Day Three

Day Three

"Yo, yo, yo, yo."

Clonk, clonk, clonk.

"Yo, yo, yo, ladies!"

I shoot out of my bed so fast I almost slip on the floor and crack my head open. I stand in the middle of our room, staring at Brandy, who's wiping her eyes.

It sounds like someone is trying to break our door down.

I drag myself over and yank it open.

A muscular college-aged guy with a crew cut grins and shakes his metal water bottle at us. He must have been using that to bang on our door.

A ping goes off in my brain. He's the crew cut guy that was with Phil in the hospital when I left.

"Move it up and out, ladies! Time for some sunshine. Sneakers, sweatpants, hoodie. Let's go, go, go!"

"I'm sorry, for what, now?" Brandy asks.

"Daily run. Move the body, free the mind. Five minutes until we leave. The name's Chuck. Pleased to meet you."

He shuts our door. In a minute, I hear that same metal water bottle being banged on Billy's door.

"I do not run," Brandy says. "I treadmill, slowly. But I do not run."

I look at myself. I'm already dressed in sweatpants and a sweatshirt, since I never took off my clothes from yesterday before going to bed. I haven't showered since I left the hospital. What does it matter, though? I pull my sneakers from under my bunk and drag them on.

"We used to do a twelve-minute mile in middle school in PE," I tell Brandy. "Sixth grade. PE was right after lunch, and it sucked. If you stopped, you had to start over. I am not looking forward to this."

"Well, I'm not doing it. The sun isn't even up yet. It's inhumane." Brandy shoves herself back under her blanket and turns to the wall. I go into the bathroom and pee and brush my teeth, moving the toothbrush carefully around the bad part.

Clonk, clonk, clonk. "Let's gooooooooo!"

I yank open the bathroom door and walk to the bedroom door and open it. Billy is standing in the hallway with Chuck, his eyes half closed.

"Where's your friend?" Chuck asks. He's bouncing up and down.

I shrug.

Chuck leans his head into our room. "You don't want to come, that's all right with me. But it's a demerit."

"A what?" Billy asks.

"I don't care!" Brandy shouts, her voice scratchy.

Chuck turns to Billy. "It counts against you. You don't follow the program, you get a demerit. You get too many, you lose things."

"Like what?" Billy asks, alarmed. "How many demerits? What things? I'll get my phone back, right? Right?"

Chuck starts jogging down the hall. "Fuck around and find out!" he calls over his shoulder.

—

Outside, he leads us in stretches. When I reach for my toes, a wave of dizziness spreads over me and needles of pain spread up the backs of my legs. Billy can barely reach past his knees.

There's no track or anything, just desert. About fifty feet away, there are more adobe buildings and what looks like…a mini-farm? That must be the goats and the chickens. There is already a bunch of kids out there dressed in parkas and hoodies and jeans, raking the coop and throwing hay and grass from a bucket for the goats to eat.

"Don't worry," Chuck says. "You'll be one of them soon."

Billy shivers. "It's freaking cold out here."

Then Chuck takes off. Like, fast.

Billy and I stare at each other.

"You first," I say.

"You," he says, and scowls. "I'm not much of an athlete."

Far into the desert, Chuck yells, "Demerits!"

"Shit," Billy says. He starts running.

I watch him run awkwardly, his feet slipping on stones in the desert sand. His arms fly everywhere.

There's no path. I could run into a cactus, get needles in my sweatpants. Fall and crack my head open. Are there tarantulas out here?

I look back at the kids with the animals. They're kind of laughing. That guy Phil, the one from the first day, is with them. He puts his hands on his hips, watching me.

"Go, go, go!" the kids chant.

I don't like people looking at me, and I can't tell if the kids are being encouraging or mean. One of them has a shaved head and is covering her mouth, she's laughing so hard. I start running just to get away from them.

Billy is a black-hooded blip far ahead of me. I can't even see Chuck anymore. What if I get lost? My lungs start burning right away. I land on a stone and almost twist my ankle. The bouncing of my body makes my face shake, and it pulsates with pain.

