Open Mind: Chapter Thirteen

The next morning, I was surprised to find myself counting down the hours until my tutoring session with Annie. As I watched the rising of the sun intensify through the slits of light that danced across my white concrete walls, I listened to the tape of my father’s singing until the battery ran out. I panicked as I considered the very real possibility that the battery that the Walkman used may no longer be in production, but as I popped the back off of the device, I was relieved to find a relatively new pair of AA batteries in the slot.

It wasn’t that the thought of discussing Emily Dickinson interested me, or that Annie had made for particularly fun afternoons, but it was the thought of it being something different from my daily routine. I could feel the suffocating procedure of each day threatening to drive me crazy, but I took our session together as an opportunity to find something to look forward to.

During group therapy that morning, I flipped through the pages of the Dickinson book, trying my best to refresh my memory on the poems and writings that Annie had selected for me. This frustrated Mrs. Sherill, who had begrudgingly agreed to lead that morning’s session.

“Skylar,” she snapped. She tapped her blue dry-erase marker against the whiteboard threateningly. She waited until I pulled my eyes from the book to continue. “The point of morning group is to be a part of the group. If you’re reading a book, you are not a part of the group.”

“I was … researching,” I said. A few in the group snickered.

“For group?”

“Of course, Mrs. Sherill.”

Mrs. Sherill sighed. “Then by all means, Miss Miller, enlighten us all to what Miss Dickinson had to say on today’s subject.”

“And the subject today would be…?” I asked. Mrs. Sherill rapped on the board to draw my attention to the word “Connection” scribbled in some bastardization of cursive letters. What a terrible word choice for Emily.

“Okay, I was bluffing,” I admitted. “This has nothing to do with connections.”

“Are you sure about that?” Mrs. Sherill said. “I had to read and study Dickinson quite a bit in college, and I’m pretty sure her life and her writing has a lot to say about connections.”

“She lived by herself, basically. She lived like she died; bitter and alone.”

“Is that what you’ve taken away from all that?” Mrs. Sherill asked, gesturing towards the book. “Connection is about more than just the people in our life. Dickinson talked a lot about nature, did she not?”

“When she wasn’t whining about death, yeah.”

“A connection to nature is still a connection. Some people struggle to connect with other people. Dickinson was one of those people. And that’s okay. It’s okay to find it difficult to connect. But we have to. Otherwise we will end up … we will end up what, Skylar?” Mrs. Sherill gestured to me with her marker, encouraging me to finish the thought.

I sighed, “bitter and alone.”

“Exactly. Bitter and alone. And life is hard enough as it is. All of you have your own struggles and challenges -- you shouldn’t have to fight alone. Not when there are all these other fine folks out here looking to connect, too.”

I turned away from Mrs. Sherill. The spotlight she’d placed on me was beginning to burn hot, and I wanted to shrink away from it. I could feel the other residents looking at me and judging -- as if they didn’t have their own problems to worry about. I never claimed to be without my own faults. And I had committed the worst adolescent crime of all.

I had no friends.

You could be a lot of things as a kid that were acceptable, if just a bit weird. You could smell. You could have a lisp. You could eat worms. I mean, you might not win Prom Queen with a mouth full of worm guts -- unless it were some terrible Carrie situation -- but you could at least blend in if you had a couple creepy-crawly connoisseurs to call your friends. Without friends, you are vulnerable. Exposed.

And that’s where I’d found myself. When I was younger, Jacky was a shield. A scrawny, greasy shield -- but a shield nonetheless. He was someone who could shoulder the brunt of the insults from the other girls; someone to reassure me that my breath didn’t really smell like pig farts or that my butt didn’t actually look like a baby’s diaper. But ever since I’d moved here, I had no one like that.

And it was my fault.

“What do you think, Skylar,” Mrs. Sherill asked.

“What I think,” I said, slowly at first but growing in speed and intensity like a snowball tumbling down a hill, “is who the hell would want to hang out with Emily Let’s Plan My Funeral On A First Date Dickinson? She didn’t make connections with nature, like beetles on a stump or some shit, because she was enlightened -- a beetle is likely the only living creature that would tolerate a nonstop barrage of musings on the meaning of life and death. No, she didn’t make connections because she didn’t want to.”

“Dickinson actually attended school and had friends when she was younger, you know. She was in and out of school, granted. But she went. But do you know what changed?”

A chorus of wrong answers erupted from the group:

“A boy broke up with her?”

“She failed a class?”

“She got grounded?”

I let the others give their answers before I provided the answer that I knew Mrs. Sherill was hunting for -- the point of her whole meandering group session.

“People close to her died.”

