Phoenix

CHAPTER EIGHT

Each heartbeat throbbed against the raw stiches in my wrist, making them feel as though they were going to burst. I breathed out and got up, shuffling to the bathroom. When I moved, the stitches pulled.

Jake would be honking his horn by now. Pete would be calling my phone.

And no one would answer.

I looked in the mirror. My curly auburn hair stood on end and purple bags hung under my brown eyes. My freckles seemed so dark against my pale skin, they looked like pin pricks. I looked at the black stitches held together the pasty skin on my wrist. The stitched-together line was jagged and red at the edges. Blood had flowed from that wound and ran quickly and bright from my fingertips onto the floor.

Remembering it made my stomach clench.

I looked for a tooth brush, but there wasn’t one. Of course. I hadn’t brought one. It was like I wasn’t planning to be in the hospital or something.

I scratched at my teeth with my fingernail and rinsed my mouth. Then I went pee. I didn’t have anything clean to change into, so I skipped showering.

I headed back to the bed. When I opened the door to leave the bathroom, I froze. A stranger dressed in scrubs sat studying a clipboard in the chair beside the bed. He was just like the observer the hospital sent in last night, someone to make sure I wasn’t hell-bent on killing myself today. Just an observer who had slipped in while I was in the bathroom. Except where the first guy had been young and black, this guy was old and white. He didn’t acknowledge me. I tried to pretend he wasn’t there. I got back on the bed and flipped on the TV. There was nothing on, of course, but I flipped through the channels anyway, making a game of seeing how quickly I could get through them.

“Would you stop that?” the observer asked. Grey hair made a horseshoe around his shiny scalp. The glaring white skin of his spare tire poked out just below his blue scrubs as it sat on his lap.

I looked at him, but didn’t say anything. He glanced at the clock and wrote something on his clipboard. I looked back up at the TV.

The remote dropped from my suddenly numb hand. I knew this place.

It was the same canyon Lucius had shown me as he died. Striated red and white rocks made a canyon that was huge and crooked. Majestic sentries of huge cliffs stood along the length of a muddy brown river and wispy cedar trees that clung to the windswept cliffs. The crystal blue sky above it was kind of smattered with the kind of clouds that only happened in the high desert.

It was the same canyon. I knew it. But what was it doing in this world? It was supposed to be part of my fantasyland.

The image on the screen changed.

“Where was that?” I asked the old man. My heart thumped in my chest and pounded in my arm. It hurt. The man looked at me.

“Um,” he said shrugging, “Utah?”

Utah? I thought. How can the Darkness have taken the Scepter to Utah?

Right then, the door to my room opened.

“Okay,” a woman said.

I immediately identified her as a nurse. Maybe it was something about the way she did things. Maybe it was the way she looked. She was short and round and had a stethoscope hanging over her neck and perfectly curled blonde hair.

“It looks like you’re not going to die. But we have to make sure you don’t wanna try killing yourself again before we can let you out.” She perfunctorily set blue sweatpants and a white t-shirt down on the bed. “Put those on,” she said as she set some canvas shoes that had no backs on top of the clothes. I looked at her.

“Can I have a little privacy?” I asked. She rolled her eyes and blew her bangs up with her bottom lip pushed out.

“Fine,” she said, putting her hand on the doorknob. “But don’t take all day. I’ll wait outside.”

I walked into the bathroom and stripped down quickly, pulling the pants on as fast as I could. The shirt went on in similar fashion. They were both too big but there was no drawstring. I rolled the waistband so the pants wouldn’t fall down. My feet slipped around in the shoes.

I walked out into the hall and found the nurse impatiently tapping her foot as she watched the door. Her name tag read “Ellie”.

“Come on,” she said. “I bet you’re hungry and we have to do vitals and meds before I can take you to eat.”

She led me down the hallway and we stopped at a chair by a scale. She had me sit and she took my blood pressure. Then she weighed me. She took my temperature. It must have all checked out because she didn’t say anything about my vitals.

“Have you been taking your risperidone as prescribed?” she asked. I nodded my head.

“Every day,” I said. “But it’s not working. That’s why I’m here.”

