A/N: okay, next chappie (woot!). I just want to say as a heads up that all information concerning western psyche is second hand, so there is a great and overriding possibility that none of it is accurate, and I borrowed the privileges system from the book "Girl Interrupted" (good movie, but better book). Wow that's a long sentence. Anyway, thank you so much for reviewing the last chapter, and enjoy!

Ten: Roger

By the time we find East Village it's midnight and the air has turned cold. I'm exhausted from driving, so we stop at a McDonalds and buy some burnt coffee. It may taste funky, but it keeps me going. I don't know how we're going to get to Pittsburgh. We've only got three dollars and twenty seven cents when we pull all our money, plus the change from between the cracks in the seats of the car.

We find the Land of Smiles by stopping every five minutes and asking people where it is. Almost everyone knows, but no one gives very good directions and we keep getting lost. I want to scream and hit someone with one of the windshield wipers, but it wouldn't be such a hot idea.

Then, at long LONG last, we find it. It's this moldy little hotel with a flickery neon sign in a window reading LAND OF SMIL S OTEL. Nice place. Really four star.

I hear Mark suck in his breath and glance out his window. There's a girl standing in the doorway under the stuttering red glow of the neon sign, smoking a cigarette. She looks like a fallen angel, bathed in this uncanny red light. She doesn't have eyes, just black smudges, her mouth is a wide gash across her face. She's dressed oddly; ripped fishnets under cut off shorts, and a huge black plaid men's shirt over a black tank top. She's got red sandals on her feet, but not the normal kind. They're those plastic things that you can get at the 7-11 for fifty cents. Jellies. I've never seen anyone over the age of seven wearing jellies.

Mark opens the door and staggers out of the car before it's stopped moving completely. He moves forward in three odd, loping steps before the falls to his knees. Then he's right back up again, moving toward her, grabbing her up in a tight hug. She hugs him just as hard, she's dropped her cigarette, and it glows for a moment on the pavement before putting itself out.

After what seems like forever they break apart and walk toward the car. Laura hasn't let go of Mark's hand and it makes getting into the car hard. They slide into the back seat and somehow Mark manages to squeeze between the two front seats and to drop into the passenger's side without letting go of her hand once.

"Slick," I say and he grins shakily. There's a new smell in the car. Thick and spicy and almost cloyingly sweet, like cheep mall incense and cigarettes. Must be Laura. She pokes her head between the seats and smiles. One of her front teeth is crooked. It leans over and against the other like a drunk slumped against a table leg.

"Who're you?" she asks. Her accent is odd, a little like Mark's, but more defined.

"I'm Roger. Roger Davis."

"Well I'm Laura. Laura Johnson." Live her voice is just the same, all smoke and air. She brushes her hair behind her ear and I notice that her nails are bitten down to the quick. "Home, James." She says, and pats me on the head like a good doggy.

It's only when we hit the turn pike that I stop holding my breath. I don't know what I was waiting for. Maybe it's just the city air that makes me feel as if something big is bearing down on my head. Some amazing catalyst. New York is full of these imaginary numbers.

"How did you do it?" asks Mark.

Laura laughs, "I got grounds, if you'd believe it!"

Mark snorts, "You got grounds?"

It's like they're speaking in code or something. "What are grounds?" I ask.

"There's this hierarchy in Loony Bins, right?" says Mark. "You start out when you get there with zero privileges. You can only go as far as the common room and your bedroom. One up from that is one to ones. That's when you have a nurse following you around like some fucking shadow. One to ones is worse than zero privileges. After one to ones there's one to twos. Two patients, one nurse. Then it's group, one nurse to about five patients. After group is grounds. Grounds is when you can go anywhere in the hospital just a long as you have a pass. After grounds is town. If you get town (but no one does) you can leave the hospital and go anywhere you want, but you have to tell the head nurse where you're going. When you get there you have to call. You also have to call before you leave."

I nod. "Sounds suffocating."

"Well that's why I had to get out," says Laura. She pulls out a smoke and starts packing it. I've never seen someone pack only one cigarette at a time.

"I still don't get how you did it," says Mark.

"I climbed out the window in the playroom and slid down the drain pipe," she says, taking a long drag.

"Bullshit." Laughs Mark, "It's three floors up."

"Well I don't know what else to tell you."

"The truth would be nice."

"The truth's so boring though!" she protests, "I like this version better."

"Laura......"

"Oh fine ! Okay, in all honesty I just walked out the front door. I was in street clothes, so no one questioned me. I just told the new nurse that I had towns and the idiot let me walk right out. She even opened my locker and gave me my old clothes and stuff. I love interns." She grins triumphantly at us. For a second, I feel almost bad about taking her back to Western.

"Hey, turn up the radio. I love this song!" says Laura. Mark cranks up the volume and "Angel is the Centerfold" comes blaring out of the speakers.