“Bingo,” Mrs. Sherill said with a grin. “Those connections that she had made were severed. First, her cousin, Sophia. Then, her principal and friend, Leon. Family friend Mr. Newton. And on and on. Each new connection ending in premature death.”

“No wonder she was obsessed,” said one of the girls in the group. Mrs. Sherill nodded in agreement. “I mean, to have all of your friends just up and die like that.”

“But she had a choice, didn’t she?” Mrs. Sherill argued. “She made the choice to lock herself away in her house rather than deal with her friends dying.”

“Maybe she didn’t choose at all,” I said meekly. “Maybe she really just couldn’t make friends after all that.”

“I guess we will never really know,” Mrs. Sherill sighed. “Her poems and letters were published after she’d already died. She didn’t really talk to anyone as an adult-- what we know of her we know from what others had said about her, and what she had written about in her poems and letters. Maybe she didn’t want to move on, or maybe she didn’t want to. Either way, she ended up in that big old house all alone in the end.”

I saw the sea of faces turn towards the doorway, and I followed them to find Annie standing there. She smiled nervously as the attention shifted to her. She muttered a hushed apology for interrupting and backed away from the doorway.

“And on that happy note,” Mrs. Sherill said with a laugh, “it is time for you all to head back to your rooms for chores.”

I rose to my feet and approached Annie as Mrs. Sherill threatened the “Dickinson” treatment for the afternoon for anyone who refused to do chores. I shuddered to think what that actually meant.

“I’ve never seen a group therapy session turn into a high school study session like that before,” Annie joked.

“Killing two birds with one sad stone,” I responded. “It actually did help, in a weird way.”

“Good,” Annie cheered. “Let’s get to it then.”

I walked alongside her as we made our way back to Dr. Lau’s office. It felt strange keeping a slower pace in order to walk alongside Annie. She seemed to notice my hesitation and spoke up.

“You can walk ahead of me, you know,” she said. There was no malice or hurt in her voice. She said it as plainly as possible. “You don’t have to walk next to me like that.”

“I want to,” I argued. “Besides, we are going to the same place. What’s the rush?”

She rolled her eyes at me playfully and kept her pace. The halls were quiet -- an rare phenomenon that a person can never really appreciate until they’ve been surrounded but nothing but noise for weeks. The administrative wing of the center was more abuzz than the residential side -- even more rare.

“Do you know what’s going on today?” I asked the question in the hopes that Anne might have some insight, as the one person my age with a foot in the administrative side.

“I think it’s a treatment meeting,” she responded as she fumbled with her keys to unlock Dr. Lau’s office door. “Aunt Gemma is here, and she only ever comes on her days off if she has to show up for a treatment meeting.”

“I’m her only patient, right?”

“As far as I know. She doesn’t talk much with me about that kind of stuff usually.” The lock finally clicked and we walked inside. The desk was even more of a mess than usual. It was clear that Dr. Lau had been scrambling to collect all of the documents that she needed for the meeting.

Annie and I settled into our familiar routine; I sat with my Dickinson book and filled out a worksheet while Annie played a game on her Nintendo DS. I was desperate to escape from Emily’s world, and so I took a chance and tried to strike up conversation with Annie.

“What are you playing?”

“A game,” she said, as she did the last time I asked.

“What game?”

“Monster Hunter.”

“Cool, cool,” I said awkwardly. I had no idea what that was and I didn’t want to burden her with explaining to me in the same way my mother would always ask me. “I’ve never played it.”

“It’s pretty fun. You hunt monsters.”

“That checks out.”

“Do you play any games,” she asked.

“Yeah, I do. I’m kind of more of a casual gamer though. My dad always liked playing games with me when I was younger, and it kind of lost it’s magic after he was gone.”

“I could see that.” Annie’s eyes never lifted from the screen, even when she gave me instructions or chastised me for not paying attention. I noticed right away that she rarely made eye contact, even in our brief conversations together, so this wasn’t anything unusual. But there was something oddly satisfying about mentioning my father without someone instantly apologizing or pouring their sympathies into me like I was some sort of sadness sponge. “I still can’t eat hotpot without thinking about how my mom used to make it. It just doesn’t hit the same, you know? The spice is all wrong and nothing really compares to it.”

“I didn’t realize that your mom was…”

“Dead? Yeah, there’s a reason I live with my aunt,” she deadpanned. It caught me off-guard, and the look on my face made Annie recoil and stutter when she pulled her stare away from the screen. She closed the DS with a clap. “I’m sorry, that was rude. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“It’s okay. It’s really a taste of my own medicine, I think.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can be a little short with my mom sometimes,” I admitted. “Sometimes she deserves it, sometimes she catches me at the wrong time, and sometimes I just want her to go away, so I say hateful things.”