“What about olanzapine?” she asked, noting my earlier response on her clipboard.

“That too,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. She handed me two pills and I popped them in my mouth and swallowed them. “Don’t you need some water?” she asked, seeming surprised.

“No,” I said. “I’ve got lots of practice swallowing pills.” I smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back. She made a note on the board.

I followed Ellie’s waddling backside through the hospital toward the smell of cooking food. My stomach growled.

We came into a cafeteria filled with other teenagers dressed like me: sweats, and t-shirts. A few had robes over their shoulders. I noted the conspicuous lack of anything remotely resembling a string. There were no drawstrings on pants, no belts on robes, no laces in any shoes.

“Eat up, honey,” Ellie said. “Someone will come get you for therapy in about an hour.”

I got in line behind a girl who kept turning her head to the side and whispering. She had her hand in her hair and bald spots from yanking her hair out. When I got to the food service station, the woman behind it plunked some hash browns and scrambled eggs down on a plate and handed it to me. The eggs moved like Jell-O. They would probably taste like crap.

“Thanks,” I said to her.

“First day?” she asked, half smiling as she tucked her hair back up under her hairnet.

“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “How could you tell?”

“You thanked me for the food,” she said, her expression changing to a smirk.

I passed the whispering girl who now sat picking at her food and walked by a boy about my age sitting in a wheelchair.

He was crying.

“What a bunch of crazies,” I said under my breath.

Then I realized that I probably fit right in, talking to myself like that.

I carried my food to a mostly unoccupied table. A tiny, bone-skinny girl sat at one end of the table, moving food around her plate without eating a bite. Her hair was stiff and brittle, her skin pasty pale, her bones made tents of her skin. She looked longingly at the food on her plate, but her lips formed a tight line across her face. I stepped over the bench and sat down at the end of the table opposite of her. I grabbed the ketchup and salt to doctor the food, and when I turned back to my plate, Lexia was beside me.

“Phoenix,” Lexia said. “The Darkness—“

“Go back to your fantasyland and stay there,” I whispered, scanning the room quickly to make sure no one was close enough to hear me.

She blinked at me, her beautiful face registering shock.

“Fantasyland?” she asked. “Our world---the real world—is a fantasy to you?”

“What else would you call it?” I asked. “Elves? Magic? A quest to stop the Darkness? That’s such a lame name for a villain, don’t you think? And Lucius…” My heart clenched at his name. Why did I feel so bad about killing a person in a daydream?

“You asked me once to call her that,” she said. I glanced around the room. Nobody was watching me. The girl at the end of the table still morosely watched her food.

“Her?” I asked quietly, hoping no one would hear. My hands suddenly felt hot, or cold. The nerves were damaged just enough that I couldn’t always discern temperature. I put a spoon full of potatoes in my mouth, ignoring the tingling. There were no forks in the crazy house. The frozen and then fried potatoes were gritty and dissolved to mush before I could chew them.

“Sominette,” Lexia whispered, looking down at her hands. “Mother.”

“That’s crap,” I said, thinking of my own fragile, lost mother. “What kind of Mother burns her child?” I sat up straight. The words had escaped from me, like I didn’t think them first. The world in which I was burned by my mother was a fantasy. “No magical bad guy burned my stupid hands. I did it. I did it the night you died—“

“I am not dead,” Lexia insisted.

Why am I even thinking about this? I chided myself. It’s not real.

“Oh Phoenix,” Lexia breathed. “Look at your hands. Look at the way magic has marked you, Phoenix of Eloria. Do you not remember?” I did what she said, looking at my ugly, scarred hands.

It made me think of the night Lexia died, of me pounding desperately at the cabin door. Punching and punching, though the hot wood was ready to burst into flames. I remembered the way my fists finally broke through that door and were engulfed in flame. I remembered the way my flesh smelled as it burned, like meat. She was screaming, and I couldn’t get to her. The sound of it dug furrows inside my brain. I dropped my spoon and covered my ears.

“No, Phoenix,” Lexia said. “No. It is a lie. It is what the Darkness wants you to think.”

“Shut up,” I whispered. “You’re dead. You burned. I couldn’t…I couldn’t save you.”