I can feel rivulets of sweat running down my back. Up ahead, Billy seems to have gained his balance. He's figured out how to move his arms in time with his legs. I'm like a flailing baby bird.

I stop, put my hands on my knees. Drops of sweat sting my eyes. I feel like I'm going to die. Maybe I should just lie down and die in the desert. I cannot do this. I don't want to do this.

I hear footsteps and pull myself back to standing, turn around.

It's Brandy, hair flying in her face, in matching pink sweatshirt and sweatpants, winter hat, and sneakers, stumble-running, face splotchy red.

When she reaches me, she pants, "Never. Leave. A. Man. Behind."

She grabs the fabric of my sweatshirt and pulls me forward with her.

—

I don't know how long it takes us to finally catch up to Chuck, but when we do, he's casually perched on a boulder, drinking from his water bottle. Billy is flat on his back on the ground beside him, looking like he's going to throw up.

"Fancy meeting you here," Chuck says, grinning.

"Sadist," Brandy says. She collapses next to Billy. "Do you have water for us, at least?"

Chuck shakes his head. "Nope. You should have thought of that yourself."

"You should have told us," I say.

"I'm not here to hold your hand," Chuck says, pulling a cloth from his pocket and wiping his face. "Somehow all of you figured out how to lie and steal and cheat and keep secrets so you could keep getting high or drunk or whatever, but you can't remember a basic function like bringing water if you exercise? That's on you. You need to learn how to take care of yourself in a good way. You lost that somewhere. Maybe you'll get it back here."

"Unlikely," Brandy says. Her neck is shiny with sweat.

Chuck stands up. "Ready?"

"I can't," I say. "Running, it hurts my face. I don't think I should be doing this."

He guffaws. "You don't run with your face, girl. You run with your legs. Stay here if you want. I'm headed back."

"Wait," I say. "I need to rest longer."

"Time's up," Chuck says, checking his watch. "Like I said, stay here if you want, but I'm headed out. Isn't it a beautiful day for a run?"

"No," Billy moans from the ground. "It is not."

"But how will I get back?" I say, looking around. "I don't know where we are." We're pretty far out. I can't see the buildings of Sonoran Sunrise anymore. There's no path; Chuck just ran wherever he wanted and we followed.

He takes off, calling over his shoulder, "Figure it out."

Billy quickly gets up and runs after Chuck.

Brandy wipes her face with a sleeve of her sweatshirt. "I'm not sticking around here. I don't want to get lost. I want to go home."

"That's not our home," I say.

I watch her run away, hair flopping against her pink back.

I sit on the boulder Chuck sat on. It's still warm from his body. My legs hurt.

It's really quiet out here.

I hate everything. I hate that stupid little bird peeking at me from a nest-hole in that saguaro. I hate that my face pulsates with pain. I hate that I'm coated in sweat. I hate that they left me here. Even Brandy left, despite that bullshit of "Never leave a man behind."

I don't think I've ever been in a place this still. Usually I'm surrounded by noise. School. My sister. My parents. My phone. Music through my headphones or my own thoughts careening inside my brain. Only drinking quiets everything down.

Now there's just…nothing.

And it's kind of scary. I don't know what to do in this quiet.

All of a sudden, my stomach rolls and I double over, coughing out leftover food from yesterday. I splutter out the last bits and wipe my chin with the hem of my sweatshirt.

The stupid little bird in the saguaro nest-hole cheeps at me.

"That's right," I say to it. "I'm disgusting. A disgusting, dirty thing."

I look down at my pile of vomit. Red ants are already crawling over it. I use my sneaker to push some sand and stones and twigs over it. Cover it up.

That was weird, what Chuck said. About us being good at keeping secrets and lying.

Covering things up.

Maybe I lied sometimes. But I had to maintain, didn't I? Everything has always been chaos around me. I just wanted to make it go away somehow. But I never cheated or stole.

Suddenly I remember what Amber said. How I lied at her mom's just to have an excuse to get the NyQuil. I did finish it off after Amber went to sleep. Sat in her green-tiled bathroom on the toilet and sucked the rest down, stuck the empty bottle way in the back of the bottom cabinet.

