Her grippy socks clung to the floor as she rushed down the hall, “ 201…200…

elevator-.” She cuts herself off short as she hears the jingling of keys. She has
nowhere to hide. She looks out the window, at the bench, and the elevator doors.
She hurdles herself out of the window and slides onto the roof. She feels the cold
night air cut through her cheap, plastic nightgown. She heads to the ledge and
peers down to the courtyard where she sees two-night security guards. She backs
up briskly, hoping not to be seen by either of them. She grazes her body against the
brick of the building, inching herself around to the gardens. They garden in the
morning because the nuns believe “it’s healing their souls,” but Lilly doesn't buy it.
She thinks the nuns are old and no one wants to hire a gardener.
She darts her eyes around for night guards and a soft place to land. With no
guards and no soft places to land, she shuffles to where the building and the
gardening shed almost meet. Five feet across and thirty feet down. If she jumps she
might miss and if she doesn’t someone might see her. They’ll check her room soon
for her nightly vitals check. “Jumping it is,” Lilly backs up abruptly; she needs her
distance. “Five, four, three, two…,” she mutters but doesn’t move an inch. She’s
siking herself out, riddled with every thought of what-if. At that moment, she can feel
her legs bolt across the roofing and jump. The weightless feeling only lasts a second
before she comes crashing down on top of the aluminum with a clattering that could
as well be written off as a cat…or Lilly trying to escape.
She swings her legs over the side of the shed and drops down, making sure
her knees are bent when she lands. She walks around to the front of the shed and
looks at all the tools as she opens the doors. “Wire cutters, a shovel, or something
sharp…What can I use as a weapon or a means of escape?” She mutters under her
breath like a shopping list. She sees a handheld trench shovel on the bags of corn
seeds. “Bingo!” She cheers having a quiet celebration in a dimly lit shed. She slips out
of the shed and blots, making her legs work even though they want to be frozen in
fear. The dampness of the dirt clings to the grooves of her socks and gives her a
hard time while she tries to run. She makes it past the trees and to the fence where
there is a car waiting. “Hopefully, that’s Justice,” she says with a sigh of relief. She’d
spoken on the phone with him two days ago and she gave him the code, “The candy
tastes a little funny.” She wedges the trench shovel against the wire fence and it
carves through. With as much force as she can muster she pushes the shovel in a
little farther. She reaches the bottom and bends the fence back, giving Lilly her
opening. She scratches her back on the way through, knowing the nightgown is
probably a few strings away from revealing her birthday suit.
She shuffles to the car, the cold hitting the open cuts on her back. She makes
it to the passenger door, dropping her shovel. Without hesitation, she climbs into the
car- a worn down Nissan Altima- closes the door, and buckles herself in. “Let’s go,”
she says hastily. “Where would that be exactly Lillyanne?” a voice asks her from the
back seat. She peers into the back seat to see the main hospital administrator Mr.
Wallace. “You sleazy, lying, son of a gun,” She spits at Justice. She unbuckles and
turns to grab the door handle pulling it hard…Nothing happens. They locked her in
the car. “Lils’ you’re not well and that’s the reason why you ended up here,” Justice
pleads. “YOU DON’T KNOW A THING ABOUT WHAT GOES ON IN MY HEAD!” Lilly barks at
both of them.
Silence floods the car; no one can escape its grasp. Then Lilly punches the
window, the shards flying like confetti, grazing across her face lightly. She grabs the
handle from the outside. Bolting out of the car down into the woods, she sees Mr.
Wallace’s lackeys. Cutting left she sees another turning around, she sees his right-
hand man Diablo. Diablo is a 6’7”, 260 whopping pounds of man. Diablo grabs Lilly and
straps his arms around her. She wrestles and struggles, trying to get away from
him, but she gets engulfed in Diablo's fury. Another lackey approaches her, she
can’t make out a face but she sees a syringe full of a lime green liquid. Diablo bends
Lilly’s neck to the side while the lime green juice gets injected into her neck.
Insitinaintiously her vision is clouded. “...Sc..rew..y..” Lilly’s voice trickles off and she
sinks into a deep sleep, not moving and not making a sound.

Chapter 2
The sounds of doctors shuffling and the heart monitor beside Lilly wakes her slowly.
Her vision returning to her slowly reveals that she is strapped down on a gurney
next to Mr. Wallace, who is going over her vitals in his notebook. Mr. Wallace is a thin
man- 6’2”; maybe 130 pounds; with sunken cheeks; green eyes; and a slick, gray
comb-over. Her eyes shift across the room, a room that she hasn’t seen before.
