The Sunflowers

A Story by gaymeme420

a [p bad] memoir work in progress

MARCH

[JOURNAL ENTRY MARCH 24.]

I am fifteen today.

The place I’m brought to next isn’t as harshly lit as the emergency room, but to me, now, the colors still burn dizzyingly bright. We’re sitting there, Michaell and I, and he’s pretending to concentrate on connecting penciled lines, and I’m pretending to watch. His eyes don’t move from the paper. The air hangs empty and the yellowy overhead light flickers from time to time. And I’m wondering when he’s going to ask.

There are colored paper flowers curling up on the walls, and I look at them because there’s not much else to see. Michaell keeps on drawing. The place isn’t so strange, if I pretend I’m in a kindergarten classroom. The floor tiles gleam dully and the garden of ugly paper flowers surrounds us, straggling desperately upwards. The only thing noticeably wrong with it in this lighting is the Splotch on the ceiling, which has unattractively settled itself above the dining-area of the commons and infected the asbestos with a pale, sickly brown color. It is of unclear origin, and the area affected bulges as though occupied, above, by some encroaching evil.

Michaell, who spelled his name out for me when we met thirty minutes ago, glances over. His mouth moves, soundlessly, like he’s going to say something. I wait next to him, halfway in the dark, breathing in stale, cold air. And I know he’s going to ask it, like everyone does, so what’s the story? And when he does, I don’t know what I am going to say. I’m tired of explaining. I’ve said it to Kit and to Thom and everybody, and I’ve said it to myself, over and over again. As long as I can remember.

The doctor asked me how I was and I said okay, because I figured he already knew what the answer to that was. What brings me here, he asked. I said I’d thought they told you. He said no, they didn’t. I said why do I always have to answer the same questions from different people who just get replaced by other people who ask again. Please just answer the question, he said, and lower your voice.

He examined my wrists. Were these a cry for help, he said.

I told him I didn’t want to be here, and that I hadn’t been planning on getting up this morning anyway.

I pulled up my brown sweater sleeves and he finally went away. The cop sitting by the end of the bed looked at me. He leaned over. The cuts are they bad? he wanted to know. Not too bad, I said. They weren’t really. He nodded. I’m sorry he said.

The boy on the other bed rolled over and I got a flash of his face. He had glass-green eyes. His expression was blank as the psychologist talked to him, too quietly for me to hear, but I could tell he was listening.

I had two paperbacks I’d already worn out and the lady asked me if I wanted some cold grape juice, but I couldn’t have it from the can. I don’t know, the boy was saying, I don’t know.

Chrissie, said the psychologist, and I looked up and the white light was all in my eyes. So what’s going on, he said. And I had to tell it again.

“How old are you?” Michaell asks, instead.

“Fifteen years and two days old,” I tell him.

“Oh.” He nods, thoughtful. “Uh, happy birthday.”

We kind of laugh.

His fingers drum on the table. “So but then,” he says, slow and casual, “why are you here?”

Recently I’ve had trouble describing things; I’ve had this need for some reason not to sketch things out, but lately to give a color-picture of them�"to show everything. It’s a simple question, though, and there’s a simple answer, if that’s what you’re looking for.

“I’m suicidal.”

“Yeah,” he says, nodding. This is not uncommon for the particular wing of the hospital we are in. “Yeah, so am I.” It’s funny how when something like this becomes so much a part of your life it’s almost mundane.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

Michaell shrugs and lifts his pencil so that it points toward the Mysterious Ceiling Splotch. “You’ll meet everyone tomorrow, I guess,” he says. “They’re all under fourteen so they’re in bed.”

The paper flowers on the walls are in feeble, childish shades of pink and blue and yellow, in an attempt to hide the whiteness of hospital-sterility�"which in a way makes it more depressing, by contrast. This is a white room.

I visited my bedroom earlier, which wasn’t much better, especially. It was big, with a large thick window taking up one wall; another of the walls painted not-quite-institutional-green, LOVE YOU A LOT LOVE YOU LOVE YOU LOVE YOU written along the side in wobbly children’s handwriting spiraling down to the corner. The rest of the walls are blank.

“It’s not too bad here,” Michaell says, noticing my silence. “They don’t, like, lock you up or anything unless you’re really crazy.”

“OK,” I say, not particularly reassured.

“You ever been somewhere like this before?”

“No, never.”

“Yeah.”

Michaell thinks about this.

