“I don't like to talk about it.”
“I understand,” I say. I assume that if I room with this girl long enough, she'll open up eventually. Also I know there are plenty of things I prefer not to talk about.
Aurora relaxes her shoulders and regards me in an odd way. She's wary yet calm. “My last roommate was schizophrenic,” she informs me.
Out of all the issues I have I am thankful schizophrenia is not one of them. “I'm not.”
Aurora narrows her wide eyes. “That's what my last roommate said.” She holds out her left arm, palm up. “Then she bit me.” I lean toward her and squint. Two curved, raised pinkish colored scars decorate a portion of her forearm. One looks like a smile. The other looks like a frown.
I sit back. “I promise you, Aurora. I'm not schizophrenic.” I tuck my legs underneath my butt, keeping my eyes on her. She doesn't look reassured.
There's an awkward moment of silence between us where each of us observes one another. The girl on the cot across from me is small. Almost like a pixie. Petite with pale, freckled skin and mop of unruly red curls on top of her head. She looks young. Way too
young to be in a place like this. I break the quiet between us when I ask, “How old are you?”
She drops her gaze away from mine and begins writing words on the wall with her finger. “Twenty.”
“Twenty?” I'm shocked. She doesn't look a day over thirteen.
“I know. I know,” she says. She's still writing on the wall and I stare at her for a second, then give up on trying to figure out what she's writing. “People always tell me I don't look my age.”
“That's a good thing though.” I imagine when Aurora is fifty she'll look forty or possibly thirty five. I bet some women would kill for those kinds of genes.
She stops writing and glances at me from over her shoulder, a wild look in her deep brown eyes. “Is it?”
The nature of her question perplexes me so I shrug and change the subject. “How many roommates have you had?”
Her attention shifts from the wall to her hair and she tugs on the end of a few strands, picking at split ends. “Twelve.”
“Twelve?” I gasp out and my mouth falls open. “How long have you been here?”
She sighs. “Two and a half years.”
My heart breaks for her when she tells me this. I can't even fathom spending another day here let alone two years. This brings me to my next question. “Why?”
“Why, what?”
“Why are you still here? Shouldn't you be out by now?”
“No.” Her light voice shifts to a lower, darker one. “The staff doesn't think that they've fixed me yet.”
“Fixed you.” It bothers me that when the staff talks about fixing people, it reminds me of repairing a broken kitchen appliance.
“Yes,” she says. “Because they don't think I've found my mind yet.”
“I see.” I scoot all the way back on my cot until my back is flat against the wall. A shiver travels down my spine as the cold plaster seeps through the flimsy fabric of my hospital gown.
Aurora abandons her hair picking and hops up from her cot. Her abrupt action startles me and I clutch my chest to stifle my racing heart. She paces back and forth in front of me and watching her is making me dizzy. I close my eyes for a second and when I open them she's inches away from me.
Geez.
This girl is beyond strange.
She bites her bottom lip, tilts her head to the side, and a puzzled look spreads across her face. “What did they tell you when they brought you here?”
“That this place was going to help me get better,” I tell her. I don't mention why I was sent here in the first place.
I don't know what kind of reaction I expected from her, but it’s not laughter. Howling laughter. The kind of laughter where you have to clutch your side because you're laughing so hard that you can't breathe. “They're a bunch of liars,” she hoots out and slaps her right thigh. “To think that they're still giving people that line.”