Ward D

by Freida McFadden

If they were well controlled, the unit wouldn’t have to be locked, would it? But that’s not the real reason I am dreading my night on Ward D. I can’t tell Dr. Sleepy the real reason I was tossing and turning last night. I can’t tell anyone the real reason I’m desperately terrified of Ward D.

The truth is, I’ve already seen Ward D. I visited it once before, nearly a decade ago. Back when my best friend was a patient there. I still remember her matted hair and wild eyes when I came to visit. She didn’t look like my best friend anymore—more like a wild animal closed up in a cage. But the thing that sticks with me most—the thing I will never forget—are the words she spit out at me just seconds before I ran out of the unit, swearing to myself I would never return ever again: You should be the one locked up here, Amy.

“What if,” I say quietly, “at the end of the night, they get confused and think that I’m one of the patients there and they don’t let me out?”

But I’m just being silly. What happened was a very long time ago. It’s a distant memory, really.

“What little girl?” “The little blond girl who was standing next to me.” “I didn’t see a little blond girl standing next to you. What are you talking about, Amy?”

As the door swings open, my stomach drops. All I can think is that I don’t want to be on this unit. I want to turn around and run down the stairs until I’m out of the hospital. It takes every fiber of my self-control to keep from doing it. I really, really don’t want to be here. And nobody could possibly understand why except for my former best friend.

the door to room 905 cracks open. A pair of blue eyes flecked with yellow peers out at me, and a shiver goes down my spine. Whoever is inside that room is watching us. And there’s also something terribly familiar about those eyes. It looks so much like… No. No way. It couldn’t be.

“The code is 347244,” he tells us.

“No.” Dr. Beck frowns. “He’s not ‘a schizophrenic.’ We don’t refer to patients that way. Miguel is a human being, and he’s more than his psychiatric diagnosis. He is not a schizophrenic—he’s a man who has schizophrenia. Do you understand that?”

A mental health diagnosis is not a death sentence. All the patients in this unit are just trying to get better.

And those blue eyes flecked with yellow are staring out at me. Watching me.

There’s a reason the person in 905 looked familiar. She was my best friend. Jade Carpenter.

After all, if you meet someone who is truly mentally ill, that’s the only way to know that you’re sane.

I thought maybe after all these years, Jade would have forgotten what happened. Well, not forgotten. But maybe look at it with a little more perspective. Maybe realized that I didn’t do what I did to ruin her life. That I didn’t have a choice.

How does somebody get to the point where their brain stops functioning like a normal brain? That their reality completely breaks from the reality that every other person in the world lives in? And what’s to stop it from happening to anyone else?

“Damon Sawyer wants to kill every single one of us tonight.” “Why…” My voice is a hoarse croak. “Why do you think that?” “Because that’s what he told me he’s going to do.”

“I’m not knitting because I enjoy it. I’m knitting for protection.”

But I have a terrible feeling that Will can’t protect me from Damon Sawyer. Nobody can. Just like nobody could protect me from myself when I was sixteen years old.

But I always made time to read. Whenever I pick up a book, it’s like an escape. For an hour or two, I get to be part of the book world instead of my own much more boring world.

Jade does have a boyfriend. But her boyfriend isn’t Will Schoenfeld,

Jade’s boyfriend is Damon Sawyer.

I heard he’s been working on the unit for like fifty years!

Dr. Beck has been an attending on the unit for “like fifty years.” Except the man I’ve been working with all night has definitely not been a psychiatrist for fifty years, since he himself is only in his thirties. If the attending physician on this unit is an old man, then who the hell was just with me in this room?