THOSE SOFT FUZZY SWEATERS, TOO MAGICAL TO TOUCH/ TO SEE HER IN THAT NEGLIGEE IS REALLY JUST TOO MUCH/ MY BLOOD RUNS COLD/ MY MEMORY HAS JUST BEEN SOLD/ MY ANGEL IS THE CENTERFOLD (ANGEL IS THE CENTERFOLD)/ NA NA NANA NA NA NANANA NANANA NA NA

For a second I feel normal again. I'm not driving my best friend's psycho ex-girlfriend back to the funny farm. I'm just a normal kid on a road trip with his friends (one of whom is crazy).

I just can't seem to get that part of it out of my head. As much as I try, it's always there, like a bad smell. I look at Laura and all I can think is 'crazy crazy crazy! Sheeeeee's a psycho!'. It was like that when Mark first told me he had tried to off himself. I never let on, but for weeks and weeks every time I looked at him all I could think was 'he tried to kill himself'. It doesn't happen anymore, thank God. It's like time has worn away the rough edges on that part of his past, and it's just become another thing that makes Mark who he is.

Half way home we stop at a 7-11 so Laura can go to the bathroom. Mark and I sit in the dark car, waiting for her and staring up at Wendy's giant head, smiling innocently down at us from across the street, forever twelve and freckled. She's still old enough to wear pigtails without it being kinky and she always will be. I'm not sure if this is a blessing or a curse or if I should stop thinking about it because she is, after all, a sign. She is not a real person she's a giant neon bust.

"What are you thinking?" asks Mark. I can't bear to tell him about my deep philosophical thoughts concerning Wendy so I say instead,

"I'm wondering how we'll get to Pittsburgh and back on only three dollars and twenty seven cents."

"Pittsburgh? Why the hell would we go there?" he asks, sounding genuinely puzzled.

"Because, in case you'd forgotten, that's where Western Psyche is." I say.

"No fucking way." Says Mark firmly.

"What?" Now I'm the one who's puzzled. Didn't we agree on this?

"We can't take her back there, she just got out!" he cries.

"She didn't get out, Mark, she escaped. This implies (at least to me) that she needs to go back because the de-crazy-fication process isn't quite finished yet." What is this boy thinking? I thought Mark was the sensible one here.

"We're not taking her back," he says. I've never heard him talk like this before. His voice has gone totally cold. He's angry, I realize. He's angrier at me than he's ever been and it's scary.

"Well then where exactly is she going to stay? I don't think your parents will take too kindly to a girl crashing in your bedroom." I point out.

"No, but your parents won't care," he says. I'm so relieved that he isn't angry that the full meaning of what he's said hasn't sunk in yet. I'm still not too hot for this new plan, but what can I do? The majority vote is against me (I'm assuming that Laura won't want to go back, though if she did I'd be more than happy to oblige her).

"Wait a sec, my house?" I blurt the second my brain processes what he's said. "No way!"

"Well where else can she stay? It's only for a night, two at the most. All she needs is a bus ticket to Vermont."

"Vermont? What's in Vermont?" I ask.

"Her grandma. She told me over the phone that she was going to stay with her." He says.

"Why didn't she just do that in the first place?" I ask.

Mark shrugs. "She said she wanted to stay in New York at first, but she vetoed that plan pretty quick. New York's too rough for her, I guess."

I think about that for a while. I'm still trying to decide if everything or nothing seems too rough for Laura when she slides back into the car. She tosses pre-packaged doughnuts at the backs of our heads.

"Sustinence." She says.

"You don't have any money," I say, right before I start feeling like a big moron. "They wanted to be free. I liberated them." She munches on a doughnut and grins at us.

I have to wonder why I can't stop being surprised by this girl. I'd thought I was so experienced. I thought that just because I went to a couple of lame suburban house parties, slept with some girls, and gotten high that I was some kind of bad ass. And now here I am, driving along with this strange girl and she keeps throwing me for a loop. I can't predict what will happen next. I don't like Laura, she has this irritating proprietary air when it comes to Mark. She acts like she has copyright on him or something. Plus I'm scared of her. I'm scared of her craziness. Of her determination to stop herself short. Of the self righteous way she parades the fact that she tried to kill herself so many times. She wears it like a badge of honor and holds it over my head constantly. Mark measures up because he tried to do the same thing, but she looks at me as some kind of puppy, someone ignorant about everything and not worth her respect because I didn't—and never will—do what she did.

Well fuck her. I'm only doing this for Mark. I'm only letting her stay at my house for tonight because Mark likes her so much (though why I'll never know).

I spend the rest of the ride seething in a rising tide of irritation. I really really don't like this girl. More than that, I don't trust her.

