“Outstanding,” she whispers. “Absolutely outstanding.” She twines her fingers through mine against the glass.

Blue says, “That’s utter devotion, Silent Sue. You know that, don’t you?”

The men, college boys, really, weekend workers with well-sculpted arms and clipped hair, slip their hands under Mikey’s armpits and haul him up. He struggles with them, the soles of his sneakers slipping in the puddle. He’s crying messy, ashamed boy tears. They set him down, faces changing from annoyance to curiosity. It’s odd to see him, smallish with his crazy dreads and thrift store clothes, next to the two orderlies fairly bursting from their blinding white uniforms. They’re all almost the same age; they’re all light-years apart.

“You pieces of shit!” Nurse Vinnie yells. “You fucking pieces of shit. Don’t you do it, don’t you let him goddamn do it!”

The orderlies shrug at Vinnie, furious behind our fourth-floor window.

Mikey holds up the soggy paper.

DIE.

Don’t you die. The ink bleeds in the rain.

Sasha bangs her head dully on the glass. Vinnie pulls her away, patting her arms tenderly, as close as he dares to get. Nurse Ava, who will hold anyone, who isn’t careful about rules, has come into the room and lets Francie lean into her, her sobs muffled against Ava’s white shirt. Blue and I watch as the college boys brush rain from their bare arms, jerk their chins at Mikey. Next to them, he looks seventeen again. But he is twenty-one now, and he’s come all this way to see me. I want to crash through the window, fly down to the parking lot, and let him hold me. Utter devotion, Blue said. Maybe Mikey could love me now, if it could be just us.

My body surges with hope.

He wipes his face, slides the wet notebook back into the messenger bag. He raises his hand to me.

Bye.

The boys give him a shove to get him on his way. He scuffles down the wet sidewalk and disappears.