Girl in Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author Name: Kathleen Glasgow
- Book Genre: Contemporary, Fiction, Health, Mental Health, Mental Illness, Young Adult
- ISBN # 9781101934715
- Date of Publication: 2016-8-30
- PDF File Size: 2.6 MB
- EPUB File Size: 2.1 MB
Like a baby harp seal, I’m all white. My forearms are thickly bandaged,
heavy as clubs. My thighs are wrapped tightly, too; white gauze peeks out
from the shorts Nurse Ava pulled from the lost and found box behind the
nurses’ station.
Like an orphan, I came here with no clothes. Like an orphan, I was
wrapped in a bedsheet and left on the lawn of Regions Hospital in the
freezing sleet and snow, blood seeping through the flowered sheet.
The security guard who found me was bathed in menthol cigarettes and
the flat stink of machine coffee. There was a curly forest of white hair
inside his nostrils.
He said, “Holy Mother of God, girl, what’s been done to you?”
My mother didn’t come to claim me.
But: I remember the stars that night. They were like salt against the sky,
like someone spilled the shaker against very dark cloth.
That mattered to me, their accidental beauty. The last thing I thought I
might see before I died on the cold, wet grass.
The girls here, they try to get me to talk. They want to know What’s your
story, morning glory? Tell me your tale, snail. I hear their stories every day
in Group, at lunch, in Crafts, at breakfast, at dinner, on and on. These words
that spill from them, black memories, they can’t stop. Their stories are
eating them alive, turning them inside out. They cannot stop talking.
I cut all my words out. My heart was too full of them.
I room with Louisa. Louisa is older and her hair is like a red-and-gold noisy
ocean down her back. There’s so much of it, she can’t even keep it in with
braids or buns or scrunchies. Her hair smells like strawberries; she smells
better than any girl I’ve ever known. I could breathe her in forever.
My first night here, when she lifted her blouse to change for bed, in the
moment before that crazy hair fell over her body like a protective cape, I
saw them, all of them, and I sucked my breath in hard.
She said, “Don’t be scared, little one.”
I wasn’t scared. I’d just never seen a girl with skin like mine.
Every moment is spoken for. We are up at six o’clock. We are drinking
lukewarm coffee or watered-down juice by six forty-five.
We have thirty
minutes to scrape cream cheese on cardboardy bagels, or shove pale eggs in
our mouths, or swallow lumpy oatmeal. At seven fifteen we can shower in
our rooms.
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