I never get the chance to work up the courage to get angry at him. I feel it brewing in my stomach, like still-warm embers of resentment. But then my mother arrives. I walk in the house one day to see Aunt Beth and Mom drinking tea and discussing my future. I get a say, of course. And I say I want to leave. Ohio is the perfect place to start over. Anywhere no one knows me is the perfect place to start over. Anywhere that isn’t where Nameless is.
It’s my dream, but it’s more like my life. It’s not quite true to life – the colors are too bright and the faces wobble. But it’s exactly what happened.
I wake up to the white-washed hospital room. I wake up realizing I ran away like a little coward.
I haven’t changed at all.
I’m safe. My counter is safe. Three years, twenty five weeks, six days. I am still safe.
But I haven’t changed at all.
Isis Blake of Northplains, Ohio, is the same fat, cowardly fourteen-year-old girl curled up in the shower. Just a little older. A little lighter. And a little stupider.
It’s dark – probably the middle of the night. I get out of the hospital bed and pull my jacket on. Stepping outside in Ohio in the winter is like suicide without all the flashy brain bits, but I’m doing it anyway. I can’t stand this tiny room. It’s trying to suffocate me with all the beeps and smiling posters of kids getting shot up with flu vaccines. Who smiles when they see a five inch needle? Sociopaths, that’s who.
I promised Naomi I wouldn’t use the window to sneak into the kids ward. But last time I checked a hall is not a window and there is a hall that goes right by the kids’ ward. I just never use it because it’s near Sophia’s room, and that’s the one place Naomi would think to look for me if she found me missing from my bed. I pile pillows under the blankets of my cot, reach under it and grab four leftover jello cups I’d been hoarding under the mattress, and ease out the door. The hallways are quiet. I readjust the jello cups by stuffing them into my bra. I take a moment to admire my considerable multicolored breasts and feel a single tear spring to my eye. Beautiful.
But back to business. I’ve got some gelatin to shove down the throats of several grubs. I just need to make it around the corner, and I’ll –
I hiss and flatten myself against the wall. A group of interns pass, all carrying coffees. I quell the urge to become fleetingly radical. I definitely want to slide across the floor behind them on my slippers like James Bond, silent and suave, but I also want to see the kids no matter what. Too much is riding on this. So like a lame super normal spy I tiptoe behind them. And pirouette.
And that’s when I hear it. It sounds like a dying cat far off, but as I get closer and closer to the kids’ ward, I realize it’s a person. Someone is screaming like they’re being ripped apart. In the empty hallway it’s eerie, and I start to consider maybe my life has turned into a horror movie and a girl with long black hair will hiking up my phone bill as she calls to tell me I’ll die in seven days, but then there’s the shuffling of feet behind me, and I duck behind a gurney. Naomi, with a few other nurses, charge towards the scream with winded urgency.
“Who forgot to up her cc’s?” One of the nurses asks.
“No one forgot, Fenwall said to ignore the change entirely,” Naomi pants. “But someone was supposed to give her Paxtal instead. Trisha?”
“It wasn’t me!” Trisha insists. The first nurse sighs.
“Jesus Trisha, not again –”
“Do you know how hard it is to get her to take them? When she’s like that?” Trisha hisses.
“Did you call him at least?”
“Of course! He’s the only one who can calm her down –”
They run past, out of my earshot. They must be talking about another Sophia. The Soapy I know always listens to nurses. They love her. She’d definitely never refuse to take her pills.
I inch closer to the door the screaming is coming from. The nurses closed it, but you can hear it through the walls.
“Why does she get to go?” The scream reverberates. “Why does she get to go and I don’t? I want to leave! Let me go! Let me go! Get your hands off me, you filthy bitch!”
I recognize that voice. Sophia. But that can’t be right. Sophia wouldn’t sound so harsh, so feral –
“I hate her, I hate you all! I fucking hate you! Get away from me! Leave me alone!”