“Well, for the record, I’m not trying to make you go away,” Annie said with a weak smile. “And honestly, the game was making me mad anyways.”

“You get stuck?” I chuckled.

“Oh yeah, nothing new,” she sighed. “But I can’t help it. It drives me crazy when I can’t get past a level. I’ll just keep playing and playing until I beat it.”

“Not me,” I scoffed, setting the book down. “There was a time when I was playing a game and I could not get past one particular boss. It was some kind of ninja woman who would hide in the shadows and you had to anticipate her attacks, and no matter how many times I tried, she always beat me. She had this obnoxious cackle that made it even worse, like she was mocking me every time she got an attack in. I got so frustrated with the stupid game that I snapped the whole disc in half.”

“Yeah, K-Slayer was a really tough fight. It’s probably good that you quit while you were ahead, because she comes back later in the game, and it’s so much worse the second time.”

“I didn’t think anyone else actually played Shinigami Shinobi around here other than me,” I laughed. “I only played the first one, of course.”

“I don’t have the newest one, but I do have the first three. You should totally come over once you’re discharged and we can play them together.” Annie shot me a playful smile. “And I’ll beat the hard parts so you don’t smash my Xbox into a million pieces. Deal?”

“Seriously?” I studied her closely, unsure of whether I should believe what she was saying. My heart was pounding and I couldn’t understand why. All Annie did was ask me to come over, but it felt so surreal. She hardly knew me, and what she did know of me, the version of myself trapped in this place, could not have been the kind of person anyone would want to be around.

“I mean, unless you don’t want to. I shouldn’t just assume you’d want to hang out outside of here, I just-”

“-no, no,” I assured her. We were both flustered and tripping over one another’s words. “That would be great. I’d like that. I just wouldn’t have thought you’d want to hang out with … you know … a Dogwood person.”

“I was a Dogwood person too, you know.” Annie leaned back in her aunt’s chair. “And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

A pleasant calm drifted between us, and I sighed softly. I’d forgotten that she was in my position at some point, trapped here between these walls and desperate to get out. But she did it. She managed to survive and escape this place, and that filled me with relief. It is possible to have been a Dogwood person -- in the past tense.

I returned to my Emily Dickinson book and Annie turned her attention to some math book of her own. She asked if I minded her turning on music, which I did not. I was very curious to get a sense of her musical taste -- you can learn a lot about a person if you know what kind of music they enjoy. What came out of the speakers was some sort of bubble-gum pop song with lyrics I could not possibly decipher. I could see Annie tapping her pencil along with the beat and understood immediately that music was not something that they would ever find common ground on.

That was until a searing guitar ripped through the speakers and jolted my brain. It was such a sharp contrast to the previous song that it shocked the system -- not to mention the volume of the track was at least double of the pop song. Annie fumbled with her papers as she scrambled to turn the song down.

“Sorry,” she muttered. “My playlist is on shuffle so it’s hard telling what might come up.”

“Makes it more exciting,” I laughed. “Wouldn’t have taken you for a metalhead.”

“I’m not,” Annie responded sheepishly. “I just like that song. My playlists are more like buffets of music -- a little of everything.”

“Do you have any favorites?”

“Not really, just whatever speaks to me in the moment. Usually something with a good beat that you can dance to.”

I knew better than to do it, but my eyes flickered over to Annie’s crutches. I couldn’t help but wonder what use a girl with crutches had for dance music, and she knew that she’d laid that trap for me.

“I bet you’re wondering why a girl in crutches would be into dance music,” she asked with hurt in her voice.

“Absolutely not,” I said with bluster, my cheeks flushed and pink.

“I can walk and dance, you know,” she chuckled, dropping the troll act. “It’s just difficult, so I don’t do it often.”

“I honestly can’t tell if you’re bullshitting me or if you’re serious right now.”

Annie smirked and picked up her cell phone. She scrolled through her playlist on her phone until she found the song that she was hunting for. She turned the phone over to me and told me to press play when she said so. She reached for her crutches and moved over to the side of the table in front of the mirror. She took a deep breath, straightened her back, and closed her eyes.

It’s hard to describe exactly what happened next, since so much of the experience was something intangible and immaterial --something that I could not possibly understand as it was happening. I could see the muscles in Annie’s body all tense and vibrate like they were being injected with some unseen energy. The energy of the whole room shifted, as if a subtle weight had been lifted from the air. Annie dropped the crutches and let them fall to the floor with a noisy clang of the metal.

“Hit it!” she cheered.

I did as she told me, and the beat kicked in immediately. She popped her shoulders from side to side with the beat.

