I took a minute to catch my breath, slow my heart. Then I said, “If you’re looking for something in particular, try using your words like a big boy.” Carefully I inched my robe up to expose as little of my skinny, fuzzy, cut-up thighs as I could while still showing the damage. “How did you know?” I said.
He knelt by my chair and peered at the carnage with a clini-cal eye. Monty’s claws could have done worse; the puckered flesh around my thigh amputation was a far more dramatic sight than anything I’d just done.
“Is this all?” he said, sitting back on his heels.
“Yeah.” I was glad, at least, not to have to explain why I’d done it. Not to this guy.
“Davis called Caryl, and Caryl called me. So now you don’t get to sleep either.”
“I’m sorry.”
He leaned forward on the arm of my wheelchair, staring me down. “If Caryl ever calls me in the middle of the night again because of something stupid you’ve done, there won’t be enough sorry in the world.”
“I called Dr. Davis, not Caryl! It was supposed to be confidential! How does she even know Caryl’s number anyway?”
“They’re like, arch-nemeses. Davis calls Caryl all the time to grill her about the Project and beg her to come back to therapy. For all they both knew, you could be bleeding out in here. Caryl thought it was her fault, Millie; she was raving some crap about a fight you two had. She was crying.”
“Bullshit.”
“She’s like a ten-year-old inside, and she worships you, thanks to that stupid movie.”
“What movie?”
“Yours.”
“The Stone Guest? How would you even know?”
“Because I pay attention to shit besides myself. Try it sometime. For all your little lecture about needing other people, you spend a lot of time wallowing in your own misery. You’ve got to find something to care about besides yourself, or you will literally die of the pain.”
“Like Lisa?”
For a second he looked like I’d hit him in the chest, but he rolled right over it. “Like Lisa. Hanged herself in Residence Five. It’s why I don’t live there anymore. P.S. I’d moved there because I found my first partner, Amir, with his head in the oven in Residence One. And I’d moved -there because my mom thought I was possessed by Satan and begged the Project to take me away.”
Without even meaning to, I catapulted headfirst into one of the distress tolerance skills Dr. Davis had taught me, namely, comparing your problems to someone else’s larger ones. It pisses you off if it’s forced on you, but if you do it on your own, it’s like a hit of refined sanity straight to the veins.
“Teo, I’m sorry,” I said. And I meant it. Not just the usual frantic Borderline apology that means I’ll lie and say I was wrong; just don’t leave me. For a moment I genuinely wanted to undo the hurt I’d done him, and any other hurts he might have collected in his lifetime. Just feeling that kind of sorry gave me a weird hope for myself. I put my hand over his where it rested on the arm of my chair.
He looked at his hand as though a bird had landed on it.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Don’t touch you, right? I get that a lot.”
“Naw, touching’s okay, I guess.” He turned his hand over and closed it around mine for a minute before standing up and turning toward the door. “I draw the line at making out, though.”
“Yeah, I’m way too hideous for that to be any fun.”
He turned back to me, annoyed. “Look,” he said, “I need you to know that it’s not going to happen with us. But it’s not personal, okay? And it’s not your scars. Caryl said you were all freaked out that I rejected you or something.”
“I am never telling anyone anything again.”
“You don’t get to have it both ways, Millie. You don’t get to have people care about you but no one poke around in your business.”
“Are you saying you care about me?”
“Go back to sleep, Roper,” he said, heading for the door. He paused in the doorway. “Should I get Monty for you? He’s very comforting.”
“Not a great idea with open wounds on my lap.”
“Good point.” He started to leave, then stuck his head back in. “By the way, Caryl will be collecting all the sharp objects from your room later today. So if you want to slit your wrists, I suggest you do it in the next couple of hours.”
? ? ?
Caryl did not, in fact, come to Residence Four in the morning but sent Song to do her dirty work instead. Song avoided my eyes as she took my cuticle scissors, my nail clippers, even my stupid electric razor. So much for grooming.
I was worried that when Caryl showed up she would send me back to the hospital despite the steel in my bones unless I did something to prove I was an asset. I wheeled myself down the hall to Teo’s room, looking for information. He refused to give me Caryl’s number—that was Against the Rules—but he gave me enough other people’s contact info to get some work done.
First on my to-do list was David Berenbaum.