When I saw my name on the bracelet they wrapped around my wrist, I didn’t want to be me anymore. “McKinney, Quinn” stared up at me, and all I knew to do was cry. My first day at Willoughby Behavioral Hospital, I cried nine times before I stopped counting. I hated that the place was called that. Willoughby. It reminded me of an episode of The Twilight Zone my dad was watching one night a few years ago, while I was finishing my mac n’ cheese at the dinner table. It was about a man who hated his life so much that he got off the train home from work in a small town called Willoughby. A peaceful place full of joy and happiness. Except that in the end you find out that the city of Willoughby didn’t really exist; the man had imagined it, and instead of getting off the train and living happily ever after, he had actually jumped off and killed himself. Whoever called it that should have done a little more research. But I guess it was accurate after all, because I saw that man’s face in every other patient—faces longing for peace and happiness, faces longing for things none of them really believed in.
I met Ronnie at group sessions on my second day. She was sitting next to me when the perfect-looking psychiatrist with the perfect life was telling us that killing ourselves wasn’t the only way out of dark times. I was there because I tried to overdose on the leftover Vicodin from my wisdom teeth surgery. The damn dry socket the procedure had left in my mouth still hadn’t closed after three weeks and every time I tasted that shit-smelling aroma on my tongue, it reminded me how I had ended up in this bitch of a place.
“Hey there,” Ronnie whispered to me when she caught me eyeing her bracelet. She had her right palm clenched tightly to it. “You can call me Ronnie,” she told me.
“Oh, I was just—”
“And you are?” she asked me. I hesitated.
“Q,” I told her. The nurse who saw me first had cautioned me not to give anybody my full name.
“Q?” she asked, cocking her head at me. “That nurse told you not to give your name out, didn’t she?” I was silent. “The one who’s obsessed with Jesus? Yeah, she thinks that if we get to know each other well enough we’ll form a suicide cult when we’re outta here.”
“Oh,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
“Oh shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound rude about the whole obsessed-with-Jesus thing. Are you obsessed with Jesus? I wouldn’t care if you were. I wasn’t saying it was a bad thing. It’s just how everyone knows her—”
“No,” I stopped her from going on. “No, I’m not obsessed with Jesus,” I said and laughed quietly. “I just meant ‘oh’ as in, ‘oh, that’s really extreme.’” She smirked and nodded.
“How old are you?” she asked, leaning closer. A piece of her tangled blonde hair fell from her shoulder and closer to my face. My instinct made me pull away ever-so-slightly.
“Why do you wanna know?” I asked. She giggled.
“I’m not being a creep,” she said. “I’m just asking because I think you and I are the youngest people here. Too old for the children’s ward so they throw us up here with Betty White, you know?” She simultaneously pointed at an elderly woman across from us. I couldn’t hold in a giggle. I shook my head.
“I don’t think Betty White would ever end up in here,” I told her. She half-smiled.
“You’d be surprised what ‘normal’ people can hide,” she said, throwing air quotes in my direction, and after a moment of silence, “I’m twenty-one.” I nodded and turned back to the physiatrist at the front of the room, but I could still feel Ronnie staring at me.
“What?” I asked after a few seconds. She raised her eyebrows at me without saying anything. “Fine. I’m nineteen.” She nodded.
“Psychology says that if you stay silent, you’re bound to get an answer. People would rather expose themselves than experience awkward silence.” I raised an eyebrow at her.
The next day at breakfast, I sat by myself. Jesus-Loving Nurse was watching and I found myself scared that if I sat with anyone she might suspect I was recruiting for my Post-Psych Ward Suicide Cult. The food was nothing shy of complete shit, and as I poked my fork through what was supposed to be scrambled eggs, I felt someone sit down across from me. I looked up.
“Morning,” Ronnie said brushing her blonde hair to the side and setting a cup of something in front of her. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” I said, shrugging and poking at the mush on my plate.
“Any plans for the day?” She asked as if I had any autonomy in this place. She took a sip from her cup when I looked up at her again.
“What are you drinking?” I asked.
“How come I have to answer your questions when you never answer any of mine?”
“How come you ask so many questions?” I said scoffing. She furrowed her eyebrows at me, then said,
“It’s apple juice. Anything else you wanna know?”
“No,” I said shortly. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to be friendly or just trying to be annoying.
“Perfect. Because it’s my turn to get an answer. Who gave you that shirt?” she asked motioning with her head towards my torso. I looked down at the black t-shirt with the Avenged Sevenfold logo on it, and only then did I realize I had a handful clenched in my fingers. Now I was annoyed.
“Why do you care?”
“I like Avenged Sevenfold too.” Before I even tried to process her statement, I thought of a better question.
“How do you know it’s not mine?”
“You’re fidgeting with it because I make you nervous. Every time someone here talks to you, you grab onto it. It brings you comfort. It means something to you. So what? Was it a gift?”
“You’re nosy as fuck,” I said letting go of the firstful of fabric. “It’s my shirt.”
“Yeah? Name three Avenged Sevenfold songs,” she said smiling. I glared at her and didn’t say a word. “That’s what I thought. Besides, the thing’s just a little too small for you. I’ve heard of comfy oversized clothes, but never undersized.”
