Normal Again: Tuesday
by Alicia
One moment I'm asleep, dreaming about something, I can't remember, and the next moment I'm wide-awake staring at the little red clock on the blood pressure machine. It's 5:58 AM. The nurses are changing shifts in the corridor.
I'm in a graveyard. It's dark, always dark, even when it should have been light. A vampire is piling dirt on my coffin. I can't breathe...
I can't remember my dream. Okay? Buffy Summers, prom queen, vampire slayer, sane, is in control of her own mind.
I start to rise, but with perfect timing, a tall black lady nurse pushes me back into bed and starts taking my blood pressure. I moan and push her away, but she just calls another nurse, and he's stronger even than me, or at least stronger than I have to pretend to be. It's all I can do to hold still through their poking and prodding, though. Did I mention I hate hospitals?
Finally they go away. I set two records: before today, I've never woken up and immediately rolled out of bed with no desire to go back to sleep, and I've never, ever pulled on yesterday's clothes without bothering to do my hair. I stuff my feet into my shoes without looking for the laces and march out in the corridor like I have a mission. I trip over someone's discarded IV--sure, like whoever had it is going to keep it on if he or she wound up in a mental institution in the first place. Did I mention I really hate hospitals?
About half of the other patients are still in their beds, asleep or taking their turns being roused by the nurses, and the other half are in the common room at the end of the hall eating their breakfasts. Since I don't think they have room service in psychiatric hospitals, I look through the trays in the little holder myself until I find one labeled "Buffy Summers, Regular Diet."
I carry the tray to the nearest table before I make myself look at it. It has a whole bunch of plastic cups of wilted fruit and some pancakes under a heat cover. And five white pills in a medicine cup in the top right corner. I take the tray to the dining table and look around to see if there’s a professional watching me. Of course there is. It's Brett, looking three-quarters asleep. I put a pill in my mouth and spit it into my orange juice. I take a bite of mushy pancake. I repeat until all the pills are gone.
Only one problem with that little strategy—the orange juice was the only thing on the tray that I felt like eating. Now there's nothing. I poke the lady next to me, a middle-aged woman who seems completely absorbed in her food. "Uh, can we get coffee in here?" I whisper.
She doesn't answer, but Brett comes up and says, "You can have decaf." He hands me a little Styrofoam cup of weak, lukewarm coffee. I taste it, make a face, and drink it all anyway. It scorches my tongue. That's a good, normal feeling. I scorch my tongue with my coffee every morning, drinking it before Mom notices I have it and tells me to drink something better for me.
A guy in a white coat interrupts me before I'm finished playing with my food. "Hi, Buffy," he says, holding out his hand for me to shake. "I'm Doctor Taylor. Are you ready to talk for a little while?"
That doesn't seem so bad. I get up, toss the orange juice cup into the trash can and slide the rest of my tray back in the warmer unit with the other discarded trays, and follow him.
We go back into the room where I slept. Again, I have this image of myself from the outside, the little girl, the patient, perched on the side of the bed waiting to be taken care of. I hate it. He’s sitting on the rotating stool staring at me.
“Buffy Summers, reporting for sanity,” I say again, because that phrase worked so well the first time. I'm not in a straightjacket, right? I hate being tongue-tied. I'm the one with all the snappy retorts. Did I mention I hate hospitals?
“Buffy. How long have you been seeing,” he squints at my chart, “vampires?”
His patronizing tone annoys me. That's really why I don't say anything, although Merrick's lectures about secrecy ring in my head too.
He pretends I did. “I see.” He scribbles. “And what do you plan to do about this?
I roll my eyes at him. “Invite them to afternoon tea." He really looks like he's going to write something down, so I say, "I see a vampire, I stake it. I see one in here, I'll find out how to dust it. Do you want to be turned into a vampire?"
“Do you have a history of violence in your family?”
“Vampires. Are. Real. They try to kill me sometimes. I've been told I'm supposed to hunt them so you can be safe in the daylight,” I say. I don't mention that the last time I went looking for a vampire was before the incident in the gym. I hardly know what it means to be the Slayer yet (and not having anyone to ask is one of the things that got me into this brand-new psychiatric mess). I say, "I'm damn good at it too" because I'm scared and it sounds good. I feel so vulnerable here, even more than I did in front of the principle's office. I blame it on Merrick. I wouldn't be here if he was alive--I never would've let the vampire thing slip to Mom--but I can't get past the absurdity of a Slayer in a mental institution, and I wish I had official instructions. I wish I had any instructions.
The doctor is still talking. “When did a…vampire…try to kill you?”
My cover is blown sky high anyway, and I seriously doubt he's listening, so I tell him the whole story—Merrick surprising me and making me learn about my physical abilities, missing the first vampire's heart the first time but then letting my hands tell me what to do and seeing it turn to dust, seeing Merrick die, the battle at the prom, fighting Lothos and burning down the gym. I leave out the nightmares and most of the gory details. He drops the stupid pencil and meets my eyes, and I begin to feel like a person again.
