little miss "crazy"

15.

And while it's true that my clothes are from the lost and found, it isn't entirely true that I have nothing, because I do have something, they just keep it from me. I saw it once, when Doc Dooley told me to stop watching the movie during entertainment to come to the nurses' station.

When I got there, he pulled a backpack, my backpack, from beneath the desk. Doc Dooley is super tall, and handsome, the kind of handsome where you know he knows how handsome he is, and that his life is much easier for it, and so he tends to be kind of easy-going with the rest of us, the unhandsome.  

So when he said, "Two boys dropped this off. Does this look familiar to you?" I was momentarily blinded by the brightness of his teeth, and fascinated by the velvety quality of his stubble.

I grabbed my backpack and sank to my knees, unzipping it, shoving my hands inside. It was there. I cradled it, sighing in releif, before Doc Dooley said, "Don't get too excited. We emptied it."

I took out my tender kit, the army medical kit that I had found when I was fourteen and trolling the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store on West Seventh with Ellis. The metal box was dented, the large red cross on the front was scratched and loosing it's paint.

My tender kit used to hold everything: my gauze, my pieces of broken mason jar in a blue velvet pouch, my cigarettes, my matches and lighter, buttons, bracelets, money, my photos wrapped in linen.

The box made no sound when I shook it. I dug deeper into the green backpack but it, too, was dark and empty. No extra socks and underwear, no rolls of toilet paper, no film canister filled with panhandled cash, no pills in a baggie, no rolled up tight wool blanket. My sketchpad was missing. My bag of pens and charcoals were gone. My land camera, gone. I looked up at Doc Dooley. 

"We had to take everything out, for your safety." He offered his hand out to me, and even his hand was handsome. I ignored it, standing up by myself, clutching my tender kit and the backpack tightly. "You have to give the bag and the box back. We'll keep them for you until your discharged."

He reached out and tugged the backpack away, slipped my tender kit from my hand. He put them behind the desk. "But you can have these."

Doc Dooley pressed the square of linen into my hands. Inside, protected by the soft fabric, are photographs of us: me and Ellis, Mikey and DannyBoy, perfect and together, before everything blew to hell.

As I walked away, pressing the photographs to my chest, Doc Dooley called out.

"Those boys. They said they were sorry."

I kept walking, but inside, I felt myself pause, just for a second.