Day Seven

Day Seven

I still can't sleep very well at night; I just roll around in my bed. It seems like everyone else gets to sleep just fine, even after the night nurse comes in to do random urine or blood tests. You don't know when that's going to happen, I guess. I don't even know how you'd get something in here to take, anyway. They came in last night and took out Holly and Gideon. It was hard for me to relax after that. I don't know why I'm so jittery so late at night. I should be tired from that god-awful ball exercise Phil made us do again this morning and the running every day, but mostly it's just making my muscles ache.

So I get out of bed and walk up and down the hall. Sometimes Janet is on duty, sometimes it's someone different. I like Janet because she plays music. If I had my phone, I'd wear it. I'm jealous of the kids that do.

But I just walk. I'm up to forty laps now. I try not to think of anything as I walk. I'm focused on chipping away the time, because each second, minute, day that goes by is one more day and night down.

—

On one wall of the activity room in Gen it's like a chapel of Polaroids. Tracy takes extras so some kids can take them home when they leave, and the others stay on the wall if they give permission. If you stand far away, it kind of looks like one whole face, almost, made up of hundreds of people. It reminds me of the mosaic mural through the Fourth Avenue Underpass. I don't know who did it, but it's cool. It's like thousands of photographs of actual people on small panels all put together so when you walk through the Underpass, it's just faces, faces, faces.

Tracy was right. You can see a difference in some people's faces in these Polaroids. They start out angry or afraid, eyes pinched, mouth tight, and gradually there's a softening, a brightening of their skin. Sometimes a smile.

Sometimes there isn't, though. Sometimes it's just the same face all the way through: set and determined, a defiance in the way the kid looks at the camera. The same stance every time.

I know I'm there, too, but I know also where not to look for my pictures so I can avoid them: the far right-hand corner, where all the new kids are. It's kind of funny to occupy a body that you actively avoid looking at.

The wall reminds me of the Polaroids Laurel took of people, the ones they sent to her service after she died. People caught quickly in time and then that time disappears and that person they were in the moment is gone in real life but kept forever on film. The color of Polaroid film is pretty: the skin tones slightly off, too bright or too murky, just a slight blurriness to everything, like paint has been applied in a gentle brushstroke and then smeared the tiniest bit.

Laurel would really like this. She would like this wall of moments immensely; she'd probably have a lot to say about each portrait. I like that my grandmother was full of words. Maybe I can be like that someday, if I can just figure out the right ones.

It's a little scary and breathtaking, too, that there are so many kids on this wall. This place isn't that big, and yet there are an awful lot of faces here.

And there will be more, and more, and more. How many of these faces are repeats? How many of these kids have come back here again and again?

I would like to not be one of them.