Sing me to sleep, sing me to sleep,
I'm tired and I want to go to bed.
Sing me to sleep, sing me to sleep,
And then leave me alone.

Her hands grabbed at my hair. That was one of my favorite feelings in the world: when she ran her hands all the way through my hair and then stopped at the nape of my neck to tug onto the short ones that grew there. A swell of chills sprouted from behind my shoulders, a crescendo of tingles accented by her breath in my ear and her lips hovering over my skin.

"You smell like lemons."

"I got new shampoo."

I pressed a trail of kisses along her bare collar, her skin warmer than my lips, until my mouth was at the crook of her neck. She leaned her head back and sighed my name and I wished there was some way I could stop everything that was happening and watch her just like that until I got tired of it, until I got so full of sweetness that it made me sick.

"I love you."

She laughed, and said my name, and told me she loved me, too. Then I made her say my name over and over, louder and louder, until there was nothing except the sound of her voice and her sighs and my heart beating loud in my ears as I tried to catch my breath.

"Kit….Kit…Kit…"

She shook my arm, trying to wake me up. Both her hands gripped me tightly, shaking, shaking, shaking me as hard as she could. I could hear her breath in my ear, ragged and choking. She was crying. She was crying hard. I could feel tears falling on my forehead.

"Kit…Kit…Kit…"

She knelt on the bed beside me, her knees pressing into my side. She grabbed my shoulders, shaking even harder, calling my name over and over, louder and louder, until there was nothing except the sound of her screaming and crying and my heart slowing down in my ears as I tried to catch my death.

"Kit. Kit. Kit?"

The hand I now saw resting on my shoulder was too pale. I quickly looked up and saw a stranger peering down at me with a euthymic expression, and it was her hand that was resting on my skin. Not Alma's.

"Who the hell are you?" I asked, jerking away from her. I wiped the sleep from my face and squeezed my eyes shut, the images of my dream fading fast from my memory. The woman smiled at me, small and patient.

"I'm Mary Eunice, but everyone just calls me Mary. And I'm a nurse here."

I didn't say anything to her. It was hard to get a good look at her face; the only light in my room was that which streamed in through the open door that led to the hallway.

"You have night meds to come take," she continued. "Would you mind following me?"

She was average height and weighed in at no more than a hundred pounds when soaking wet. Her mannerisms were subdued and slow, and her tone was so soft that I had to strain to hear her. She meant no harm to me. And even if she did, she wasn't physically capable of inflicting it.

So I followed her. I followed her out of my bed and into the bright hallway, shuffling my feet along the hardwood floors. I followed her down the corridor past the open bedroom doors of the other patients. I followed her past every set of eyes that watched me as I went, refusing to look up or acknowledge a single one of them. I could feel them all staring at me, sights honing in on me the second I came into their view and staying on me all the way down the hall. But I wouldn't look up.

Surely one of those sets of eyes belonged to Violet, big and brown and filled with the gleam of something—wonder, or mischief, or horror—and I considered looking up, risking locking on eyes that weren't hers and facing the faces of scrutiny, just to share a brief moment with the girl whose hips moved like smoke. But I was too afraid.


Mary 's thin white fingers held onto a small plastic medicine cup as she rummaged around in the cabinets in the med room.

"I promise you, it won't take this long every time," she called to me from the other side of the little square window that separated the two of us, her on the side of the med room and me on the side of the abandoned corridor.

"We have…you know…a week's worth of daily doses set up in those…um…plastic medicine divider things…" She was trying to divide her attention between giving me a long-winded apology, reading my med sheet, and rummaging for the right bottles in the expansive cabinets that lined the wall closest to where she stood. "So once you're all…settled in…someone will set one of those up for you and this process will be…much…faster."

"It's alright. I don't mind waiting."

"I know you don't, and that's gracious of you. But still…" She'd found the right bottles and lined them up on the countertop below the cabinets, twisting off the caps, one, two, three, four. I wondered how many times she'd done this, how long it took her become so smooth and rehearsed in her movements, for the muscle memory of her arms to perfect the motions necessary to do what she was doing. I watched her face, which was completely unmarked by any sign of any kind of emotion–not blank, not void, just as euthymic as her tone of voice had been. She couldn't have been more than five years older than I was, but she had obviously dedicated those five years (plus many more, most likely) to perfecting the choreography of preparing medication for patients. I hoped she enjoyed it. I hoped she enjoyed it for the rest of her life, and that she would never lay awake or look out the window or glance away from the television and wish she'd spent her time practicing something else.