“You’re—”
“Observant,” she cut me off. “I know. So c’mon, whose shirt are you wearing?” She asked quietly, almost as if she genuinely cared. I shook my head and looked at the table in front of me. Then I looked back up at her.
“It was my sister’s,” I said quietly.
“And she grew out of it?” she asked.
“Something like that,” I replied.
“So you guys are close?” I looked around the room, then down at the cup of apple juice sitting on the table.
“Were. We were close.”
“Not anymore?” I didn’t say anything. “So why are you wearing her shirt?” I sighed and looked up at Ronnie. She was leaning across the table and her murky green eyes were locked onto mine with conviction.
“She… she… ” I stammered. “She went missing.” Ronnie leaned back for a moment, then drew closer again. Her demeanor seemed to change as soon as the words came out of my mouth. Her playful questioning turned to intense listening as she used her previously-stated silence tactic to get me to say more about my sister.
“It was a little over a month ago,” I said. “Casey was seventeen. A junior in high school. She stayed after school that day because she had lacrosse practice. Her coach called my parents right when their practice was supposed to be ending. Apparently she left to go to the bathroom about halfway through and… and she never came back. Everyone on the team went looking for her, but she was gone. And so was her car.”
“Do you think she ran away?” Ronnie asked.
“Umm,” I shrugged. “They don’t know.”
“But what do you think?” I looked up at her again.
“Well, most kids don’t run away and stay missing. Most seventeen-year-olds aren’t that smart.”
“Is she?”
“If she were, she would be smart enough to know who she left behind,” I said more aggressively than I meant to. Casey was always doing stuff like that. She was a selfish person who always did what was best for her. She never cared about how the consequences might hurt other people.
“And you haven’t heard from her since?” Ronnie asked. I shook my head. “Maybe she didn’t run away…”
“I don’t like to think about that,” I said, still shaking my head.
“Wait,” Ronnie started with more intensity now. “If she was kidnapped, she could still be out there.” I nodded my head. “And that’s ok with you?”
“It’s not ok with me, but what can I do about it?”
“Find her,” she said sternly. “I’m gonna help you do it.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised to wake up to her standing over me that night, but for some reason I was. I jumped but she put her hand on my arm and her finger over her mouth, telling me to keep quiet.
“How did you get in here?” I whispered. She looked down at me with a touch of disappointment.
“I’ve been here too long to not know how to sneak around. You know, sometimes people confuse being smart with being crazy.”
“Ok, but what are you doing here? In my room?”
“I’m helping you find Casey. Now let’s go,” she said tugging my arm. My jaw dropped open slightly.
“Ok, here’s the thing. I didn’t see it at first, but now I can see why someone might think you’re crazy… Do you seriously think you’re smart enough to find her?”
“If I’m smart enough to sneak through a mental hospital, then yes. Now get up. We have shit to do.” Without thinking about what I was doing, I was on my feet and out the doorway, trailing closely behind the girl I had met only the day before.
“What if we get caught?” I whispered to her.
“Listen,” she said turning around and looking at me sternly. “We don’t have a lot of time. The security guard who watches this hallway always drinks too much coffee and leaves his post sometime in this ten-minute time frame. But the thirty seconds we have to escape in that ten-minute time frame is different every night, so we have to be vigilant.”
“What the fuck?” I whispered to her, this time louder than before. “I’m not doing this with you. We’re going to get caught, and I can’t—”
“Q,” she said, interrupting me and grabbing my shoulders. Her hands were strong. “Sometimes in life you just have to trust people. And it sucks because you have no idea what’s gonna happen to you. But the only way you’re ever really gonna know if you can trust someone or not, is by just doing it. I need you to trust me right now, and by the time you’re back in your bed before anyone notices you’ll realize that I’m not gonna hang you out to dry.”
I didn’t know how to respond. After staring at her for a few seconds, I nodded. She nodded back, and before I knew it we were on our way.
She was meticulous. She knew her way around every lock and ever nook in the building, passing nurses and security guards with little trouble at all. At one point, I think I saw her smile because of the thrill.
Just minutes later we were in the wardrobe ward. The lights were off, but I could see that there were cabinets, filled with what I assumed to be uniforms, against three of the four walls. Ronnie walked over to one and opened it, then started pushing the hanging uniforms aside.
“Don’t even tell me you’re gonna push away the clothes and there’s gonna be a secret passage like Narnia and we’re gonna magically appear outside or something. That shit only happens in—” the screeching noise of Ronnie sliding the last row of uniforms interrupted me, revealing a hole in the back of the cabinet, just big enough for a person to squeeze through. “...movies,” I finished. Ronnie turned around.
“You like Narnia? You struck as more of a Lord of the Rings kinda gal. Lewis was a good writer too. I wonder what he would say if he saw this…” she said looking back at the hole in the cabinet. “Imagine this book: Willoughby Behavioral Hospital: Ronnie, Q, and the Hole in the Uniform Cabinet.” I couldn’t stop myself from laughing out loud. “Shh,” she said, putting her finger to her mouth. Then we heard footsteps coming down the hall. “Come on!” she mouthed and beckoned me inside the cabinet. I ran and jumped inside. She silently closed the door behind me. It went completely dark. We listened as the footsteps came closer, and a flashlight shined through the cracks in the doors. I felt a strong hand grab my arm. We were both silent until the light went away and the footsteps walked back down the hall.
