My soul is crooked and dark, depraved and destined for hell. At least, that’s what Pastor Jeff told me…
Smile, Sawyer. I couldn’t. Stop crying. I tried to stop. You’re defiant. I had to be. Don’t you love me? No. Don’t you love Jesus? I didn’t know anymore. Why can’t you obey like Simone? Because I’d rather go to hell. Simone, show Sawyer how to be good. I didn’t want to watch. Sawyer, open your eyes. I did. To Simone’s—blue, clear like shattered glass. Shattered by the threat of hell. Shattered by Jeff.
The therapist I was forced to see wanted me to talk about this, I presumed, since she wanted me to talk about my childhood, about anything that could have led to my December incident.
Bitch, please.
“Is there anything on your mind, Sawyer?” Dr. Harper started each session with the same wordless stare before crumbling into this question. She had two personas: soft, sweet therapist with a gentle manner, and assertive pain in my ass. I imagined her psyching herself up for our forty-five minutes twice each week. I liked to picture her in front of the mirror saying some kind of Sawyer-specific mantra—I will make it through the whole session as sweet-therapist. I will not break character. I would have felt bad for her if she wasn’t making so much money off my incarceration.
Her simple question, “Is there anything on your mind, Sawyer?” was already an admission of defeat. Every session was a game of Talk Chicken. Who would cave to fill the awkward silence first? The first time was the longest, a full six minutes before she broke. Our fourth round, the undefeated champion: me.
I shook my head.
“You’ve been here for two weeks now.” Was that all? She crossed her legs and propped her delicate face in her spider-leg fingers with her elbow on the arm of the chair. “How have you been adjusting?”
I shrugged.
“Do you like your roommate?”
“I don’t like that she has six pillows.”
“Are you saying you don’t have enough pillows?”
“I have one.” Which wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t paper thin and my spine wasn’t battered from years of gymnastics and cheer. “The second night I was here, I asked one of the nurses for a second one, and she said they were all out. But I knew where they were. She offered me a Trazodone to help me sleep.”
“Did you take it?”
“No. I don’t need medication.”
“I have here in my notes,” she started as she lifted a page in my file, “that you are on Effexor and Zoloft daily, Xanax as needed, and were given an injection of Haldol on the tenth. Are you saying you’re not swallowing your medication?”
“Haldol? Is that booty juice?”
“Yes. Did something happen on the tenth?”
“Sure.” I switched my bare feet to squish under the opposite knees. “Some nurses pushed me face down on the solitary room bed, then pulled off my leggings and panties.”
“I’m sorry if the shot was triggering for you.”
I scoffed. “It’s not a trigger. Nothing’s a trigger. It’s just normal instinct to fight someone when they pin you down and take your clothes off, isn’t it?”
“What led up to the ‘booty juice?’” she asked, but she already knew. She had the file.
“I’m told I threw a chair at Louie…” I flicked my fingers as if I this had yet to be proven to me. “During lunch, apparently.”
“You don’t remember?”
“Of course I remember,” I lied.
“Okay.” She lifted her chin from her palm, her brown hair swishing over her collarbone as she challenged me. “Where’d you hit him?”
“In the thigh.” Lying again. And to a psychologist, which was basically lying to a mind reader.
“No, Sawyer, you missed.”
Shit. Of course I missed. I should have guessed that. Dad always said I had terrible aim.
I crossed my arms. “Then why did I get booty juiced?”
“What was the last thing you remember before throwing the chair?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you tell me why you did it?”
I shook my head, though I knew. Sure, I was violent, but not without reason.
She softened her voice and leaned forward, her sharp elbows poking into her knees. “Sawyer, I know what he called you. Were you feeling unsafe?”
I snickered. “You all say that word a lot, you know? Feeling. Like everything I experience is some delusion, a deviation from fact. But if you know what he called me, you know I wasn’t feeling unsafe. I was unsafe.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“It’s almost visiting hours. Can I leave now?” I asked as I dropped my feet to the carpet.
She sighed, her eyes moving past me at the clock on the wall. “You may, but do you understand the conditions of your hospitalization?”
“I’m here to pay my debt to society.”
“You’re here to get help—”
“Mandated by the courts.”
“But if you don’t let us help you, we can decide that it is in your best interest to stay longer. If you continue to cut your sessions short—”
“Okay.” I sighed and bounced my toes against the floor. It was probably a psych patient thing; I’d scan any circle of us here and find a lot of restless legs and fingers. Or maybe it was just this place. It was January, and the AC was blasting. We were all bundled up in our drawstring-free hoodies, shaking to get warm. “Tell me what I need to do to get out of here.”
“Basically, I can’t sign off on your discharge until I have evidence you’re not going to repeat the kind of behavior that got you arrested last month. Are you ready to tell me about that night?”
“Isn’t everything in my file?”
“I meant talk about it for your sake, not mine.”
“I’ve already told the story a hundred times: to the police, to my lawyer, to the shrink who evaluated me for the plea bargain—”
“Right, but you haven’t talked about how you felt.”
I summoned my most melodramatic eye roll yet. I could imagine Dr. Harper’s view of it: the white of my eyes showing as my pupils revolved back into my head in slow motion. Contemptuous and gorgeous. I’d been working on it for years. “I feel that it wasn’t my fault. I feel that I shouldn’t be locked up here. I feel that it is unfair.”
“Unfair, okay—”
“If I have to stay, can we talk about something else?” I sank back into the couch, crossed my arms, and kicked my bare feet onto the table, one ankle dropping onto the other.
“Of course, Sawyer. What’s on your mind?”
“Nothing.”
Dr. Harper sighed discreetly and flipped through my file. “Why don’t we talk about your CBT assignment from yesterday?” She pulled out a stapled packet of papers, glanced at it, then dropped it on the coffee table between us. Her needlelike fingertips pivoted it my direction. “I was intrigued by how you filled it out.” That was shrink talk for—I was pissed to see that you didn’t even try to follow the directions.
I didn’t have to see the Behavior Chain Analysis form, which was a diagram of blank bubbles representing links in a chain from a trigger to a bad behavior, to know what I wrote. The idea was for us to fill in all the bubbles, and then find the best link in the chain to break before we misbehaved again. Over the entire page, I had scrawled JAKE in intricately filled bold letters.
“What was the problem behavior you were trying to address?”
“December 2.”
She nodded. The date was more than enough to explain. “And who is Jake?”
