exactly. what. it. feels.like by Kristin Ginger

I fall behind as they crowd around the new girl. They’re sizing her up, asking her questions—in the usual order: what’s your name? (they already know, of course); did you know you were going to be committed? (they did, they’ve been talking about you ever since the nurse mentioned a new girl); how old are you? (most of us look younger than we are); what are you here for?

They didn’t ask me that last one when I came. They didn’t need to; all they had to do was take one glance and everything was clear.

The new girl is small. Wiry, Guatemalan, and agitated—there’s a sheen of sweat over her face like someone dying tangled in sheets. I listen to the interrogation. She doesn’t answer anything they say how she should; she says they don’t care what her name is, she doesn’t care if she’s here, and she doesn’t care why, either. She does say she’s sixteen. Just a year younger than I am but no bigger than a twelve-year old. Her similarly petite mother is down the hallway speaking with a nurse and handing over personal objects—a brush, Crest toothpaste, a stack of white underwear.

We all walk down the hall together, first the nurse and then the girl, then everyone else and then me. We reach room number five and the nurse goes in with the new girl. We’re shut out, and Holly kicks the wall. Holly is angry because room number five is where she sleeps, and she doesn’t like living with a roommate. Holly, I’ve decided, doesn’t like a lot of things. This includes being alive.

I wish the new girl had been placed in my room. She would be better than Lindsay—hell, anyone would be better than Lindsay. Even an ana or bulimic girl, because even if that would mean the bathroom always being locked, Lindsay keeps punching holes into my room’s walls, and every night she wakes up screaming.

This means I wake up screaming, too.

It’s lunchtime, so I’m left alone on the floor with the new girl. The others have left after the noisy, over-stimulated ordeal of slipping lace-less shoes on and lining up for count off before walking single-file out the double doors (zzzt! the electricity is turned off, and then the doors close and two seconds later zzzt! it’s back on again).

The nurse gives me and the new girl hospital cafeteria trays and plastic utensils. The new girl sits in the red chair, and I sit in the blue, diagonal from hers. The chairs are huge plastic cubes with shallow seats curving into their tops, hard to pick up but not impossible (last week Alex managed to heave one at Dr. Arthorn).

Before she goes back to her desk, the nurse flicks on the television, so the two of us are left sitting next to a children’s show that features a large blue bear and a large yellow sofa. We are not allowed to watch channels that show disturbing or violent images such as the news: there are crazy people out there.

I eat my carrots first, nibbling them down as quickly as possible. I watch the new girl out of the corner of my eye. She’s playing with her utensils, bending them back and forth. I wince, knowing she shouldn’t—if one breaks she won’t be allowed to eat with anything but her hands, because breaking can leave them jagged (here the rules for jagged, for sharp, and for safe are different from the Outside).

Luckily, she stops after a moment and starts eating her green beans instead. When she looks over at me I pretend to be completely absorbed in opening my applesauce. I hate applesauce.

“I’m Teresa,” she offers.

I dig my thumbnail between the plastic cup and plastic sheet, tucking my own name (Julie) into the ridges of my throat without speaking it. I try to pry through the glue and open the damn fruit cup but keep failing: my nail is too short. My nails are trimmed as close to the skin as possible. This is because otherwise they dig into my skin and I end up covered with little red crescent-moons pulsing on my cheeks and stomach and thighs, plus not a few infected scrapes that I usually open on my deadwhite legs. This always takes a while and usually results in an inordinate amount of pus, sweat, and dead skin under my nails. Disassociation can be much messier than it sounds.

“How long have you been here?”

I try to pretend that it’s the TV talking, that she’s really addressing the blue bear and his retinue of overly cheerful children. But suddenly she stands up with her tray, moves over—and sits in the green chaircube straight across from me. Startled, I dart a glance up, and her eyes look straight back at mine. Her eyes are almost black.

