Say My Name

Chapter Nineteen

Red Maple Psychiatric Hospital.

The place at the end of the road that people drive by, but don't ever actually go inside because they aren't mentally fucked up in the head.

There was a time in Betty's youth when she was scared of that place. Her mom told her it was for kids who were born with a special kind of brain. A brain that makes them do violent things to themselves or to other people. And after watching several movies and TV shows about it, Betty came to fear it even more. Because all she pictured as they drove by were kids slamming their heads against walls, and others not blinking for hours as they rock back and forth on their beds. Now she knows that's just the media dramatizing it. Not everyone acts that way. But never in her life did she picture herself standing between those walls.

Life was just sort of bizarre in that way.

The woman dressed in white hit a round button that opened a door, revealing the long-awaited hallway that Betty stared blankly at. She looked back at her mom, who nodded subtly in her direction, gesturing that it was all right to go inside. Betty froze in place, knowing that as soon as she walked through the door, that'd be it for her. She'd be stuck between these walls for two weeks. Maybe even longer.

As soon as she took her first step inside, the door shut behind her. The alarm on the door vibrated under her feet and in her chest, causing her heart to pound a bit faster.

It had been about a week since the incident. She needed time to heal before they transferred her to a psychiatric hospital.

And what Betty quickly realized when she got there was that everyone was just like her in some way. Whether they were victims of abuse, depressed, anxious, insecure, lonely; she still found a way to relate to them. Even if she didn't necessarily try to kill herself, she still had to come up with a depressing story to tell the other kids why she did what she did. And after a while, she started to believe the words that were coming out of her mouth.

She'd talk about her mom, and her dad came up a few times, and eventually, she ran out of people in her life to blame. And it wasn't like she was lying about the way she felt or lying about the way certain people in her life treated her, she wasn't.

That was the part that scared her the most. That no matter how personal she got, nothing out of her mouth was a lie, which made her realize that it wasn't a cover-up or a fictional story she was telling.

It was her story. A story she had been holding in for a long time.

And it wasn't like she'd ever see any of these people again. She wouldn't. So, she knew she wouldn't be judged or questioned for coming clean about a few things.

"Do you self-harm regularly?" The therapist blatantly asked her in the middle of a group session.

All of the kids in the circle had their eyes on her. Betty sat there with an open mouth, getting ready to speak, then carefully tugged at her sleeves, bunching the material in her palms to cover the scars.

She slowly shook her head, denying that she did self-harm. The therapist acknowledged her answer and wrote it down on her clipboard.

Okay, so, she didn't come clean about everything. But to be fair, she had never talked about her scars before. Most of the time, she pretended like they didn't exist or pretended like she wasn't aware of them.

Her mom saw them once when she was 14. She pretended like it was an accident and her nails were just really sharp that day. Her mom just kind of looked at her and didn't give much of a response. She didn't know if her mom actually believed her, but she never brought it up again.