Free Girl in Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow

hands, as if to say,
What happened?
    The glass is cold on my forehead. Vinnie is playing Go Fish with Sasha and Francie in the corner. Blue is on the couch, humming to herself.
    My face is swimming with tears as I watch him in the falling rain, his mouth open, his cheeks red.
    Vinnie says pointedly,
“Charlie.”
Blue stirs on the couch. She joins me at the window.
    “A boy.” Blue’s breath makes a foggy circle on the glass. “A real live boy.”
    Sasha and Francie throw down their cards.
    The first time Ellis brought me back to her house in the fall of ninth grade, after we’d known each for about a week, she didn’t blink an eye to find an older boy already there, in the basement, reading comics with one hand and stuffing the other in a bag of salty pretzels. There were anarchy symbols Magic Markered on his sneakers. He looked up at Ellis, his mouth full of pretzels, and smiled. “Your mom let me in. Who’s this?”
    He was wearing a Black Flag T-shirt. Before I could stop myself, I said, “I’m about to have a nervous breakdown.”
    He put the comic book down. “My head really hurts,” he answered. He waited, his eyes gleaming.
    “If I don’t find a way out of here!” I yelled, startling Ellis at the bar. She glared at me.
    The boy laughed and yelled back, “I’m gonna go berserk!”
    We sang the rest of the song while Ellis rifled through her parents’ mini-fridge. She was a little miffed, you could tell. She didn’t like that sort of music. She liked goth and mopey stuff, like Bauhaus and Velvet Underground. Nobody else at our school could recite the lyrics to “Nervous Breakdown,” I was sure of that.
    But she shouldn’t have worried. Mikey always loved her more.
    “Oh,” Sasha and Francie say in unison as they gather at the window.
    I push up the sleeves of my sweater and press my arms to the window. Can he see my scars, all the way down there?
    Mikey covers his face with his hands. I remember that gesture. He used to do that, a lot, when Ellis and I did things that overwhelmed him. “You
guys,
” he would say tiredly, “stop, already.”
    Vinnie stands next to Blue and groans deeply. “Shit.”
    “Girls,” he grunts. “Goddamn girls and boys.” He raps on the glass roughly, making Sasha jump back.
    “Go!” He shouts to Mikey through the glass. To himself, he mutters, “Don’t make me call anyone, son.”
    He turns to me. “You! Put down your damn arms.”
    “It’s like that movie!” Francie exclaims. I’m waiting for Mikey to take his hands away from his face. His T-shirt is soaked from the rain.
    Sasha starts to cry. “No one’s ever come to see me,” she wails. Vinnie mutters “Shit” again as he punches the buttons of his pager. Blue’s fingers are on my shoulder.
    “Shut the fuck up.” Francie is getting agitated. “Nobody ever comes to freaking see
me,
either.” She picks at her chin with her fingernails, drawing tiny specks of blood.
    Blue says, quietly, “Look.”
    Mikey has opened his messenger bag and is furiously scrawling with marker back and forth on a notebook pressed against his knees. He holds it up. I squint through the glass, through the rain.
    DON’T.
    He drops the paper. It flutters and flattens on the wet ground, settling near his sneaker. He rips another page from the notebook.
    YOU.
    Nurse Vinnie raps his pager against the window as Sasha’s wailing grows.
    Francie tells her, “Shut
up.
” Gives her a pinch that only increases the wailing.
    “I have a situation here.” Vinnie is at the phone.
    Mikey struggles with the next piece of paper; it’s stuck in the notebook’s rings. Two hospital orderlies amble across the parking lot. They shout to Mikey; his head shoots up at the same time the paper rips free and is caught in a pocket of wind. Running after it, he slips in a puddle and crashes down. Blue sucks in her breath. We look at each other. Her eyes are glittering.
    “Outstanding,” she whispers. “Absolutely outstanding.” She