Emily


White walls. Running fingers over the carefully painted bricks that make up the white walls. Cool when you touch your face to it, gives you the shivers, makes you feel like something important is happening to you. Reminds you of waiting. Feeling scared. Nervous foot tapping. The white walls.

You remember her disappearing through a thick door in one of the white walls. Ridiculously thin. You didn’t know her, you only saw her. You were there for meetings about your depression. But you saw her everyday. God. Was it her that you saw, or the bones? Which came first? You don’t remember, and never will, but you never stop trying to remember. Not ever.

You hear the shuffling of bare feet on the tile floor of the hospital. An odd noise to hear, in such a place. You put down the worn out copy of Better Homes and Gardens, September 2009. You weren’t interested in it, anyhow. In mental hospitals, they like to keep everything there as neutral as possible. HGTV plays silently on the Sanyo television screen in the back, with a young couple embroiled in a silent battle over tile or hardwood. Compelling stuff.

It is then that you saw her for the first time, a pale, shivering girl, in a paper dress with an Abercrombie and Fitch kids hoodie thrown over it. Her limp, frazzled blonde hair tickles her back as she takes small steps down the hallway. She bites a cracked lip, looking up at the large man in an orange shirt and tie who opened a door for her. Blinking with those blue eyes, ringed in pencil eyeliner. She couldn’t have been older than thirteen. She walked out later in the same ensemble, but instead of paper, stretch denim and a pair of black converse. You stare, enraptured, unsure at what you had just seen.

In a place like this, you always secretly wonder what the others are struggling with. Sometimes you notice a person nervously knitting a scarf, or tapping their foot, or picking at a raw patch on their elbow; these are the people that are easy to pick out as being one of us. Others look like typical people, your next door neighbors that you run into at Kroger in the toilet tissue section, kids that look like the ones you ignore in the hallways at school. Those are the ones that make you feel a bit nervous, your imagination runs wild, wondering what could have them here, in this building.

But this girl was an exception, a member of a different breed. The kind that shuffled from room to room in house slippers, the ones that had posters in their residence rooms, the ones that shivered, holding a cup of soup in the elevator. The ones with jutting cheekbones, striking eyes, and the essence of a living skeleton. After they pass by, you shiver, feeling like you’ve seen something different than human.

Your therapist awakens you from your thoughts, snapping you back into reality with the equine sounds of her high-heels smacking the floor. You follow her into the sunlit room where you have group therapy. The sun ricochets through the window, off of the metal legs of the chairs. It’s around three o’ clock, the time of day that you typically get a headache. Perfet.

The typical girls sit there. Savannah. A depressive that can’t stop talking about cutting herself, wears a Slipknot shirt, has chronically slumped shoulders. Kylie, nervous snivelling wreck. Tissues. Knee socks. Vera Bradley glasses. On Prozac and Adderall simultaneously. You, a Luvox baby since age 12. And now, the new girl.

She walks in, orange shirt man making sure she’s alright. He walks quietly out of the room, taking one last glance back at her to make sure she isn’t having second thoughts. She introduces herself in a quiet voice as Emily.

Jo, the group leader, gives us a prompt about self-esteem. Savannah gargles through several shoddily-pierced lip rings that everybody hates her because of the way she dresses, and that she hates them back. Everyone stares and blinks. She pops her gum on her angel bite piercing, then begins scuffing the floor with her Hot Topic combat boots.

Kylie blows her nose. Once. Twice. Three blows. She’s the kind of person that shoves used tissues back into her purse. She licks her lips, they’re chapped raw. She talks about her dead grandmother. You’re filled with a surge of pity for this girl. She’s so young. She’s ten. She’s homeschooled. And a total, complete mess. She withdraws from the conversation by rubbing her glasses clean with a paisley-print cloth. The conversation by default rotates to you.

You let out a sigh. You have nothing to say. Except for that you don’t like yourself much and only look forward to ravioli and reruns of the vampire diaries. But you don’t share that. You mumble that you’ve tried leaving positive notes for yourself around the house, even though you sure as hell haven’t. Who on earth writes that they’re beautiful on post it’s? You’re a huge liar, and receive a round of applause for it. Great. You think about you mother’s $100 group therapy check swirling in circles down the toilet bowl.

When everybody stopped staring at you, they crossed their arms and looked at Emily, the new girl. She spoke in a clear voice that rang in your ears like a bell, and said that she had anorexia. She whispered that her parents hated her for it, and that they didn’t understand why she did what she did. She talked about how food felt like the elixir of life that she didn’t deserve, she talked about how she felt like uncooked pasta, ready to break and crunch under all the pressure and pain. And she started to cry, uncontrollably, a sight never seen before in a group session like ours.

Then for no reason, you all walked towards her and gave her a hug, perhaps out of the goodness of our hearts, perhaps because it just seemed like the human thing to do. Something compelled you to put your selfish reasons for being here and went to support little Emily. You remember distinctly how cool her skin felt, as if she had one foot in the grave. It only made you squeeze her harder. A fresh tissue from Kylie’s purse was offered, a piece of RPM gum from Savannah. From you, your favorite purple pen, cap and all.

It seemed like just another day, and you didn’t tell your mother about it when you got home. You let the surprise rainstorm’s raindrops drip slowly down the front windshield. But you remembered what true friendship was. You remember her being in your group for the next year. You remember the day she died.

Running your hands up and down the white, white walls, this time of the ICU in the hospital, tears falling faster than drops from an angry sky. And you sit there now, in a waiting room where you no longer need to wait, but feel compelled to, hoping that the people in the room where her skeleton lies will suddenly surge out. Or at least let you see her. But you feel the iciness set in, that you’re now an outsider and no longer belong.
But you look at the walls and remember Emily. You look at the walls and remember to be strong.