I wish my mother had left me a hairbrush like hers did. Instead, I’ve had to use a flimsy little comb they give me each morning. They take it away from me as soon as I finish. The water evaporates from my hair and leaves it in a frizzy apricot mess—a lopsided mess, because I’m missing a third of it from above my left ear.

Teresa probably thinks I have cat lady hair. She’s examining me, eyes unabashedly scanning my face. Of course, it’s ridiculous to care about my hair. It’s comical, because it’s my cheeks and neck I should be worried about. But I can’t help it, because everyday the nurses watch me as I use the comb and wonder why I even bother. Which is partly why I do bother.

Teresa, on the other hand, has sleek dark strands tucked behind her ears. Even though her earlobes are empty, I think she must have had large gold hoops in them just an hour ago. I don’t like thinking about jewelry. It reminds me of the old turquoise ring they took from me when I got here, which reminds me of my grandmother. Which reminds me of why no one needs to ask why I’m here.

She’s just eating now, not bothering me anymore. She forks food into her mouth without seeming to care what it is she’s eating. I continue my meal cautiously, ducking my head close to the plate.

We both finish at the same time, swallowing the last of our blue 2% milk cartons and setting them down with unnerving synchronization. I hate finishing my drink at the exact same moment as other people. I always feel like one of us is copying the other. I think I’m glaring at Teresa, but it’s hard to tell what my face looks like these days. She looks back at me unwaveringly. And then she pushes up her thin blue sleeves.

Lining the underside of her left forearm is a grid of long, thin burn marks crawling into the smooth skin. On her right forearm is a wedge-shaped scab, raised and crusty brown. I stare unabashedly, eyes tracing the sullen red tracks, my nostrils flaring in reaction to the sudden, vulnerable thread that has grows out of her disfigured wrist and into my disfigured cheeks in an invisible intangible Frida Kahlo entwinement.

“Curling iron,” she says, answering my unasked question. “And a clothes iron.”

We sit and stare at one another—at each other’s eyes and not each other’s markings. After a moment, Teresa pulls her sleeves back down. The nurse walks over, snapping the thread between us by asking for our plastic spoons and forks.

I take a breath, wondering why Teresa should be any different from Holly, with the words “fat” and “hate” cut into her arms or Ashly, with her safety-pin scratches. I picture their arms, Teresa’s and Holly’s and Ashly’s, and it’s not the difference between burning and bleeding that matters. It’s the sleeves just above Teresa’s arms, ready to hide them, that change things. Holly and Ashly walk around with their arms bared defiantly or proudly or angrily or for attention, none of which has anything to do with me. But Teresa, with her blue sleeves ready and her proof of suffering kept hidden, to convince herself rather than others—the rules of Teresa’s world weave in and out of my own.

The others file in, back from one of today’s four excursions. Their voices break in waves over my head, disturbingly loud after being nearly alone for an hour. I’m supposed to go on the next excursion, our only non-meal trip. It’s to the gym. I already know I won’t.

I sit unmoving for the next hour as the others play cards with our 47-card deck. Mark tries to coax me into a game of chess, but gives up after a while; other than Ashly and the schizophrenics he’s the only one who really talks to me, and after all it’s not so much me the schizos are talking to. Yesterday Derek yelled at me for not letting him go to the party, and it took a good four sentences before I figured out who I was (his fuckup of a father).

Teresa is the center of the card games, new to the group and small but constantly moving, motion making her seem bigger, taller. Her dark glossy hair shifts under the fluorescent lights, her lips pursing as she looks at her hand. Her only real competition for the game is Patrick, who has nails longer than any I’ve seen—he isn’t here for SI, so they let him keep them. Teresa and Patrick choose to play Go Fish so that even the worst burnouts can play. They’re on their eighth round when the nurse comes over and calls for lineup.

