Finding Her Voice

5 a.m.

Two more hours and this shift from hell would finally be over. Taryn blamed it on the full moon. It made people extra crazy, at least in Daytona Beach. 

Thirteen admissions between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. - ugh. The middle of the night shift was usually prime time for catching up on chemistry homework, or hanging out in the group therapy room holding karaoke contests or binge-watching old John Hughes movies from what her step-monster swore were the best days "evah!" It was the one thing they had in common, though Taryn would rather gag herself with a proverbial spoon than ever admit it to the Queen of Aqua Net. 

But there were no parties in the library with The Breakfast Club tonight, thanks to a baker's dozen of even crappier parental units who couldn't manage to control their kids. Taryn wasn't that much older than some of them, just old enough to have gotten her license as a Certified Nursing Assistant, thanks to the medical track at Livingston High School that saw the value in letting its seniors work for a living. So while her friends cruised the strip and hung out on the boardwalk, Taryn spent 12 glorious hours every Saturday night at Jackson Behavioral Health Center, doing the dirty work for the overweight nurses who stuffed their faces full of doughnuts while they surfed Tinder wondering why they were still single. It had only taken a few shifts for Taryn to start to question her career ambitions.

Yet here she was, in a semi-residential juvenile mental health treatment facility, and she was basically in charge most of the night...well, along with Benny. Ugh. He was a cheerleader, for real, at Bay State, and he literally lived the role like 24/7. He seriously could not stop trying to motivate people. It was so annoying.

Speak of the perky devil. He was heading her way, dancing down the hall. 

"Tay! Girl, you rocked it tonight! All those admissions...all those girls with lice! You were a freakin' diva with mayonnaise and a comb!"

How could he smile and talk about lice at the same time? What a freak. Just the mention of those nasty little rice-like hair critters made Taryn's skin crawl. She hated them even more than being called Tay. And if she ever smelled mayo again she would puke. The nurses didn't have enough lice treatment on hand for all the girls who arrived infested, so Taryn was tasked with coating their hair (of course, they all had long, thick manes) with a healthy dollop of white smelly goo, then combing through each and every strand to pull off all the larvae and eggs. Grey's Anatomy had not prepared her for this in the slightest. And Benny was definitely not her McDreamy.

She really wanted a hot shower. Why was the clock moving so damn slow this morning? Now she was convinced her head itched, but she didn't even want to touch her own hair. She shook herself instead, which Benny mistook for a dance move.

"There you go! Dance it out!" He mirrored her move, like Tigger having a seizure. Taryn stopped and stood still, folding her arms and watching the ridiculousness with a sigh.

Fortunately, it only took a second for their youngest patient to notice action outside her door and peek out into the hallway. Saraya was a regular, and honestly, everyone's favorite. She was a really good kid with a really bad situation. Her mom had a taste for drug dealers, addicts, alcoholics, abusers - and anything they could do, she could do better. And she didn't care if Saraya saw or got in the way of any of it. 

A year or so ago, when she was just five, Saraya saw one of these men beating her mom in their living room, so she swung at him with a baseball bat and then ran out into the street screaming for help. Taryn thought it was the bravest thing she'd ever heard. But Saraya's mom called the police - on her own five-year-old daughter. And the cops picked her up and brought her here to Jackson. The system was pretty screwed up, in Taryn's opinion.

But in a way, it worked. Because Saraya was smart. At Jackson she had a bed and a warm, safe place where she could get a good night's sleep with three meals and snacks every day. She could do schoolwork and play outside with other kids, talk to grownups who listened and helped. She liked it here. So she figured out how to keep coming back. The system sucked, but she knew how to work it. And the doctors and the nurses and the social workers knew what she was doing. But getting her legally removed from her mom's custody wasn't as quick and easy a process as it seemed to Taryn that it should be, so until that happened, or until Saraya's mom ended up in jail (or dead, which Taryn knew they all were thinking and not saying), she pretty much had an open invitation to stay as long as the system allowed with each admission.

"What's up, Princess?" Taryn asked the pink pajama-clad figure trying her best to sneak to the snack closet unnoticed.

"Is he okay?" she asked, raising an eyebrow at Benny, who was still gyrating. 

Taryn laughed. "Not any stranger than usual."

Benny looked over, faking offense. "I thought you said I was a good dancer," he said to Saraya. 

The little girl shrugged and grinned.

"I see how it is," Benny teased. "No more extra cupcakes for you!"

"But I get hungry," Saraya replied. "They make us wait too long. I'm growing fast, you know!"

She snuck a glance at Taryn. "Can we sing a song?"

"Not right now," Taryn said. "It's not time to get up yet. Maybe at breakfast."

"You sing so pretty. I want to sing like you someday."

"Flattery will get you nowhere, kiddo. Back to bed."

"Can I get a snack first?" she turned on her cutest smile.

Taryn shook her head, though it was really hard to resist the kid. "You are too much, little lady. You know Nurse Ratchet up there isn't gonna bend. Breakfast is coming up soon once the day shift gets here."

Saraya scrunched up her nose with a glance at the nurses station, where Nancy and Rose were both engrossed in whatever social media was feeding them at the moment. They were not the most popular of the nursing staff - some of the others were much more lenient. But Nancy was by far the best with blood draws - it never took more than one stick, so she got credit for that if nothing else.

"Are you gonna put that goop on my hair?" Saraya asked, folding her arms protectively over her braids. She already knew the answer. She just didn't want to go back to bed.

"No, silly, you're lucky because you've got special hair that those nasty bugs can't hold onto so you'll never need that icky stuff."

"It's good to be brown," Saraya smiled and twirled around. "You're a little brown but not the same as me."

"My brown is just from the sun," Taryn laughed. "So it kinda fades in the winter. Yours stays pretty all year round!"

"You're pretty, too," Saraya gave her a hug. "Benny thinks so, too," she whispered, not so softly.

"Saraya!" they both warned. She'd been trying to play matchmaker for weeks. 

Nancy looked up from her phone and shot them all an evil look.

"Saraya, I know they're telling you to go back to bed, right?"

"Yes, Nurse Ra- I mean, Miss Nancy!" Saraya giggled as she scurried back down the hall and into her room.

"Taryn, don't let these kids walk all over you. You'll learn when you have kids of your own," Nancy lectured.

"Ew, no thanks," Taryn shook her head at the thought. "I like them way more when they belong to other people."

"What? You're so amazing with them, though," Benny chimed in. He was back in cheerleader mode. "You're really a natural. I can see you in pediatrics."

And I can see you as a Teletubby someday, Taryn thought, but instead just gave a tight-lipped smile. No, there would definitely be no children in her future.

"Can you two do some charting for us before shift change?" Rose asked. "With all these admits we got way behind."

"Of course!" Benny swooned. "Don't you worry, Miss Rose, we've got it all under control. Do you mind if we go down to the admin offices so we can each have a computer? We can knock everything out twice as fast that way!"

"That's why you're gonna do great things, Benny," Rose said. "Always working smarter, not harder." She tossed her key ring over the counter and he almost caught it before it clattered to the floor. 

"How are we supposed to sleep with all that noise?!" one of the disgruntled newly admitted teenagers howled from down the hall.

"Shut up!" another yelled back. "I was sleeping fine til you started in!"

"And so it begins," Nancy sighed and hoisted herself up from the nurses station to begin her long waddle down the hall to remind the masses who was in charge.

For once, Taryn was a little glad to be escaping the unit, even if it was with Benny.