“Well, you don’t have much to worry about,” he says. “What specifically happened, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Well, I’m on a very small dose of Zoloft, so they’re going to up it, and�"”

“Yeah, but what happened?”

(It’s bright bright bright in here and your heart’s warm and slippery in your chest and you’re holding something silver that flashes in your hand and your backpack’s pressing into your knees and you’re sitting there in the bathroom stall and what are you going to do now?)

“I, uh…”

(So why not, why not today, though, there’s nothing wrong with your reasoning, you’ve decided now, you can’t go back now, and everyone who says you’re wrong just doesn’t want to believe you and this is what you’ve wanted all this time so why not?)

“I just…”

(What are you doing what are you doing what are you doing what are you)

“What?”

(And it’s dripping into your hands but it’s not enough and so you try it again again again but it doesn’t go it won’t go deep enough and f**k why isn’t it working)

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

(White light shining just like Christmas lights.)

“Alright. That’s fine. It’s gonna be OK you know.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

Just like Christmas lights, just like Christmas lights, I kept repeating that phrase over and over in my head that one night I sat outside with wet hair watching the red-and-white lights of the cars flying past down the driveway. It was cold and windy and my breath kept getting stuck in my throat. Those were the only colors I saw, black and red and white. The neighbors’ kids, I think, were having a party. And I was sitting by the pepper tree in the front yard wondering whether it would more or less s****y of me to just get it over with and throw myself in front of one of those cars right now. I don’t really know what I was doing out there. It was a sickening, choking feeling being inside of my mind and I kept thinking somehow if I got away from the other places maybe I could just leave my head, too. But that didn’t happen, of course, anyway.

My chest felt sick, slimy, and fragile inside, like it was collapsing, a wet paper house with the roof fallen in. Every time I breathed in I felt it slipping further. My heartbeats felt purple and red and they were inside my head and everywhere and my blood felt like it was just thin watercolors drip, drip, dripping through my veins. My throat felt raw and tasted bloody from crying. The shower was the only place I got to cry these days; no one would hear me there. Sometimes I didn’t even go in to wash my hair. I’d just cry until my head hurt. It was aching now. Pathetic. The water had been all in my eyes and my mouth and noise and I was choking and I just kept saying stop it, please stop, please go away.

But I didn’t really think about doing it much anymore. I never even really knew why exactly I was crying. It’d been going on for months, but I’d had the feeling for years, as early as six or seven years ago. I have this weird memory of waking up in the middle of the night when I was maybe eight years old and just crying and my mother came in and asked what was wrong and I said I didn’t know and she said go back to sleep.

They took away my shoelaces and duct-taped my shoes together, instead, but the tongues still flop around uselessly when I pace up and down the wide curving hallway. My pulse drums feverishly inside my fingertips. The little shallow light that was there is dimming. I stop in front of the telephone on the wall and my hand runs over the square, silver numbered buttons. I rest my forehead on the wall and breathe in. A colorful poster in several languages, behind the telephone, explains residents’ rights. I scan down the list. One of them is telephone access 24/7.

I dial Thom’s number�"I know hers by heart�"and listen to the steady buzzing drone. Waiting. Pick up, please pick up.

“Please insert fifty cents for your first three minutes.”

I set the phone back on its cradle, sit on the floor, and stare blankly at the opposite wall for a few minutes. The walls seem too close and I can’t breathe. I stand up again and walk back to my room.

Please insert fifty cents for your first three minutes.

I flop down on the thin hospital-mattress and press my face into the pillow. A hot sourness rises in my throat. I let myself cry for five minutes before giving up. I press my hands into the hollows of my eyes and see red. Just-like-Christmas-lights.

Their clear liquid eyes in the morning watch me as I take a place at the breakfast table. The girl in the pink gym shoes says, “Who’s that?”

“Chrissie,” Michaell says. I stare at the gym shoes.

“Oh. Well, that’s Michaell with two L’s, and that’s Ezra over there, and that’s Allyson hiding behind him. What’re you doing?” she adds.

“Drawing.”

“That’s really good,” Allyson says quietly, pointing as she sits down. She studies the picture. “Could you draw me something?”

“Want me to draw you?” I ask, looking up at her. She stares at me and shakes her head. She has soft brown eyes like two old pennies and long, dark brown hair that falls into her face when she looks down.

I nod and start sketching. Allyson watches silently.

