Patricia McCormick: Cut

“How about an ice cream bar?” Debbie says. “Like a salad bar. You can go back as many times as you want.”

“Yeah, right,” says Tiffany “That’s just what you need.”

“I was kidding,” Debbie says.

“What do you want?” It’s a voice I don’t recognize right away the new girl’s.

When I look up, two rows of heads are turned in my direction. This reminds me, suddenly, of a book my Gram gave me when I was little, about Madeline, the little French girl who lived with twelve little girls in two straight lines.

I pick up my plastic spoon and sculpt my mashed potatoes into a little hill.

“We don’t know about her,” I hear Debbie say. “She doesn’t talk.”

I make a little mashed potato ski slope, then flatten it with my spoon. The other girls go back to talking about the petition and I decide that dinner’s over for me, that it’s time to bring my tray up to the conveyor belt that takes all the dirty dishes and cups and leftover food through a window into the dish room, where they disappear.

I stand and try to squeeze between the chairs at our table and the ones behind us. The space is tight and I hold my tray high so I don’t bump into anybody. I pass safely behind Sydney, then Tara When I get to the new girl, she rocks back; my toe stubs the leg of her chair. Milk sloshes out of my glass and down the back of her sweatshirt.

“Jesus!” She practically spits out the word. “Why don’t you watch what you’re doing?” She’s wiping her sweatshirt with a paper napkin. They all look at me, six sick girls in two straight lines, waiting for me to do something.

Somehow I navigate through the sea of tables and chairs and more chairs until I’m finally at the conveyor belt.

The lunchroom attendant, a heavy woman who sits guard over the trash cans to keep track of how much food the anorexics throw out, gives me a bothered expression, then goes back to her paperback.

Across the room, a dish explodes on the floor; there’s the obligatory smattering of applause. The attendant gets up, turns her book face down on her chair, and brings a broom and dustpan over to the girl who dropped her dish.

I stand in front of the blue trash can marked “Recyclables” and finger the edge of my aluminum pie plate, aware that no one’s watching me, that all I’d have to do is rip the pie plate in half to get a nice sharp cutting edge. The clatter of dishes and conversation dims to a hush as I slip the thin, impossibly light disk of aluminum into my pocket. I’m calm, finally, because I know that even if I don’t use it right away, I have what I need.

That night, Sydney tosses and turns and fusses with her blankets for almost an hour after lights out. I lie on my back and count the seconds, praying for herto fall asleep, so I can hear the sound ofher steady in-out breathing—so I can fall asleep.

She rolls over, facing my direction.

“Callie?” she whispers. The space between our twin beds is only a foot or two.

I hold my breath and try to pretend I’m asleep.

“Callie? Callie,” she says. “Do you still do it?”

I hold very still.

“I mean, are you still, you know, cutting yourself?”

From down the hall comes the faint squeaking of Ruby’s nurse’s shoes as she makes her rounds. From the sound of it, Ruby’s still four doors away. I think of it as a problem on a standardized test: if Ruby’s shoes squeak every 2.5 seconds and she’s four rooms away, how long till she reaches our door?

“Lookit, Callie.” Sydney blows out a gust of air, the way she does when she’s smoking an imaginary cigarette in Group. “It’s OK with me if you don’t want to talk.”

Just a few squeaks until Ruby’s at our door. People who aren’t asleep when Ruby comes around have to take sleeping pills. Everyone is afraid of those pills—even the substance-abuse guests.

Sydney sighs. “Just don’t, you know…please don’t hurt yourself.”

Tears, warm and sudden, sting the corners of my eyes, but I don’t cry. Sam cries. My mom cries. I don’t cry. I roll over as Ruby passes by. She pauses outside our door a minute, a brief interruption in the steady squeak, squeak of her shoes. Then she moves on. And after a while I figure Sydney must have fallen asleep, because finally I can hear the steady in-out of her breathing.

On the way to your office the next day Ruth clears her throat. She puts her hand over her mouth, then says she has something to tell me, that this is the last day she’ll be my escort. Her voice is small, unsteady. “I’m graduating,” she says. “Tomorrow.”

She smiles a practice smile, and one of my dad’s favorite dumb jokes comes to mind. The joke is about a family riding along in a brand-new convertible. The car hits a bump, and one of the kids, a girl named Ruth, falls out. But the family keeps on driving. Ruthlessly. “Get it?” he would say, grinning. “Ruthlessly?”

Sick Minds will be a Ruthless place once she’s gone. I would like to tell Ruth this, give this joke to her as a graduation gift. But then she is gone and I’m sitting next to the UFO—Ruthlessly—and wondering how she got better without looking any different.

You furrow your brow and ask me to please look at you a minute. I look past you, out the window, at a squirrel sitting on the end of a branch.

“Callie,” you say softly. “I want you to think about whether you want to continue coming to see me.”

The squirrel nibbles on his acorn, looks around suspiciously, then goes back to his lunch.

“This—the two of us sitting here every day, with me watching you count the stripes on the wallpaper—isn’t helping you.”

The squirrel freezes; the branch quivers as another squirrel scrambles toward him.

“And Callie…I believe you want help.”

The squirrels are gone, but the branch is still quivering. I steal a glimpse at you; you’re pretty, I realize, and youngish. You wrap your hands around your knees, like we’re two girlfriends, just hanging out, talking. I go back to counting the stripes on the wallpaper.

After a while, I hear your dead-cow chair groan. You sigh. “OK,” you say. “That’s all for today.”

The clock says we still have fifty minutes left. But you’ve already capped your pen and closed your notebook.

I keep my hand on your doorknob a minute, standing in the waiting area outside your office, wondering what I’m supposed to do now. There’s no one to escort me and there’s no place to escort me to.

I picture you on the other side of the door, closing the manila file with my name on it, all the empty sheets of notebook paper, from all the days I came and sat in your office counting the stripes on the wallpaper, spilling into the trash. And it occurs to me that I’m alone—really alone—for the first time since I got here.

I let go of the knob and move away from your door, slowly then faster, down the hall, not really knowing where I’m going, just going. I pass a supply closet, then a door with a large red bar and a metal flag on it marked “For Emergency Use Only,” and I wonder if an alarm really would ring if I opened it, if it would be like a prison escape movie, if Rochelle would throw down her magazine and come running, if Doreen would drop her linens and man the searchlight, if the other girls would stumble out of their rooms and ask what was going on. But my feet carry me past the Emergency Use Only door, back the way I came with Ruth a few minutes ago, back to Study Hall.

The door is closed, though. There’s no sign or anything. Of course it’s closed; Study Hall is over. Everyone is at Individual or Anger Management or Art Therapy. Everyone except me.

Down the hall I hear keys jingle. Marie, the daytime bathroom attendant, is taking up her post on the orange chair. I walk in her direction, trying to act normal.