“Phoenix,” she said. She reached for me, and I jumped back. I didn’t want her, whatever she was, to touch me.

“Hold still,” she said and reached again.

“Stop it,” I said. “Don’t touch me!” I realized I was shouting and looked around for the orderlies. They weren’t going to let me sit here ranting, were they? Nobody seemed to notice, though.

This place was strange.

Lexia put her hand up, waiting for me to take it. I looked into her silver eyes, and saw my sister staring back at me. Her elven face asked for my trust. I pushed aside the revulsion I felt at the thought of touching a dead thing and raised my scarred hand. Lexia grabbed it and it felt like needles stabbing me. The room blurred around me.

Days without number. Nights with no rest. Time blurred and stretched and snapped back into place. In my mind, I was there again. Only it wasn’t the there that is now, it was the there that was then.

Smoke. It was always smoke. Ever since she awakened my power, every battle ended in smoke. Screaming and popping, and smoke. I raised my leather gauntlet to my nose and scrubbed away the smell. The guilt refused to leave. Magical energy, the essence of the lives I had allowed the fire to take, flowed through me. I looked through the smoke toward my mother.

“Will you not help me, son?” she asked. She seemed unaware of the men holding her arms. They were the last of the humans left in Eloria. Sominette had made it her business to destroy them when she realized she could not control them. And when there were none left to oppose her, she brought an endless flood of strange elves against the gates of Eloria.

I could not answer her. I could not look at her. But I could not look away either, lest my eyes fall upon the bodies of the elves I had been forced to destroy in this battle. And so I looked at the smoke, trying to pretend that it was mist or fog. Trying to pretend that I did not feel the magic of the life essence of the elves in it begging me to draw it into myself.

Princess slid to a halt, spraying dirt and ash over everything. Lexia flung herself from the saddle, throwing herself into Mother’s face. Her rage trickled through me, a Mindwalker unaware of the effect her emotions had on those around her.

“Why could you not leave us alone?!” Lexia demanded. “Why?” Sominette looked at a point over Lexia’s head. In regal defiance, she refused to meet Lexia’s eyes. Lexia pushed herself before Sominette’s face again. “We let you leave. We let you leave! You could have gone on your way. And yet, you chose to attack us. Why? Why did you do this?”

Sominette’s eyes coolly turned to her daughter.

“Someone has to save this world, Lexia,” she said, raising her chin. She did not see the charred bodies, the broken ground. She did not see the death all around her. The death that she caused.

“How is that saving the world?” Lexia screamed.

Cinder skidded to a stop next to Elandril’s destrier. Eremil immediately dismounted, pulling Lexia back from her confrontation. Elandril looked at Sominette with the eyes of a lost man.

“You were banished, my love,” he said quietly to Sominette. “And yet, not only do you return, you bring an army to destroy us.”

“I will have the Scepters,” Sominette said. “I will take them however I must.”

The elves of the honor guard arrived then, bloodied and dirty from the day’s battle. They formed a half circle around Elandril, but he did not see them. Elandril drew his silver sword, glistening drops of sorrow tracing his cheeks. The sword trembled as he held it before him.

“So,” Sominette said, unconcernedly. “It comes to this.”

“No,” I whispered. Dark clouds gathered with unnatural speed on the horizon. Twisting and spinning into greater darkness. Lexia placed her hand on my arm and I looked into her frightened silver eyes.

“Be still, Brother,” she said.

“Strike me down if you will, Elandril,” Sominette said. “My quest will not end.”

The darkness on the horizon grew.

“I am sorry, my beautiful love,” Elandril said. He raised the sword and brought it down.

No, a quiet voice said, pulling me back to reality. It’s a lie. You need to kill her. Strike now.

Lexia’s silver eyes flew wide and she pulled her hand back from mine.

“Do you see?” she asked, her shoulders heaving with the effort of drawing breath.

What was that? A dream? A memory? A fantasy within a daydream?

“The Darkness was our mother, once,” Lexia finally said. “She was not always evil. She wanted only to save Eloria. But her way did not work.”

Skeleton girl at the end of the table was staring at me. I smiled at her and picked up my spoon. The eggs were just as bad as they looked. I tried to choke them down anyway. I was sure that not eating, like that girl was doing, was a pretty good way to make sure they kept you in here forever.