There’s an overhead light that burns her eyes until they adjust to the
brightness of the room. She sees the monitor that is beeping louder and louder; an
exact depiction of how her heart feels as if it’s outside her chest. She peers at Mr.
Wallace and two other nurses, one is young, blonde, looks a tad older than Lilly, and
very fit. The other is older, much older than Lilly; with wider hips; and a look of
disdain, a lot like her own mother. When she first tries to speak it’s a jumbled mess
that makes blondie jump out of her skin. She tries again but slower, “Where am I
exactly Wally?” A nickname she gave him the first time she had spat in his face for
what she called “sticking his nose where it didn’t belong”. “You’re back inside where
you belong, we’re running blood tests to see exactly where we went wrong with
your medication,” he states cooly, enough to make her feel brushed aside.
“As I said, Wally, you have no idea what goes on inside my head,” she states
sharply, trying to cut him with her words. “But, I am getting enough of a clue to know
that something is clearly not right in your cranium,” He taps her nose with the end of
his pen. An action that he could only do at this moment while Lilly is strapped down.
She would have broken the pen and all the fingers on his hand in any other
circumstance. “After we are done getting the samples, we’ll go in for psychiatric
evaluation where you need to open up if you ever have hopes of leaving,” he says
with a slight fake endearment to his words. She has no other means of escape at
this particular moment, so she has to comply. Letting the blood trickle out into the
small bag beside her, wanting her heart to pump faster so she can get this over
with.
Afterward, Lilly is unstrapped from the bed, her bare feet hitting the floor
where she is ushered into Mr. Wallace’s office. His office is a light color of blue with
cheesy, inspirational pictures on the wall, one most notably being the cat hanging
on a branch reading, “hang in there”. She scoffs at it like she always does. She sits
on the brown, suede couch covered in way too many throw pillows which, like the
name states, she does throughout her sessions. She sits down waiting for him to
start his lecture and then the sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong part begins.
He walks to his chair and sits down calmly and picks up his notebook. Lilly is
confused at this moment. This is usually when the lecture about God’s love for her
begins. He sits forwards and says two words, “Explain yourself.” Lilly, startled by his
words, sits there in her silence for a moment or two and then clears her throat.
“I don’t believe there is anything wrong with me Wally. You don’t see that for
yourself but I am perfectly fine,” She urges, wanting him to believe her. “Lillyanne,
Why would you ever have to come to St. Paul’s if you are perfectly fine?” He asks,
sitting up in his chair. “Because of a misunderstanding that happened a while ago,
and I am past this part of my life; let me leave it behind me.” She says, her voice
strained.
“A misunderstanding?! Lillyanne, you came here because your mother saw
sadistic traits in you and she wanted you to get help!” He explained in such an
abrupt way that Lilly snaps. “That has nothing to do with you! I was defending
myself against my stepfather!” She presses him away further. “Tell me the story of
that night and we’ll see what we can do for you.” He says calmly. “I don’t see how
this will help, but I’ll comply,” Lilly says, biting her lip. She proceeds, “It was Christmas
eve, nearly a month after I turned 16, and my stepfather had been ‘celebrating’
pretty hard that night. When the party stopped because he had run out of his
‘party juice’ he was pestering my mom to go get more at the store. She’d refused
him and that’s when he decided to start throwing his empties at her head. Yelling at
her, ‘After everything I’ve done for you and your brat?!’ That’s when he chose to
swing at her, big mistake, I grabbed him by his arm and slammed him on the floor. At
that moment I blacked out and when I came to he was a bloody pulp of a man.” She
has no remorse for the man who has threatened her mother.
“Well, Lillyanne, why do you think your mother would send you here if your
actions were justified?” Mr. Wallace asks. “She didn’t. He made her send me here. The
moment he was able to speak again he demanded I be sent to a mental hospital. He
believed I was ‘crazy’, ‘psychotic’, and ‘the most disgusting monster’ he’d ever met.
My mother was scared of being alone and broke, yet again, complying with his
orders. She told me I’d be here a month, it’s been six,” she said, her voice shaking. Dr.
Wallace sat in his chair like there was a needle in his chair. He looked out the window
at the hole in the gate Lillyanne had created the night before.
 He looks at Lillyanne putting his arms onto the armrests and leans in closer.