I guess that was stealing, in a way.

A swell of pain rises in me, but I push it down. I don't want to cry. I'm sick of crying. I'm sick of all of it. Everything.

I don't know how I'm going to get through this.

I slide off the boulder onto the ground and wedge my face between my knees. The darkness feels comforting.

"Jesus Christ, just get up."

I look up.

Strands of hair stick to Brandy's cheeks.

"I thought you were behind me," she pants. "I ran all this way back, so the least you can do is get off your ass and come with me. I need a ride-or-die in this place, and it looks like you're it, so get up and let's go."

She's waiting, hips cocked.

"If we die in the desert, at least we'll die together," she says. "Also, you have puke on your sweatshirt. Extremely gross."

She grimaces.

"Fine," I say, reaching down and grabbing some sand. I smear it over the vomit on my sweatshirt.

I stand up.

I'll need at least one friend here if I'm going to survive.

—

"Wait," Billy says suspiciously. "This looks like school. If I wanted to do school, I'd be at school. Not that I want to be here, but I did not think here meant school."

We're in the activity room after running with Chuck, eating, and taking showers. My body is sore from the run. Although I'm glad I finally took a shower and changed out of my puke clothes, it was also weird to shower with Brandy right outside the door. I did it as quickly as possible.

We're sitting at round tables. There are easels and giant buckets full of art supplies and Legos against one wall, and things like a beanbag toss and plastic darts near another. There's a wonky mural of upraised hands reaching toward a starry night sky, which I didn't notice before.

Fran has given us stapled packets of paper. She takes a sip of her coffee.

"Not school, Billy," she says. "Not a test or a quiz. Just some looking inward."

I didn't sleep well last night. I kept tossing and turning, which hurt my face. I couldn't settle down. I kept doing the math in my head, like, I have been here two days. But I have been away from home for a total of seven days. I haven't had a drink in seven days, but the first three days in the hospital might not count because I had so much alcohol in my system, right? So I was okay. And they gave me painkillers. I was tired the first two days here and mostly slept, so maybe that doesn't count. But now it's going on seven days without alcohol and I'm getting a little anxious about that.

Those things just ran through my head. Over and over. Sometimes my brain won't stop.

I'm fidgety at this table, rolling a pencil between my palms.

The first sheet of paper is titled Decision-Making Worksheet: Cost-Benefit Analysis. Under that, it says The substance or activity to consider is, and then there's a blank line, where I guess we're supposed to write whatever it is that got us here. Over two blank squares, it says USING and DOING.

Above the left-hand column, it says Advantages: Benefits and Rewards, and above the right, Disadvantages: Costs and Risks. The bottom two squares are titled NOT using and NOT doing, and one square says Advantages: Benefits and Rewards and the other says Disadvantages: Costs and Risks.

Billy groans. "This is school." He drops his pencil on the table.

Brandy takes some colored pencils from a bucket and draws hearts in her grids.

Billy is right. Who knew there was going to be school in rehab? This assignment is as stupid as the forms Tracy tried to get me to fill out in the hospital.

"The point is to think about what, say, drinking does for you," Fran says. "Does it have positives? What are the negatives to your drinking? Or if you like your pills, why? How does getting high on Oxy help you? Are there ways it makes your life harder? Less manageable?"

"I don't know," Billy says. "I feel pretty good when I'm high. That's a plus right there."

"Sometimes we spend so much time trying to get high or drunk that we forget about the risks involved," Fran says. "Emotional risks. Financial risks. Familial risks. Friendship risks."

Friendship risks. Like me, with Amber. Maybe Dylan, too.

Kristen certainly doesn't count. She can be fun, but she doesn't really care about people; look what she did to me.

Cherie? She was pissed at me about the art project, but that wasn't really my fault, was it? It was the Wi-Fi's fault. Granted, I might have a been a little woozy, but that didn't stop me from trying to do the work. I mean, I guess I could have done it earlier. Remembered to do it earlier, anyway.

