Milo's Story: Stories from The Gateway: Companion tales to The Gateway Trilogy (2 page)

A sudden scraping of chairs against the linoleum signaled the end of the session, to which I had been paying zero attention. I vacated my seat just in time for a large, surly-looking girl to pull it out from under me and carry it to the stack in the corner.

“So Milo, that’s the general format of our group sessions,” Dr. Mulligan said with a smile that made her look like she had twice as many teeth as a normal person. “Topics are fairly patient-led, and you should feel free to jump in any time that you have something you would like to add. Do you have any questions that I can answer for you?”

“Uh, no, thanks,” I said, attempting to smile back. “It seems pretty straightforward. I’ve been to my fair share of these before. It was pretty much what I expected.”

“Very good,” she said, smiling again, and then bounced off to oversee the stacking of the chairs.

“Hey. It’s Milo, right?”

The girl had approached me so quietly that I had no idea she was there, and took an involuntary step back from her.

“Yeah. Hannah?”

She smiled at me too, a small and slightly rueful expression. “I just wanted to apologize for earlier. I didn’t mean to be in your room when you got there. It was just a misunderstanding.”

“Yeah, whatever. No harm, no foul,” I said.

“Have they found you another one yet?”

“Another what?”

She blinked. “Another room.”

I laughed. “Why would they find me another room?” Was it my imagination, or did she actually turn even paler as I watched her?

“I told you to ask the nurses for another room,” she said, and there was definitely a slightly panicked edge to her voice.

I laughed again, though it was only my nerves doing the laughing. “I don’t even know who you are. And I doubt the nurses would give me another room just because you told me I needed one. Besides, what’s wrong with the one I have? You know, besides the fact that it’s here in this godforsaken hellhole?”

I’d meant the last bit as a joke, but she didn’t even crack a smile. She opened her mouth and closed it again, picking at a stray thread dangling from the tattered cuff of her oversized sweater. She dropped her eyes to the floor.

“I just… I really think you might be… more comfortable in another room, that’s all,” Hannah said quietly.

“Is that all?” I asked.

She looked me in the eyes just long enough to take my breath away with something nebulous and desperate in her expression, but then she turned and left without another word.

“You’ve got the Ballard girl onto you, huh?” A scrawny pimpled kid with Coke-bottle glasses right out of a cartoon sidled up to me as I watched her walk away.

“Onto me? What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“That chick is scary. Messed up,” the kid shook his head. “I know you just got here, but I’d keep my distance if I were you.”

“Great, I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “Just out of curiosity, is there any particular reason I should take your advice, seeing as you could just as easily be the messed up one around here?”

The kid shrugged. “Guess not. Just thought I’d warn you, since she’s taken an interest. I wouldn’t want her interested in me.”

He walked away. His words didn’t make me any more nervous than I already was. He hadn’t told me anything I hadn’t guessed about Hannah the second I’d laid eyes on her. Besides, from what little I caught of his brief, almost bragging little monologue during the group session, I had him pegged as a Look-At-Me, and so I pretty much dismissed anything that came out of his mouth as attention-seeking bullshit.

Back in the doorway of my room, I looked around. It was small, non-descript, and slightly depressing. There was a bed, a desk, and a closet, all empty. The sight of the bars through the dusty window panes was disturbing, but I’d known they’d be there. Even though the sunlight streamed in between them, they pulled a trigger in my head, a sort of mild claustrophobia, but I shook it off. My own stuff was still packed away in two bags where I’d tossed them into the middle of the floor. I tried to find something—anything—that might explain why I would want a different room, and then laughed out loud at myself. After all this time, I couldn’t believe I was actually taking a Fox seriously.

~

Okay, so even the best of us have to eat our words at some point or another, and mine became a not-so-tasty midnight snack that evening—well, at 12:27, to be exact. There I was, in the middle of some deep and glorious beauty sleep, and then suddenly, without understanding why, I was sitting straight up in my bed, heart pounding, palms sweating, and with a panic of unknown origin coursing through my body.

I stared wildly around the room. Nothing. There was nothing out of place. For good measure, even though I knew it was childish, I looked under the bed, in the closet, and through the bars of the window, down onto the pitch-black yard below. No proverbial monsters. Everything was quiet and still. I slumped back onto my pillow, which smelled slightly mildewy, and took a deep, shaky breath. I must have been having a dream I couldn’t remember, or else some noise had woken me. This place was one big mystery, full of unfamiliar sounds and smells and sights that were bound to be unsettling until I got used to them, and usually I was out the door again before that could even happen. I reasoned that it had nothing to do with the fact that a strange girl with strange eyes thought there was something wrong with my room. Yeah, that wasn’t it.

A small sound echoed in the hallway outside. I slid back off of my bed and pressed my face to the tiny window in my door. The girl was there, sitting with her knees pulled up to her chin, nodding off with her back pressed to the wall directly opposite my door. The sight of her made my pulse race again. What the hell was she doing here, sitting outside my room like some sort of stalker?

I reached down and checked my door, but it was locked, so I didn’t think there was any way she could have gotten inside. At the little clicking sound of the jiggling handle, her head jerked up and her eyes flew open. Before I could pull away from the window, she caught sight of my face. We stared at each other for a long, tense moment. Then she just raised a hand and flicked it in a casual wave, before cupping it back over her knee and resuming her silent vigil. Her expression betrayed not a bit of embarrassment or any other emotion that should have accompanied being caught on such a creepy little stakeout; she appeared totally at ease.

I knew there was a button near my bed that I could activate to alert a staff member, but for some reason, I felt no desire to push it. Instead, returning her wave awkwardly, I shuffled over to my bed and lay back down. I never heard anything else from the hallway, and I never got back up to check if she was still there; somehow, I knew she was. It was a long time before I fell asleep again.

