I typed in my name, my address, my GPA. I’d done it so many times already for other places that they were all blurring together. Community colleges close to home that only offered two-year degrees. Schools you could drive to in half an hour. Safe choices. Predictable ones.
The kind of schools guidance counselors suggested for students with “transitional challenges.”
That was the term they used when you’d been out of the real world for too long. When you had gaps in your transcripts and a résumé full of therapy sessions instead of clubs or sports.
When your “few weeks” away turned into two years, the world outside stopped feeling real.
I blinked, dragging my gaze from the blue glow of the screen.
But all I could see were the white walls of the place they’d locked me in.
They took my shoelaces first.
Then my phone and Nico’s picture.
Then every piece of privacy I had left, one item at a time, until even the edges of me felt dull and padded and watched.
In exchange, they handed me a laminated daily schedule with color-coded blocks for group therapy, individual sessions, mealtimes, and “quiet reflection,” along with a spiral-bound notebook I wasn’t allowed to tear pages out of—just in case I tried to hide something inside. They even counted the pages before giving it to me, like trust was something that had to be measured.
“You’ll be here for a couple weeks,” my mom had said at intake, in a tight voice, her mouth set in a line too firm to be comforting. My dad stood beside her, nodding along, his smile thin and grim, like he was trying to convince himself this was mercy and not surrender.
That was a lie, but I think she believed it when she said it.
It was a lie built from exhaustion and guilt and the desperate hope that someone else might be able to fix what she couldn’t.
Two weeks blurred into two months.
Then six.
Then twenty-four.
I turned fifteen with a waxy cupcake from the cafeteria and a folded construction paper card signed by staff members I barely knew, written in that fake cheerful handwriting they all used when they didn’t know what else to say.
By the time I left Northfield Psychiatric Wellness, I was sixteen.
My hair was buzzed to an inch of regrowth after a “therapeutic reset.”
My file had been stamped with the wordStabilizedlike it meant something.
Like it meant safe.
Like it meant I wasfixed.
I blinked hard, dragging myself out of the past and back to the glow of the laptop.
The screen had dimmed slightly, the cursor still blinking inside a blank field titled:
EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES/HOBBIES.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard, but nothing came.
No clubs. No sports. No volunteering. No late-night diner runs or beach trips or dumb inside jokes carved into yearbook pages.
Just…blank.
I hadn’t done anything.
Not since I got back.
