Chapter Four

**Warning: story contains thoughts of / attempted suicide**

The moment after I swallowed the fat red pill, I felt different. I checked to feel if the blue one was there, still stuck to the thick lemon tart hidden behind my front teeth and was relieved.

So relieved, I felt drunk almost. Or high? This was the medicine they should have given me from the start!

Violet! Can you hear me? Ella’s voice echoed in my mind, though sounded as if she was speaking to me from the end of a tunnel. I couldn’t control my sudden outburst of laughter.

“Well, I’m glad to see you’re liking your new medicine, Violet,” Dr. Ross said with a smile as he straightened his glasses and shifted in his chair.

“What do you say we start with something easy, hmm?” He clicked his pen.

The air conditioning decided to kick on in that moment, somehow managing to blow his whisps of white hair in an impossibly funny way. The whisps actually waved at me!

I burst out laughing again. The doctor tilted his head as if trying to decipher an ancient glyph. Ella shifted at my bedside and tried repeatedly to touch my arm with her hands.

“And what is so amusing, Violet?”

“Your hair looks like it belongs on Santa’s balls!” It was so true. How had he never seen this?

“Like…if he had one ball, maybe, which would be your head…and then he went around in his sleigh with no pants on and the wind caught it, ya know?”

The doctor pursed his lips and scribbled something in his notebook while muttering to himself.

“No filter, as expected. Euphoric humor, also expected.” He looked up from his notebook at me and smiled.

Even in my addled state, something in that smile felt wrong. Off. As though it should be on a hungry lion peering through the grass at his broken-legged prey.

Violet, listen to ME!

Ella’s voice suddenly became louder in my mind, as if she had turned up the volume, causing me to start and turn to her. Seeing she finally got through to me, she spoke quickly, before another comedic outburst took over.

Focus, Violet. The red pill he gave you must be some type of truth serum. He’s going to interrogate you, but you CAN’T tell him about me.

“What are you looking at, Violet? Is someone there with you? An invisible friend, perhaps?”

SAY ONLY WHAT I SAY! Ella shouted in my mind, and I became sober enough in that moment to understand her urgency.

I had a few friends when I was younger. Then just one, and she left me when I came out to her, and none of them were invisible.

I echoed back Ella’s words like a parrot to the doctor.

He seemed disappointed by my answer, which I felt was a good sign.

“Then what do you keep looking at? I’ve often noticed you having conversations with yourself when you’re alone in your room, Violet.”

Ella spoke again, almost too quick for me to repeat word for word in my giggly-fuzzy mind.

And just how would you know what I’m doing when I’m alone in my room, good doctor? Are you spying on me? Cameras? Isn’t that an invasion of privacy?

Dr. Ross looked taken aback by my answer for a moment before regaining his composure and straightening in his chair.

“I think you know, Violet, that it is unsafe to leave you without supervision. You could still be a harm to yourself and to others.”

“HAH! A harm to OTHERS now, too? You’re so full o’ monkey shit, Doc,” I said as easily as a sneeze.

SSshhh! Repeat me ONLY. Ella’s voice scolded.

How have you kept me here so long with no visitors? Or a phone call? Don’t I get a phone call?

The doctor clicked his pen closed and sucked his teeth in subtle frustration.

“What did you see when you cut yourself in the bathtub, Violet?”

I didn’t see anything. I almost died from blood loss and was out of it. What kind of question is that anyway? You’re causing me trauma, ‘Doctor’. Why are you really keeping me here, against my will, and probably breaking laws?

I took in a huge breath after repeating Ella’s quick words in my head and looked to the doctor, finally understanding the words I was saying. I was interested now. Ella was going somewhere with this.

“I just want to help you get better, Violet.” The doctor moved his chair closer to my bed and my skin crawled. Instinct told me I should run, but something in the back of my mind said that would only make things worse. More pain. Impossible.

“Now tell me, Violet, was it your parents’ tragic car accident that sent you into depression? Or the fact that you were rejected from all six of the colleges you applied to last summer?” His eyes glared into mine with a tangible energy.

Something in me broke and flooded my mind with pain. Suddenly, Ella’s voice and mine were in tandem as we spoke together through my tears.

“Shut up. Stop it.” I wished my voice sounded stronger, though it wavered as I shook and sobbed. My mind searched for the answers to his questions, but all I found was circles of endless pain, depression, torment.

“Ah!” he said, as if he discovered the secret answer. I couldn’t help but look up, hopeful he knew the answer to make the effects of the serum end my mind’s searching, stretching to almost break even more.

“Or perhaps it was Jessica.”

“I said shut your mouth.”

“Yes…It must have been Jessica that finally did it. Your best friend since…what, high school?”

“First grade. STOP IT!”

“The one person in your whole pathetic world who you thought would accept you for who you are, maybe even love you back.”

“STOP IT!” Mine and Ella’s minds converged, shouting louder than before.

“And how did that go for you Violet?” he said now close enough for me to smell the nauseating scent of his cologne and feel his breath on my face. His sickening smile and hungry eyes.

“When you told her the truth? That you loved her? How did that go?” he pressed.

“NOT GOOD!” I said through sobs.

“No. Not good at all it seems. She left you…”

“STOP IT!”

“All alone…”

“STOP IT!”

“JUST like your dead parents—”

“STOP!”

The lights and the air conditioning snapped off, encasing the room in ringing silence.

The doctor’s mouth opened. I turned around but didn’t see Ella at my side.

Click, click. Beep, beep.

The nurses rushed into the dark room a moment later, and before I could cry out—for who, I don’t know—one had a needle sticking into my neck as the others held me down and the doctor stroked my cheek with the back of his hand.

“Shhhhhh. It’s okay, Violet. We can try this again tomorrow.”

The silhouettes of the doctor and nurses in the darkened room seemed to have the colors pulled from their features, before fading out entirely.

I was weightlessly floating in darkness again.

Back in the bathtub?

I looked down at my wrists, but instead of one thick, horizontal cut on each, there were dozens, all diagonal and vertical crossing each other in a sickening array.

I sat up in the bathtub and looked around the inky darkness and saw nothing. Was all alone.

Dead?

I looked down at my wrists again. No cuts now. Just my NASA wristwatch from grade school on my left wrist, and a lime green cast on my whole right arm. I was eleven again.

On the cast, written in Jessica’s slanted writing with black sharpie:

Violet rocks my socks off!

♥ Jess