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CHAPTER 90

When I woke, I was strapped to the bed.

And I’d pissed in it.

It was not a great start to the day.

Apparently, after I got chauffeured to Belman in the back seat of a police car, I tried to attack the receptionist and the lobby security guard. Once they got me to my floor, certain parties wanted to give me an ass-jab, but Amy talked them out of it. Somehow she got me into my bed, and she sat with me until I calmed down. I slept for eighteen hours, and then I walked around the ward like a zombie for the next twenty.

News like this wasn’t the kind anyone wanted to hear. I felt ashamed, knowing everyone had seen me like that, even though I was pretty sure they’d seen worse before. From me, possibly—from others, definitely.

“It’s like you got really drunk at a party and acted like a total ass but you don’t remember it,” Michaela said.

“Exactly,” I said. I didn’t mention that I had never, not once in my life, been drunk at a party. I had never evenbeento a party.

“At Steve Boardman’s sixteenth birthday, I lifted up my skirt and started screaming about how I was a slut and a whore,”Michaela mused. “That’s what they told me, anyway. It was the last time I ever drank tequila.”

Michaela was lying on the bed that used to be Sophie’s. She wasn’t always the nicest person in the ward, but I liked her, and I was really glad not to be alone. Then I started thinking about what would happen if Michaela left the way Indy had. Then what would I do?

Don’t get better, I thought.I mean, yes, get better—but just not quite yet.

Honestly, though, how much longer did I think Belman would keep me? I didn’t like the way Dr. Ager looked at me, with a weird mixture of surprise and resignation. Like:Really? We’re still putting up with you?

I didn’t like to think about where I’d have to go when they kicked me out.

“Dr. Ager is wholly committed to your care,” Dr. Nicholas assured me when I met with him the next morning.

“Okay,” I said, not believing him.

“But I’d like to hear about what happened the other day when you were given a pass,” he said.

I stared down at the tile floor, at the faint outlines of an old coffee spill. “I caused a scene on the bus, and the police brought me here,” I said.

I was pretending like he didn’t already know this, and that this was a legit answer to his question.

Dr. Nicholas scratched his pen across his pad of paper for a little while and then he said, “Did the episode come on suddenly? Was there something that frightened or upset you?”

Was there something that frightened or upset me? Hmmm, let’s see. I was forced to leave the ward before I was ready, and then I took a bus ride that just happened to lead me directly toward aplace where I could see the man I might be in love with getting cuddly with another girl.

For starters.

And then everything went black except for one tiny pinprick of light, and I fell into that light and I woke up in my other world, and I didn’t like what was happening there. That was all I wanted to say about it.

The baron loves another—

Be quiet!

How long can a peasant please a lord?

Stop!

“Hannah? Still with us?”

“Sorry. I was just thinking.”

“Can you tell me what you were thinking about?”

I could. I didn’t want to. What was the point? When had talking made anything better?