a/n: I know I told you guys that this would be up last week, but I've had a bunch of work to do with school ending soon and then all this shit to do with prom and graduation and my dance recital and my musical coming up, so uh, yeah, I haven't had much time. But alas, here it is! Sorry it's not that long, but enjoy some socio!Jade anyway, because she's actually my favorite thing ever to write.
"monsters are real, and ghosts are too. they live inside us, and sometimes they win."
stephen king
- CONFIDENTIAL FILE -
NAME: West, Jadelyn August
AGE: 17
DIAGNOSIS: Antisocial Personality Disorder (Sociopath)
Jade grimaced as she walked out of the therapist's office; she was with Dr. Munroe today, the head therapist at Greenhaven. They always expected her to spill out her life story and tell them what was wrong, and give in. But she didn't, no, of course not, she never would.
/
"Jadelyn, would you please open up to me? I'm trying to help you," Dr. Munroe said gently.
"First of all, get my fucking name right. It's Jade, not Jadelyn. Okay Alice?" Jade replied in a mocking tone.
"You're not to call me Alice, Ms. West. You are to call me Dr. Munroe. And I am trying to help you! Why won't you let me?" she replied in a stern tone, sighing.
"Don't you fucking get it? I don't want your help. There's nothing wrong with me, but if you want to try and make it out like I'm crazy, then go ahead. I'll give you fucking crazy, I'll play the bad guy. But, see, I think the problem here is that you people don't know what you're doing. You're all fucking idiots who get paid to sit around and act pretentious and drug people and then have the audacity to act like you've cured them when really, all you've done is strip them of who they really are. Whatever, I don't give a shit."
"Watch your language, young lady! And you're ill. That's why you're here. And you cannot get out until you stop refusing our help!" Dr. Munroe said back, her voice rising in frustration.
Jade just snorted and crossed her arms, a scowl on her face for the rest of the session as she refused to speak another word.
/
As Jade walked down the corridor now, she couldn't help but laugh at how the therapists still tried. They kept trying and trying to make her better. They didn't realize that Jade didn't want to get better.
Jade walked into the TV room and glanced at everyone to see who was there. Andre, Tori, Robbie, Cat, Trina, and Sinjin. There was no sign of Beck.
She turned on her heel and walked out of the room. She glided down the hallway and knocked on room 3-C, but got no answer.
"Oh, Beckley!" Jade singsonged. When she still got no reply, she just opened the door and saw Beck sitting on his bed. "Why are you just sitting there?" she snapped at him. Beck glanced at her and huffed.
"Find me another fucking lighter. They took the last one you gave me, and I need to light something on fire or I'm going to go insane," he said angrily.
"I'm surprised," Jade started. "They didn't put you in isolation for lighting your sheets on fire."
"They injected shit in me," he told her.
"Medicine?" she asked. He nodded. "Don't let it happen again, unless you want to become part of the living dead."
"If they ever try to do that again, I'm lighting them on fire. I wanna see them burn," Beck said with a mischievous look in his eyes. Jade just rolled her eyes and walked out, closing the door behind her. When she turned around, she saw Tori walking into the bathroom, looking around. Jade grinned and followed her in.
"Hey Vega, throwing up some more food?" Jade asked, smirking. Tori's eyes widened and she turned around instantly.
"What? No!" Tori said quickly.
"Oh, give it up Victoria." Jade pushed Tori backwards, laughing (emptily, as always) as she watched her fall to the ground. "Oh my, Victoria! You're looking awfully frail. You should probably stop upchucking all those meals. You wouldn't want word to get out to our lovely therapist Alice, would you?" Tori glared at Jade as she got up.
"You don't know anything," she growled at Jade.
"Ah, au contraire, Vega. I know everything. And that's what scares you the most," Jade said, smugly.
"You think you're hot shit just because you're a sociopath, Jade. You're not! You're sick, and you need help."