"That was close--" I started, but I didn't get the words out.
“Ok,” she said interrupting me, still holding my arm and using her other hand to point into the hole. By now, my eyes had adjusted. I took a peek inside and saw a ladder leading down into the darkness.
“What the hell? You want me to shimmy through a tiny hole and down a ladder into the unknown? Are you kidding me?”
“You don’t really have a choice. Also, it’s not the unknown. They rebuilt this hospital after a fire burned it down like twenty years ago. That’s just part of the basement of the old hospital. It was all that was left after the fire and they just built on top of it.” I shook my head at her.
“How do you know everything?”
“It gets boring in here,” she said. “Now go!” I stared at her. She stared back. “Trust me.” I nodded and then slid my head through the hole, reaching for the ladder. I felt her hands grab my feet and help them through the missing drywall until my whole body was wrapped around the ladder.
“Go all the way down. Eventually you’ll hit the floor.”
“Oh my god,” I whispered in disbelief. What the hell was I doing? I didn’t know, but I did it anyway. I descended the ladder one rung at a time. When I looked up to see Ronnie following me, I saw her reach through the hole and move the uniforms to cover it back up. I scoffed again in disbelief, and continued descending the ladder.
Every step down got darker, until I could barely see the ladder that was supporting me. My steps got more careful as I wasn’t positive when there wouldn’t be a rung under my foot anymore.
“You should be getting close,” Ronnie said as my foot simultaneously hit the concrete floor.
“I cannot see anything,” I said, and I heard my voice shake a little.
“Hang on. I’m almost there,” she said jumping from about four rungs up, landing right next to me in the dark.
“What the hell?” I yelled. I felt her hands grab my arm.
“Come this way.” And seconds later, I heard a heavy door creak open and the dark cavern flooded with moonlight. Ronnie stood there looking at me. I said nothing. She lifted her hands and motioned proudly at the grass, the trees, the outdoors that I hadn’t seen for a few days.
“I don’t even know what to say anymore,” I said.
“Nothing,” she said and grabbed my arm again, walking me outside. “Just walk and listen. We have to be really careful. Obviously. If you see anyone or anything that moves, don’t be seen. Always make sure you cover your tracks when you come down here. I’ll always be with you so I’ll help you. But if we wanna find your sister, we have to… ” she continued on, but I stopped listening. I breathed in the cold air and knelt down to feel the grass with my hands. I don’t know how long it had been since I’d stopped listening when she came up and put her hand on my shoulder.
“What?” I asked and turned to her.
“I said, where would your sister have gone if she did run away? We’ll go there first.”
“Umm… I don’t really…”
“It’s ok if you don’t end up being right. It’ll just give us a start at least.”
“I really don’t know..”
“C’mon. Anywhere helps.”
“No, I mean—” I stopped and looked at the grass beneath my feet.
“What?” Ronnie asked. I kept quiet until she plopped herself down beside me. “You don’t wanna find her, do you?” she asked, almost like if I were to say it were true, she would understand why.
“It’s not that. I would love to see her again. But I know that I won’t.” She looked at me. “We won’t find her no matter how hard we try.”
“You know,” Ronnie started as she picked a blade of grass from the ground and crumbled in her hand. “That’s super insulting.” She smiled at me. I smiled back. “Maybe we won’t. But what else can we do other than try? I mean, honestly, I’m not gonna waste my life away coloring pictures all day or reading books I’ve already read a hundred times or trying to act as sane as possible. I can’t do that forever.” She threw the blade of grass. It didn’t go very far.
“Why are you here anyway?” I asked. She let out a laugh.
“I tried to kill myself. A few times, actually. But the only times people care about are the ones that put you in the hospital, I guess.”
“Or the ones that kill you,” I said. Ronnie looked at me with a frown, nodding. “Why did you try to kill yourself?”
“Depression,” she said quickly. “She’s really a bitch sometimes. She makes you think everything is wrong. Well it’s just bullshit.” I turned my head to her in question. She continued. “I mean, have you ever thought about the fact that nothing in life is ever actually ‘wrong,’” she said, throwing those air quotes at me again. “Wrong is just a word people slap onto things when they don’t know how to process them. Nothing is ever really wrong; things just don’t always go how we expect them to. That’s what we mean when we say something is ‘wrong.’ We mean that we got blindsided. Or betrayed. By someone or something. We mean that our great expectations have failed.”
“So you’re saying depression isn’t real?” I asked.
“No. Not at all. It’s definitely real, or I wouldn’t be here. And neither would you,” she said looking up at me confidently. I nodded, because she was right. “I just mean to say that maybe life is never really as bad as we think it is. But with a brain that’s disordered, it’s hard to believe that.”
“Why did you wanna be dead?” I asked without hesitation. She shrugged and smirked at me.