"Here you go," she said, stretching her arm and placing the medicine and a paper cup of water on the widow sill. I crumpled the paper cup after finishing it and mashed it into the other one that had held the medicine, and then handed it back to Mary.

"Thank you," I said before turning to return to my room.

"Wait, Kit. You oughtn't take those things on an empty stomach. Don't you want something to eat before you turn in for the night?"

I shook my head.

"But you haven't eaten all day. You fell asleep the second you finished making your bed this morning."

"I know."

"You're not hungry?"

I shrugged. "I probably am. I'd just rather sleep, that's all."

She sighed and looked at me with a half-worried, half-sympathetic, fully irritating look on her face.

"Alright. Have a good sleep, Kit."


"You're really not going to say hi to any of us?"

I turned around to face the girl I had ignored while walking back to my room. I'd hoped that, though she'd obviously been staring at me, she might let me pass without saying anything to me.

I looked at her face, but not straight into her eyes. She noticed.

"Won't you look at me?"

My eyes snapped to hers, then immediately away. Her stare was too wide, too intense. Like the stare of someone who was truly crazy.

"Is everyone at this fucking hospital incapable of making eye contact? Jesus Christ."

"Not the staff."

I jumped, not knowing there was another person behind me. Looking over my shoulder, I saw another young girl around my age leaning against the doorframe of the exactly diagonal to that of crazy girl's. They had trapped me, both watching me from either side of where I stood. I could not walk away. I could not escape talking to either or both of them.

"The staff will look at you," the second one continued.

"They're the only ones. Other than you, Grace."

"Maybe that's because everyone is afraid of you," the second one said. She must have been Grace.

I stared down at the floor not knowing which one of them I ought to look at. They continued a conversation over my head, something concerning the first girl's sanity and physical attractiveness.

"So what's your name, anyway?" The first one asked.

"Kit."

"Kip?"

"Kit. Rhymes with Mitt."

"Kit. What is that short for?"

"Nothing," I shrugged. "It's just my name."

The girl scoffed, rolling her eyes and smirking at Grace.

"Where are your parents from? Iowa?"

"No. Dorchester."

She smiled at me, biting her lip and batting her eyelashes. She was attractive in a desperate sort of way, like how you're attracted to girls on reality TV shows. They're only pretty because they want you so bad.

"You from there too?"

I nodded, watching warily as she ran a hand down from the back of her neck, over her chest, and across her stomach. It didn't excite me. Not really.

"You should come in my room and tell me all…about…your childhood."

She had walked toward me and placed her hand on my arm, circling me like prey. Her fingertips grazed along my shirt, dragging from one shoulder to the other, lingering on the bare skin on the back of my neck. She brought her lips close to my ear as she whispered to me, carefully enunciating her last words. And just like that, in the unflattering light of the hallway with someone else watching, I felt a strange longing for her. If she were a girl on the street, someone I saw at the grocery store, I wouldn't look at her twice. If she were a drunk girl at a party trailing her hand along my shoulder in the same way, I would probably roll my eyes at her. But under these circumstances, in this voluntary prison with commonly self-loathing inmates, I became the person that would concede to this girl's wishes. Because she was sad, and I was sad, and we were both lonely. And we could both do with what she was asking for.

She stood in front of me with a hand on either one of my shoulders and smirked, waiting. Her eyes were much lovelier up close than I'd expected them to be–almond shaped and clear and stormy blue. It didn't add up with the rest of her face. From a distance, she looked obviously underfed and unrested and unhappy; up close like this, the details of her face made her look less threatening. Less decayed. Looking at just her face, free of makeup or scars or dragging fingernails, she seemed so much more innocent than the whole picture. She couldn't have been older than eighteen, which means she hadn't been at Pritchett for very long. There were freckles sprayed across her nose and her eyebrows were significantly darker than her hair, like she'd died it one day on a whim and now had to keep up the style to avoid growing it out or cutting it very short. She was a teenager. Judging by her accent, she grew up not too far from where I did. She might have gone to school with my younger sister, been a freshman when my sister was a senior. They might have shared a class together, or been on the basketball team together. They could have been friends. She probably wanted to go to college. She probably had a childhood nickname that numerous people still used to address her.