On cue, I lean my head back to feel for the wall behind my cubechair. I start out softly, just tapping it with the back of my skull. When most of them have gotten on their shoes I start a bit harder, making a soft thudding sound. The rhythm reminds me of jump rope. I chant silently with each tap: left, left, I left my mother with forty-nine kids, to die of starvation without any gingerbread, did I do right, right, right by my country, by gosh I had a good job when I left, left…

Finally, the nurse glances over toward me, and it’s time: I start whacking my head as hard as I can, jump rope chant lost and my eyes closed, wondering thickly, distantly, how many brain cells I sacrifice with each collision. Something inside me uncurls and my breath is harsh but free, unrestrained, real. I wonder what bliss feels like.

Two minutes later they’ve got me in the quiet room like I knew they would. They only strapped down my hands, not my legs. I probably could have convinced them to even let my hands go free, but the effort isn’t usually worth it.

The plainness of the yellow walls—my brother told me once that yellow is supposed to make people cheerful—without only a few scuffmarks breaking up their smoothness, makes me think about how I don’t have freckles anymore. I know that I would hate them if I still had them, but now I just think about the stories my mother told me when I was little about how freckles are really Leprechaun kisses. She’s proud to be a Macgregor. She wears her flaming red hair in a silver clip. She stands up tall. She would never feel so translucent in her fair Scottish skin that the thought of disappearing makes no sense (to disappear you have to exist).

I concentrate on that now, on disappearing—on fading into the yellow walls of the quiet room and the nurses coming back; opening the door; frowning, little apostrophe creases between their unplucked eyebrows; and then shrugging, shutting the door and leaving my ghost tied to the cushioned bench in the room.

It’s not a straightjacket padded-wall sort of nuthouse cell. It’s just a room, a hospital room, and it has a cushioned bench with straps, and my ghost caught up in them. Nothing strange, nothing psycho, nothing like the speculations of outsiders. Outsiders, is what they are now. They live Outside and they breathe Outside and theirs is a world I’ll never really return to, not fully. I’ll just hover on some invisible meniscus that keeps me a millimeter distant from them at all times.

It’s especially strange to see them come to the Inside, to see them walk through the hall without walking through our hall, with their zippers and their pens and their purse straps and their shoelaces and their jewelry and their jackets.

Only two Outsiders have come to see me: my brother and my grandmother. I only let my brother in because I like him less. That much power, at least, I do have—the power to go to the quiet room instead of seeing my grandmother. Or worse, her seeing me. Power has become relative to me. Power can just mean existing—can mean ribosomes still synthesizing. Or power can mean being able to bite when they take away breakable mirrors and non-Velcro curtains and pens and paperclips and CDs and jewelry and scissors and irons and finally control of feet and hands. Power can just mean being able to close your eyes and pretending not to hear.

My mother hasn’t visited yet. And she won’t.

The problem is, I never realized that they would want to know why. At the time, I didn’t really realize anything, but I certainly never thought explaining myself would be an issue. It was so logical.

But now my brother comes to see me—he comes once a week and sits there and looks at me. And he wants to know why.

He only asked it out loud the first time, when he walked in with a blue umbrella in his hands and wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt (I stared at the strings dangling from the hood with fascination, wondering at how something once so ordinary could have become something so dangerous, forbidden. My mind flashed a picture of a neck wearing a circlet of dark bruise-pearls).

He sat down and looked at the socks on my feet and asked, just once, “Why?”

And I knew he was asking me a question. I knew it was important. But somehow the words slipped sideways out of his mouth and floated past my ear. I tried to grab them, to hold onto them so that I could figure out their meaning, but I kept getting distracted—I forced myself to focus. I thought, he’s asking you a question; okay, what is the question? Okay. The question is why.

Only, when I thought about why, my mother popped into my mind. She was whistling “Morning Has Broken” as she mixed flour and eggs together, and under my eyelids I saw the cake rising out of her yellow bowl whole without having been put in the oven.

She had made that cake (vanilla, chocolate frosting, a lopsided tulip on top) and had waited there in the hot kitchen all day for my brother to come. She hadn’t given up when my brother was an hour late, or even when Grandma came down for dinner. I ate with Grandma while my mother sat there—she had moved to the window and the cake was in her lap. She was waiting with more patience than she ever had with the chickens or my stepfather or the pastor at church.