The next morning when I woke up, I ran to the window like a kid at Christmas to see if Hannah was still there, but she was gone. I felt weirdly sad about it, though I couldn’t begin to explain to myself why that might be. It didn’t actually make any sense. Shouldn’t I be relieved that she was gone?

I spent way too much time picking out what to wear, but something about the process made me feel like myself; after all, if I didn’t care, then what the hell was the point of it all anyway? No one else would appreciate that I looked fabulous, but at least I would, and that was something I could hold onto in a place where they just keep ripping shit away from you.

It took two tries to find the cafeteria, a hideous blend of ‘70’s linoleum floors, fluorescent lighting, and burnt orange plastic furniture that made me wish I’d stayed lost. I checked in with the unsmiling woman by the door, signing in and putting on a nametag, the final touch of indignity to my carefully chosen ensemble. I searched the sign in sheet for Hannah’s name, but it wasn’t on the page I could see. By the time I emerged from the buffet line with my tray of tasteless cafeteria food, there were no empty tables. I started scanning the room for the emptiest one I could find, but stopped when I saw I was being flagged down.

The kid with the coke-bottle glasses was waving energetically at me from a table he was sharing with three other kids. I considered ignoring him, but quite honestly, I was intrigued. I mean, it’s always nice not to be the kid in the corner eating by yourself, even if it meant sharing your table with a bunch of freaks in a mental facility. As the new kid, I could easily be considered the freak among freaks, so rather than encourage that image, I headed for the table and sat down.

“Milo, right?”

“Yeah. Sorry, I don’t actually remember…”

“Trevor,” the kid with the glasses said. Then he pointed everyone out in turn. “Jacob, Colleen, and Meghan.”

“Hey,” I said in a general vague greeting. They all nodded back, saying nothing.

“So, we wanted to know what happened last night,” Trevor said, leaning towards me conspiratorially.

“Sorry, Trevor, you’re going to have to be a little more specific,” I said, mutilating the top of a little cardboard carton of milk so that I could pour it onto my corn flakes. “It was a pretty wild and crazy night. Can you narrow it down?”

Trevor shared an excited look with the others. “Really?”

I snorted. “No, not really. Are you kidding me? What the hell is there to do in here? I read some magazines and fell asleep.”

I watched all four eager faces deflate around me. “Oh,” Trevor said. “We’d heard you were the reason Hannah was back in solitary.”

My spoon paused en route to my mouth. “What do you mean?”

“Hannah Ballard was moved out of the girls’ hall in the middle of the night,” the girl named Meghan said. She had bleached blonde hair grown out at the dark roots and had drawn an elaborate design of hearts, stars, and flowers all over her own left hand with a black pen. “We heard her yelling and screaming down the hallway when the nurses dragged her out at like, three in the morning.”

“Her roommate Carley said she was caught sneaking back in, and that she’d been down on the boys’ floor to see you, and she got caught in your room,” said the other girl, named Colleen. She had a very round, freckled face that was lit with the manic sort of glow only a really juicy rumor could ignite in some people.

The boy named Jacob laughed quietly. “You are such an idiot.”

Colleen turned an affronted look on Jacob. “What? It could be true! Why would Carley say it if it wasn’t true?”

Jacob just shook his head and smirked at me with an appraising glance. He’d clearly taken one look at me and decided there was no way I was the type who would sneak girls into my room. I took one look at him and decided he was a hideous bitch.

Colleen was still eyeing me suspiciously, with a half-smile. “Are you saying that she wasn’t down in your room last night?”

I shook my head. “No, she wasn’t in my room,” I said, which was technically true. “So where is Hannah now?”

“Well, we call it solitary, you know, like in prison movies,” Trevor said. “The staff calls it re-entry therapy. Basically she’s had all of her privileges and social activities revoked until they decide she’s learned her lesson. And they took her out of her regular room and put her in one of the rooms on the behavioral hall.”

“That sounds like it sucks,” I said, trying to sound off-hand.

“It does,” Colleen said. “That’s kind of the point. It’s how they stop people from breaking the rules.”

“Have any of you ever had to do it?” I asked.

“I did once, when I first got here,” Jacob said. “They said I was ‘resistant in my therapy settings.’ You throw one chair at a doctor and they get all defensive.”

Meghan giggled, staring soppily at Jacob like he was the most badass, and therefore most attractive, thing she’d ever seen. I could actually see her future clichéd relationship struggles playing out across the cafeteria table, and it was all I could do not to laugh out loud with my mouth full of cornflakes. Hitch your wagon to a star, sweetie.

“So, how long until they let her back into her regular routine?” I asked, trying to sound casual about it. The truth was that I was much more interested in what was happening with Hannah than I had any logical reason to be.

Trevor shrugged unconcernedly. “A few days, probably, as long as she cooperates with the restrictions they put on her. She’s been in there a lot, but it’s never been for very long.”

“Yeah, I’d say she’s pretty good at it by now,” Colleen said.

“So what’s the deal with her, anyway?” I asked.

“You mean what is she in for?” Trevor asked, again with the prison terminology.

“If you want to put it like that, yes.”

All four of them looked at each other in a darkly significant sort of way, and I immediately regretted asking them, sure I was now going to get the hallway gossip version of the truth, which, most of the time, barely resembled the truth at all.

“She hallucinates,” Meghan said at last. “Like, all the time. Voices and people that aren’t there. She’s been in institutions all over the state her entire life.”

“They bring in special doctors just to see her. Carley says she’s been on every med they can throw at her, and nothing works,” Colleen added.

“Yeah, well, Carley is a chemistry experiment herself,” Jacob said. “But she’s right, Hannah’s running out of options here. They’re going to move her soon, I bet. Someplace higher security. Someplace permanent.”