“So I could finally stop expecting things,” she said with a little laugh. I laughed too; it was funny in a morbid, disappointing sort of way. “It’s just like Shakespeare said. ‘Expectation is the root of all heartache.’ He was a wise guy, you know. He’s got such a bad wrap just for writing one story about thirteen-year-olds who fall in love in three days. But really, he knows what he’s talking about.”
“Damn, someone paid attention in school,” I joked.
“No, actually I didn’t. I’ve just been here so long that I’ve read every book in the library like a thousand times. Shakespeare’s my favorite though.” I nodded.
“I liked Hamlet.”
“When sorrows come,” she quoted with a smile, “they come not single spies, but in battalions.” I smiled at her. She was as sharp a person as I had ever met. “You know, people think you have to have some awful life to be sad. It’s not true. All you really have to do is trust people. All you have to do is expect. And that’s the surest way to end up sad.”
“Why are you here?” I said again.
“I just told you.”
“No. I mean, why is someone as rational as you in a psych ward?”
“Oh. You mean that,” she replied. I nodded. “Really, I think the most realistic of us all are the saddest. To be happy about this world is to blatantly ignore all that’s wrong with it. The depressed ones have the most sense of all.”
“You sound like a real misanthropist right now,” I told her. We smiled at each other.
“If nothing else, my one redeeming quality is how honest I am about terrible things. But I guess these days people just call that insanity.”
She was so right that I couldn’t even nod to agree with her; my thoughts rabbit-trailed inside my head, and they were all I could focus on. She was right about everything. Maybe there was more to insanity, more to instability and sadness and hopelessness, than anyone ever cared to see. Neither she nor I was insane. Not at all. The truth was that somewhere along the way, something changed us—something scarred us. Something made us feel the way that put us there. Was that so insane? Perhaps true insanity can be found in anyone who ever called someone else’s scars ugly without first understanding the origin of them.
She stood up, walked over to me, and reached her hand out as if to help me up. “So… you wanna go look for your sister or not?” I looked up and stared at her. Then I grabbed her hand.
“Sure.”
A few hours later I was back in my bed like nothing had happened. That was our routine for a few weeks—we sleuthed by night and acted like cured mental patients by day. Nobody suspected anything about the bags under our eyes because after all, we were so fucked up that it was nothing unusual.
Eventually, we did go to all the places I told Ronnie my sister might be hiding had she really run away. We never found her, or any trace of her for that matter. I knew we wouldn’t.
I never had it in me to tell Ronnie that my sister wasn’t missing. She didn’t run away. She wasn’t kidnapped. She died. Casey had killed herself that day that she left lacrosse practice. It was true that both her and her car were gone, but they were both found in the woods where Casey had gone to shoot herself with the gun that my wreckless father kept in his unlocked desk drawer. My parents didn’t put any of the blame on themselves, and if they did, they had never shown it. I remember the day I came home from college to find Casey sobbing in the room we shared before I moved out.
“Mom and dad do not give a fuck about me,” I remember her saying. “Why is it not ok to be sad? And why won’t anyone help me?” She had gone to them for help. They turned her away. Seven months later when her body was found, they acted like they never knew their precious daughter had been so distraught. The real reason I tried to kill myself was because I wanted to be with her again.
I was discharged from Willoughby Behavioral Hospital a few weeks later. Ronnie sat down with me at breakfast that morning.
“Hey,” she said quietly.
“Hey,” I said back quieter.
“Nice shirt,” she said smiling. I was wearing my sister’s Avenged Sevenfold t-shirt. I smiled back. “You get to leave today?” she asked. I knew she already knew the answer. I nodded. “Are you excited to finally smell fresh air for the first time in weeks?” she asked, then winked at me.
“Oh yeah,” I played along. “Definitely have no recollection at all of what that smells like. What’s grass again?” She laughed.
“What’s the first thing you’re gonna do?” she asked.
“Probably take a shower without someone monitoring me,” I said in complete seriousness.
“Sounds like the life,” she said smiling. “Do you think life will be a lot different? Out there with the ‘normal’ people?” she asked. I shook my head.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I was told once not to have expectations. Or else I might end up back here.” Ronnie laughed again.
“That wouldn’t be so bad,” she said softly and my smile began to fade.
“McKinney,” I heard an elderly voice call from behind me. Jesus-Loving Nurse walked up to our table. “The doctor will see you now before you go.” I looked back at Ronnie.
“McKinney?” she mouthed almost inaudibly. I laughed quietly.
“Can I have a second?” I asked her. The nurse reluctantly agreed and took a few steps back. I turned back to Ronnie and stared at her. I didn’t know what to say. I’ve learned that when it matters most, we can never be grateful enough for the people who deserve it.
“Thank you,” was all I could get out. She nodded.
“Take it easy on yourself,” she said back. I stood up and she spoke again. “Q?”
“You can call me Quinn,” I said. “My name’s Quinn.” She smiled and nodded.
“Quinn. I hope you find your sister some day.” I immediately felt my hand grab the front of my shirt. I twisted it a bit as Ronnie and I stared at each other in silence. Then I pulled my hand away and reached into my pocket.