Jade cocked her head to the side. "We're all sick. Isn't that why we're here? At least I'm not like you though. You think you're so fat when you're really only seventy-eight pounds. You can see your ribs sticking out! So if anyone here is sick, it's you. You're the one that's going to die. Because even though you tell the therapists that you're getting better and that you're trying to eat more, and that you haven't been throwing up, you're lying to them. At least that's not me. Sure, I may be a bitch, and I may not talk in therapy, but I don't throw up every chance I can get. No, that's you. You're not getting any better Vega. And because you're not getting any better and you're saying that you are, you are going to die."
"Fu- fuck you," Tori barely stuttered out before she ran into one of the stalls and puked. Jade laughed again.
"Aw, too bad," Jade started to say, and then finished in a mock posh British accent, similar to that of the therapist's, "Dr. Munroe isn't here to see this." Then she walked out of the bathroom, leaving Tori to dry heave into the toilet.
Jade, she wasn't always a sociopath.
When she was younger, she was kind and optimistic and lovely and happy.
At school, her teachers praised her constantly and looked at her fondly, with warm smiles on their faces. Whenever her parents would take her out somewhere, adults would coo over her and wistfully tell her parents that they wished their children were more like her.
She wore colorful sweaters and mismatching socks, she stuck perky stickers on everything and everyone, and you'd always see a smile on her face, no matter what. She was generally silly and naive, but she liked to make peoples' days and cheer people up that had a frown on their face because she hated when people were sad. She thought being unhappy or bitter or resentful or angry was a waste of time.
And then her mother committed suicide.
She came home from school one Wednesday when she was twelve with a big grin on her face and the math test she'd studied all the night before for in her hand with a big 100% written in red at the top. She bounced in anticipation of showing her mom, knowing how proud she would be when she saw it.
She called for her mom as she walked through the door and dropped her backpack by the bottom of the stairs. Her mom didn't answer, and the house was strangely quiet, and Jade thought it was peculiar, because her mom had never not been there when she got home from school.
"Mom?" she called again as she walked up the stairs and towards her parents' room, but she still didn't hear anything, and a small pit started forming in her stomach. Jade had watched horror movies and heard terrible stories from other kids and on the news and read about ghastly things in books, but nothing could have prepared her for what she saw when she opened her parents' door.
There, dangling from the ceiling fan by a frayed rope, was her mother. Her immaculate mother, with her perfectly curled blonde hair, who had only ever smelled like Chanel No. 5, who always wore fashionable outfits and high heels and dark red lipstick, was in front of her then, lifeless and devoid of any emotion, but still as chic and beautiful as ever.
Jade stood there for a moment, her eyes impossibly wide and her chapped lips parted slightly, and then she squeezed her eyes shut and fell to the ground and dropped her test, and she screamed as she and it floated down to the fluffy white carpet. She was still screaming when the phone and the doorbell rang, which was most undoubtedly her neighbors checking to see if everything was alright, which, no, everything was all wrong, wrong, wrong. She was still screaming when her dad came home and blinked his eyes and cursed and took a shaky breath and called the police because he didn't know what to do either. She was still screaming when the cops came and talked in hushed tones with her dad and two men in white came and cut the rope and put her mom on a stretcher and draped her in a sheet and carried her away.
She screamed for a long time after that, but it was lost to everyone after awhile, even herself, and then it faded into a harrowing, hallowing pain that felt a lot like screaming sounded, that clawed at her insides always, even now, even though she pushed all of her feelings away and wasn't supposed to feel anymore.
The day that her mom's funeral was held, after her mother was put in one of her best dresses (a long, pale green one that matched the color of her eyes before they became barren and dead) and was lowered into the dirty, cold ground, and everyone had said their condolences and went home with traces of tears on their cheeks, her dad punched her in the face, telling her that it was her fault that her mom had killed herself, and then stormed off to their den to drown out his thoughts with alcohol. Jade had held her face and sobbed, the dull ache in her cheek feeling a lot like the one in her heart.
After that night, her dad continued abusing her, his antics driven by drunken rage, and each attack left Jade even more bruised and battered and emotionally unstable than the previous one.
But then, Jade started to not care; she started to look forward to her dad beating her because she had started to believe that he was right, that it was her fault that her mom was gone, and that she deserved it when he hit her.