When the sun went down she was still sitting there, even though it had been four hours by then. I sat with the dirty dinner dishes on the table and watched her stand, look at the cake, and then just…let go.

It smacked the floor with a slightly wet thud. She walked out of the room without a backward glance.

And I remembered then, with my mother’s exit in my mind and the thud of his forgotten cake in my ears, that my brother was asking me a question. But when I opened my mouth to answer him it was full of chickens and aprons and frosting and a window overlooking the long dusty drive up to the house.

He was looking at me again, I realized, and I told myself, listen! He’s asking you a question. Okay, what is the question. Okay, the question is why…

And all I could think to say was, I had to clean up the frosting. She went to bed even though it was only 6:30 pm. I cleaned up the frosting from the floor and took a bite of the cake from the part that hadn’t touched anything, and then I threw it out. And now you’re here, visiting, and asking me why, which is somehow not related to cake. And I can’t give you an answer, so now you’re leaving. Which is also somehow not related to cake.

He came back the next week, and the week after that, and he’ll be here this week too. And he won’t ask me why, but the word will still be there. Sitting between the two of us. Flailing like a man drowning in six inches of water.

By the time Teresa and the others come back from “exercise” or “play-time” or whatever the hell they call it (those are the brain cells I purposely knock out of my head), I’m out of the quiet room. They’re letting me sit peacefully by myself near the window. Mark comes over and sits down.

He starts talking to me, but I only half pay attention because I know it’s not really me he’s talking to: it’s the shell that he sees and is drawn to because of its grotesqueness. I’m okay with that, though. Really; I understand. I’m drawn to grotesqueness, too. But it’s not what I would choose to call it…it’s another label like “crazy,” a label for the people who give it and not the people who bear it.

Mark is telling me about how he’s going on a hunger strike to get out of here, both him and Alex. They’re going to pretend not to eat a thing, but they’ll have Ashly sneak them snacks when no one is looking. They’re going to demand that they be let out or they’ll starve to death. Clever.

I only glance at him from time to time because that’s all the interaction he needs from me. I wonder if he has an obsession with eating; yesterday when they gave him solitary and a six-page questionnaire to figure out if he’s bipolar, he freaked out. They sat him alone down the hall where we could see him and they could keep an eye on his every action from the nurse’s station. When they kept insisting he fill out the questionnaire, he ripped off the first page and started chewing. The nurse didn’t believe he’d go through with it. But there he went, swallowing it, and then the next and the next and soon he’d eaten the whole six-page survey.

I wonder if Mark realizes he’ll be out in a few days anyway. They don’t really keep us longer than five or six weeks, not usually. That’s what Ashly says, anyway. She’s been here three times so I figure she knows. Her first time she was suicidal and the second she was a cutter and suicidal and this time she’s a cutter and suicidal and a druggie, CD (chemical dependence) all rolled into one. Plus, most anyone who’s here more than two days develops anger issues, so I figure she’s got those too. At the last group therapy session she grabbed the TV cord and started trying to strangle herself with it. She said it was because the therapist was young and blonde and pretty and “acted like Mary fucking sunshine.” This outburst wasn’t unusual for Ashly; she and Lindsay are the most dramatic of the girls. I like Ashly better, though. At least if Ashly tries to flush her head down the toilet it isn’t my toilet she’s using. When Lindsay did that, insisting that she was shit and needed to take care of herself, it left me with an awful feeling every time I went to the bathroom for a week that I was sitting over a bowl with her blonde head in it, staring up at my ass.

Alex comes over and interrupts Mark, bragging that he almost made Nurse Jenna swear (she said “ass-tronaut” instead), painfully reminding me that they are only thirteen. They air high-five. No one is allowed to touch in here, of course. I don’t mind because I never touched anyone Outside, anyway. Mine is not a touchy-feely family. I can count on my hands the number of times my mother has hugged me. I am fine with this. Even Grandma, whom I love, is not someone I touch. Of course, she looks like she might break if I did, with her coat hanger neck and transparent eyes. She’s usually in bed dog-earing all her mail-order seed catalogues instead of going around being all Mrs. Fields-huggable. It’s hard to know what to do with her when she’s upright, on her feet, instead of under her K-Mart quilt.

