A Year of Novembers

Chapter Two

             There are three pink carnations on the bed stand in my room, all barely poking out of a glass vase. They are my favorite flower, but they seem wilted and browning after the conversation I had with Ms. Deville. The sickening yellow on the walls makes the white carpet look dingy and dirty.

            The world is put in a sickeningly bright light, thanks to Ms. Deville. I am as dangerous as the masked murderer equipped with a knife, because thoughts like mine bring about the end of tradition. With such a bright light fixed on the world as I’d seen it, I see a massive web of faults covering it. I am naïve for believing that my thoughts are better than the normal man. My thoughts bring pain, fear, and devastation to all who surround me, and I thought I was just an interesting mutation.

            Lorna enters the room while I am deep in thought. She is long and rail-thin, her face dominated by a hooked nose and small eyes. She grins and sits next to me, greeting me and chattering while I brood.

            “So, why are you here?” she prattles. I lift my eyes to observe her for a moment, and then shrug.

            “I’m a hurricane. I’m not sane. Never have been.” I look her up and down, and her hyperactive, bubbly personality seems ordinary for a child. She isn’t obviously impaired, so I can’t help myself from asking, “What about you?”

            She rolls up a sleeve of her jumper to reveal dozens of criss-crossing lines. They pepper her arms, running into each other like hundreds of puffy pink minnows. Her face is still stretched into a childlike grin, the kind that looks too wide to be comfortable, and I think for a moment that she must be slow as well. The smile is vague and empty, like her mind is wound too loosely, and her instinctual response is to smile without thinking.

            “The ladies who work here say that I am a danger to myself. And that I don’t think too well,” Lorna remarks. “They’re awful nice to me. My momma wasn’t as nice. She liked to hit me ‘cause I was so dumb. They don’t hit me here. Th’say they want to make me better. I been here a long time, and I am so light and airy, like I got little bubbles that fill me up with little bits of sunshine.” She rambles on until my curiosity tempts me further.

            “Didn’t your mother love you though?” I ask. The moment it’s out of my mouth, I wish I’d worded it better, because Lorna goes from clipped sentences to incoherent babbling. I try to shake her out of her trance-like state, but her eyes remain fixated on some invisible point.

            I watch her after I realize the futility in trying to snap her out of it. She mumbles quiet, disjointed phrases until she goes quiet, and the loss of the strange words fill the room. Still, she sits rigidly on her bed, facing a plain wall, lost in some crevice of her mind.

            I slip into my bed, shimmying underneath the crisp sheets and weighty quilt and shutting my eyes tightly. It’s early, just after dinner, which was given to me away from the other girls, and I can see the small vessels of my eyelids because of the sunlight that wanders into our room from the opposing window. Still, I pray for sleep, because there is no better way to escape a nightmarish reality than to burrow away into your dreams.

            I wake up early the next morning and roll over to assess Lorna’s state of being to find her gone. I decide that she must have gone to breakfast, which I am tremendously late for; it’s seven thirty, and breakfast ends at eight. I pull on a pressed uniform and slip my fingers through my hair.

            The cafeteria is alive with the buzz of talking. Girls crowd around tables, undoubtedly gossiping and whispering meaningless secrets to each other. I grab a cooled muffin from a table, the monitor scolding me and telling me to be punctual.