And eventually, she didn't even feel it. And she started wearing all black, because all that surrounded her was darkness, and she became fascinated with things like scissors, because they took away the pain; because they made her feel something for a little while.
But then her dad got remarried and she stabbed her new stepmother with one of the numerous pairs of scissors she owned (and would've succeeded in actually killing her without a trace, had her father not gotten home from work early) and he called her a "stupid, worthless bitch" and threw a glass vase at her head and left the court to deal with her.
The judge ruled that she would be sent to Greenhaven Psychiatric Hospital, and she laughed, hollowly, in his face.
In the first ten minutes she was there, the therapists realized what they were dealing with and immediately sent her to Building C, where she walked into the TV room and over to a big armchair that a small, mousy girl with oversized glasses (that she would later find out was named Fawn Liebowitz and had Borderline Personality Disorder) was sitting in, and growled at her, "Move. This is my chair now." The girl scrambled out of it and ran down the hallway, and Jade shrugged and sprawled across the armchair and closed her eyes, ignoring the looks of the other patients who were staring at her. She made it her vow, then, to make sure everyone would fear her and know she was in charge, and that she would know everyone and everything when it came to this stupid loony bin she was stuck in.
Later that night, she made a list in the large, brown, leather notebook she brought with her (the one that held all of her secrets within it) of all the psychotic people she was stuck with and whatever the fuck was wrong with them:
Fawn Liebowitz - Borderline Personality Disorder
Steven Carson - Depersonalization Disorder
Hope Quincy - Bipolar I Disorder
Hayley Ferguson - Anorexia Nervosa
Shawn Becker - Schizoid Personality Disorder
Jade West - fuck off
People came and gone - until she became surrounded with those that are there now - but she always, always stayed. She had escaped several times, but she would get bored and irritated with being on the run, and had to make sure no one was trying to take over her authority in her absence, so she would just carelessly stroll back in and act like nothing had happened.
She never told the therapists what they wanted, and never took her medicine. And she never slipped up; never gave in.
Jade West never admitted defeat.
Jade hated to sleep. Every time she fell into unconsciousness, she would always see her mother's swinging body, her flesh rotting away.
It was 1 AM and while Cat was asleep in the bed next to her, she was still wide awake. It was late at night like this, where Jade actually thought about her past, and let the silence drive her crazy. Sometimes, she liked to pretend that the darkness of the room cloaked around her and suffocated her. Sometimes, she liked to take her long nails and scratch her arms until she drew blood. The crimson color of the liquid had become her favorite and the feeling of the blood running down her arms thrilled her. It reminded her of when she used to be able to slide her cool, metal scissors across her thighs and stomach and forearms and anywhere else; it reminded her that she was worthless.
Tonight, however, she was snapped out of her thoughts when she heard screaming from out in the hallway.
"Give me my sleeping pills!" she heard through the wall.
She heard one of the guards, Mr. Daniels (just Ryder to Jade, because she refused to give anyone in Greenhaven any sort of power over her) respond, "We can't. You need to sleep without them", and Jade grinned. Trina was having another freak out, because the therapists told the guards to take her off of her sleeping pills, again. She crept out of her room to see what was happening.
"Do you know what I dream about?" Trina growled. "I dream about a man with no face who finds me, no matter where I hide. And he finds everyone close to me too. Then he kills each of them in a different way, one by one. He'll behead one. He'll throw one in an oven and lock the oven, and then turn it up to full heat. He'll gouge the eyeballs out another one with his thumbs. And me? He takes me, and puts me in a machine that twists my body around around until everything breaks. And I can feel it. So don't you dare tell me that I need to sleep without sleeping pills. You have no idea what it feels like to feel like every bone in your body is breaking!" Trina started flailing around, trying to get them away from her. The guards grabbed her and dragged her back into her room, shutting the door behind them and muffling her yells.
Jade was intrigued by what she heard about Trina's nightmares, and wrote down the new information she learned about them in her journal on the page marked TRINA. She smirked while she got her black nailpolish and painted her nails black again, and then filed them. Then, she dug her nails into her arms and watched the blood pool out from behind the scratches.
It was only after the blood dried that she realized that she hadn't felt any pain.