Mark’s planning is interrupted by the afternoon therapist calling us all in for group. We get in and sit in the cubechairs, which have been arranged in a circle. This therapist’s name is Nora, and she looks dangerously similar to Mary Fucking Sunshine. I just know she had half a grapefruit and two pieces of toast for breakfast this morning.

It doesn’t take long for my first impression to be proved correct: she wants us to play self-esteem bingo.

This goes better than I would have thought—it takes ten minutes, not five, for Ashly to get the TV cord around her neck, and the CD boys don’t flat out turn their backs on Nora until after Ashly’s been removed and the imbecilic woman still tries to keep us playing the game. I am beginning to consider banging my head when she calls out, “Everyone with the ‘good characteristic about me’ square!” and, peering over at my sheet of paper and catching it before my hand covers the stupid square, says “Julie! You have that square. Why don’t you share a good characteristic about yourself to get a chip?”

Fucking hell. I look at her and think about my options. Answering is not one of them. Banging my head is getting a little old. Ashly took the TV cord, and Derek’s been muttering to himself for a while now without anyone paying attention; I don’t really need schizo to be added to my file, anyway. The CD boys are facing the wall, my roommate’s chewing her lower lip raw, and Teresa’s examining her nails.

I have the sudden urge to get Teresa’s attention. So I don’t just ignore Nora until she gives up—the neatness of her ponytail tells me that would take far too long, anyway. Instead, I take my self-esteem bingo card with its printed grid of assignments listing phrases like “something you enjoy talking about” and “a good memory from the past year” and start giving myself paper cuts. They hurt like a bitch, and not in the good way, which makes me sort of regret it until the realization of what I’m doing dawns on Nora’s face. That makes it worth it, especially when Holly and Teresa both start snorting with laughter. Mark turns around and gives me a thumbs-up.

Poor Nora, I think, slicing into my forearm with limited results because the paper keeps flopping over, as she says “No, honey—no, please stop that, Julie!”

She doesn’t get it; she should be grateful for this. We’re just showing her what she’ll have to deal with if she really wants this to be her job. And trust me: she doesn’t.

The session ends early. Both Mark and Alex let out a loud “Awww,” protesting, and Nora glares at them. I like her better for it, but it doesn’t matter. She’s done for: not only did she think that hurting ourselves was the problem, she didn’t think of herself as an Outsider.

Teresa and I are alone for dinner again. Other than breakfast, which only half counts because I’ll be half asleep, this is the last meal she’ll eat with me. After twenty-four hours in the ward they let new ones go to the cafeteria. I’m the only one on closed ward.

When Teresa sits diagonal from me, back in the red chaircube instead of the green, I am oddly disappointed. I watch her start to scoop up her corn, and my legs tense.

It takes me a full minute of counting, and then another, before I can make my muscles work. I stand. Then I pause, standing there half-protesting my own actions, and Teresa looks up at me. Avoiding her eyes, I walk to the chaircube next to hers (yellow) and sit down.

I grab my spoon and start eating quickly, but she doesn’t go back to her dinner. She sits and looks at me until my corn is gone, and then my mashed potatoes. I hate myself for moving closer to her. I wish I could move back, but that would be worse, so I keep eating.

Finally I can’t stand her looking at me any longer. I stop.

“It’s not like I was ever beautiful, you know!” My hand flies up to cover my mouth, but the words have already come out, so I stop my arm halfway. I don’t want to look self-conscious. Not that I have a choice: my expressions all look the same these days.

She puts down her fork. “Shit, Julie,” she whispers, shaking her head slightly. “Shit.”