“Lillyanne, from my observations you do have a mental illness. Bipolar disorder is
something hazardous if left untreated.” He says while knowing she doesn’t want to
medicate. He continues, “If we get the right medication and dosage for you, we can
get you out of here in no time.” She sat still with her spine ridged, she doesn’t want
to be medicated, she doesn’t need to be medicated. Nevertheless, she knows she
must comply to get out of there. “We have a deal…I guess.” She murmurs, shifting
her arms over one another.

Chapter 3
Lilly sits in her room, pouting, as per usual. She doesn’t go out during her free
time most days. Most days, she’ll lay in her bed, unable to move; unless she gets
those random bursts of energy throughout the months she’s been there. She gets
up slowly in her bed, dragging her feet on the floor, and heads to the bathroom. She
stares at her reflection in the mirror. Sunken in cheeks from starving herself, her
pale blue eyes, and her cheaply done dark red hair stares back. She splashes water
on her face and decides to take a shower. The showers are modified so one has an
“accident” in the shower again. The cold water makes her shiver and she can’t get
the image of Christmas eve out of her head; getting dragged off of her stepfather by
her mother while she wailed loud enough for her neighbors to come walking by to
“check in”. She steps out of the shower once she’s done and rolls over in her bed
feeling exhausted by the ten minutes of “hard work”. Having unstable moods means
that Lilly will never know how she feels until she opens her eyes in the morning. A
routine that she wishes would stop. Most days she feels worn down and on the edge
of giving up. She stares up at the ceiling wishing that her escape plan worked. In the
six months, she’s been here, that’s the first time she’s dared to get up and go. The
plan would have worked if she never got Justice involved. The lying little snake that
he is made the whole plan go south. She thought that she could depend on him since
they’d been best friends since childhood. Going through life and whatever is thrown
at them together. Justice is 17 and is three months older than Lilly. He’s 6 ‘4, about
150 pounds, with dark brown hair, and piercing blue eyes. He’s so attractive that Lilly
has thought about dating him, but decided that they would be better off as friends.
Never mind that now, he lied to her and tried to trick her into having an intervention.
She got her payback by punching his car window to bits. She smiles at that thought.
Just then, a nurse walks into her room and tells her that lunch is served. She
gets up begrudgingly. No one tells you this about going to the mental hospital. The
food is horrible, downright disgusting. When she gets down to the common area,
eyes stick to her like glue. She feels a mixture of guilt and pride. Walking over to a
table she sits down alone until a perky auburn haired girl sits in front of her. “Hey,
you, a little birdie told me about your great escape last night,” she says while her
eyes are sparkling in wonder. “Yes, I did. Unfortunately, I am back in here yet again,”
she whispers, making sure an admin doesn’t hear her. “Well, I hope you know that I
thought that was so cool! My name is Audrie,” she announces and sticks her hand
out. Lilly shakes her it. “Ok, Audrie, I’m Lillyanne. Lils for short.” She affirms what
Audrie thought her name was. “I wish I could get out of here.” Audrie sighs. “Yeah, me
too. It didn’t work all too well for me though.” She hums, resting her hand on the side
of her face. “That’s because you didn’t have a backup,” She singsongs quietly. “How
am I supposed to trust you we just met?” She questions. “That’s the point, I can’t
trust you to not just throw me under the bus and run, and neither can you. Let’s
face it though you’re crazy, I’m crazy too. Let’s just make a deal.” She mentions and
sticks out her hand yet again. Lilly gets up and rolls her eyes and walks off. “Nice try,
but I am no rookie at this.” She scoffs, walking toward the one tv they have. A picture
of Lilly's house flashes in front of her on the news. She gasped and read the caption
on the screen. “Woman killed in her home the husband is nowhere to be seen”.
She backs away from the screen and stumbles on a pile of loose newspaper
someone was using for craft time. She hits the ground and lets out a monstrous
wail. A nurse approaches her slowly and puts and hand on Lilly’s shoulder. She
snaps and shouts. “GET OFF ME! YOU’RE NO HELP TO ME NOW!” The nurse pulls her
arm away and backs up to go get help. The “what-ifs” start rushing through her
mind. If she had been there, she could have stopped him. If she’d not been locked up
in Saint Paul’s, he would have left. What if after what if fills her mind and makes her
blood boil. Was this the intention of getting her sent away so he could beat her
mother until she was gone? That scum runs off before he can take accountability for
his actions. What if he’s after her next? With no other hesitation, she walks back over
to Audrie with tears in her eyes. She pushes them back to say “We leave tonight.
Meet me in my room in twenty minutes.” She runs off to her room and wails until she
hears a knock on the door. She gets up and catches her breath slowly.