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“I’m sorry. I used your milk. I was hungry. I brought my own cereal, though,” she tells me softly.
“That’s okay. You’re welcome to make yourself at home here, Lacey. Help yourself to anything you want.” I smile to back up this statement. I mean it. I don’t have a clue what she’s been through but I know it was enough to make her want to die. Repeatedly, in fact, given the scars I witnessed on her wrists. She slowly picks up the spoon again, like I’ve given her the permission she needs to continue eating.
“You’re just a resident, aren’t you?” she asks me.
Half in the cupboard, reaching for a cereal bowl of my own, I stiffen. Just a resident is a strange thing to say. Becoming a resident is perhaps one of the hardest things a person can do, and yet the way Lacey says it makes it sound like I’m an underachiever. “Yeah, well, I guess I am,” I tell her.
“How much money do you earn in a year?” She hoists her Lucky Charms to her mouth; her teeth clack on the metal of the spoon.
“Just over forty-seven thousand,” I tell her. I would probably kick the ass of another person who asked me that question in that particular tone of voice, but when you’re mentally damaged you get special privileges. Lacey appears to understand this privilege as she continues with her abrupt line of questioning.
“So how come you can afford this place? Up on the hill, out of the city. Killer view.”
“My grandmother left me an inheritance. A lot of money, I guess. I sank it all into this place.”
Lacey mulls this over. Eats some more of her Lucky Charms. “Are you working today?”
“No. We’re going to see my friend Pippa. You remember, the woman I told you about?”
“The shrink?”
“Yeah. She’s lovely. You’ll really like her, Lacey, I promise.” She doesn’t look too convinced. She sulks into her cereal while I rinse a spoon, trying to think of something to say to her. I feel like I’m walking on eggshells. I need some common ground with this girl. I catch sight of the cereal box and an idea forms—yeah, I’m pathetic, but what else am I supposed to do?
“You mind if I have some of your Lucky Charms?” Even in this small thing, if she feels less indebted to me, if she feels like she is doing me a favor, then that could change the dynamic of our painfully awkward relationship. She looks up at me from drawn brows, and I can tell she’s assessing me, trying to work me out.
Eventually she whispers, “Sure,” slowly pushing the box toward me with her elbow.
I pour myself a modest bowl, making sure not to take too much. “This your favorite?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” I pour the milk, and then take a bite, trying not to pull a face at the saccharine sweetness.
“Because of the powers,” she tells me.
I stand up straighter. “What do you mean?”
“The charms. Each one gives you powers.” This rings some vague and distant bell in my memory—a childhood remembrance, fuzzy and dusty from old age. I look down at her breakfast and notice that she’s separated out all of the marshmallows on the very edge of her bowl, stranding them, running yellow and pink and green food coloring into the rest of her cereal as she eats. “All of the charms, they’re supposed to be good for something if you eat enough of them,” she continues. She leans across the breakfast bar between us and scoops one of the moons out of my bowl and pops it into her mouth. This feels like a breakthrough of sorts. I grin at her.
“Okay, Lacey, you’re gonna have to fill me in. What do they all mean?”
Her lips form a nervous, drawn smile. She doesn’t make eye contact; she looks at the table between us. “Clovers are the one everyone knows. They give you luck, but it’s smart because you never know what kind of luck you’re going to get. Good or bad, so…” She shrugs. “And then horseshoes, the power to speed things up. Shooting stars give you the power to fly. Hourglass to control time, rainbows to zip from place to place.” She presses her index fingers together, and then jumps them apart. “Balloons mean you can make things float. Hearts, you can bring things back from the dead.”
I look down and I see all of the charms she mentioned sitting on the edge of her bowl, uneaten. She ate the crescent shaped charm from my bowl, the only one she hasn’t explained. And from the looks of things, that’s the only one she’s eaten from her bowl, too.
“And what about the moon charm? What does that one do?” I instantly regret asking. Her face falls, shoulders curving in to form a barrier between the two of us.
“I’m not sure, actually. I forgot.” She takes a deep breath, pushing away from the counter. “You mind if I use your shower? I feel pretty gross.”
“Of course. No problem. Like I said, make yourself at home.”
She avoids making eye contact with me as she quickly washes her bowl and hurries from the kitchen. Once she’s gone, I can’t help myself; I look it up on my phone:
Blue Moons—the power of invisibility.
Dr. Walcott, Yankees baseball fan, profuse creator of perspiration, giver of diazepam and other wonderful drugs, has a nervous disorder. I’m pretty fucking sure he does, anyway. Every meeting we have, he chews his way through at least three pens. Three pens in the space of an hour. That’s gotta be costing the state at least a couple of hundred bucks a year, I figure, considering I’m hardly the scariest bastard in here—he must go through at least five with those guys. He plays the part of looking relaxed, but I know if I move too sharp he’ll shit his pants and call for the guards. Pathetic, really. I mean why work in a prison if you’re this terrified of your patients.