My longing for her was flesh was gone, replaced with a longing to substitute her sadness with something else. On the basest level, she was regular. Just like I was. Without her slinking body language and choppy, unwashed hair and irregular speech pattern, I couldn't see the madness in this girl. It didn't show on her face.

I stepped backward.

"I'm tired. I ought to go to bed."

Her face fell. She pulled her hands away and pursed her lips at me, her whole body shrinking.

"Fine, you fucking prude. But don't say I never tried to help you out."

"I would never."

I backed away from her slowly, her hands sliding from my shoulders as I did, and nodded to Grace as I passed her. I worried that I'd offended the girl, that my rejection would spur some sort of emotional turmoil inside of her that would take numerous days of work on the part of the hospital staff to properly settle. Before opening the door to my room I looked down towards her room on the other side of the hall and saw her still standing in the hallway, watching me. Her body language was deflated, relaxed, much more slack than it had been when they were standing close. I wasn't sure if she held herself that way because she was disappointed, or if she held herself that way because she was relieved.

I turned the doorknob and stepped into my dark bedroom, thinking it strange that she hadn't told me her name.


Fake yellow light streamed onto the patch of carpet that my gaze fell on. The window at the foot of my bed was filled with ink where darkness overcame the forest view in the distance. It was not yet morning.

When I looked back at the square of light on the floor, a shadow had appeared in it. I could tell immediately from the curve of its hip and the tilt of its head that the shadow belonged to Violet. I craned my neck around and saw the dark outline of her small frame leaning against the doorframe, arms and ankles crossed. I could hardly see her face, as the light was hitting her back, but I didn't need to light to know that she was watching me. I could feel it.

"You sleep a lot," she said. Her voice was low and hushed, like a child conspiring in the middle of the night before Christmas. Careful not to wake the others. Careful to keep her secret.

"What time is it?" I asked.
"Some time after two," she said.

"Why aren't you asleep?"

She paused, shrugging.

"I don't really sleep."

"Ever?"

She shook her head.
"When was the last time you slept?"

"Thursday."

Just the prospect of swinging my legs over the side of my bed exhausted me after twelve near-straight hours of sleep, and she hadn't slept since Thursday. She was able to outpace me walking up a hill, outwit me talking up a storm, and act as though she were too normal to be here, and she hadn't slept since Thursday.

"Won't they catch you out of bed?" I asked.
"No. They never notice."

They never notice. They don't appear at the sounds of footsteps in the hallway. They pay no mind to a sick girl, fresh out of inpatient, as she stands just outside my bedroom. My mind flashed to all the other things the night staff may not notice. They may not notice me walking out of this bedroom and wandering through the corridors. They may not notice me jimmying the handle to the med room and taking however much I needed to stay asleep for the rest of the week, or for the rest of eternity, depending on just how tired I was. They might not notice me taking Violet into my room and locking it behind me, something that only allowed when one is changing, and keeping her in here for as long as I wanted. They might not notice if I left the building altogether, and they may not notice if I took her with me when I did it.

"Come to bed," I asked, stretching out one arm toward her. "Come lie down with me."
I could hear her exhale and see her shake her head, but she didn't move away from the door. She just stood there, watching.
"No. Not tonight."

Not tonight. Not a promise that she might come at another time, but a presentation that such a thing could be possible. That if I'm careful, if I do everything correctly, I may not have to sleep alone every night I spend on Pritchett 3. I consider the possibility that, with a warm body beside mine during the night, I might not have such awful nightmares all the time.

She uncrosses her arms and straightens her legs and I know she's going to leave. I want to come up with something to say that will keep her from going, something funny that would start a conversation or a question she'd have to take a while to answer. But I was too tired and it was too dark and she was already backing away.

"Goodnight," was all I said to her. She reached forward to pull my door closed, and just before it clicked shut and surrounded me in complete darkness, I barely heard her whisper back a reply:

"You too."


A/N: Thank you all for the wonderful, flattering comments. I really appreciate reviews–they let me know I'm doing it right and that you're enjoying it! Working on the next chapter just as soon as I wake up from a nap. ;p