Part 19 (2/2)

”All right,” I said. I looked into his eyes and my heart fluttered. ”Happiness and Hope, by Kristen Elliott. There are no real words to describe what happens when I look into your eyes. Is it happiness? It makes hope rise. Hope that I always make you smile. Hope that your smile will never disappear. Convincing, charming, sweet, and always there for me. I hope that we will always be.”

”Who was that for?” he asked.

”Dad,” I said, feeling shy.

”Okay. It's beautiful,” he said. He leaned in and kissed me. He walked over to the door. He winked with one last sweet smile, and he left.

There was no more hope. There were no more smiles.

I didn't think about what I was doing when I swung as hard as I could. I had to keep them away from me. The counselors were pulling on me. Three of them grabbed me off the bed and carried me from the bedroom. I continued to scream with blood dripping from my mouth. They carried me to a room and laid me down on a bed. I kicked and screamed harder when I saw that the nurse had a needle.

Geoffrey told her to stick me. He was probably angry that I had knocked his gla.s.ses off his face while I'd been having the tantrum. The nurse and another counselor locked me down in restraints. The nurse stuck the long needle in my neck and pushed all of the liquid inside that needle into my veins. It burned.

I screamed out to them hoa.r.s.ely that I hated them and that I needed to die. My throat burned. I felt myself start to move in slow motion. My mouth slowed down. Screaming became hard to do, so I stopped. Exhausted tears fell out of my eyes. I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the bright lights and the dizziness that came over me. My mind stopped racing. Thoughts slowed down. Warmness came over me.

I heard them talking over me. I couldn't move. I couldn't open my eyelids to see them. The lids felt too heavy.

”She will be okay. Give her a few hours,” I heard the nurse say. ”Are you all right, Geoffrey?”

The door shut.

”No,” I tried to scream out. It was just a whisper.

I heard my heart pounding in my brain. It was loud, and it made my head hurt. I knew this was prison. I knew it. Where was Dr. Cuvo? He'd said that I could tell him if something terrible happened. Something terrible was happening. I tried one last time to yell out, but my mouth wouldn't open. My teeth weighed down my jaws. I felt a loss of control over my body. Every part of me was too heavy to move. Even my brain felt weighed down. Exhausted and without hope, I decided to give up. I took a deep breath and let go.

PART 2.

The Mirror.

By Kristen Elliott.

The mirror.

Made of shattered gla.s.s and full of veins Disfiguring her maimed beautiful image.

Inside and out.

A reflection bears the burden Of who she is.

What she has become And what will forever be.

One side Her-self.

The other side just.

Her.

CHAPTER 22.

When you are heavily sedated, it is almost like being awake, but you are so deep in sleep that you don't even realize it. When I slept, I often dreamed. As I laid in the BCR, I had very vivid dreams of the past that felt real.

John and I used to sit together after school and read our poetry to each other. I was just a freshman, and he was a junior. He played on the basketball team, swam for the swim team, made Honor Roll Society, and was in our high school's writing club. He was a celebrity in my eyes, and he had many admirers at our school. They were mostly girls. What kind of interest did he have in a loser like me? I wondered every time a pretty girl walked by and smiled, but he looked right through her and continued to talk to me and show me attention.

John's smile reminded me of my dad's. John's father was my dad's brother, after all. Did that make us cousins? Well, technically John had no blood relation to me. John's father and my dad weren't really close to each other, as most siblings were. Our families were acquainted, and we lived close by, no matter what. In spite of it all, I still could not force myself look at John as a relative. I liked him too much. I loved him less like a relative, and more like what I wanted him to be: a boyfriend.

My dreams carried me into a deep sleep filled with vivid images and heavy thoughts of sadness and nothing. Suppressed feelings arose in my dreams to haunt me, turning these dreams into the most awful, realistic nightmares. Mr. Sharp always found a way to work himself into my thoughts while I slept. His voice seemed louder in my dreams than it did when I was awake.

”How many times have you been kissed, Kristen?” he taunted me. ”Come on, and tell me how many. Have you ever been kissed?”

I told Mr. Sharp, ”He might kiss me. He might, if I look at him in the way those girls do when they want boys to kiss them. He'll know, and he'll want to.” Mr. Sharp cut me deep with a knife, so that I wouldn't feel the pain of what I knew would never be.

”John will never do that,” Mr. Sharp said as my blood dripped down my arms. ”John won't kiss you because he does not love you that way. No one can ever love you like that.”

I wanted to wake from this dream. I didn't want to be pulled back into the past. I didn't want to see John smiling as he looked at my writings and read them aloud. This ent.i.ty pulled me in. I was fourteen years old again, sitting in the room where the writing club met after school. John and I were the only ones in the room. I wasn't in the writing club. I just wanted to let him read some of my writings, and I wanted to read some of his. I was sincerely interested in his writing as well as spending more time with him. It was nice to know that John was interested in my work. He was interested in something about me. That fact was hard to believe at first, but when he and I sat in the room together, just the two of us, and he smiled at me with genuine affection, I could not deny it. The feeling of being close to him was how I imagined being in love felt. I was nervous, but I was calm and excited all at the same time. This dream felt as real as when it had actually happened.

The day was warm, and the sun was out in a partly cloudy sky. I felt my skin tingling like it always did when John smiled at me. He looked beautiful as he parted his lips slightly, smiled, and started to pa.s.s the sheet of notebook paper back to me that contained a piece of my soul in the form of words. He held the paper out to me and softly said, ”Kristen.” It was just simply, ”Kristen.” The sound of my name from his lips and the way he said it made me blush.

”What do you think?” I asked nervously.

”I think that you should join our writing club,” he admitted.

As I reached out to grab my paper from his hand, I shook my head and said, ”No, thanks. That's okay.”

His smile disappeared, and what looked like disappointment took its place. He s.n.a.t.c.hed the paper back towards him.

”Oh, you're scared,” he said.

”Scared of what? I'm not scared,” I defended.

A grin appeared on his face.

He said, ”Yes, you are. You're safe in this little world you've created for yourself. You write your poems and you keep them on a shelf. I'm the first person you've let actually read something because you're afraid of letting your work out for other people to see and criticize.”

”I'm scared? What about you? You haven't put any writings of yours in my hands yet. I've already shared three of my poems with you, John.”

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