“I hope so too,” I said and set down a folded piece of paper in front of Ronnie. She unfolded it carefully. I had drawn the Avenged Sevenfold logo from my shirt onto the front of the paper. She smiled and flipped it over. I had written So Far Away, Fiction, and Dear God—Casey’s three favorite Avenged Sevenfold songs. “I really hope so,” I repeated. I gave her one final smile before I turned away, and that was the last I saw of her.
I met Ronnie at group sessions on my second day. She was sitting next to me when the perfect-looking psychiatrist with the perfect life was telling us that killing ourselves wasn’t the only way out of dark times. I was there because I tried to overdose on the leftover Vicodin from my wisdom teeth surgery. The damn dry socket the procedure had left in my mouth still hadn’t closed after three weeks and every time I tasted that shit-smelling aroma on my tongue, it reminded me how I had ended up in this bitch of a place.
“Hey there,” Ronnie whispered to me when she caught me eyeing her bracelet. She had her right palm clenched tightly to it. “You can call me Ronnie,” she told me.
“Oh, I was just—”
“And you are?” she asked me. I hesitated.
“Q,” I told her. The nurse who saw me first had cautioned me not to give anybody my full name.
“Q?” she asked, cocking her head at me. “That nurse told you not to give your name out, didn’t she?” I was silent. “The one who’s obsessed with Jesus? Yeah, she thinks that if we get to know each other well enough we’ll form a suicide cult when we’re outta here.”
“Oh,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
“Oh shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound rude about the whole obsessed-with-Jesus thing. Are you obsessed with Jesus? I wouldn’t care if you were. I wasn’t saying it was a bad thing. It’s just how everyone knows her—”
“No,” I stopped her from going on. “No, I’m not obsessed with Jesus,” I said and laughed quietly. “I just meant ‘oh’ as in, ‘oh, that’s really extreme.’” She smirked and nodded.
“How old are you?” she asked, leaning closer. A piece of her tangled blonde hair fell from her shoulder and closer to my face. My instinct made me pull away ever-so-slightly.
“Why do you wanna know?” I asked. She giggled.
“I’m not being a creep,” she said. “I’m just asking because I think you and I are the youngest people here. Too old for the children’s ward so they throw us up here with Betty White, you know?” She simultaneously pointed at an elderly woman across from us. I couldn’t hold in a giggle. I shook my head.
“I don’t think Betty White would ever end up in here,” I told her. She half-smiled.
“You’d be surprised what ‘normal’ people can hide,” she said, throwing air quotes in my direction, and after a moment of silence, “I’m twenty-one.” I nodded and turned back to the physiatrist at the front of the room, but I could still feel Ronnie staring at me.
“What?” I asked after a few seconds. She raised her eyebrows at me without saying anything. “Fine. I’m nineteen.” She nodded.
“Psychology says that if you stay silent, you’re bound to get an answer. People would rather expose themselves than experience awkward silence.” I raised an eyebrow at her.
The next day at breakfast, I sat by myself. Jesus-Loving Nurse was watching and I found myself scared that if I sat with anyone she might suspect I was recruiting for my Post-Psych Ward Suicide Cult. The food was nothing shy of complete shit, and as I poked my fork through what was supposed to be scrambled eggs, I felt someone sit down across from me. I looked up.
“Morning,” Ronnie said brushing her blonde hair to the side and setting a cup of something in front of her. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” I said, shrugging and poking at the mush on my plate.
“Any plans for the day?” She asked as if I had any autonomy in this place. She took a sip from her cup when I looked up at her again.
“What are you drinking?” I asked.
“How come I have to answer your questions when you never answer any of mine?”
“How come you ask so many questions?” I said scoffing. She furrowed her eyebrows at me, then said,
“It’s apple juice. Anything else you wanna know?”
“No,” I said shortly. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to be friendly or just trying to be annoying.
“Perfect. Because it’s my turn to get an answer. Who gave you that shirt?” she asked motioning with her head towards my torso. I looked down at the black t-shirt with the Avenged Sevenfold logo on it, and only then did I realize I had a handful clenched in my fingers. Now I was annoyed.
“Why do you care?”
“I like Avenged Sevenfold too.” Before I even tried to process her statement, I thought of a better question.
“How do you know it’s not mine?”
“You’re fidgeting with it because I make you nervous. Every time someone here talks to you, you grab onto it. It brings you comfort. It means something to you. So what? Was it a gift?”
“You’re nosy as fuck,” I said letting go of the firstful of fabric. “It’s my shirt.”
“Yeah? Name three Avenged Sevenfold songs,” she said smiling. I glared at her and didn’t say a word. “That’s what I thought. Besides, the thing’s just a little too small for you. I’ve heard of comfy oversized clothes, but never undersized.”
“You’re—”
“Observant,” she cut me off. “I know. So c’mon, whose shirt are you wearing?” She asked quietly, almost as if she genuinely cared. I shook my head and looked at the table in front of me. Then I looked back up at her.
“It was my sister’s,” I said quietly.
“And she grew out of it?” she asked.
“Something like that,” I replied.
