Upside Down

• exposure •

At 6:41, I woke up in a cold sweat. It takes four minutes for the tears to clear.

"Are you okay?" Alli's voice rings through the heavy silence.

I pressed my cheek to the pillow and found her eyes glowing in the dark room. "Why are you awake?"

"How could I sleep?" she replies.

"I find these mattresses strangely comfortable."

"Not the mattresses. I have insomnia, Marley."

"Can't they give you meds?" I respond as the sleepiness in my voice falls away.

"I'm on thirty milligrams of Melatonin already."

"Is that a lot?"

"I guess. The average adult takes five." She pauses and licks her lips. "Marley, what do you keep dreaming abou—"

A loud thunk on the door stops her in her tracks. Myah pops her head through the door and grins like it's not seven a.m.

"Morning, ladies! Get ready, breakfast is in thirty minutes!" she cheers.

"Umf," I groaned, muffling my voice in the pillow wrapped around my ears.

"Oh, c'mon, rise and shine, ladies!" Myah cries one more time before slipping out the door and flicking on the light.

"Isn't she a ray of sunshine?" Alli moaned.

I giggled and slid out of my bed. I slipped a thick blue hoodie off of a hanger on our shared closet's doorknob.

I found some somewhat attractive sweatpants in my dresser and tugged them around my waist. For once, they didn't slip off. I'd gained what Dr. Smith describes as "therapy weight." I wasn't fat, I wasn't even borderline chubby. It was just than skin was finally creeping over my sharp rib bones and my knobby elbows.

I don't even bother with shoes. Most people here don't either. I just tug on a pair of tie-dye socks and yank a brush through my tangled, greasy hair.

"Boy howdy," Alli snorted, "when's the last time you washed that mop of crap?"

"Boy howdy?" I repeated. "Anyway, I haven't showered since..." I counted on my fingers. I hadn't showered once here or at the hospital. "Um, a week or so?" I replied sheepishly.

"God, no! Marley, that's disgusting!" But she's laughing. She wraps her fingers around my wrist. "You'll feel much better once you shower. C'mon. We'll both take a shower and then get ready for community group."

"Breakfast!" I cried in despair as she dragged me out the door.

"We'll grab a snack from the common room, dork."

I follow her to the end of our hall. Each hall has a community shower room, which is constantly monitored by a handful of nurses. A nurse assigns me a shower in the huge room. I estimate there to be about fifteen.

My shower is basically a shower head bolted to the wall above a cement floor with a drain. There are two curtains separating the humid bathing cubicle from the rest of the room. I hook the shower caddy the nurse gave me on the plastic rack screwed into the wall. Then I peel off my clothes that already smell slightly rank from my accumulating body odor.

As the warm water washes down my back, my soapy fingers roam my body. My breath catches in my throat when the pad of my index finger finds the raised pink scar on my hip.

"To remember me by, love."

I felt his hands again, hot knife hands, fingers digging into my waist, blue patches blooming beneath his touch. I remember the layer of grime he left behind, his breath in my neck, dirty dirty dirty.