“And that’s it,” I finish. “I’m the Chosen One…and I’m fifteen—sixteen! —years old. I'm trying to figure out where I'm going from here. Then Mom surprises me when I get in late because I'd just won a battle against seven of them, and freaks out when I tell her the truth. And here I am.” I start to ramble until I see his glazed eyes. "Can you tell Mom I'm not crazy? I promise never to try to drag her into this other world again. And Dad--can you tell him that there are good reasons I keep getting in trouble?"
He's not listening anymore, but writing on his clipboard. “I think we can teach you some mechanisms to defuse these negative thoughts, for starters,” Dr. Taylor mutters.
I stare at him. “What? Negative thoughts? What are you talking about?”
“You seem like an intelligent young lady, Buffy. You just need to recognize that your monster delusions and learn to overcome them. When you understand what they're doing for you, you'll be able to replace them with healthy coping strategies."
“You didn’t hear a word I just said, did you?” I interrupt him.
Maybe he senses how frustrated I’m becoming—or how close I'm coming to smacking him (and no matter what anyone says, my Slayer strength is real; I'm crumpling the bed rail in my hand)—because he says, “We’ll pick this up tomorrow. Take it easy. Attend the groups. Learn what we’re about here, what you can take with you.”
As he turns to leave, I fire one last question at him. “Are you the one who'll send me out of here?”
He nods, although his back is to me. That's rude, so I'm mad at him for that too, but I just say, “When?”
“That’s up to you.”
He leaves. I sit there for a long time staring at my hands. I used to play with my nails in history class. I try that now. It doesn't feel the same.
The doctor's praises for the morning groups still ring in my mind as I poke my head out of the room. I'm about to ask a nurse where I'm supposed to go when someone shoves a pile of badly mimeographed pages into my hands and tells me to use them to fill out a Scantron form. The pages are full of weird statements. The Scantron has letters A through F corresponding to "Completely Agree" through "Completely Disagree." There are about five hundred of these statements.
I take the first few seriously. Yes, I'm in control of my basic emotions. No, I don't think the world's against me.
Do I think life's against me? I'm honest enough inside--and again there's a change from the girl I was even a few months ago, who wouldn't have even given it a thought--honest enough for the question to make me uncomfortable. I leave it blank.
Somewhere around statement number thirty five, I start playing connect-the-dots. I find out how many words I can spell with the first six letters of the alphabet: "CAB," "DEED," "FACE..." Like they're going to read it anyway.
I give the pages back to the pretty dark-skinned condescending lady doctor just in time to take the last tray from the lunch cart. The soup is cold, and so is everything else. I put it back. No one notices.
Visiting hours start at two in the afternoon. Two to six, each weekday. I'm a little embarrassed to be learning the schedule and settling into the routine at a psychiatric ward, but it does look like I'll be here for the rest of the week. I refuse to let myself think beyond that. Mom and Dawn walk in right at two. I fling myself into my mother's arms like a child. (It's hard to be embarrassed about anything I do when I have my name plastered in big red letters on the white board behind the nurse's station next to a record of my daily bowel movements. That's another story that I think I'm going to delete from my memory.) When I finally pull away from Mom, I wonder if I'm going to get away from this whole experience with any dignity left.
Mom looks like she thinks I'm not going to leave at all, judging from the size of the suitcase she's carrying.
I hope she just had a case of the guilties for sending me here and took it to The Gap. I don't recognize the top poking out of the left front pocket. It's kind of cute. Whatever else I say about my mother, she has killer taste in clothes. Maybe the bag is full of cute new ones for me to wear, at home.
I'm almost as glad to see Dawn as I am to see Mom. She gives me a dignified little sister hug under Mom's satisfied gaze, but then Mom leaves to give the nurses the third degree about me and Dawn throws herself into my arms like she hasn't seen me in months. Or like she's afraid she won't see me for months, but I refuse to dwell on that. "What's wrong, Dawnie?" I whisper.
Even shaking, she manages to put the bossy little-sister in her tone. "Buffy, you need to get your butt home this instant."
"Well, duh, just let me out the door without a straightjacket...no one wants that more than—" I start to say "me," but Dawn puts her hand over my mouth.
"Mom and Dad fought about you all the way home last night," Dawn whispers.
I had wondered why Dad wasn't with the others...well, no, I hadn't, not in the middle of a workday, but I hadn't expected them to start in on me so soon. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. I've been in trouble lately. A lot of trouble. Mom and Dad haven't talked about much else when I've been around, lecturing me when they think I'm listening and quarreling about me when they think I'm not.
"Dad said he didn't mind paying for the insurance, but no daughter of his was going to be called crazy, and that's when Mom said you need help and she was going to fight anyone, especially him, to get it for you, and he called her a—"
Dawn breaks off when Mom suddenly leaves the day nurse and comes back over to us. She pretends to be excited about bringing presents, but she's covering up being so scared that it terrifies me too, and she starts unpacking the suitcase right in the hall. I pick it up with one hand and take hers with my other, pulling both mother and suitcase into my room. Mom recommences unpacking. I'm almost distracted for a few moments. I hold up a top that just came into style last week. Mom must really be feeling guilty; she'd never let me wear that outside of the hospital. There are going to be some Battles Royale over club outings the instant I get out of here.
