Stay with me

Chapter Nine

“To everyone, she’s seen as nothing.

With everything I have, she is

quite the someone.”

—Oliver Masters

IT WAS HARDER to breathe at Dolor. Everywhere I turned, I was being forced to talk about shit—feelings and emotions. People talked about me as if I weren’t standing right there. They told me what was wrong with me, who I was, my symptoms, my disorders, what went through my mind as if they knew me. I wanted to scream nothing was wrong with me. They’d poked and poked and poked, and when I’d thought they couldn’t poke any longer, Ollie had shown up and kissed me like that.

Pacing my dorm room, my lips beat like a drum to its own pulse in his absence. At one point within the last five minutes, I’d believed he was the actual devil. Surrounded by indestructible walls, only Satan could punch through and lure me in the way Ollie did.

Frustrated with my irrational thinking, I shook my head. Ollie clouded my judgment, and I couldn’t think straight. A slow rising pressure built, and with each step I felt myself gradually losing it. He’d kissed me, and before leaving, he’d somehow managed to pick up my scattered pieces, stuff them in his pocket, and take them with him.

Before Ollie, I didn’t have pieces. He’d built them, broken them, and stolen them.

Pulling on my hair, nothing took away the suffering brewing inside my chest. And when the pulling didn’t work, I threw my fist into the concrete wall.

Instant regret.

“Mother fucker!” I cursed at the top of my lungs as my body crumbled to the ground. My chest burned, unable to find a single breath afterward. Thoughts even stopped as I curled into a fetal position with my fist clutched to my chest. My door swung open and a cool rush of air brushed past my already frozen body. Voices echoed throughout my room, but I couldn’t focus long enough to understand what they said. Low moans came from somewhere. Was it me? Was I moaning?

My heart was in my fist as it pounded at an irregular pace.

My vision was stu

“Alicia, go get the nurse!” someone shouted. “Oh my god … Alicia!”

My eyes fixed on the gray cement wall I had punched moments before, and I couldn’t find the will to move them in either direction. Voices came in and out of focus like a long-distance call.

“Don’t move her. She’s in shock. Everyone back up.” It was my dark angel in all white—the nurse.

When I came to, a thin gray sheet lay over me. A cast covered my hand, and Dr. Conway sat in my desk chair, reading over papers in her lap. Her high and thick black hair framed her ivory skin. She belonged in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I wanted to smile at the thought of her spraying my fist with Windex, but I couldn’t.

She brought her long red nails to her lips as a wide yawn broke out.

“What happened?” I asked, and she looked up from her paper.

She removed the stack of papers from her lap and placed them over my desk before crossing her legs. “You broke your hand.” A light sigh blew from her dark red lips. “And tell me, Mia, what on earth did the wall ever do to you?”

I rolled my eyes at her attempt at humor.

“You can’t resort to violence. If you have one more incident, we will have to remove all your furniture from your room, and if you harm yourself again, we’ll have to place you in solitary confinement. Now, why did you punch the wall?” She raised a brow.

Her eyes were tired, and I could tell she had been waiting a while for me to wake.

I drew in a deep breath. “A guy kissed me,” I said through an exhale.

Dr. Conway pressed her lips together.

“It’s not fu

She threw her hand in the air. “Hey, I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to.”

She turned her head to see out the window in order to hide the smile I caught regardless. She so badly wanted to laugh, and it took her a moment to reel herself back into the conversation as a psychologist. “I’m not concerned about the broken hand or the fact you punched a wall. I’m more concerned about the state of shock you went into afterward. Can I ask you something personal?”

“No.” It was an automatic response, a response much easier to say than “yes.” Others would disagree. Others would find “yes” was much easier because you wouldn’t have to disappoint anyone. I didn’t envy those types of people.

Dr. Conway glanced up at the clock above my door. “It’s almost nine. I have to head home.” She picked up her stack of papers from the desk and gathered to her feet. “In the meantime, I want you to think back at what’s inducing this anger. What’s the common denominator sending you into a rage both times? There you will have your answer.”

Dr. Conway dropped her chin and left. She left me alone with a million more thoughts and unanswered questions I didn’t have before my fist met the wall.

I thought Fridays would be my favorite, considering there were no classes, but they grew to be my least. During breakfast, I wrote lyrics to songs I couldn’t listen to over my cast in a sharpie next to my tray of uneaten food. Since I’d arrived, I’d lost five pounds—like I needed to lose any more weight.

From the table in front of me, Screaming Kid stared at his tray, waiting for something magical to happen, as if it were a cocoon on the verge of becoming a butterfly.

Most didn’t know this, but a butterfly spent the majority of their life in the caterpillar and cocoon stages. The caterpillar stage was the most dangerous and life-threatening. Then, if they could make it past the caterpillar stage, they had to hide in a defenseless cocoon for up to two weeks to only turn into something beautiful for a short amount of time.

What stage was I in? Was I the damned caterpillar or was I hiding in a cocoon? Would I ever turn into a butterfly, or would the storm take me away before I learned the truth?

Ollie was already a butterfly—beautiful and strong.

While I was damned, he was divine.

Zeke must have felt the weight of my stare and glanced up to see me. The longer we looked at each other, the more I noticed the deep agony embedded in his sad brown eyes. He’d never spoken a word. The only sound coming from him were shrieks.

And even in silence, his eyes were screaming.

I stood, walked over, and took a seat across from him. “What’s your name?”

His facial expression froze as he stared back at me.

“I think your name is Zeke, and since you probably won’t tell me otherwise, it’s what I’ll call you.” Better than Screaming Kid. Leaning back in the chair, I dropped my right-handed cast over the table. Zeke’s attention went to my cast. “I punched a wall. It was stupid. And yes, I regret it.”

Zeke snapped his eyes back to mine, and his brown curly hair bounced off his forehead.

“Truth is, up until I arrived here, I hadn’t been able to feel anything … but you want to know a secret?” I leaned in and pointed my eyes in Ollie’s direction. “That stupid guy over there kissed me—three times now, and it does something to me I can’t explain. So, I took it out on the wall.” I fell back against the chair as Zeke looked over to Ollie and back at me. “Damn, it feels good to get that off my chest.”

The corner of his lip turned up slightly. He’d understood every word.