“So you guys are close?” I looked around the room, then down at the cup of apple juice sitting on the table.
“Were. We were close.”
“Not anymore?” I didn’t say anything. “So why are you wearing her shirt?” I sighed and looked up at Ronnie. She was leaning across the table and her murky green eyes were locked onto mine with conviction.
“She… she… ” I stammered. “She went missing.” Ronnie leaned back for a moment, then drew closer again. Her demeanor seemed to change as soon as the words came out of my mouth. Her playful questioning turned to intense listening as she used her previously-stated silence tactic to get me to say more about my sister.
“It was a little over a month ago,” I said. “Casey was seventeen. A junior in high school. She stayed after school that day because she had lacrosse practice. Her coach called my parents right when their practice was supposed to be ending. Apparently she left to go to the bathroom about halfway through and… and she never came back. Everyone on the team went looking for her, but she was gone. And so was her car.”
“Do you think she ran away?” Ronnie asked.
“Umm,” I shrugged. “They don’t know.”
“But what do you think?” I looked up at her again.
“Well, most kids don’t run away and stay missing. Most seventeen-year-olds aren’t that smart.”
“Is she?”
“If she were, she would be smart enough to know who she left behind,” I said more aggressively than I meant to. Casey was always doing stuff like that. She was a selfish person who always did what was best for her. She never cared about how the consequences might hurt other people.
“And you haven’t heard from her since?” Ronnie asked. I shook my head. “Maybe she didn’t run away…”
“I don’t like to think about that,” I said, still shaking my head.
“Wait,” Ronnie started with more intensity now. “If she was kidnapped, she could still be out there.” I nodded my head. “And that’s ok with you?”
“It’s not ok with me, but what can I do about it?”
“Find her,” she said sternly. “I’m gonna help you do it.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised to wake up to her standing over me that night, but for some reason I was. I jumped but she put her hand on my arm and her finger over her mouth, telling me to keep quiet.
“How did you get in here?” I whispered. She looked down at me with a touch of disappointment.
“I’ve been here too long to not know how to sneak around. You know, sometimes people confuse being smart with being crazy.”
“Ok, but what are you doing here? In my room?”
“I’m helping you find Casey. Now let’s go,” she said tugging my arm. My jaw dropped open slightly.
“Ok, here’s the thing. I didn’t see it at first, but now I can see why someone might think you’re crazy… Do you seriously think you’re smart enough to find her?”
“If I’m smart enough to sneak through a mental hospital, then yes. Now get up. We have shit to do.” Without thinking about what I was doing, I was on my feet and out the doorway, trailing closely behind the girl I had met only the day before.
“What if we get caught?” I whispered to her.
“Listen,” she said turning around and looking at me sternly. “We don’t have a lot of time. The security guard who watches this hallway always drinks too much coffee and leaves his post sometime in this ten-minute time frame. But the thirty seconds we have to escape in that ten-minute time frame is different every night, so we have to be vigilant.”
“What the fuck?” I whispered to her, this time louder than before. “I’m not doing this with you. We’re going to get caught, and I can’t—”
“Q,” she said, interrupting me and grabbing my shoulders. Her hands were strong. “Sometimes in life you just have to trust people. And it sucks because you have no idea what’s gonna happen to you. But the only way you’re ever really gonna know if you can trust someone or not, is by just doing it. I need you to trust me right now, and by the time you’re back in your bed before anyone notices you’ll realize that I’m not gonna hang you out to dry.”
I didn’t know how to respond. After staring at her for a few seconds, I nodded. She nodded back, and before I knew it we were on our way.
She was meticulous. She knew her way around every lock and ever nook in the building, passing nurses and security guards with little trouble at all. At one point, I think I saw her smile because of the thrill.
Just minutes later we were in the wardrobe ward. The lights were off, but I could see that there were cabinets, filled with what I assumed to be uniforms, against three of the four walls. Ronnie walked over to one and opened it, then started pushing the hanging uniforms aside.
“Don’t even tell me you’re gonna push away the clothes and there’s gonna be a secret passage like Narnia and we’re gonna magically appear outside or something. That shit only happens in—” the screeching noise of Ronnie sliding the last row of uniforms interrupted me, revealing a hole in the back of the cabinet, just big enough for a person to squeeze through. “...movies,” I finished. Ronnie turned around.
“You like Narnia? You struck as more of a Lord of the Rings kinda gal. Lewis was a good writer too. I wonder what he would say if he saw this…” she said looking back at the hole in the cabinet. “Imagine this book: Willoughby Behavioral Hospital: Ronnie, Q, and the Hole in the Uniform Cabinet.” I couldn’t stop myself from laughing out loud. “Shh,” she said, putting her finger to her mouth. Then we heard footsteps coming down the hall. “Come on!” she mouthed and beckoned me inside the cabinet. I ran and jumped inside. She silently closed the door behind me. It went completely dark. We listened as the footsteps came closer, and a flashlight shined through the cracks in the doors. I felt a strong hand grab my arm. We were both silent until the light went away and the footsteps walked back down the hall.
"That was close--" I started, but I didn't get the words out.
