Brynna woke up and stepped out of bed. There really was no reason to get dressed, although the nurses here at “Hugs Not Drugs,” as some of the other patients called it, encouraged them to get back to their daily routine—the parts of it that didn’t include getting drunk or high—as much as possible.
She shimmied into a hospital-approved robe, startlingly white, like everything else in the place, and was met in the doorway by Marcus, the orderly. He was two whole heads taller than Brynna and had forearms like giant hams. Faded tattoos were barely visible on his dark skin, and he looked every bit like he could crush you with a stare. Marcus was linebacker big and bald, and had the softest, sweetest voice Brynna had ever heard. He was getting off duty when she came in last night, but he was the one who put her instantly at ease. Louise, the night warden, was sour and pinched, and for every one of Marcus’s soft, doughy folds, she was angled and sharp, wearing her disdain for her charges as plainly as she wore her uniform.
“Hey, Marcus,” Brynna said softly.
His face broke into a wide, easy grin. “How’d the first night go, Sleeping Beauty?”
Truthfully, Brynna wasn’t sure she’d slept at all. She remembered staring at the industrial ceiling above her, watching the way the raindrops cast murky, gray-blue shadows against the ceiling tiles.
“Okay, I guess.” She pointed to the ladies’ room across the hall. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”
“No problem.” Marcus turned around and fiddled in his cart, then Brynna heard him mumble something into the miniature walkie-talkie that all the Woodbriar nurses had clipped to their shoulders.
Brynna took a step into the hallway, and he held up one meaty palm to stop her. “Escort’s not here yet. And you need this.”
She looked down incredulously as Marcus placed a little plastic cup in her hand. Heat shot through her, and her mouth went dry as she blinked at the man in front of her.
Marcus gestured toward the cup. “You know the rules. Every morning.”
Brynna tensed at the thought of locking herself in the bathroom, peeing into that stupid cup, and—what? Handing a full cup of urine to Marcus? Humiliation hummed through her body, and she wanted to sink into the shiny white laminate underneath her. A woman Brynna didn’t recognize came strolling down the hall with a neon-green bungee keychain wrapped around her wrist. She paused in front of the women’s restroom, sunk her key in the lock, and opened the door a foot. “You coming?”
Brynna looked at the specimen cup in her hand. She looked at Marcus with his eyes that suddenly didn’t look so soft anymore. She looked at the woman, her “escort,” guarding the threshold to the bathroom.
And she wondered how it was that she had gotten herself here.
Brynna took the cup from her father’s hand. All she ever wanted at Woodbriar was to come home. But now home was just like rehab.
“You’ve been home from the hospital for over a week now…”
“And I’ve seen Dr. Rother almost every day. I’ve done everything I’m supposed to be doing. I’m even back at school.”
“We just want to make sure this isn’t all too much for you.”
Brynna pointed toward the drug test. “And that’s your way of doing it? How about just asking, ‘Hey, Bryn, are you doing okay’?”
Her father cleared his throat while her mother shifted her weight. “Brynna,” she said, “we’re all in new territory here. There isn’t exactly a handbook on how to help you. We’re doing the best we can. We just want to make sure you’re safe.”
Her mother’s words grated on Brynna’s teeth.
“Fine. Do you want to come in and watch me pee too?” she asked.
“Brynna, we’re doing this for your own good. We all know that sobriety is a process—”
Heat seared Brynna’s insides. “You can stop quoting the posters, Mom. I remember what every one of them said.”
Every room at Woodbriar was festooned with framed posters with calming photographs—a cupped hand collecting drops of water, a rainbow in front of a pale orange sunset—and each poster bore some kind of twelve-steppy message that made the Woodbriar residents—at least the ones that Brynna knew—sick to their stomachs.
“Do not talk to your mother like that, young lady.” Her father scoffed. “Now go.”
Brynna rolled her eyes, annoyed but stung, as she went into the bathroom. Ten minutes later, all the test tabs turned their innocent colors—amphetamines (blue), negative; barbiturates (pink), negative; benzodiazepines (green), negative. Her mother had gotten the super-test-for-everything pack, so Brynna had to stand there in the kitchen, growing angrier by the second as her father ticked off the other eight drugs she was not doing.
“Okay,” her father said with a resigned sigh.
Brynna snaked her arms in front of her chest. “At Woodbriar, I’d get an hour of free time when I tested negative.”
“Brynna, drug testing was part of your plea bargain,” her mother said.
“From the court. Not from my own parents. But thanks for the vote of confidence.”
FOURTEEN