The words are all wrong. I slowly peer around the corner and into a tiny slit of window unprotected by the curtain. I can’t see much, but I see Sophia’s legs flailing on the bed as the nurses try to restrain her. I see Naomi walk by with a syringe in her hand. Sophia fights, the bed shuddering as she beats her legs harder. And then her feet move slower. Her screaming becomes softer, hoarse shouts I can barely hear anymore through the glass.
“Please,” Sophia sobs. “Please. I want Tallie back. Please, just give me Tallie back.”
One of the nurses starts towards the door. I pull back, around the corner. As much as the curiosity is burning me up inside, I can’t hang around much longer, or I’ll be in deeper shit than the elephant keeper at a circus. I take the stairs to the kids’ ward without looking back. The commotion Sophia made was the perfect cover – the guard isn’t even at the door. The sleeping room is lined with beds; stickers and colorful sponge art pressed onto each headboard. Toys and books stack on the ground, and the gently beeping monitors glow in the darkness.
James is the first to notice I’ve come in. He sits up and whispers groggily.
“Isis? Is that you?”
“Yeah,” I hiss. “Hey.”
He points at my chest, his bald head shining in the faint lights of the monitor. “Why are you jiggling?”
“I’ve always been this stacked.”
James rolls his eyes. I laugh and I shove a jello cup at him. He rips the top off, slurping it down in one gulp. I inch over to Mira’s bed and carefully place her jello cup on her forehead. She sleepily opens her eyes and groans.
“Isisssss. It’s cold.”
“Hurry up and eat it, then.”
They eagerly stuff sugar down their throats, and I clear mine trying to find the words to say goodbye.
“Listen,” I say. “I’m getting out of here tomorrow.”
“You’re leaving?” Mira sniffs.
“Yeah. I got better.” I smile. “Just like you will.”
“I won’t.”
“You will. You will and don’t you dare let me catch you saying you won’t.”
“Will you come back to see us?”
“Is the sky mildly blue? Duh I will!” I give him a noogie. “Also, toys. I’m gonna bring some cool new ones for your birthday, and James’ birthday, and Martin Luther King’s birthday, and my own birthday, because frankly these dinky little hand me downs do not suit your highness.”
Mira grins. A light flashes out in the hall and I duck behind her bed.
“The guard!” I exclaim. “Shit. Take mushrooms. Shiitake mushrooms.”
“Shiitake,” James echoes. I bop his head.
“Hey! That’s a bad word.”
“But it’s a mushroom! Nothing’s wrong with mushrooms!”
“Haven’t you played Mario? Everything is wrong with mushrooms.”
“He’s coming this way to check,” Mira hisses at me. The guard’s so close I can hear the jangling of his keys.
“Okay, everyone calm down. Don’t panic. OhmygodwhatamIdoingwithmylife. Don’t panic!”
“We’re not!” They insist together.
“Right! Okay!” I breathe out my nose and charge towards the window. I always have a harder time climbing down than up, but it’s the only place in the room to hide; every piece of furniture in here is kid-sized and too small. I open the window and leap over, clinging by my fingertips on the sill. My converse scrabble on the cement of the wall, the cold winter air nipping at my butt, which hangs fourteen feet above certain death, or at the very least a broken kneecap. The door to the ward creaks open into utter silence. The grubs are good at pretending to be asleep.
&nbs
p; “Who left the window open?” I hear the guard murmur. My heart rockets into my throat. He strides over and I pray to whatever god is listening that he won’t see my fingers. I must be praying right for once! He doesn’t see my fingers at all! He just kindly closes the window and shoves them off the sill instead. My hands jump to the ledge on the outside, but it’s so tiny and slippery, and I fight, my hands aching -
All I can think about is how to fall elegantly so my dead body doesn’t look stupid, because I’ve seen a million crime shows and honestly existentialist panic is no reason to not try, in your last moments, to contort your body as you fall so you strike a dramatic pose. It’s your last pose ever! You have a moral obligation to make it fabulous! Or at the very least not-disgusting.
I could pose like Beyonce, but one thing is still for certain.
I’m going to die.
Which is a whole lot of very not good.