She just won't stop moving around in the back seat. First she kicks off her shoes. Then she lies on her back and sticks her feet in the air and walks them back and forth across the ceiling. Then she's sitting up again, reaching between Mark and me to crank up the radio and singing along at the top of her lungs. Then she opens her window and sticks her head out. After that she shrugs off her over shirt and snakes her arms around Mark's neck, from behind. She grabs one of his hands and starts gnawing on the fingernails and he just lets her. It's disgusting!

"What the hell are you....." I never get a chance to finish because it's then that I see her arms.

Her arms ! God, at first I thought that the marks were just shadows cast by the little droplets of water on the windshield, but that goes out the window pretty quickly. It's the smiley face that catches my eye. It grins cheekily from her left shoulder, mocking me with its long eyes. It's a soft brown, like a bizarre birthmark. It's no shadow, but maybe it's just henna or something. But then I see more of them. Dozens of little smiley faces beaming up from her arms. A little manic army on the edge of hysterical giggles. Most of them are that same soft, fawn brown like large beauty marks but some are shiny and pink or slightly scabby. It hits me like a sledgehammer, they aren't henna, they're burns . She's burned little smiley faces into her arms. She lifts her outside arm to brush a lock of hair out of her eyes and I get a view of the inside of her right arm. It's riddled with long, thin slash marks. Most are horizontal or diagonal but there's one, long shiny red one that runs from wrist to elbow. It's like the big mamma of scars, and the others are its babies. The scars also have varying degrees of freshness. Some are faded to brownish-pink. Others are scabby or shockingly red and fresh. How did she get away with it? How could she do that in a place where she's supposed to be kept safe from all that? Where she's supposed to be stopped?

Laura catches me staring and grins savagely, "I call it Bubba," she says, nodding at the scar on her right arm. "And this is Esther." She raises her left arm and turns it so I can see a matching scar there.

"Shut up, Laura." Says Mark quietly. Laura stares at him for a long moment before sliding her arms away from him and huddling in the back seat.

"Turn the music up!" she says, after a moment. The song is already roaring out of the speakers, but Mark turns it up as far as it will go. "BAM BAM BAMBAM BA-BAM BAM BAMBAM! I WANNA BE SEDATED!" she screams along with the Ramones.

"You're such a stupid fucker, Mark." She says after a moment.

"I know," he says. "I'm going to stay with my grandma, Mark. With my fucking grandma. Understand? My fucking grandma!" she's screaming now.

"I understand," he says, calm as ever. How can he be so calm?

"No you don't! You don't understand! The fucking world's got you by the fucking balls! You're treating me like they do! You're a stupid fucker, Mark! I hate you!" she lunges forward and grabs his hair. "Stupid fucker!"

"We're taking you to your grandma, Laura." He says, his voice shaking slightly. "Calm down."

"Don't tell me to fucking calm down! Don't tell me! Don't tell me anything! I want out. I want to get out of the car. Stop the car, Roger." She lets go of Mark's hair and slumps down in the back seat.

"Don't stop the car." Mark pleads. "Please, man."

I nod. I'm not stopping the car.

"You were right. Can we get there on three twenty seven?" I look over at him. It's breaking his heart to say it. I can tell. It's like earlier, in the kitchen. He looks like he's going to shatter at any minute.

"I don't know. I just don't know. How many toll booths are we going to go through?" my voice is shaking. I wish it wouldn't. I want to sound strong for him.

He shakes his head. "Too many. We'll call at the next gas station."

"Call who?" I ask. "Her parents?"

"The cops," he says softly, "I don't know her home number. We'll call the cops and they can take her home."

I nod again. We ride in silence, punctuated by swearing from Laura in the back seat. I turn into the first gas station I see.

"Do you want me to do it?" I ask. He nods, tight lipped and I wonder how much this is costing him.

I feed the quarters into the pay phone and dial 9-1-1.

"What is the nature of your emergency?" asks the operator.

"I—I don't know exactly. My friend is sick. She needs to go back to the hospital. She ran away......I just don't know what to call it. She's—she's crazy, I guess. She needs to go back to the hospital."

"What is your location?"

"A gas station. Exxon. In.....somewhere between Scarsdale and New York City."

She asks me for land marks, how many hours from the city. I tell her as best I can and then all that's left to do is wait.

I sit in the car next to Mark. Laura is huddled in the back, staring at nothing.

"I hate you," she says in a small voice.

"You promised, Laura." Says Mark, just as quietly. "You swore you wouldn't do it anymore. You promised ."

We don't talk again till the cops come. Then it's a million questions, bright lights, squawking radios, too much too much. Someone calls our parents. A state trooper gives us a ride home.

"We did the right thing, right?" whispers Mark when the pull up in front of his house. "Right?"

"Right," I say. But in all honesty, I don't really know either.