The Innocents

Chapter Twelve

I wrestled with my thoughts that night and into the morning.

I'd fallen asleep four or five times only to wake up again, my stomach bouncing each and every time. I guess part of me was hoping that each time I fell asleep that I'd wake up and be home. This was a fantasy and sleep was a long time coming.

"What did you do to deal with these emotions beforehand?" Mrs. K had asked on our next meeting.

"I listened to music," I said sullenly.

"We play music here."

"Yea, right. That's not music."

"Oh?"

"Music is when you can feel emotion coming from the lyrics and know that whatever they're saying is important. Not this hoity, toity bullshit written by old guys for jail bait flashing their nipples to sell magazines. Real music doesn't need nipples."

"You're passionate about music then?"

I had gone off on a tangent and I sat back in my chair. "Yea, I am."

Mrs. K fiddled around with her monitor and said, without looking at me, "I see you like to write and you went to a therapist before?"

I leaned forward and uncrossed my legs. "How did you know that?"

"I have all of your school and medical records right here."

"Isn't that against the law?"

She shook her head and I got it immediately. Suddenly I felt like I was melting. It wouldn't even matter if I had. I'm a nonperson now. Laws outside The Iron Rose don't apply any longer. My existence was limited to whatever the guards, the warden and Mrs. K said it was. If they want to find out when I had chicken pox, there it was. If they wanted to see how many times I had detention, there it was. If they said, walk out this door and dance like a chicken, I'd have to do it.

That was when I began to hear my former classmates, old friends, relatives all musing on what had become of me.

I heard she cheated on Jackson and tried to cover it up because she thought was pregnant.

I heard she's in a high security prison where you shit in a bucket and eat moldy cheese.

I heard she got a tattoo.

I heard she turned mental. She probably trying to chew off her own tongue as we speak.

I always thought she was weird. She listened to a lot of rock and roll.

Oh man. I lent her a book. You think I'll get it back? I hope I get it back.

"Fuck you."

"Say it again?"

I straightened. "I said fuck you but it wasn't meant for you."

"Who was it meant for?"

Great. Now I have to explain why I was obsessing over people's potential gossip. She was going to tell me that I shouldn't care which was true. But I was only seventeen. I care.

I think to myself that the voices are better left unannounced. Plus, they had faded anyhow. I did feel a little empty like a rubber ball bouncing around an empty room. I smiled and told her to forget it which she promptly did. We moved on to talking about music and I began to feel a little bit better. My mind pieced itself together in the most stable way it could and the rubber ball stopped bouncing and in my head, calm. No voices. Nothing. Nobody here but us chickens.

Then she wanted to talk about Jackson so I did. I liked talking about him. It made that part of my life seem.... not so obsolete. I also saw him as my weakness. Love should never be a weakness. It should strengthen you, right? Instead, it was my Kryptonite. It made me sad for the things I wish I had and things I may never get back.

I can honestly say that I fell for him on our very first real date. It wasn't your typical night on the town. We went out to eat at the local wing joint and I gorged myself on buffalo wings using up half a stack of napkins. I'm not the salad and water type of girl. If you can't like me for my appetite than you have no business in my life. That's how I saw it. Then we ended up on the swan boats and you already know about that. We kissed. It was magical. Fireworks lit up the sky like we were The Magic Kingdom on the Fourth of July.

Well, that kiss was what propelled us into what I like to call the drug addiction stage. We were inseparable. Indivisible. He was an extension of myself. A Siamese twin with an invisible umbilical cord. I was so consumed that I didn't realize how much of myself that I was losing. Mrs. K called it dependency which was a word I had never wanted to be associated with. It was a horrid word meaning that I couldn't love myself enough to not need somebody to validate my existence. That is just how I saw it.

And then I thought she was going to go into some spiel about that being the price of being female etc etc etc. To give up ourselves for husbands, families, babies, but instead she basically told me to reevaluate what I wanted in relationships and that maybe what I thought made me happy wasn't always the healthiest.

If you haven't noticed, I live in a completely different time. Maybe, if anyone reads this, things will be different, but from what I've seen of history is that it repeats itself more often than not. This isn't the first time women have been oppressed and it certainly won't be the last. That being said, Mrs. K was certainly the first woman that I have met that seemed to disapprove of the state of things even if she didn't realize it. There wasn't a man in that photo on her desk after-all.

"I don't understand why any of this is necessary," I said to her. "I'm a prisoner. I'm not a mental patient. I'm not required...."

"What the state requires and what I require are two very different things," she said coolly.

Mrs. K was developing an edge, Go her. This should be more interesting than previously thought. But all I could mutter was a sarcastic, "Awesome."

I left her office that day feeling torn. On one hand I liked talking about the things that once made my heart happy. Music, books, Jackson, but on the other it created a larger space where all of that once was. Whenever I left her office it was like walking back into the wardrobe from Narnia into the professor's stinky old house. Left with the memory of Fauns and beavers and faced with the jarring realities of life.