My last fingers slip off the ledge. And then there’s weight all at once on my wrist as someone grabs it. Whiplash rocks my body and hard cement collides with my belly, scrapes my elbows. I look up into icy blue eyes shaded by wild tawny hair.
“Y-You!” I sputter.
Jack pulls me back up through the window, Mira and James on either side of him, wide-eyed and ecstatic.
“You almost died,” Mira whispers shakily.
“You were all like ‘WHOA’ and the guard was all like ‘BYE’ and Jack came in and was like ‘GRAB’!” James shrieks.
Jack straightens. I stand up on shaky legs and contemplate life and the refreshing fact I still have a life to contemplate at all. Jack freezes when our eyes meet, and turns on his heel abruptly. I run and put myself between him and the door. He stares at me and I stare at him, some unsaid pressure bearing down on my lungs. Adrenaline sears my veins, and a twisted pain tears through my chest. I can’t look away. He’s not even that good-looking. He just looks so…sad? And that sadness is condensed in an arrow that he’s shot right into me with his dumbo Antarctic eyes.
“How –”
“I was walking behind you in the hall. I followed you. I have a knack for knowing when you’re about to do something stupid.” Jack answers in clipped tones.
“Why –”
“Sophia. I came to the hospital for her. Now move.”
Jack tries to maneuver around me but I stop him at each turn.
“I’ve had years of practice being fat. We are good at blocking things. Also, floating in saltwater.”
“Let me through.”
The smell of mint and honey floats towards me – that same disconcerting smell of him I found in my memories earlier today.
“See, I think I should not let you through, since you are a really bad boyfriend, and logic dictates a bad thing should not be near a good thing, so essentially, Sophia doesn’t need you around.”
He scoffs. “You have no idea what you’re talking abo –”
“You kissed me,” I say. “Sophia told me you kissed me. And I remembered it. A bit. And even if you saved me, and Mom, and pulled me up from the ledge or whatever, I can’t forgive you for hurting Sophia like that. I can’t forgive you for kissing someone you didn’t like. That probably hurt me, too. You’ve hurt a lot of people, haven’t you?”
Mira and James watch us, our words like pingpong balls their heads inevitably follow. Jack is expressionless, wordless, like a recently-wiped chalkboard. I can’t read him. But tiny wisps of incredulousness give way to shock, and then his face sets in an icy mask of irritation.
“Get out of my way,” He repeats, a deadly quality in his voice.
“No. See, I’m a good dragon. Does your small-yet-somehow-still-functioning brain know what a dragon is?”
“Scaly!” James chirps.
“Breathes fire!” Mira adds.
“I’m the dragon,” I say. “And Sophia is the princess. And it’s my job to guard her from the likes of you.”
Jack raises a brow. “Likes of me?”
“A bad prince. The kind that ruins princesses forever.”
The ice-blue splinters of his eyes darken, shading over. His eyes are easier to read than his face, but not by much. Is it anger? Guilt? Frustration? No. It’s none of those. It’s helplessness.
“You’re too late. I’ve already ruined her forever,” he says, and pushes past me with such force I don’t have time to brace. He’s long gone by the time Mira decides to speak up.
“They call him sometimes. Naomi does. When Sophia gets really mad.”
“What do you mean?”
James shuffles, staring at his feet. “Sometimes…sometimes she gets weird. And mad. And when we ask about it Naomi says it’s someone else yelling, not Sophia. But it’s her voice. And then they call Jack, and he always comes no matter what time it is and she calms down and gets quiet again.”
I watch Jack’s figure grow smaller down the hall.
***
She remembers.
Isis Blake remembers me.
The world doesn’t move for me. It stopped that night in middle school. It trembled when Isis first punched me, and grew to a roil with every day I fought the war against her. And then it went still for weeks. For weeks that felt longer than years.
Today the world shakes and it shakes with her name and her set, determined face as she looked me in the eyes and told me I was a bad prince. Today it shakes because she might think I’m terrible (you are terrible. Your hands are bloody and you are terrible), but she remembers me. A small fragment of the old Isis - the one who recognized me and despised me months ago - shone through in her eyes. She hates me. But she remembers me.