Dawn? She's an unknown. She's too new, though I feel pretty bad for forgetting about her during lunch when I had to print out that paper for Deavers.

I stop rolling the pencil. Look at those squares on the paper.

"What's this ‘substance' line for?" Brandy asks.

"It's whatever you do. Your poison of choice." Fran smiles.

"Did you ever have a poison?" Billy asks Fran. "Me, I'm kinda a Mom's-painkiller type person. Valium. Stuff that evens you out. Stuff that has an end date, you know? Like, I know it'll last four to twelve hours, depending on how many I take. If I don't have a lot, I can supplement with my granddad's beer. He doesn't care. Then it's smoooooth sailing."

I perk up at the word granddad. I guess Billy and I have that in common. Drinking with our grandparents.

Billy looks almost dreamy, thinking about it.

Fran sets down her coffee cup. I think she's the oldest person I've met here so far. Gray hair spiking from her head. Hiking boots. Roses tattooed on her wrinkly forearms.

"Child," she says to Billy, "you name it, I did it. If it messed you up, I was all in. But then I watched my very best friend die, right in front of me. Under a tree in Anza Park on Stone. I've been in recovery now for seventeen years. And yes, some of what you'll do here will seem like school, because, like me, you need to learn. You will not live if you cannot learn how to live."

I sigh. This place is going to be an endless source of feel-good affirmations and slogans, just like those posters in the lobby when we arrived.

I look at my sheet and let out a long breath. I write alcohol in the substance line.

Under advantages, I write:

Feel more normal, like other people

Talk easier to people

Don't feel so anxious

Relieve stress

Don't feel

Be alone

Under disadvantages, I write:

Headaches

Making sure no one knows

I listen to everyone scratching away. Fran is on her phone. She looks briefly at my sheet.

"Those aren't headaches," she murmurs. "They're hangovers."

I ignore her. This is tedious.

I grit my teeth and tell myself to play nice and just get through it and move down the sheet to NOT using and NOT doing.

In the grid for advantages, I write:

My family wouldn't be mad at me anymore.

Amber would be my friend.

Maybe I wouldn't have lost Dylan.

I wouldn't feel so tired all the time.

I would remember more things, like homework (or Dawn).

I pause, thinking. Then, in very tiny letters, probably too small for anyone to read, I write, the video wouldn't have happened.

In the grid for disadvantages, I write:

I would feel anxious all the time again.

School would be harder.

I don't know how to feel.

I can't handle stress.

No one will be my friend/won't go to parties.

I don't know how to feel.

Lonely or lonelier

Then I write, This is the most ridiculous test I have ever taken and whoever wrote it sucks completely and 4-ever. I draw a smiley face with Xs for eyes and an arrow through its head.

Brandy slams down her pencil. "Done!" she announces. She shoves her paper across the table to Fran. "What grade did I get?"

"It's not a test like that, Brandy." Fran scans the sheet. "You don't have many disadvantages to drinking."

"Nope," Brandy says. "I like it. It makes me feel better. I have lots of friends. I go to parties. It helps me chill."

"Hmm." Fran puts Brandy's paper down. "But you're here."

Brandy scowls. "So?"

"Well, somewhere, somehow, something happened that brought you here. And while your being here is positive, the reason behind it is not. Get what I'm saying?"

Brandy twists a strand of her dark hair. It's still wet from her shower. She was irked that there wasn't a blow-dryer. "I'm just here because my mother hates me, to be frank. She'll do anything to get me out of the house so she can be alone with her boyfriend. So what?"

"What mom would want you out of the house so bad she'd pay all this money?" Billy asks.

I look over at him. "Wait, how much is this costing?"

Billy rubs his fingers together. "Probably mucho moolah."

"Well, it doesn't look like it," Brandy says, and sniffs.

How are my parents paying for this? My dad works in a cubicle and my mom has insurance through her radio job, but it can't be all that great. I think there was estate money from Laurel, but I don't know how much. My mom kept pretty quiet about that stuff. That was something else my parents fought about after she died. Selling off some of Laurel's photographs to museums. Auctioning them at special art houses. Some curator calls once every few months, but my mom gets really agitated and lets it go to voicemail.