“Ok,” she said interrupting me, still holding my arm and using her other hand to point into the hole. By now, my eyes had adjusted. I took a peek inside and saw a ladder leading down into the darkness.
“What the hell? You want me to shimmy through a tiny hole and down a ladder into the unknown? Are you kidding me?”
“You don’t really have a choice. Also, it’s not the unknown. They rebuilt this hospital after a fire burned it down like twenty years ago. That’s just part of the basement of the old hospital. It was all that was left after the fire and they just built on top of it.” I shook my head at her.
“How do you know everything?”
“It gets boring in here,” she said. “Now go!” I stared at her. She stared back. “Trust me.” I nodded and then slid my head through the hole, reaching for the ladder. I felt her hands grab my feet and help them through the missing drywall until my whole body was wrapped around the ladder.
“Go all the way down. Eventually you’ll hit the floor.”
“Oh my god,” I whispered in disbelief. What the hell was I doing? I didn’t know, but I did it anyway. I descended the ladder one rung at a time. When I looked up to see Ronnie following me, I saw her reach through the hole and move the uniforms to cover it back up. I scoffed again in disbelief, and continued descending the ladder.
Every step down got darker, until I could barely see the ladder that was supporting me. My steps got more careful as I wasn’t positive when there wouldn’t be a rung under my foot anymore.
“You should be getting close,” Ronnie said as my foot simultaneously hit the concrete floor.
“I cannot see anything,” I said, and I heard my voice shake a little.
“Hang on. I’m almost there,” she said jumping from about four rungs up, landing right next to me in the dark.
“What the hell?” I yelled. I felt her hands grab my arm.
“Come this way.” And seconds later, I heard a heavy door creak open and the dark cavern flooded with moonlight. Ronnie stood there looking at me. I said nothing. She lifted her hands and motioned proudly at the grass, the trees, the outdoors that I hadn’t seen for a few days.
“I don’t even know what to say anymore,” I said.
“Nothing,” she said and grabbed my arm again, walking me outside. “Just walk and listen. We have to be really careful. Obviously. If you see anyone or anything that moves, don’t be seen. Always make sure you cover your tracks when you come down here. I’ll always be with you so I’ll help you. But if we wanna find your sister, we have to… ” she continued on, but I stopped listening. I breathed in the cold air and knelt down to feel the grass with my hands. I don’t know how long it had been since I’d stopped listening when she came up and put her hand on my shoulder.
“What?” I asked and turned to her.
“I said, where would your sister have gone if she did run away? We’ll go there first.”
“Umm… I don’t really…”
“It’s ok if you don’t end up being right. It’ll just give us a start at least.”
“I really don’t know..”
“C’mon. Anywhere helps.”
“No, I mean—” I stopped and looked at the grass beneath my feet.
“What?” Ronnie asked. I kept quiet until she plopped herself down beside me. “You don’t wanna find her, do you?” she asked, almost like if I were to say it were true, she would understand why.
“It’s not that. I would love to see her again. But I know that I won’t.” She looked at me. “We won’t find her no matter how hard we try.”
“You know,” Ronnie started as she picked a blade of grass from the ground and crumbled in her hand. “That’s super insulting.” She smiled at me. I smiled back. “Maybe we won’t. But what else can we do other than try? I mean, honestly, I’m not gonna waste my life away coloring pictures all day or reading books I’ve already read a hundred times or trying to act as sane as possible. I can’t do that forever.” She threw the blade of grass. It didn’t go very far.
“Why are you here anyway?” I asked. She let out a laugh.
“I tried to kill myself. A few times, actually. But the only times people care about are the ones that put you in the hospital, I guess.”
“Or the ones that kill you,” I said. Ronnie looked at me with a frown, nodding. “Why did you try to kill yourself?”
“Depression,” she said quickly. “She’s really a bitch sometimes. She makes you think everything is wrong. Well it’s just bullshit.” I turned my head to her in question. She continued. “I mean, have you ever thought about the fact that nothing in life is ever actually ‘wrong,’” she said, throwing those air quotes at me again. “Wrong is just a word people slap onto things when they don’t know how to process them. Nothing is ever really wrong; things just don’t always go how we expect them to. That’s what we mean when we say something is ‘wrong.’ We mean that we got blindsided. Or betrayed. By someone or something. We mean that our great expectations have failed.”
“So you’re saying depression isn’t real?” I asked.
“No. Not at all. It’s definitely real, or I wouldn’t be here. And neither would you,” she said looking up at me confidently. I nodded, because she was right. “I just mean to say that maybe life is never really as bad as we think it is. But with a brain that’s disordered, it’s hard to believe that.”
“Why did you wanna be dead?” I asked without hesitation. She shrugged and smirked at me.
“So I could finally stop expecting things,” she said with a little laugh. I laughed too; it was funny in a morbid, disappointing sort of way. “It’s just like Shakespeare said. ‘Expectation is the root of all heartache.’ He was a wise guy, you know. He’s got such a bad wrap just for writing one story about thirteen-year-olds who fall in love in three days. But really, he knows what he’s talking about.”
“Damn, someone paid attention in school,” I joked.
