AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Don't think about him, Avery.
Focus on what's ahead of you.
I look at my tray and mentally assess the damage.
I count a single piece of white bread, eighty calories.
One piece of, well, I think it's fish, with a buttery-looking sauce, two hundred fifty calories.
A grotesquely pink dessert with an enormous amount of whipped cream that feels like a personal affront. I'll be safe and call it four hundred.
One helping of steamed carrots, sixty calories.
And also, what may or may not be chocolate pudding, one hundred fifty calories.
They also gave me an apple juice today, but that one is easy. It lists the caloric content on the side of the box with the rest of the nutritional information.
One apple juice, a hundred calories.
That brings the grand total to—I do the math in my head—1,040 calories.
It's more than what I would normally allow myself in an entire day. I finish looking at my plate and start with the least amount of calories first, like I always do. It seems like if I eat at least half my tray, the guards are happy with it. That way, I don't have to go for an extra session with the headmistress, and they can feel like they're breaking me.
Sometimes, I can hide the food, shoving it into a napkin and dropping it beneath a table, but I almost got caught yesterday. Plus, after the creep threw down in the hallway, it sounds like solitary might be worse than where I'm currently at. It has to be worse if it means being locked up with him. I can't get locked up in there with the creep. I won't survive.
After I eat the carrots that taste like absolutely nothing, I move on to the fish, skipping the glucose spike with the bread and swallowing one slow bite after another. I leave the strawberry shortcake untouched with the juice, but I think they'll be happy today. Just to be safe, I open the juice carton, take the tiniest of sips, and thenaccidentallyknock it over, wetting the table, before I quickly right it again. The guards aren't paying attention, so that's a win for me today.
My mother would be proud.
I stand, taking my tray to the nearest guard, who accepts it and tells me to wait there. He takes it back to the cafeteria line to have them weigh it and comes back out a minute later.
"You're free to go," he says.
I bite the inside of my cheek to stifle my smile.
These people won't be too hard to fool.
I don't even purge on my way to class.
13
GABE
Iwalk into class late—well,verylate, likethere's five minutes left and I'm only here for my Fireflykind of late. Butcher finally let me out of the hole this morning. I guess he gave up on trying to perform a fucking miracle and cure me. That or he moved on to his next victim. On second thought, it's definitely that. I'm just one piece of the fucked-up pie around here, and Butcher likes to take his knife to every single slice at one point or another.
Last night, they finally untied me from the chair, dragged me to a cell with padded walls, and let me sleep in a horizontal position. Then this morning a beefy guard with a graying mustache dropped a fresh set of clothes through the hole in the metal door and told me to change.
They didn't even let me piss before they sent me on my way. They just shut the door to the unit in my face and told me to head to class, but at least I got a glimpse of Butcher's newest distraction. There was a commotion in the ward at the place where the hallway divides into a T, veering left and right. Three guards ran from the left side of the hall to the right as somebody screamed bloody murder. Actually, it was more like burnt murder because I've only heard someone scream like that when they were on fire.
The victim probably thought they were from one of the hallucinogenics pushed into their veins. It was probably Jenkins or one of the other intellectually challenged students here. Everybody knows they have it worse than the rest of us because the Asylum isn't equipped to deal with a manic teenager with the rational capacity of a child. Like children, they have tantrums, and, like a bastard, the Butcher is vile, so it almost always turns into a freak show with one of them trying to kill someone. Then again, when is there not screaming around here? It's like a daily occurrence at this point. If a schizophrenic doesn't lose their shit, has another day even passed, or did the matrix glitch out for a moment?
I leave, grateful it's not me in there again, and take the stairs down from solitary confinement to the second floor. Then I walk the halls until I reach the spiral staircase that leads to my dorm room. The winding maze of halls and passageways in this place doesn't make sense. I just have it all memorized at this point. The Academy's been through so many identities—a typhus hospital, a state penitentiary, an orphanage, and more—that it's almost got its own case of dissociative identity disorder, and each of its identities has left its own scars.
The secret tunnels in the walls, the ones Saint likes to walk, are from the Typhoid Mary days, when the building was a hope and a prayer to the people coughing up blood as they died.
The almost-finished basement is thanks to the state coming in after the hospital shut down and attempting to turn the building into something useful, a penitentiary.
And the orphanage, well, it's gifted Kill with some of his favorite hideaway spots.