We finish unpacking. Mom gets distracted—I think she's captivated by the self-help videos they keep in the rack my room or one of the equally lame posters—and at that moment Dawn presses Mr. Gordo into my hands.
"Buffy, look at this one," says Mom. "It's Not All About You: The Secret To Getting Over Yourself And Out Of Your Destructive Thinking."
I try not to show her how much the choice hurts me. Being the Slayer isn't a self-centered delusion. It's a calling I didn't choose...I spend a lot of time wishing I hadn't been Chosen.
It's a peculiar kind of wishing and not-wishing all at once. The wish is always there for life to be easier. To be able to gossip about clothes or sneak out to clubs the way I did a few months ago, without the weight of the world on my shoulders. Yet there's also this little voice that makes me try out the strength in my arms, and whispers that without the destiny I wouldn't have that. Everything is so much more intense when you're the Slayer. The intensity...it isn't exactly pleasant, but it feels good; it's something you get used to, even in only a couple of months. And I don't know what it would be like to have that and lose it again.
I succeed in not showing any of these thoughts, I guess, because Mom catches the eye of the psychiatrist from outside the door and chases her into the adjoining empty room.
Dawn pulls a slim pink diary out of the backpack she always wears and hands it to me. It has a picture of ice skates on the front, and a little padlock across the pages. "It's blank," she says, "so you can start again. You should write in code. You're secret identity girl anyway. I mean, if you think you--if you really are--whatever you are, as a warrior, you should have a cool secret identity."
I thank her, toss the diary on the bed, and then just hold her close for a very long time.
The sun sets just as the staff starts shooing away all the visitors. It's January, after all; winter, even if it isn't cold. I watch it from the edge of my bed with Dawn's gift open in front of me. I can't think of a good way to start writing. I've never felt so alone. The Slayer is always alone.
A vampire walks past me. My door is open, and I get a close and personal view. She's in vamp face. How stupid is it possible for an undead creature to be?
Pretty stupid. Did I mention that I'm in the "short-term" ward of the crazy hospital (due either to my stubbornness or Mom's insistence that there isn't anything wrong with my grip on reality)? The vampire walks right past all these nice open public short-term rooms to hunt the schizophrenics in the hall next to us. Those patients have been in their rooms for years, plenty of time for their rooms to count as their homes instead of public places like ours. I can see the vampire bouncing off their thresholds. She just keeps trying. Wow.
Stupid or no, eventually she's going to kill someone unless I do something about it. I toss my diary on my bed and start searching my room for something pointed and wooden that survived the suicide-implement purge.
I'm already starting to hunt. My motions change; my instincts kick in.
The night nurse chooses that exact moment to walk into my room. Her nametag says "Shellie." She has blond curls, and a face that would be sweet if it wasn't permanently twisted into the most condescending expression I've ever seen in my life. She wraps a blood-pressure cuff around my arm and chirps, "How are your thoughts, Buffy? Feeling violent right now? How's that grip on reality?"
Maybe I'm fed up with her already, or maybe some of the stupidity in the room is contagious, because I blurt out, "There's a vampire behind you." I kick myself as soon as the words are out.
The vampire is behind her, heading the other direction now, back out of the schizophrenics' ward, toward the far side of our hall which is the day room, and I'm close to panic. There are still visitors in the day room
"We're in the hospital to not see things like that," she says down her nose.
I hit her. Solid blow to the temple. She goes down like a...like a...I'm too satisfied to think of a good metaphor. She's out cold, though. I rip off the blood pressure cuff, and I'm tempted to just bolt out of the room, but first I do take the time to check that Nurse Shellie isn't seriously hurt. She'll wake up in a few minutes. She won't have any brain damage that she didn't already have from birth.
If I can get it into our empty group room, I can find a way to deal with it. No innocent victims if , and no witnesses either. Merrick would approve. I'm disappointed...I'm desperate for something to prove that I'm really the Slayer, not a crazy girl, so I can go home and do my job.
Self-pity bout over, it's time to hunt a vampire. I should've asked Dawn to bring a stake.
"Visiting hours are over," I say with only a hint of sarcasm. I shove the vampire into the group room and close the door behind us. "Oh, but you're not a visitor. Why don't you stay here and do a feelings check?"
It lunges at me. I avoid the fists and teeth easily.
"We'll make an exception if you're here for family group," I add sweetly. I back out, swing the door solidly shut, and turn both of the outer locks. I check the schedule posted on the door. "DBT 11:00; Bipolar Support 1:00."
Whatever the heck DBT is, the people congregating to talk about it tomorrow are going to do so in the middle of one big pile of dust. There are a zillion windows in that room. I couldn't find anything to stake it with, but the sunlight tomorrow will do the trick. Just so long as no stupid nurses open the door before sunrise and get themselves bitten.
I don't have time to think about that. Brett, fresh for the night shift, taps me on the shoulder. I think he found Shellie.
At least the being in trouble is familiar. Normal, even.
For me, now.
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