“No, actually I didn’t. I’ve just been here so long that I’ve read every book in the library like a thousand times. Shakespeare’s my favorite though.” I nodded.
“I liked Hamlet.”
“When sorrows come,” she quoted with a smile, “they come not single spies, but in battalions.” I smiled at her. She was as sharp a person as I had ever met. “You know, people think you have to have some awful life to be sad. It’s not true. All you really have to do is trust people. All you have to do is expect. And that’s the surest way to end up sad.”
“Why are you here?” I said again.
“I just told you.”
“No. I mean, why is someone as rational as you in a psych ward?”
“Oh. You mean that,” she replied. I nodded. “Really, I think the most realistic of us all are the saddest. To be happy about this world is to blatantly ignore all that’s wrong with it. The depressed ones have the most sense of all.”
“You sound like a real misanthropist right now,” I told her. We smiled at each other.
“If nothing else, my one redeeming quality is how honest I am about terrible things. But I guess these days people just call that insanity.”
She was so right that I couldn’t even nod to agree with her; my thoughts rabbit-trailed inside my head, and they were all I could focus on. She was right about everything. Maybe there was more to insanity, more to instability and sadness and hopelessness, than anyone ever cared to see. Neither she nor I was insane. Not at all. The truth was that somewhere along the way, something changed us—something scarred us. Something made us feel the way that put us there. Was that so insane? Perhaps true insanity can be found in anyone who ever called someone else’s scars ugly without first understanding the origin of them.
She stood up, walked over to me, and reached her hand out as if to help me up. “So… you wanna go look for your sister or not?” I looked up and stared at her. Then I grabbed her hand.
“Sure.”
A few hours later I was back in my bed like nothing had happened. That was our routine for a few weeks—we sleuthed by night and acted like cured mental patients by day. Nobody suspected anything about the bags under our eyes because after all, we were so fucked up that it was nothing unusual.
Eventually, we did go to all the places I told Ronnie my sister might be hiding had she really run away. We never found her, or any trace of her for that matter. I knew we wouldn’t.
I never had it in me to tell Ronnie that my sister wasn’t missing. She didn’t run away. She wasn’t kidnapped. She died. Casey had killed herself that day that she left lacrosse practice. It was true that both her and her car were gone, but they were both found in the woods where Casey had gone to shoot herself with the gun that my wreckless father kept in his unlocked desk drawer. My parents didn’t put any of the blame on themselves, and if they did, they had never shown it. I remember the day I came home from college to find Casey sobbing in the room we shared before I moved out.
“Mom and dad do not give a fuck about me,” I remember her saying. “Why is it not ok to be sad? And why won’t anyone help me?” She had gone to them for help. They turned her away. Seven months later when her body was found, they acted like they never knew their precious daughter had been so distraught. The real reason I tried to kill myself was because I wanted to be with her again.
I was discharged from Willoughby Behavioral Hospital a few weeks later. Ronnie sat down with me at breakfast that morning.
“Hey,” she said quietly.
“Hey,” I said back quieter.
“Nice shirt,” she said smiling. I was wearing my sister’s Avenged Sevenfold t-shirt. I smiled back. “You get to leave today?” she asked. I knew she already knew the answer. I nodded. “Are you excited to finally smell fresh air for the first time in weeks?” she asked, then winked at me.
“Oh yeah,” I played along. “Definitely have no recollection at all of what that smells like. What’s grass again?” She laughed.
“What’s the first thing you’re gonna do?” she asked.
“Probably take a shower without someone monitoring me,” I said in complete seriousness.
“Sounds like the life,” she said smiling. “Do you think life will be a lot different? Out there with the ‘normal’ people?” she asked. I shook my head.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I was told once not to have expectations. Or else I might end up back here.” Ronnie laughed again.
“That wouldn’t be so bad,” she said softly and my smile began to fade.
“McKinney,” I heard an elderly voice call from behind me. Jesus-Loving Nurse walked up to our table. “The doctor will see you now before you go.” I looked back at Ronnie.
“McKinney?” she mouthed almost inaudibly. I laughed quietly.
“Can I have a second?” I asked her. The nurse reluctantly agreed and took a few steps back. I turned back to Ronnie and stared at her. I didn’t know what to say. I’ve learned that when it matters most, we can never be grateful enough for the people who deserve it.
“Thank you,” was all I could get out. She nodded.
“Take it easy on yourself,” she said back. I stood up and she spoke again. “Q?”
“You can call me Quinn,” I said. “My name’s Quinn.” She smiled and nodded.
“Quinn. I hope you find your sister some day.” I immediately felt my hand grab the front of my shirt. I twisted it a bit as Ronnie and I stared at each other in silence. Then I pulled my hand away and reached into my pocket.
“I hope so too,” I said and set down a folded piece of paper in front of Ronnie. She unfolded it carefully. I had drawn the Avenged Sevenfold logo from my shirt onto the front of the paper. She smiled and flipped it over. I had written So Far Away, Fiction, and Dear God—Casey’s three favorite Avenged Sevenfold songs. “I really hope so,” I repeated. I gave her one final smile before I turned away, and that was the last I saw of her.