She remembers a kiss (which kiss which kiss which kiss the fake one from the beginning or the true one in Avery’s house?).
Today my world shakes. Not hard. But it moves under my feet and reminds me that yes -yes. I’m really alive. I am not ice. I am not a freak, or a monster. I am not something people are afraid of, or avoid. I am human and I have done bad things, but the world shakes and I am human. I am not untouchable. I can be shaken.
By Isis Blake.
As I walk into the hospital room more familiar to me than home, Naomi walks out of it, her hair frazzled and her nurse scrubs wrinkled. A scratch mark mars her arm from her elbow to her wrist. It isn’t deep, but it’s red and angry and very noticeable.
“That bad?” I ask.
Naomi shakes her head. “I have no idea why she….she hasn’t done this for an entire month, and now –”
“Something must have triggered her,” I say, and try to push past her into the room. “Let me talk to her.”
“She’s sleeping. Trisha administered a tranq.”
The elation from knowing Isis remembers me drains away. I feel a dark fury start to broil over me, but Naomi backtracks.
“Jack, listen. Listen to me. It was the only thing we could do. She was threatening to hurt herself with a pair of scissors.”
“How did she get –” My own anger chokes me off. “Why did you let her have those?”
“I didn’t! You know me better than that, for christ’s sake! I don’t know where she got them, or how, but she had them and all we could do was stop her before she could do any real harm to herself.”
Dread replaces the anger, layering over it like a sickening cake. I can barely open my mouth to speak, but the words somehow escape.
“She must have been triggered. She’s gotten so much better. You know she wouldn’t do this unless someone said something that upset her.”
Naomi waves a tired hand towards the sleeping Sophia in the bed, tucked under the white covers too-perfectly. Too peacefully.
“You’re welcome to talk to her when she wakes up. But my shift is over in five minutes.”
I instantly spot the fine wrinkles under her eyes, the weary bags that all nurses get sometime in their long and stress-ridden careers. She’s so tired. She’s been Sophia’s best nurse, the only one she really likes and trusts.
“I’m sorry,” I mutter.
&nbs
p; Naomi’s eyebrows shoot up into her hairline. “Excuse me? What was that strange word I just heard you say?”
“Don’t make me say it twice.”
I push into the room and close the door behind me. I watch Naomi leave through the frosted glass of the room’s divider, her smirk evident even through the opacity.
The room is dim and quiet, save for the beeping of the monitors that staccato out her vital signs in too-cheery chirps. Every bouquet I’ve given her this year is still in the room – wilted and browning and not enticing in the slightest. But she keeps them all. She keeps each vase full of water, and all the vases in chronological order.
It’s then the guilt hits me like a steel maul to my chest. I haven’t visited for two weeks. There’s a two-week gap she’s carefully left in the line of flowers, two empty vases waiting for me to bring them the blooms they need to serve their purpose.
I let my guilt at not being able to save Isis override my duty to Sophia. And that’s unforgivable.
How can I be so excited about a girl remembering a kiss when the girl who needs me is suffering?
Selfish bastard.
I sit on the end of her bed gingerly. The white blankets fold like snow under my weight, and contour gently around her outline. She’s so much thinner than I remember. Her every bone sticks out like a bird’s – frail and hollow-looking. Her cheekbones are sharp and evident. There’s no trace of the rosy bloom I’d gotten so used to seeing growing up. That went away after that night long ago.
“I really am a bad prince,” I murmur.
I smooth hair away from her forehead. She mumbles softly and rolls over.
“Tallie…”
My fists clench in the sheets, and the molten spike of feverish regret bakes my insides, starting in my heart, working its way to my lungs and stomach and everything in-between.
Tallie.
Our Tallie.
‘You’ve hurt a lot of people, haven’t you?’
-5-
3 Years
26 Weeks
0 Days
Dr. Fenwall is Santa. If Santa went on a slimfast diet and wore corduroy pants every day of his life and used words like ‘endometrial tissue’.