And I see her hand coming toward me. I know I could stop it. She’s so close. I know she’s going slowly on purpose, approaching me the way people approach wounded animals. I watch her hand and I stay still, deathly still, afraid to swallow or breathe because the noise and movement would create an earthquake and not only her hand but her whole existence would fall away from me.

There. She makes contact, the whorls of her fingerprints lightly hovering against the ridged tissue of my unfamiliar cheek. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t ask why. She doesn’t need to. Her hand, pressed without any sense of urgency against my scarred face, transfers her gesture down my neck to cut into my sternum and bury pain between my ribs.

I close my eyes: after all, I remember, there are different rules here, different rules for sharp or jagged or unsafe. On the Outside Teresa’s hand would be safer than scissors, safer than plastic utensils, safer than fingernails.

I want her to slap me. To take her hand and smack it against my cheekbone. She doesn’t, and I hate her for it.

Suddenly I wince, a small involuntary spasm, even though she hasn’t done anything. But her hand doesn’t leave, and suddenly it isn’t her but me who is falling away from here—away from our trays and Teresa and this moment: I jerk into the day that it happened, and suddenly I am walking down the drive again, the weight of the lighter fluid in my hand. And there, in that late afternoon, it makes perfect sense—because it is time: because the dogs are barking happily and the evening sun is hot; because somewhere my voice is humming and the stones beneath my feet are rough; because my hands are twitching and my neck is stiff; because I already know what it feels like—exactly. what. it. feels. like.—to be on fire.

I expect everything and nothing of what happens once the lighter fluid has dripped down the nape of my neck and the flames are uncoiling over my thighs. And then my grandmother is next to me in the ambulance and she’s screaming at me to stay awake, to stay with her; her voice is old and hoarse but strong enough to sing opera concertos to an audience of cornstalks swaying in the loose Illinois breeze and the sound is shepherd-crooking me around the waist to drag me back into this body, this viscous body with its smoky pores and dying cells, and I am carried away on it and the shriek of sirens that flash red-blue-red-blue-red in a wordless yellowless primary color demand.

Teresa doesn’t touch me again after that meal. But when every time we have group, she ends up sitting on my right-hand side, and every time we play cards, she ends up sitting on my left. I don’t look at her. She doesn’t look at me. I stop talking in my sessions. She ignores me but is always next to me, less than three feet away. Existing.

On Wednesday they tell me my grandmother is here. Teresa is sitting next to me as usual. For the first time in days she looks at me. I tilt my head a little, feeling her eyes on me, so that my tangled hair falls back to expose my neck and cheek more than usual.

Then I look at her. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t change her expression. She doesn’t know what seeing my grandmother means; she doesn’t know who found me. I look at her, at her silky hair and smooth cheeks and naked earringless ears and thin unblemished neck.

I think about my grandmother. I think about the day she gave me the turquoise ring, her wedding ring, in all of its tarnished dirt-cheap love. I look at my naked hand and think about my partly bald head and then suddenly about the rest of my body, still bandaged. I think about how my pubic hair caught fire because I dropped the match into my lap and how my thighs seared and my abdomen is marred, scabs crusting over my bellybutton. I think about breathing in smoke and swallowing the smell of burning flesh. I wonder about how my mother found out, whether my grandmother told her. I try to figure out how much I should care and how much I do care, picturing each as a jar of marbles and trying to see which is fuller. My brother’s jars would be empty. My grandmother’s, full. I can’t see my mother’s.

I give up trying and think instead about the day with the cake. I picture her sitting there with me and grandma in the room but living in a world only populated by her and my brother, and maybe my stepfather and the chickens and the reverend. I imagine my own lines of life retracing to loop around me, petunias, and my grandmother. After a minute I add Teresa. Then I draw the lines straight through the middle of my mother and brother, and then after a moment through my father too.

Five seconds pass this way (days in our time, but seconds in theirs). I think, fuck my nails for being so short. I try to dig them into my temples anyway, but it doesn’t work. So I tell the nurse, “Okay.”

I go to my room, I finger-comb my hair, and I wait for Grandma.