Page 38

“Sure, yeah, no problem,” he said. “Anyway …”

“Buh-bye!” Sophie chirped, and Jordan Hassan gave me one last indecipherable look before turning around and vanishing into the hall.

Then Sophie clapped her hands together in delight. “He’s in love with you, it’s so obvious. He’s read all the nurse’s notes, he has a savior complex, and now he’s made you his pet project. He’s going to make you better or die trying!”

A gorgeous, ambitious Columbia student in love with a girl he believes is probably a schizo but maybe possibly a time traveler? The idea was so ridiculous that I started laughing. A minute later, Sophie joined me. We were both cackling like a couple of crazies, which, of course, the world thought we were.

Maybe she and I would be friends after all.

CHAPTER 38

Suddenly, though, Sophie wasn’t laughing anymore. “The thing is,” she said, “ever since I was twelve, what I’ve thought about the most is dying.” Her voice was blunt, and her face deadly serious.

I felt like I’d been punched. How had we gone from giggling about Jordan to a confession like that in a span of fifteen seconds? And how was I supposed to respond? Believe it or not, people didn’t share their darkest secrets all that often at Belman. Most of us tried to keep our problems as private as we could, guarding those scary parts of ourselves like they were a treasure instead of a curse.

“The first time I tried to commit suicide, I took a bunch of pills,” Sophie went on. She tucked her legs under her and pulled a hospital pillow to her chest. “I counted them out into these neat little groups of five, and I just worked my way through the piles. Then my dad walked in and saw what I was doing. He was so pissed—like, ‘What are you trying to do, kill yourself?’ And I’m like, ‘Duh!Is that not obvious?’” She clutched the pillow tighter. “They made me start seeing a therapist three times a week, but it didn’t change anything.”

“Oh, Sophie,” I began, but she kept talking without seeming to hear me.

“The next time I tried, I took my dad’s gun from the garage. It turned out he’d hidden all the bullets, but I put the muzzle in my mouth anyway, to see what it felt like, and then I held it to my temple. I was trying to decide where the best place was. This time my mom found me, and she brought me straight to Belman. And that’s the story of how I got here the first time.” Sophie shook her head. “It would’ve been better if she would’ve just brought me the goddamn bullets. And by now, she probably thinks that, too.”

Then I did something that surprised me. I got up and went to sit beside her, and I took her hand in mine. “I know that’s not true,” I said. “Your parents love you. They want you here, where you’re safe.” I squeezed her warm fingers. “I’m sorry, Sophie.”

She shrugged and squeezed back. “What can you do? I was born like this. Just like I have red hair and big feet, and like you can’t help looking like Lily Collins, I have this thing that comes over me—like this awful black fog or something—and when I’m inside it, there’s no light or happiness or meaning. I can’t describe how awful it is, because the words don’t exist. When I’m in the fog, I just need to get out of it again. And dying feels like the fastest way.”

“But it’s the worst way,” I said. “You know that, right? You can’t get better if you’re dead.”

“When I’m inside that fog I don’t believe there’s any way to get better.”

“But there is,” I said. “I have to believe that, and you should, too. So maybe coming to Belman is a good thing.”

“Oh, sure,” Sophie said. “Belman is super great, super historical, and it’s got gobs of famous alumni. It’s basically the Harvard of psych wards.”

I laughed. “On the adult wing, maybe. Here we’re just a bunch of messed-up teenagers. Then again, who knows what we might accomplish someday? Our potential is still untapped.”

“Exactly. Maybe someday I’ll actually manage to kill myself,” Sophie said. But then she smiled, and I realized that she was trying to be funny.

“Or maybe you’ll manage to get well,” I said.

Sophie nodded thoughtfully. “Could happen. All I know is, if I was, like, riddled with cancer, I could be cured tomorrow. My parents would pay all the money in the world for the greatest doctors in the history of mankind, andsnap, I’d be healed.” She slipped her hand out of mine and slapped it against her forehead. “How come they can take out tumors, but they can’t take out thoughts?”

I didn’t know what to say. It was a question that all of us had asked at one point or another. But no one had ever come up with an answer.

DELIA F. BELMAN MEMORIAL PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL PATIENT LOG

Date:1/23/23

Name:Hannah Doe

PROGRESS REPORT: Hannah became agitated during group therapy. She accused fellow patients of being helpless, lazy, and overfed. She called them “pig people” and said that the only thing wrong with them was that their lives were too easy. She was removed from group.

She subsequently informed staff that they were also pig people, slavishly working for a corrupt system and failing to understand “anything about anything,” including grief, legacies of deprivation, and the realities of time travel.

After that she wouldn’t speak at all. She ate dinner in her room and refused all medication with the exception of 5 mg zolpidem for sleep.

CHAPTER 39

I just wanted to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. Maybe that was because it never actually got dark on the Belman ward, and it definitely never got quiet. People cried and moaned at night. They talked to themselves or to phantoms. Nurses chatted through their shifts, their words muffled by the fan they kept near their station. I’d learned to make these sounds fade into a kind of white noise. It wasn’t comforting, but it was familiar. The lullaby of the psych hospital.