Free All Is Not Forgotten by Wendy Walker Page B

commit their crimes, or the prison environment created their illness, is not always easily determined. And for my purposes, largely irrelevant. In any case, I understand the criminal mind.
    The third reason I was chosen to become involved with Jenny Kramer has to do with a young man named Sean Logan. I will get to that shortly.
    After slicing her wrists open, Jenny awoke in the middle of the night. Her father was in the room and had fallen asleep in a chair. From her description of this moment, there was never any doubt in my mind that she had fully intended to end her life.
    My eyes were suddenly open and I was seeing the curtain again. It’s light blue and it hangs on metal rings from this bar that goes around the room in the ICU. They put me in the same room where I was the night they gave me the treatment. The night I was raped. I hate saying that. They tell me I should say it—and think it—because it will help me accept it and I guess get better. But it hasn’t, right?
    Jenny lifted her bandaged wrists in the air.
    Whatever they gave me to sleep was still sort of there, so I felt pretty good. Like I was high.
    â€œLike when you take the pills from your friends’ houses?” I asked her.
    Yeah. Then all these thoughts came at once, like a stream of bullets. I’m dead. I’m alive. This whole year never happened—it’s still the night of the rape. I felt relief that this year had been a bad dream. But then I felt horrible that I would have to live it all again. And that made me come back to the most obvious thing, which was that I had cut myself. And then more thoughts fired out at me. It was like this shock that I had done that, and even relief that it hadn’t worked, because I must have been crazy to want to do it. But then all the reasons that had made me do it rushed in, and I was like, oh yeah, I wasn’t crazy. I had reasons, really good reasons, and they’re all still here. The bad stuff that I feel every day, all the time, was still there. It was like swimming up from the bottom of the pool and popping out of the water to find yourself exactly where you started before you dove in. You know what I mean? I was exactly where I was before. I tried to move my arms onto my stomach because that’s what I do when I think about it, about the bad stuff I feel, but my arms were tied to the bed rails. Then I just thought how angry I was that it hadn’t worked.
    Jenny cried then. It wasn’t the first time. But these were angry tears.
    It wasn’t easy, you know. I was so scared. I sat in that bathroom and I was crying and crying. I thought about Lucas mostly, and about my dad and what this would do to them. And my mom, too, though she’s stronger than they are. I imagined she would be really mad at me. I almost stopped but then I told myself, just do it and get it over with! The blade was really sharp and it hurt way more than I thought. It wasn’t the cutting that hurt, but the air when it went into my veins. It was like this horrible stinging and burning. I did both of them. Do you know how hard that was? With the pain of the first one, knowing how bad it would hurt again? They say you shouldn’t look at the blood because it will make you try to save yourself out of instinct, but it was too hard not to look. And they were right. My heart started to pound like wild and “Stop it! Stop it!” was screaming in my head. I started looking around for ways to bandage myself, but I had removed everything before I started because of the instructions I read. I knew that would happen, that I would try to stop. I had to fight it so hard. You have no idea how hard it was. I had to close my eyes and lie down on the floor and focus on the dizzy feeling, which actually was kind of good. Like I was just letting go of everything. So I did. I just closed my eyes and ignored the voices that kept screaming at me and the burning pain. And I just let everything go.