Can I get-get-get to know-know-know you better-better baby?

She spun around with a little hop and grinned at me, mouthing along as the song continued to repeat the same line over and over. She pointed at me, smiling and laughing along with the song. Her whole body burst with life and joy as she danced.

I don’t do that kind of thing, she sang as she pointed to me. I have never been a dancer, and in that moment, not even the most compelling, dance-able beat known to mankind could move me. With each repeat of the line, it was as if an invisible string between us was pulling her to me, urging me more and more to dance with her.

Can I get-get-get to know-know-know you better-better baby?

I turned my face from her, my face covering my flushed cheeks. Her body was released from the string and she pulled herself backwards, moving from me while still popping her shoulders and hips to the beat. I lifted my face and could sense her enthusiasm and energy fading, even as the music blared on, and after a few moments, she dismissed it with a wave and a chuckle and walked to the phone to turn it off. As she did, Dr. Lau slammed the door open. In a panic, Annie ripped the whole phone and aux cable from the speaker and sent it hurling through the air to the back of the room.

“What the hell is all this,” Dr. Lau snapped as she threw the door closed behind her.

“Tutoring,” I responded nervously, as more of a question than a statement.

“If this is your idea of tutoring, then no wonder we are getting nowhere,” she said as she tossed a manila folder of papers onto her other mound of papers on the desk.

“You should have heard me during group this morning. We had a whole conversation about Emily Dickinson. It was really enlightening.”

Dr. Lau looked at me with exasperated confusion. From behind her, Annie was giving me a wordless signal, with her hand slicing at her throat, to stop talking. But it was seemingly too late.

“Emily Dickinson? What does that have to do with anything?”

“The essay? My English assignment?”

Dr. Lau turned to face Annie, who had grabbed her crutches and started to make her way towards the door. “You aren’t going anywhere, Annalise.”

“I just figured you’d want--”

“What I wanted was for you to tutor her like we agreed. I had to go before the treatment team and make an absolute ass of myself with nothing to show for all this work. Work that you have been undermining for weeks.”

“I already told you,” Annie snapped, her rage bubbling beneath the surface with each syllable. “I am not training her in that shit. You wouldn’t listen to me when I told you that I don’t want anything to do with bringing her in.”

“And I told you that if you don’t, you can forget about that cute little hatchback VW you’ve been wanting. And anything else, for that matter.”

“Fine. I’ll earn it myself, my own way.”

“You’ll do what I tell you to do because I told you to do it.” Annie took a sharp breath to argue but Dr. Lau but her off before she could speak a word, “and don’t throw that ‘you’re not my mother’ shit in my face again. I’m here and she’s not, thanks in no small part to your laziness.”

Annie turned away from Dr. Lau, but she approached her until their faces were inches apart. I could see the tears streaming down Annie’s face. The doctor whispered menacingly, “you’re such a selfish, spoiled little girl, you know that?” She turned back to me and gestured towards me with open arms. Her voice grew loud and defiant again. “All Skylar wants is a chance to do what you do -- an opportunity she would surely not waste the way that you have.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I spat. Seeing the way Dr. Lau treated Annie filled me with anger.

“No…” Annie muttered breathlessly.

“Oh, she didn’t even tell you?” Dr Lau sneered. “Annie was Dogwood’s first, and most successful, resident to ever complete Open Mind therapy. She’s seen and experienced things that no one else ever has -- she’s been given opportunities and gifts that some people would die for. She’s taken and taken from this program, from this treatment, and refuses to give anything back. I’m sorry, Skylar, to have subjected you to her self-serving behavior.”

“Please stop,” Annie pleaded wearily. “just let me go.”

“Why are you treating her like this?”

“Because you could have had your father back weeks ago if Annie hadn’t been such a ungrateful child,” Dr. Lau spat, her venom particularly pointed at that final word, child.

“My father,” I questioned, stunned in disbelief. My disbelief quickly soured to rage. “Don’t play games with me, this shit isn’t funny.”

“Tell her,” Dr. Lau said. “Tell her the truth. Tell her she could have seen her father by now.”

“I don’t know,” Annie admitted, defeated. She slumped down into the floor. “She has a strong connection, so maybe. I’m so sorry…”

My attention turned to Annie. It felt wrong to be upset with her, but this conversation had left me feeling anxious and dizzy. What were they playing at? The conversation had turned from something surreal into reality in that moment, and my heart started beating out of my chest. My father … I could see him? How? It was too sick of a joke to be played this seriously.

“How?” I muttered. “How do I see him? What do I have to do?”

“If this is what you want,” Dr. Lau said, “then we can start your first real tutoring session right now. We’ve got weeks’ worth of work to do.”