“Our--” I said, gagging on the eggs. They needed more ketchup; a lot more ketchup. “Our mother? And she was trying to save Eloria? Doesn’t sound like a villain to me.”

Lexia nodded

“The distinction is subtle between villain and hero,” she said. “One act, viewed in retrospect, can be construed as both good and evil, depending on the party looking back at it.”

“Well that’s twisty,” I said. Lexia rolled her eyes and gave me a half smile.

“Mother’s intentions were good,” Lexia explained. “Even when she burned you. Everything she did was aimed at saving Eloria. She gave her life trying to save Eloria. She still thinks she is the hero.”

“She’s dead?” I asked, poking the eggs. I didn’t understand what she was saying. I poked the eggs some more. They were liberally coated in ketchup, but the texture was still bad. I made myself clean my plate.

Lexia stared into the distance for a moment.

“Do you remember when we left the feast?” Lexia asked. “Do you remember looking at the tapestry that depicted the Fall of Sominette.”

I didn’t want to tell her that I remembered it. As a daydream.

Stupid, I told myself. Lexia’s a daydream.

I swallowed convulsively. Those nasty eggs were trying to come back up.

“Father killed her,” she said. “He had no choice. She refused to stop.”

“Stop what?” I asked. But I knew. I remembered it. Or I day dreamed it.

“She would not stop trying to save Eloria,” Lexia said.

I shook my head. “This is all crazy,” I said. “As crazy as me.”

“Do you not see?” Lexia said, her voice rising in pitch. She was yelling. Had I ever heard her yell? She was usually so calm. “The Darkness wants you to believe that. She wants you to believe that you are not who you are. She shows you this world to trick you into believing that ours is not real,” Lexia said. “It is difficult to tell truth from lies once one has embraced the lie, but-you-must-fight-on.” She finally looked at me with her silver eyes. There was a fierce strength there, an unwillingness to relent.

“The Darkness still does not recognize the evil she has become,” Lexia said, more calmly. “Lies and deceit fall more easily from her lips than the truth, and still she does not realize she is the villain.”

“But—“ I was trying to get a grasp on all of this. But it seemed so off. And at the same time, it seemed like I knew it already.

“Do you not see?” Lexia said, shaking her head. “She can see hearts truly, as I do. She loves you, but that will not stop her from destroying you, from destroying all of Eloria. The Darkness tells lies so that your heart yearns to believe it. That is what she is doing to Light, with her corrupted magic. Eloria will be adrift in darkness and despair when our end finally comes.”

“And what do you want me do to about it?” I shouted.

“Remember who you are!” she yelled back.

“That boy is crazy,” a whispering girl said as she walked by. Her eyes met mine for a moment. A tuft of her hair was clutched in her palm and a bright red weal marked her scalp where she had just yanked it out.

My eyes followed the whispering girl and saw Ellie the nurse standing in the doorway. I glanced up at the clock. True to her word, it had been an hour. The nurse motioned to me and I left my plate where it was. She caught the eye of several others and beckoned them to her. Before long, a group of six of us stood before her. None of the gathered group seemed overtly crazy, like the whispering girl. The six of us were a collection of sad faces: big eyes and pale skin and an overwhelming feeling of sadness.

“You guys have group therapy first thing,” she said. “Then you will have some time to do crafts.”

We all just kind of looked at each other.

Crafts? –our faces seemed to say.

Ellie led us down a white hallway with blue VCT tiles. She stopped at a metal door with a glass and mesh window in the upper left corner. She knocked once and then pushed the door open.

“Here’s the rest of your group,” she told the man seated inside. He was tall and thin, with a full head of brown hair and a beard.

Instinctively, I looked over my shoulder for Lexia. But of course, she wasn’t there.

I’m so crazy, I told myself.

“Please,” the man said, standing, “take a seat.” He gestured to the circle of chairs. Several kids were already seated.

We all picked chairs and sat. There were still a few empty ones. No one seemed to want to meet each other’s eyes. We were in the room together, but we tried to ignore each other. The kids who were already seated when we came in gave each other knowing smirks.