“How old are you?” demands the girl in the pink gym shoes. Her mouth moves rapidly when she talks, as if she’s chewing gum.

“Fifteen,” I say.

She gives me some statistics. “Ohh, you’re even older than Michaell, then,” says the girl. “Susanna was the oldest when she was here. She was sixteen. I’m nine.”

“Stop bothering her, Bird.”

“You’re a good drawer,” says the girl in the pink gym shoes, not looking at him. She leans in close with her face in her hands. “Can you draw something for me?”

“Sure, when I’m done with Allyson’s. What do you want?”

“Oh, anything,” she says, opening her eyes wide.

She’s sitting near the doorframe with her planet-and-star pajamas on when I come to her room. “Here,” I whisper, pushing the paper across the floor to her. Bird’s head bends to look at it and I carefully step back into the hall and walk away.

In the morning, Bird presses a folded paper object into my hand and says quickly, “It’s for you,” then runs away. I uncurl my fingers and find two wings and a small, pointed face. I leave it to sit on my bedside table later.

My bedroom is fluorescent-lit with a white noise of constant, soft humming. It feels like I’m on an airplane. I keep reading over the writing on the wall.

It’s hard for me to believe when I wake up that I’m here�"here where I’ve been so scared of coming for months and months. In the morning my throat tastes unfamiliar and raw, like iron. The room seems emptier and quieter than it is�"it’s like a mausoleum in there, basically. It’s scary.

I wonder who wrote that on the wall, though.

“That room used to be mine,” Michaell says, “before I shared one with Brian.”

I haven’t met any Brian. “Who’s that?”

“He’s not here anymore.”

“Oh.”

“We’re not supposed to say their names,” Michaell says after a while.

“Whose?”

“The kids that used to be here.”

“Spooky,” I say.

“Uh-huh.”

“And whose was it before you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Lots of people’ve had it. We’re moving around all the time.”

I nod and poke at the rubbery pancake stuck to my plate, the same kind the boy at the table next to me seems to be attacking with his fork. They brought breakfast in a cart on wheels, with two columns of trays pushed in neatly, the receipts sticking out at the ends. Outside the window the sky is like a swelling, glossy blue balloon floating away from me. The boy looks at me. He wears plastic gold chains around his neck and blinks in a slow, sleepy way that makes it look like he’s got dust in his eyes.

“Wanna AWOL?” he asks me, cheerfully. “Doesn’t everybody. I’m thirteen. I tried to kill myself,” he adds, by way of introduction.

“Pediatric unit’s not so bad,” Michaell counters. “There’s some scary s**t in the adults’, man.”

I’m not sure if it’s okay to go around asking everyone what they’re there for, but I am curious. A little girl with wet feathery hair and tennis shoes that don’t reach the floor sits at the table shared by Allyson and the boy with the chains, wearing a jacket with pink sequined butterflies glinting on it.

“But so Chrissie,” Michaell goes, “how did your parents find out about�"you know?”

I shake my head. “They don’t really, uh, know yet. I just didn’t get up for school so they made me call my psychiatrist and she was like, ‘Are you going to do anything?’ and I was like ‘I don’t know, man, I’ve already done some stuff,’ so she told my mom to take me to the ER.”

Michaell doesn’t press further. “Oh, OK.” He stirs at his apple juice.

I watch the little girl with the butterfly jacket. She’s laughing with Allyson, moving her hands around in the air as she talks. She has a funny little-kid smile, some teeth too big and some missing.

“Me and you shouldn’t really be in pediatric,” Michaell says. “They just don’t have room in the teenagers’ wing right now. But we might get some older kids soon, I think.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. There’s only open rooms here, and teenagers come more than the littler kids do. People come and go all the time,” he adds, after a while.

[JOURNAL ENTRY MARCH 18.]

Not real.�"Yellow, yellow, yellow.�"Yesterday I brought my razor to school to try and slit my wrist in the bathroom stall but I couldn’t get the blades out so I just cut and then I went to class. There’s a small unintentional scratch over one vein from tracing over it. I panicked so badly the period before, I’m always even more unreal after I panic like that. I had a lot to say yesterday and I did and there is no use writing it again here. My head was so empty.�"Thom made me a daisy-chain crown to wear.

