Girl in Pieces

Louisa is like the queen. She’s been here, this time, forever. She tells me, “I was the very first fucking girl here, back when they opened, for God’s sake.” She’s always writing in a black-and-white composition book; she never comes to Group. Most of the girls wear yoga pants and T-shirts, sloppy things, but Louisa dresses up every day: black tights and shiny flats, glamorous thrift-store dresses from the forties, her hair always done up in some dramatic way or another. She has suitcases stuffed with scarves, filmy nightgowns, creamy makeup, blood-red tubes of lipstick. Louisa is like a visitor who has no plans to leave.

She tells me she sings in a band. “But my nervousness,” she says softly. “My problem, it gets in the way.”

Louisa has burns in concentric circles on her belly. She has rootlike threads on the insides of her arms. Her legs are burned and carved in careful, clean patterns. Tattoos cover her back.

Louisa is running out of room.