“I’m Dr. Thompson,” the man said. “And we are all here for the same reason.”

Snickers broke out and we eyed each other sideways.

“We are all here to get better,” Dr. Thompson said. “In order to do that, we need to talk about how we all got here. Jimmy, can you go first?”

A boy with light brown hair and greenish eyes nodded. He was a couple years younger than me and pudgy.

“I’m here because a week ago, I decided I couldn’t take it anymore,” he said.

It was all I could do not to roll my eyes.

“I took a handful of pills,” he continued.

I wished I could do with him what I did with Mr. June. I tried to tune him out and make up words for his moving lips, but my brain was frozen.

“I didn’t die,” he said.

Obviously.

“But I ended up here,” he said spreading his arms to indicate the hospital. “And you know what? I’m glad I did. I’ve had time to, like, think about everything, about everyone, I’d be leaving behind. And it, you know, made me really grateful I didn’t die.”

“Thank you for sharing,” Dr. Thompson said. The kids who had been sitting when we entered the room copied him. It sounded like some kind of ritual.

“Who is next?” Dr. Thompson asked.

“Me,” I said. Everyone’s eyes turned to me. I could tell the doctor was surprised. I’m sure he didn’t expect any of the new people to talk so soon. “I’m here because ’I see dead people’.” I whispered the last part to make it sound like the kid in that old movie.

Almost everybody laughed.

“One snuck up on me in the bath and bit my wrist,” I said. “They thought I tried to kill myself, so here I am.”

“Really?” a girl asked. She was one who was seated when we came in. She had pierce scars on her lips and eyebrows, but no jewelry, and her blonde hair was tipped with green. Her face said she didn’t believe me. “A ghost bit you?”

“Yup,” I said, levelly meeting her eyes. This lie was so much easier to tell and it sounded so much better. Maybe it was because it was closer to the truth. “I really wanted to be playing basketball tonight. I’m the center at Eastmont. But I’m stuck here. This isn’t what I wanted to have happen.”

She rolled her eyes.

“I’m not sure any of us wanted this to happen,” Dr. Thompson said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. I couldn’t tell from his expression if he thought I was trying to mock the group or if he thought I was seriously disturbed. “Thank you for sharing,” he finally said. The rest of the group copied him.

“So,” a tiny girl said. She might have been twelve. Her hair was red, like Jewel’s, just strawberry enough to be red instead of blonde. She wrapped her hands around her upper arms and hunched forward on the chair. “Are there any ghosts here now?”

“My sister follows me everywhere,” I said, looking at the empty chair beside the little girl. She yelped and scooted closer to the pudgy boy, Jimmy, next to her. He patted her shoulder and shot me an angry look.

“Okay,” Dr. Thompson redirected, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Who’s next?”

I tried not to listen to the rest of them

When they finally let us out of that room, I was never so relieved to be facing a morning of crafts.

Bring on the colored macaroni, I thought.

Ellie was there to lead us back to the common room. Sure enough, a tub of brightly dyed macaroni sat on a long table beside some glue sticks and paper. I noted the conspicuous lack of scissors and strings. The skeletal girl from breakfast sat idly pushing colored pasta around on her paper. Red and yellow and orange all blending together, swirling and changing.

“Fire,” Lexia said from behind my shoulder. “It looks like fire.”

I clenched my fingers into sweaty palms and swallowed. It did look like fire. I didn’t want to think about that.

Lexia followed me over to a couch in front of a wall-mounted TV. Blank-faced kids stared up at the screen, silently watching. I sat down in an empty chair beside the couch, trying to watch too.

Trying.

Lexia stood with her hands on her hips, her lips drawn down at the corners.

“Phoenix,” she said, “You have to find your way out of this. We need you. The Darkness—“

“Shut up about the Darkness already!” I shouted. “Just go away and leave me alone!” The other kids’ wide eyes turned on me, evaluating. A heavy-armed orderly took two steps toward me from his post by the wall before deciding it was an outburst and not the start of something dangerous.

I’m yelling at people who aren’t there, I thought, pulling my hands through my hair.

I really do belong in here.

I closed my eyes.