Chapter 6: The Bathroom Sink

6. The Bathroom Sink

There was one bathroom for the nine of us who lived on the second floor of Holshue House.  The two toilet stalls did have doors, which was better than at Lincoln High School where they had taken the doors off the stalls so girls couldn’t get away with smoking or doing anything else naughty in there. Obviously the first limitation on my plan to just hide in our room was the need to go to the bathroom. There was a large bottle of water had been left sitting on the desk, and we sipped it so as not become dehydrated. But then in the quiet of the early afternoon we needed to pee, and so we ventured out.

There was no lock on the door, at least not one that we could lock and I reminded myself that anyone could invade our space at any time. My first trip to the restroom was uneventful. I didn’t see anyone in the hall and the bathroom was empty. I slipped into a stall, took care of my business and scurried back to the room.

The next time we had to go was much later in the day and I had heard more movement out in the hall. It was probably shortly after the evening meal. We waited until a lull, but when we had to go very badly we slipped down to the bathroom again.

This time both stalls were occupied, their doors closed and latched. A wiry pale girl with a ring in one side of her nose sat on the edge of the sink, her pants pushed down to her knees. It took a few seconds to register, but then I realized that she was actually peeing in the sink. My jaw dropped.

“Don’t get me no shit, new girl,” the girl snarled. She moved her right hand down towards her pants as if she might have a weapon there, but I was pretty sure she was bluffing on that.

We quickly looked away, but kept the girl in peripheral vision in case she decided to attack. After wiping herself with her bare fingers, the girl hopped down from the sink and I fully diverted our eyes so as not to see anything of her private parts as she pulled up her pants. “You need to piss?” She gestured towards the sink.

Looking down at the floor we nodded towards the stalls, and I said, “We can wait.”

Then we looked in at the unoccupied gang shower in the adjoining room where four shower heads faced the center while I could here the skinny girls washing her hands in the sink she had just used as a toilet. “Don’t worry, new girl, most of the bitches on this floor are really shy. And there’s a schedule they’ve worked out on the shower so they don’t have to take showers together, but it ain’t written down nowhere. I guess you’re just going to have figure it out, pris.” She laughed a little and I turned to look at her just long enough for my eyes to catch the bruising and scares up her left arm, remnants of drug use. Then she was gone.

A moment later one of the toilets flushed and an Asian girl came out of the stall, deliberately avoiding any eye contact. As she walked to the sink I rushed into the stall to relieve myself, glad to be back for the solitude. I waited for the other stall to empty before coming out to wash my hands, avoiding the sink that the girl had peed in.

At my door, on a paper plate, was a baloney and cheese sandwich on white bread and a handful of carrot and celery sticks. Realizing that I had missed supper I took it with me into my room and ate it slowly, trying to savor every bite. There had been a fresh bottle of water as well. For a moment I wonder who … but then I realized that it didn’t make any difference since I didn’t know anyone. At least someone seemed to know that I was here.

After the encounter with the Goth girl in the bathroom Allison withdrew even more, seeming to caught in an endless tape loop of the scene where she had danced in the sprinkler with James, been caught by her father and then struck, each time focusing on that word, “pervert.” I slept better, awakening only once with the nightmare of that night down by the river.

The sandwich was good and had reminded me that we needed to make a conscious effort to find food the next day. Glancing at the manual on the bedside table I figured out the two-note chime that ordered us to the cafeteria for meals. I ate watery eggs and toast for breakfast, along with a cup of coffee, a bit of mac ‘n cheese for lunch and then Salisbury steak with potatoes for supper. At each meal I took our tray to a corner of the cafeteria and looked down at my food as I ate as quickly as I could before retreating to our room. Allison had become so quiet that I didn’t hear her at all, almost as if she had taken on my spider shyness. It seemed that I would have to be the consciousness that kept this body we shared alive and functioning.

At dinner I did catch a glimpse of the girl we had seen peeing in the sink the night before. She was dressed in all black making her even more pale. She cast a scowl in my direction and I hurriedly looked back down at the gravy congealing on the meat on my plate. I palmed the peanut butter cookie and took it back to the room to avoid spending any more time there in the cafeteria. It was like for an instant I could smell her pee in the sink again and it turned my stomach. Still, I was glad that we had smuggled out the cookie.

