“Keep the car running,” she goes on. “Like I said. Back in ten.”
FIVE
GWENNA
I am aswim.Everything around me liquid. Everythingwithinme liquid.
Especially my head.
“That was overkill,” Jessie is saying. I blink. Focus. We’re sitting in the waiting area outside the director’s office. The very same plush gray couch I sat on with my mother seven weeks ago, the very same pale gray walls, the very same sleek frame around the same nothing artwork. “Grace panicked. You’ve seen what happens to some of those girls when the boyfriends show up with?—”
“They’re not my boyfriend,” I mumble. What? That doesn’t even make sense. I squint my eyes shut and open again.
“It was only 10 mils of Ativan,” Jessie says. “It should wear off in a few hours, max. I’m sorry, Gwenna. If I’d been there…”
“It’s okay.” I nod, genuinely grateful, even as my throat is raspy and thick and my skin is still tingling with a light sheen of panic.
Because they’re here.
Theycamehere.
To see me.
To…save me?
I don’t know. I don’t know. Even through the Ativan haze, I’m anxious and knotted up andI don’t know what’s going on. Apparently they were told to leave the premises, but I can’t shake the feeling that they’re still here somewhere, standing by. Waiting.
“Yes, I’m looking at it right now.” Linda the admin cradles her desk phone to her shoulder, frowning through her reading glasses at her screen. “No. No. It’s—we’d need to have another transfer in to cover it. Her…” Linda taps a key, scrolls her mouse. “…mother, looks like.”
At the sound of that word, panic spikes in me. Or tries to. It’s like the volume’s been dampened on my reactions and I can only get to a 3 or 4 out of 10.
“Wait,” I say, loud enough for Linda to hear--she ignores me—and certainly for Jessie. “Wait. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Jessie says, looking to the director’s firmly shut door and then back to Linda.
I believe her.
Did something else happen?I think.Did they…do something? Break something?It doesn’t sound like them—property damage—but neither does showing up here like…like this. Maybe they…
God, I wish I couldthink.My brain feels like soggy cotton. I give my head a shake just as the director’s door snaps open.
“We’re going to—Gwenna.” Her tone drops on a dime, from snippy to its usual serene. “You’re here.”
“You asked for a case conference,” Jessie points out.
“Of…course.” The director exhales, throws Linda a look, and folds her hands at waist level. She’s around sixty or so, I’d say, slender, but more wiry than willowy, with steel-gray hair she wears swept back in a tortoiseshell barette and an endless wardrobe of billowing linen clothes. “Please. Come in.”
We do, Jessie waiting for me to toddle in first and shutting the door behind us.
The director’s office is blander than the waiting area, if that’s even possible. Even the chairs are stiffer. Grace the counselor is there, as is the security guard.
“Well.” The director settles behind her desk. “This has been…a morning, hasn’t it?”
No one says anything. The director presses onward.
“Obviously, this kind of…incident is unacceptable. That much should go without saying.” A hint of the snippiness bleeds in on those last words.
Then why say it at all?I almost blurt out.