Great. Now I'm costing my parents money they don't even have, so I'll feel guilty about that forever.

"Listen," Brandy says, raising her voice. "There is simply no limit to what my mother will spend to get me away from her, okay?"

Her face is flushed; her eyes have grown damp.

She stands up quickly, slamming her pencil back in the bucket. "I finished my homework. Can I go back to my room? This is lame."

"Sure," Fran says.

Brandy wraps her arms around herself and stomps out of the activity room.

"She just gets to leave?" Billy says. "That doesn't seem cool. I'm not even done with my sheets!"

"I can't force anyone to do anything they aren't ready for, Billy. If somebody chooses to be here and not put in the work, well, that's on them. You just need to worry about yourself. Do you want to put in the work? Do your advantages outweigh your disadvantages? Maybe by the time thirty days is up, you'll have an answer."

Billy sighs. "Thirty freakin' days."

He goes back to scribbling on his sheets.

Fran looks at me. "How are you doing with yours?"

I hand her my sheets.

"Interesting," she says. She peers over her glasses at me. They're pink with fake stones at the corners. Like something my boss, Patty, would wear.

"What do you mean, ‘the video'?" she asks.

"Video?" Billy says. "Do tell. Sounds saucy." He leans forward, very interested.

"Shut up," I tell him. "I don't want to talk about it. It's none of your business."

"That's all right," Fran says gently. She makes a note on her clipboard.

She inspects my packet again. "I see a lot of anxiety. Loneliness. You must be carrying a lot. Would you say that's accurate?"

Don't cry. I grind my teeth, but that hurts my face, so I stop. I pinch my thigh under the table and shrug.

"Bella, tell me what kind of kid you are. Do you need me to say you did very well on this worksheet, do you need me to ask you to work harder, or do you need me to just accept it?"

"That's a weird question," I say slowly.

"I'm just trying to get a sense of you," she says.

"Well, I like good grades," I say. "I try to get them."

"Why?"

Billy is drawing ghosts with devil horns on one of his worksheets. I watch his fingers working carefully, gracefully. The ghosts are actually pretty good, with nice shading.

I think of my art project, that tree. I guess I'm going to fail that now. Along with every other class. By the time I'm out of here, school will be over for the fall. It will be after Christmas. I'll be so far behind everyone else.

"Because it makes people happy," I finally say.

"Who?"

"My parents. Teachers."

"Does it make you happy?"

"Well, if they're happy, I'm happy."

"But, see, I don't think you are happy. I don't see that on this sheet. If you get all As and your parents are happy, why are you still not happy? Has it ever made you happy to get good grades?"

"I don't know? I mean, it's stressful. All that work. Most of it I don't even care about."

I'm getting confused. Because now I'm thinking my grades don't actually make my parents happy. They're always angry/mad/sad no matter what.

Don't cry.

I grip the pencil between my fingers. I'd like to snap it in half.

"I'm the kind of girl who just wants you to say I did a good job on this stupid packet and let me go be by myself. That's the kind of girl I am," I say.

"Then you did a good job on this sheet, Bella. You can go."

I stand up.

"Dammit," Billy says. "I'm always the last one to finish a test."

Fran laughs. "Again, not a test, Billy. Not a test."

—

We spend the afternoon napping. Or rather, Brandy naps. I just stay in my bunk staring at the bottom of the mattress above me and feeling the soreness of the run with Chuck in my legs. Holly still isn't back. I'm very jittery. I can't tell if I'm bored or if I'm anxious. I get up and look through Laurel's suitcase. I didn't bother to put my clothes in the dresser by my bunk since we're supposed to go to Gen tomorrow anyway.

I flip through the things my mother packed again. My favorite gray wool cardigan from Tucson Thrift. A swimsuit. Flip-flops. Mittens. A wool hat.

I take off my hoodie and put the cardigan on.