That night, after the lights in the room had been switched off with some master switch somewhere, I slept off and on with the nightmares of our sins. Michael was dead, Brianna shamed, and Davie might still be lying in the hospital with the danger of being disfigured for life. Why had I put my seat belt on that night? Why had I lived when it was my crazy lust for excitement that had wrought so much harm? And Allison’s parents hadn’t spoken to us since the sentencing.

As a spider solitude had never bothered me, but now, in this form, I felt a deep human loneliness, made even more poignant by Allison’s withdrawal into herself. The pain of it felt somehow good – the way being out of breath from a hard run can make you feel alive. Alive, I was alive, and selfish as it seemed, there was something very good about that.

On our third day at Holshue House, Ms. Slanick, now wearing a loud flowery blouse and black slacks, came and got me from my room, telling me that I “had” to attend therapy. She said it wasn’t optional, and as I followed her down the stairs, I learned that everyone attended one of the two group therapy sessions, everyone that is except for one person who was considered too disruptive to attend any activities. I thought about becoming disruptive as a way to get out of therapy, but I knew that it wasn’t in my personality. Spiders are basically very quiet.

Therapy was held in a room that had once been a parlor and the wall décor and woodwork kept remnants of its former glory with oil paintings and flowery wall paper, the circle of metal chairs an anachronism. There were nine of us “clients” sitting in that circle, including pee-in-sink girl and the Asian girl I had seen coming out of the stall on that first night. I kept my eyes looking at the floor, not wanting to make contact with them or any of the other girls. Judy, the therapist began by asking everyone around the circle to say their names, but since I wasn’t looking at anyone I didn’t learn any of the names. When I sensed the quiet that told me everyone was looking at me, I said “Allison” even thought the Allison part of me had withdrawn, and wasn’t ready to speak for herself. I couldn’t very well speak the truth that I didn’t actually know my real name.

For half an hour she went around the circle and asked questions of each girl, about how they were feeling and shit like that, but each time they came to me I would just look at the floor and say nothing. Each time Judy said that they would “come back to me.”

Still, she didn’t seem to relent, and on the third coming back to me with a question of what I felt an awkward long silence fell across the room. Knowing that I had to say something I finally said, “I hate!” with the words coming out much louder than I had intended. I wasn’t even sure what the rest of the sentence was when I said it – I meant it in a broad way. I hate the world. I hate this place. I hate this life. I hate fucking therapy sessions.

“Whom do you hate?” Judy asked in a quiet voice.

For the first time I looked up to see her, sitting there in her Nirvana t-shirt and jeans, her steely blue eyes locked into mine, insistent, unyielding. “I hate …” and then I had to give it some thought. There were lies, so many lies I could make up right then, but instead I gritted my teeth and spat it out, “I hate myself.”

“That’s good to know,” was all she said, and her eyes moved elsewhere around the circle. I had been released from any deeper testimony.

For the first time I looked at the other girls around the group. The pee-in-the-sink Goth girl was there dressed all in black, as well as the Asian girl I had seen in the bathroom that night. But like a compass needle, my eyes locked onto another, directly across from me in the circle. Her tightly curled hair spewed in all directions from the top of her head, and had been highlighted with blonde coloring that beautifully complemented the russet of her skin. It looked like the softest, most beautiful skin that I had ever seen.

Her dark brown eyes, almost black, glistened as she looked right at me. There was something totally peaceful about her expression, and yet it felt like she knew me, like she could see me, not just the Allison-me, but me, the spider deep inside, who had once lived under the microwave, who had lived and lived before that. She saw all that and knew it more than I knew it myself.

I shook my head, not in a “no,” just an attempt to clear my head. And then I saw them. The hands – long, slender and elegant, each finger perfectly formed, the skin perfection, and always that deep russet color.

Judy, the therapist was interrupting my moment, and I suddenly became aware that everyone was still sitting in silence, waiting for my words. “Why do you hate yourself?” she asked quietly, even though I had hoped that they had moved on to someone else by now. Maybe she had asked it before and I hadn’t heard it because of my focus on this one girl in her jeans and lavender blouse with lace on the sleeves.

I shifted my vision, away from those beautiful hands to look Judy right in the eyes. “Because I killed someone, and then ruined someone else’s reputation.” I looked down at the floor, making it clear that I had nothing more to say.

After another period of suitably long, uncomfortable silence, Judy moved on to someone else. Not the girl I had been looking at, the one whose name I now wanted to know so desperately. I’m sure it had been said when I wasn’t paying attention at the beginning of the session. I wanted to ask, but I would not. I had returned to the safety of my silence.