Girl in pieces

A timeline

A girl is born.
Her father loves her. Her mother loves her father.
Her father is sad.
Her father drinks and smokes, rocks and cries.
Into the river he goes.
The mother becomes a fist.
The girl is alone.
The girl is not good in the world.
No one likes the girl.
She tries.
But her mouth is mush.
Stupid girl. Angry girl.
Doctors: Give her drugs.
Lazy girl. Girl is mush on drugs.
Mother hits girl. Girl shrinks.
Girl goes quiet. Quiet at home. Quiet at school. Quiet mush mouse. Girl listens to radio. Girl finds music. Girl has whole other world. Girl slips on headphones. World gone.
Girl draws and draws and draws. World gone.
Girl finds knife. Girl makes herself small, small, smaller. World gone.
Girl must be bad, so girl cuts. Bad girl. World gone.
Girl meets girl. Beautiful Girl! They watch planets move on the ceiling. They save money for Paris. Or London. Or Iceland. Wherever.
Girl like-likes a boy, but he loves Beautiful Girl.
Beautiful Girl meets wolf boy. He fills her up, but makes her small. Beautiful Girl is busy all the time.
Girl hits mother back. They are windmills with their hands. Girl on street. Girl stays with Beautiful Girl, but wolf boy leaves drugs.
Beautiful Parents are angry. Beautiful Girl lies and blames Girl for the drugs.
Girl on street. Girl goes home.
Beautiful Girl texts and texts Something wrong Hurts Girl slips headphones on. Girl slides phone under pillow. Beautiful Girl bleeds too much.
Girl gets messed up, too messed up, broken heart, guilt. Girl breaks mother's nose.
Girl on street.
World gone.
---------------------------I'm staying here, but I don't know for how long. I've been released from individual sessions with Casper. My paperwork and discharge dates are being sorted out. They have another emergency stay from a judge while they work out an arrangement with my mother and with the halfway house.
Casper is still kind to me, but there is something else there now, between us, a distance that makes my heart ache. My sorrys start up again, but Casper just shakes her head sadly.
Vinnie checks the stitches on my forehead every morning, clucking his tongue. Blue calls me Frankenstein in a horror-movie whisper. I go where I'm supposed to go. At night, I just pretend to do my online classes. I've tried to message Mikey when Barbero is busy or napping, but the only response is an empty white chat box. I watch the Somali office cleaners at night, drifting across the windows in the building next door, pulling their carts of solutions and mops and cloths.
The sky is postcard dreamy now, the clouds less full of rain, the sun a little stronger every day. If I look farther out the window, between the towering, silvery buildings, I can see the endless terrain of the university and, beyond that, the snakelike wind of the river that leads to St. Paul, to Seed House and being hungry and dirty and hurt and used up, again, because I have nowhere else to go.
Sasha is making popcorn. Vinnie has brought in tiny canisters of powdered flavoring: butter, cayenne, Parmesan. He cooked a pan of brownies at home and Francie is helping frost them. The room phone rings. I'm blazing through the channels, one by one, until I hear my name. Vinnie wiggles the phone at me.
I listen to the breathing on the other end before I tentatively say hello.

Charlie, you didn't put me on the list!" Mikey.
I almost drop the phone. I grip the receiver in both hands to keep it from shaking.
"T told you I was coming! You were supposed to put me on a visitors' list or something. I'm only here for one more day. I'm here for the show later tonight and then we go in the morning."
"T did put you on the list!" My mind races frantically. Did Casper forget? Or did they just take him off since I'm going to be leaving? "Where are you? I need you. They-"
| Teed
"Hang up, Charlie. Is there a window? I'm in the parking lot out front
I hang up and run to the window and press my face to the glass. A shock of orange catches my eye. He's standing in the parking lot, waving an orange traffic cone in the air. When he sees me, he lets the cone fall.
Mikey looks the same somehow. He looks open and worried. And safe.
There's a light rain, droplets glistening on his dreadlocks. He looks bulkier, though he's still small. He holds out his hands, as if to say, What happened?
The glass is cold on my forehead. Vinnie is playing Go Fish with Sasha and Francie in the corner. Blue is on the couch, humming to herself.
My face is swimming with tears as I watch him in the falling rain, his mouth open, his cheeks red.
Vinnie says pointedly, "Charlie." Blue stirs on the couch. She joins me at the window.
"A boy." Blue's breath makes a foggy circle on the glass. "A real live boy."
Sasha and Francie throw down their cards.
The first time Ellis brought me back to her house in the fall of ninth grade, after we'd known each for about a week, she didn't blink an eye to find an older boy already there, in the basement, reading comics with one hand and stuffing the other in a bag of salty pretzels. There were anarchy symbols Magic Markered on his sneakers. He looked up at Ellis, his mouth full of pretzels, and smiled. "Your mom let me in. Who's this?"