I paw through the rest of my things. A Cormac McCarthy paperback. That one I asked her to buy me after watching this guy talk about it for four hours on YouTube but I've never been able to finish it. It's complicated and I kept getting distracted. The copy of Wild. My fuzzy slippers. And an embroidered black velvet pouch.

I unzip the pouch, curious.

Inside are photographs.

Ricci, her face pink with sunburn, smiling madly in the hot tub at Agnes's farm.

And Laurel and me, playing Scrabble at her kitchen table, our faces creased in concentration, her hair a long black and white braid down her back, her fingers heavy with the silver rings she liked to wear. She was wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt that Kurt Cobain made for her after she photographed him for Rolling Stone.

There I am across from her, squinting at the board, dressed in my flannel and jeans. Was this last year? The year before? I can't remember. My mother took the picture, one of the few times she came to Laurel's when I was there.

I press the photo to my good cheek.

Then I slide the photograph back into the velvet pouch, my body swelling with grief. I relatch Laurel's suitcase, walk out of our room, and keep walking until I reach the end of the hall, and then I turn around and go all the way down to the other end.

And then I do it again, and again, each time passing the person who sits at the desk, watching me curiously as I walk faster and faster. Eventually, she just puts some music on her laptop, something that sounds Broadway show tune–ish, and honestly I don't care. I just want to walk and walk until I can't feel anything anymore, and the sound of someone singing about seventy-six trombones is just fine with me. I'm a walking cartoon, a bobblehead doll, a mess of bruises and sore legs and failure.

—

After dinner, they let us watch television. Billy chooses some crime show. Brandy picks at the polish on her toes, complaining that she's bored. I try to focus on the show, but all I can think about is that worksheet and Fran's question about if good grades make me happy. Well, it's stressful to work for them and to worry about deadlines and doing things right and presentations and all that, but I wouldn't say I ever feel particularly accomplished when I'm done. I liked my tree, because that wasn't like checking off a box or filling in a blank or remembering a specific historical term or something, but then that got ruined because Ms. Green said I wasn't in it.

Billy changes the channel to a house show. People are complaining about countertops and kitchen cabinets and how they want two sinks and not just one in the bathroom.

Brandy perks up. "Oh, I love these shows. It's like the pinnacle of selfishness. Have you ever noticed how if they have kids, they're extremely concerned with making sure there are rooms only for the kids? And their toys? ‘We need this third floor so Timmy can keep his toys here because I'm sick of stepping on them.' These people should not have children. They do not understand childhood at all."

"Shit, I would have died to have my own toy room," Billy says. "My dad was always kicking all my toys around when he got mad."

"Why didn't you just keep them in your room?" Brandy asks.

"I didn't have a room," Billy says. "My brother and I slept on the pullout in the front room. My dad had the bedroom."

His voice is tight.

He switches the channel.

"Gumball," he says, relieved. "This is better. Much better."

"Is that a talking cigarette in an elementary school?" Brandy asks. "What in the fresh hell?"

I can't believe I'm going to spend thirty days with these people, and with a bunch of other kids soon. I wonder what Ricci's doing. What my mom told her. How much she told her. What is Amber thinking right now? Did Kristen and Lemon get in trouble? That video. I hug myself tightly, leaning away from Brandy on the couch, close to the armrest.

How many people have seen it? It's probably everywhere by now. School. I won't be there. I'm going to miss so much work. Am I going to have to repeat fall semester? What's going to happen to my grades? What are people saying about me? I was supposed to work at Patty's this past weekend. I'm going to have so much homework to make up when I get back. Am I going to have to go to summer school? When I go back to school, who will even talk to me? Amber cut me off. I'm not talking to Kristen and Lemon ever again, and Cherie was mad at me. I'll have no one. Why am I having these thoughts again, I've already had them, why won't they just get out my head—

My mind is spinning. I'll probably lose my job at Patty's and then I can't go on the trip with Amber but Amber won't want to go now anyway—

I can't breathe and I am breathing too fast, all at once.

I'm not going to have anything or anyone when I get out of here.

