Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 110492 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 552(@200wpm)___ 442(@250wpm)___ 368(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 110492 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 552(@200wpm)___ 442(@250wpm)___ 368(@300wpm)
“But I know I’m right,” Torri whispered to herself. “I know they’re coming—I just can’t do anything about it!”
Two
“All right, Ms. Morrison, you know that hygiene time is over. Time for breakfast, now.”
The voice of Mazy, one of the “caretakers,” as the orderlies were called at St. Elizabeth’s, broke into Torri’s bleak thoughts.
Torri looked up and tried to smile. She tried her best to continue acting normal—sane—despite the frequent fugues and the night terrors. At least Mazy was one of the nicer caretakers. She didn’t grab you by the arm or push you up against the wall when you didn’t move fast enough. And plenty of them did, despite it being against the rules to “manhandle” the patients.
St. Elizabeth’s was actually a pretty plush establishment, as mental hospitals went. The older buildings, built before the Civil War, (back when it had gone by the name “The Government Hospital for the Insane,”) had all been boarded up or torn down. The new hospital had been built on the East Campus only about ten or twelve years ago, so the facility was still quite new. And the patients it housed were often well-connected so nothing too bad happened there—during the day, anyway.
It was the night shift that Torri had come to dread—and not just because of her night terrors.
But it was better not to think about that now—better to just “get along and go along” as Nana used to say.
“Thank you, Mazy,” she said, nodding at the female orderly. “I wonder what’s on the menu today?”
“I hear it might be pancakes.” Mazy gave her a bright smile—the same kind of smile you might give to a rather slow child. “Won’t that be nice? Let’s go see, shall we?”
“Of course. Thank you.” Torri nodded automatically. Three months ago, if someone had spoken to her in that tone, she would have bristled and demanded to know what the hell they thought they were doing. Now, she simply nodded meekly and followed the orderly in her pale pink scrubs, out of the women’s restroom and down the long halls towards the cafeteria.
The pale pink walls matched the orderlies’ scrubs, making Torri feel like she was inside a giant seashell. She supposed that someone in Administration must have read an article about pink being a soothing color but after a while, it just got monotonous.
At least she didn’t have to wear pink herself, Torri thought. The loose, ill-fitting scrubs that were standard issue for all patients were a boring beige, which looked equally awful on everyone—but still, it wasn’t pink.
There were doors at regular intervals along the corridor, all with various paper signs taped to them. Group Therapy! read one, with a bunch of daisies printed under the words. Patient Lounge, read another. Under that, was a picture of an old-fashioned TV set—the boxy kind with rabbit-ear antenna that Torri could never remember seeing in real life. Art Therapy! had a big smiley face printed under it.
Someone—possibly Tanya, who had been Torri’s roommate before she got her own room—had scrawled Fuk Art! over the yellow smiley. One of the staff would see it eventually and print out a new sign, Torri thought. The psychiatrists here wanted everyone and everything to look positive, so the vandalized sign wouldn’t last for long.
At last they reached the cafeteria and she got in line with the other patients, all wearing the same boring beige scrubs that she was. The cafeteria food was bland and industrial, like everything else in the psych ward. The pancakes were half flabby, half stale—clearly they had come in frozen and been carelessly reheated in one of the big ovens. The bacon was limp and greasy, and the orange juice tasted dusty—as though it had been squeezed from oranges that were a thousand years old. The coffee was halfway decent, but it was almost always decaf. Too much caffeine wasn’t a good mix with some of the patients’ medications.
Torri took her tray and went to sit at a table with Gloria and Emile. There were no last names here among the patients. The orderlies might call her “Ms. Morrison” but in Group Therapy with everyone else she was just “Torri.”
As she put down her tray on the round, sticky table, Emile rose and offered her his hand. He was a thin little man with extremely hairy arms. Tufts of wiry brownish-gray hair stuck out of the V-neck top of his scrubs as well. Torri had heard some of the staff say he was once quite high up in the Department of the Treasury, here in DC, but he had snapped under the pressure. She didn’t know if it was true or not, but it was clear there was definitely something not right about the little man.
“Hi, I’m Emile.” He smiled vacantly at her. Torri knew from experience he would continue to stand there smiling with his hand out unless she took it.