LITMIR.BIZ

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protective order unless you agree to admit yourself here.”

      “Like, a restraining order?” Again, Violet hated herself for sounding so young.

      Dum cast a look at the head nurse, who had been hovering in the corner like a Crocs-clad warden. “Your mother says you’re a threat to yourself and your family. It’s in everyone’s best interest if you stay here.”

      She gritted her teeth, but figured she’d rather be in the hospital than at home. And so, without knowing her clinical diagnosis, Violet Hurst voluntarily committed herself to a facility that treated serious mental disorders with the help of psychotropic meds.

      Back in the intake office, the counselor on duty read her the riot act: “You can go home if and when the doctors agree to discharge you. If you insist on being discharged, you can write a three-day letter asking for your release from the hospital. The hospital has three working days—Monday through Friday, weekends and holidays excluded—to give you a decision. We will either release you or we will file an affidavit and you will receive a court hearing. Do you understand all that?”

      “I think so.”

      “Sign here, please.”

      Her heart pounded. The pen felt too thick in her cold fingers. The name Violet scrawled on the line began with a headstrong V but soon after collapsed into a mousy grade-school script. Her last name, Hurst, looked like a blight on her first, which, by this point, it was.

      After she signed away what precious little agency a sixteen-year-old girl has, Violet took her first shower in days. She had to sign out a showerhead at the front desk—a strange procedure, born of the fact that past patients liked to unscrew them and throw them at the staff. After drying off with a rough white towel and stepping into a fresh set of the standard-issue pajamas, she wandered into the dayroom. As she walked down the hallway, Violet felt her distended stomach flip. For the first time since intake, she felt like a detainee. She had no ID, no cell phone, no clothes, no escape. A terrifying thought cut through her façade of couldn’t-care-less. What if I never get released? Relieved as she was to get away from her mother, she wasn’t eager to spend her teens and twenties in lockup. What if they gave her drugs? The antipsychotic kind that left her slurry and diabetic, grimacing at walls?

      In the dayroom, two girls brawled for control of the channel button. They looked roughly the same age as Rose. One had a tumble of dyed red hair and thin, eyeliner-drawn brows. The other was tall and angular with eyes that were almost aggressively blue, piercing through the overgrown bangs of her Mick Jagger haircut. A fresh-looking scar, pink and terrifying, curved from her earlobe to her voice box. Violet couldn’t help thinking the girl had a sad majesty. She was scrappy-beautiful. A beam of sunlight picked up the rusty highlights in her otherwise clove-brown hair.

      After the nurse broke up the squabble, the screen was smeared with fingerprints. Violet grabbed a tissue from the box on top and gave it a quick buff.

      “Thanks,” the brunette said. “And sorry. I’m Edie. This is Corinna.”

      Corinna eyed Violet like a target, then aimed her sniper gaze back toward the TV.

      “Violet.”

      “Did you just get here?”

      Violet tensed and nodded. “Last night,” she said.

      “Was it pills?” Edie asked.

      It took Violet a few beats to catch her drift. By then the girl was already elaborating.

      “Suicide attempt? It’s okay. You don’t have to be embarrassed. I mean, come on”—Edie gestured to her scar—“Have you ever seen anything more embarrassing than this?”

      Later, Violet would find out Edie had strung herself to a curtain rod with a length of electrical wiring. Instead of killing her, the rod had snapped and the wiring had gashed a four-inch wound in her neck. Her Vassar roommate had found her, bleeding nearly to death, making a second attempt with a plastic shopping bag over her head. One hundred stitches and a six-pint transfusion later, Edie ended up at Fallkill Psychiatric. This was her second stay in two years.

      “Psychedelic crisis.” For simplicity’s sake, Violet added, “LSD.”

      “Wow,” Edie said. “You look all right, considering. Was it bad?”

      Was it bad? High on seeds, Violet had joined Imogene in front of the mirror and been surprised by the size of her own widened pupils. They looked like dark holes in a Violet-featured, rubber Halloween mask.

      “Do you feel really heavy?” Imogene had asked. “I feel like gravity is working triple-time.”

      Violet hadn’t felt heavy. Just the opposite. She was having a bad trip, and after hearing her mother’s voice, she felt weightless, like not even her friends could ground her in the moment. Some invisible current was already pulling her back across town to the very last place she wanted to be: her parents’ house, where her mother was destined to ambush her with another accusation. Damn it, Violet! Just admit it! You were angry with us and you broke the window! Your friends keyed your father’s car! You came home drunk again and tipped over the trash! Violet could defend herself all she wanted, but no one ever believed her. Not with her mother in the other corner, spinning stories like rows of knitting and crying on demand. Violet couldn’t explain these freak events, but she knew they weren’t her fault.

      She couldn’t take it anymore. That was the reason she’d taken the seeds to begin with. Her mother had come into her room Friday morning and (falsely, homophobically) accused her and Imogene of being lesbian lovers, to the tune of, “I’m not some clueless mother, Viola! You with your buzz cut! And that little dyke with her rainbow hair!” It might have been comical, were it not for her mother’s lecture about dressing like a “sloppy lesbian” and the mention of some gay-be-gone camp in Sullivan County. When Violet had screamed at Josephine to get her bigoted ass out of her room, her mother had laid into her harder than she ever had: “You are sick, Violet! I wish other people could see this anger you reserve just for me! You’re so superficial! So false, with those big cow eyes you lay on your father! And the phony compassion you lavish on Will! I feel sorry for you, you know that? All the natural fibers in the world can’t hide how artificial you are. Keep doing your Buddhist chants all day long, little girl. They won’t hide the fact that you’re a selfish bitch. You’re ugly, Viola. You’re ugly inside.”

      That was the speech that had sent Violet seeking out oblivion one last time. Seeds crunching between her molars, she’d been thinking she just wanted to melt her face off. She’d needed Love, Salvation, Deliverance. LSD, for short. Violet thought, under the circumstances, she deserved at least that.

       WILLIAM HURST

      “MOM?” WILL ASKED, as the car shot under the tollbooth’s rising yellow arm.

      “What?” she said, with an undisguised tone of annoyance.

      “You know that letter that came for Violet?”

      “What about it?”

      “It has that thing on the back. The same thing Rose used to use.”

      “You mean a wax seal. You need to call things by their proper names, Will. How many times do I need to tell you that thing isn’t descriptive? Neither is stuff, by the way. Or neat, or cool, or amazing.”

      “Sorry. The wax seal. Rose loved those.”

      “Yes, she did. You’ve always been such an observant boy.” Her eyes in the rearview mirror crinkled with sad warmth. “Even when you were a baby. When you were eighteen months old, you’d walk into a room and immediately home in on what was different. You’d fixate on it. Even if it was just the smallest detail: someone wearing a new brooch, or a book someone had moved onto a high shelf.”

      “I did?”

      “You

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