Jesus, I just want a drink. Something, anything, to make this go away.

My heart: thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.

"Hey, dude, what's going on?" Billy says. "You okay?"

I'm pounding on my chest, trying to keep my thump-thump-thump-thump heart inside my body.

"Shit," Brandy says. She jumps off the couch and runs out of the room.

I miss Ricci. What if Ricci had been the one to find me? That would have killed her, seeing me bloody on the front stoop. Like, she'd remember that forever. Once, my sister got so drunk she broke her cheek open on the front stoop of my house. Who's taking care of her? My mom has no idea which cat videos work the best for calming her down (it's the YouTube account with the tuxedo cat named, inexplicably, Justin Bieber); she doesn't know it has to be three Oreos, not two, not one, not four, and how to say good night to the tree frog and mist the tree frog and arrange the Minecraft figurines just so and tap the goldfish tank—

How many people have seen my boob? How far did that go? I'll have to see all of them again someday at school and somebody will probably write something about me on that one particular stall in that one particular bathroom and then what about the complete strangers, seeing me, drunk and pulling down my bra, laughing at me, reposting, reposting, endless, endless, endless, my tit forever out there, my eyes falling down my face, and I just wanted to feel better, you know, and my dad was so mad at Thanksgiving but who asked them to even get married in the first place and school was shit, and I just wanted to feel better and did Tracy say I had liver damage what does the liver do anyway what is its function can I fix that somehow is that how I'm going to die—

I need, right now, to not feel, but my way of not feeling has been taken away from me, which seems like the cruelest thing in the world.

Janet, the night person, is kneeling in front me. She takes my balled fists in her hands.

"Easy," she says. "Easy. Slow. Look at me."

Can't focus. Brain on fire.

She's massaging my hands. Kneading the bones.

"I want you to lie on the floor, okay, Bella? I think you're having a panic attack. Can you do what I do?"

She leads me off the couch and down to the concrete floor, arranging my legs. "Get me that cushion," she says to Billy. I stick my hands inside my cardigan, twisting the fabric.

He hands her a couch cushion. She puts it under my feet so they're elevated. She lies down next to me, stretches her arms up behind her head, flat on the floor. "Mimic me," she says.

I untangle my hands from my cardigan and stretch them above my head.

Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump

"My heart's falling out," I gasp.

"No, it is absolutely not, and I tell you that as a medical professional," Janet says.

"Just give me something. Anything," I plead.

"I can't," she says softly.

"I'm going to die. I can't breathe."

"If you're talking, you're breathing, dude," Billy says. Above me, his face is worried.

"Billy, Brandy," Janet says. "We're all in this together. Get down."

They both lie on the floor.

"Breathe. In, out, in, out. Slow. You can do it, Bella."

I stare at the ceiling.

There are painted birds and coyotes and moons and stars up there. How do you do that, paint on a ceiling? Oh, yes, I remember from art class. A scaffold, like Michelangelo at the Sistine Chapel.

"Damn, that's a cool ceiling," Billy breathes.

"I didn't even notice that," Brandy says. "That's nice. What kinds of birds are those?'

"Wren, sparrow, roadrunner, quail," Janet says. "Say that for me, Bella."

Thump-thump-thump. I can't focus on what she's saying.

"Bella," Janet says. "Try."

My lips are dry, my voice hoarse. "Wren, sparrow, roadrunner, quail."

Thumpthump.

Wren, sparrow, roadrunner, quail.

Looking at the sparrow on the ceiling. Little thing. That's what I saw in the desert in the saguaro after the run with Chuck. A little sparrow cheeping at me. I think of its tiny sound. It wasn't lonely in the desert, like me. It had made a home in a sharp and pulpy place.

Thump.

Slower now, heart tired. Heart sleeping. Brain off.

Wren, sparrow, roadrunner, quail.

I don't know how long we stay on the floor, all of us, saying the names of those birds, maybe it's a few minutes, maybe an hour, but in time, I get so invested in the words, and in the ceiling story, that my body softens, and I can breathe, and then I am just tired, tired, tired.