Girl in Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow

charcoals and pencils. Miss Joni gave me a brand-new sketchbook, too, a super-nice one, which she must have bought with her own money, and which made me feel a little guilty.
    Casper is perched across from me on a folding chair borrowed from Rec. Doctors are not allowed to sit on the beds of patients.
    Her enormous blue eyes are kind. I still feel so bad about what I did to her.
    She raises her hands and traces the shape of my body in the air. When her fingers reach my boots, she says:
    “You own all of yourself, Charlie. Every last bit.” She pauses. “You understand what’s going to happen, yes?”
    I swallow hard. “I’m going back to live with my mother.”
    Casper has given me a piece of paper with the numbers for the halfway house, a support group, a hotline number, her email address. This paper is tucked at the bottom of my backpack.
    “No drugs, no drinking, no silence. You have to work hard, Charlotte, to stay ahead of your old habits. Old things, old habits are comfortable, even when we know they’ll cause us pain. You are going out into the unknown.”
    I pull the backpack up on my lap and hug it close. I can’t look at Casper. I concentrate on the slippery quality of the backpack’s fabric.
Mamamamamama.
    Casper says, “Cool moss,” and smiles at me. I don’t say anything.
    She tries again. “You look like a farmer, Charlotte. A very disturbed, balding farmer.”
    I look down at Mikey’s sister’s overalls, the Dead T-shirt, the ratty peacoat his mother put in the box. I wiggle my feet in my boots. I missed my boots, the heavy, definite feel of them. When Vinnie brought them to me, I held them close for a long time.
    We don’t say anything in the hallway as we pass the closed Rec door. I can hear them murmuring inside. Like with Jen, they’re not allowed to say goodbye to me. As the elevator descends, the heat in my stomach builds into an enormous ball. My words start slipping away again. The doors slide open.
    She’s at the desk, holding a sheaf of papers and an envelope. She’s all gray: gray zippered jacket, gray jeans with a hole in one knee, gray sneakers, gray knit hat.
    The only color on my mother is her hair.
    It’s still like fire, a deep red that she’s wrangled into a slippery ponytail.
    My own hair is dark blond tucked under Mikey’s sister’s red wool cap, just the slimmest bit of it since I cut my dyed black nest of street hair off.
    My mother doesn’t smile, but I didn’t really expect her to. Just for a minute, though, I see something, some wave of
some thing
, flit across her eyes.
    Then it’s gone.
    Inside my pockets, my hands tremble. I close them into fists, tight as I can make them. I haven’t seen her in almost a year.
    Casper is all business, striding to my mother. “Thank you for coming, Misty.” She looks back and motions me forward. “Charlie, it’s time.”
    The closer I get, the less I feel myself. I am slipping away—there it is again, what Casper says is
dissociation
. If only my mother would smile, or touch me, or something.
    She looks at me for only a minute, before she turns to Casper. “It’s good to finally meet you. Thanks for everything. With Charlotte, and all.”
    “You’re welcome. Charlie, take care.”
    Casper doesn’t smile, she doesn’t frown, she just touches my arm, and then gives me the smallest push before turning back to the elevators.
    My mother begins walking to the bay doors of the hospital, ponytail limp against her jacket. Without looking back, she says, “You coming?”
    Outside, the sky is a quilt of puffy clouds. My mother’s cheap sneakers squeak on the sidewalk. “I don’t have a car right now,” she says into her chest, lighting a cigarette as she walks. I wonder how she got to the hospital, if someone dropped her off. She’s always hated the bus.
    It’s warm out; the tip of her nose is shiny. I can tell already that the peacoat is going to be too hot. As we come to the corner, I look back, and there they are