As it happens, Michaell is right. I’m not the newest person in C-Unit for very long at all. A week after I arrive in John F. Kennedy Adolescent Neuropsychiatric Hospital, I come to the dayroom for breakfast one morning to find that a girl wearing a green jacket is sitting at the chair I am accustomed to seeing Allyson in. Her hair is tied back from her face in a long ponytail the color of milk tea. When I sit down she doesn’t look up. It turns out she’s seventeen and her name is Winona Smith. She’s been 5150ed, she says, and she’ll be out in three days (she claims).

Allyson and the boy with the plastic gold chains, Ezra, haven’t noticed yet. They’re laughing together about something over in the corner. They do that a lot, I realize. It’s kind of funny to see them standing together, him three years older and half a foot taller, sharing the same joke.

Winona Smith picks at her breakfast. “Do they have avocadoes here?” she says, finally. She adjusts the soft, fluffy white collar of her green jacket and tilts her head a bit, staring blankly through me.

I look her up and down. “I don’t think,” I say.

“Too bad,” says Winona.

“I guess so.”

Michaell asks about the small, fat green notebook on the table, and she pulls it a bit closer to her. It’s got black-and-white magazine pictures pasted on the cover. “It’s my journal.” She sniffs a bit. “I’m only going to be here three days,” she reminds us.

“I like your jacket,” I try.

“Oh,” says Winona. Michaell laughs.

“It isn’t all bad,” he says, looking at her.

Winona appears to relax her guard a little. “Well, who are you guys, anyway?” she says, not unfriendly.

We introduce ourselves, sort of.

“I’m here for being suicidal too,” she says without self-consciousness. “God, I hope I’m out in three days, though. What do you even do all day here?”

She seems oddly comfortable with the place and us, all of a sudden�"she sits in the chair like it’s in her own kitchen, and the formal edge is wearing off of her voice.

“Oh, lots of stuff. We’ll tell you about them as we go along.”

All at once it feels like we are friends. Winona gets along with most everyone. Her dusty cornflower blue eyes glint with enthusiasm when she talks and she has a bright, sudden laugh.

Winona Smith, it seems, will be taking my old bedroom, while I will be rooming with Allyson. These arrangements are run down to us just after breakfast. Then we’re taken outside. Today is cold and white-skied, and Winona stands with Michaell and I, tugging at the collar of her jacket. “What are we supposed to do?” she says. It’s a small space enclosed by glass, overlooking the five floors below us. The only plants are behind the glass; the rest is cement and stone.

“Just hang out, I guess.”

“I can’t believe you’re fourteen,” Winona tells Michaell, abruptly. “You look my age.” He does, too; it’s something in his face.

We sit down by the glass wall, behind the wooden benches. I notice the letters E.S. are written in black ink above Winona’s left wrist. The green notebook with the black-and-white pictures sits next to her, with one hand protectively covering it. She stares blankly ahead. She doesn’t have the dull eyes, or the weighed-down posture, or the ragged, sporadically bleeding fingernails bitten down from anxiety. She doesn’t have the outward signs that anything is wrong at all. When she smiles, it looks real. Michaell has a flatter voice, unlit eyes�"most of the people I’ve met here do. I suppose I have them, as well. Sometimes when I look in the mirror my expression is so hollow that I get frightened. I don’t know how and when this happened. What I do remember is that one day, when I was home alone and it was raining and the blue glow of the television screen danced on the windowpane, I looked outside and caught a glimpse of my reflection and I realized I didn’t recognize myself anymore.

Winona’s on Prozac, she says, and I tell her I’ve been taking an antidepressant for about a month. This is because the first therapist I went to didn’t prescribe me any medication. She had dark hair, a bright, exaggerated voice, and raised her eyebrows frequently. I don’t remember her name, but she had a green box of Teen Life Survival Cards on her desk. I asked her what am I supposed to do with these and she said they would be helpful for teen life situations. I stopped going to her after the first appointment. My second therapist, Dr. Meloy, referred me to Dr. Hall, who prescribed me 12.5 milligrams of Zoloft to start with.

“Thorazine’s great, though,” says Michaell. “And Xanax.”

Across from us, Allyson and Ezra have taken up playing catch.

Winona agrees with Michaell about Thorazine and Xanax. I’m not on either of those; they’ve given me Ativan for anxiety. The Zoloft hasn’t done much for me, or else I wouldn’t be here. When I was younger I used to wish someone would tell me there was something wrong with me so I’d at least know it was true. I didn’t believe that anything was until I was at least thirteen. I thought I was making everything up in my head. I still think so sometimes.