Blinking lights and too-white walls made my head ache when my eyes finally opened. A throbbing pain in my hand grounded me and made me wonder where I was.

I pulled my head up to examine wherever I was: a hospital room, all blue and white and gray. I looked down at my left hand, which had a bandaged index finger. Oh, I remembered. Oh.

Fragments of the night before came back to me slowly as a migraine burned my brains.

I shut my eyes for a moment to get rid of the horrible ringing in the back of my head, and when I opened them again, my mom and James were standing over the hospital bed with deep frowns and creases in their foreheads.

“What were you thinking?” My mom asked. She didn’t talk loudly, she didn’t talk angrily. Nothing.

I flinched at the normal volume of her voice, fireworks behind my eyes when I closed them z “Sorry,” I muttered under my breath, barely loud enough to be heard.

“You cut off a finger, drunk, in Gia’s basement, on your birthday. Elena, what’s wrong with you? Why are you doing this?” She sounded on the verge of tears, and I could see overloads of stress heavy on her shoulders.

I looked away guiltily, with a frown. “I said sorry,” I repeated, staring blankly at the thick gauze around my reattached index finger, which still ached madly around the joint.

My mom shuddered, her eyes puffy. “Oh my God, Elena, oh my God.”

James sighed, dropped his hands in his pants pockets. He asked me, “Why did you do it?”

“Jesus, you think I know?” I rolled my eyes, which set off fireworks in my head.

By five in the afternoon, I was back home, laying on the couch with an intense hangover and a surgically reattached finger.

“Dinner,” called my mother sullenly, and I dragged myself into the kitchen.

I picked at my salad, uninterested, and stared at the ever-visible marks I’d carved into the table with my fork.

James sat down and said, “We need to talk to you.” Never a good sign, especially after a night of drinking and being hospitalized.

“Oh, yeah, okay.” I chewed on a bit of lettuce, not making any eye contact.

“James and I,” began my mom, drawing out her words slowly, “have found a sort of… Group therapy thing, with other kids your age, kids like you, and we think it might be very beneficial to you, you know…”

I wasn’t surprised. The subject of some sort of therapy had been brought up during dinner time conversations before. “Oh,” was all I said in reply.

“Are you willing to actually go?” Asked James, tense. “You have to be willing.”

“I don’t care.” I sighed, too hungover and exhausted to argue. Hell, maybe I really am just crazy. “I really don’t.”

“So, you’re going to cooperate?”

I shrugged, frowning. “Okay, I guess.”

“Thank you,” my mom smiled, but it was a phony one. I could tell.

The small talk of dinner time mostly consisted of my parents discussing their Saturday plans, and work, and their mutual friends. Stuff like that, boring things.

That night, I went to bed early but couldn’t get to sleep. I lay awake in my bed for hours, staring at the gauze around my thumb, mulling over the remnants of my memories from the previous night, again and again. It was a pretty cool Sweet Sixteen story, I guess.

The longer I lay awake, the more I wanted Wyatt- and Valium. Or pot. Or pretty much anything just to make me sleep.

A couple of hot tears ran down my face, and I didn’t even realize it until there was warm, salty water trickling down onto my neck.

That Saturday, James drove me to the group therapy thing that was located about fifteen minutes out of town. The thin white building was shoved between a Salvation Army and a Domino’s Pizza, with a sprawling shared parking lot.

James walked me inside, told the nearest woman with a clipboard who I was and said that his wife had talked to her on the phone earlier, et cetera. Then, just like that, he drove away, and I was left sitting on a rock hard blue plastic waiting chair.

I gazed around the cramped waiting area. Whitewashed walls, grimy linoleum flooring, a line of plastic blue chairs against each wall until they were stopped by various gray doors with metal plaques in their centers.

There were only two other people waiting in the plastic chairs: a dark-haired girl my age, very pregnant yet skeletal everywhere, and a pallid, anemic middle school aged guy who had his knees up to his chest and his arms on top of his head, shaking like a leaf in a hurricane.

I leaned my head back and stared at the dirty white ceiling until a plump Latina woman called my name and told me to follow her down an ancient metal staircase, which led into a dingy basement with a circle of blue plastic chairs in the middle of it.

Cliques of teenagers were hanging around, and they were already much less alienating to me than the kids at Pleasant Grove High School. I stood in a corner until the Latina woman whistled and told everybody to take a seat, which everybody did, rather reluctantly.

I sat down in an empty chair between a slightly chubby girl with a split lip and a badly scarred, ginger punk rocker type guy.

“Now, everybody,” began the woman, who sat slightly out of the circle. “We have a new face here today, a last minute guest…” I dropped my gaze, knowing that she was clearly talking about me. After a moment of rambling, she said my full name and asked, “Would you like to say something about yourself, Elena?’

I shook my head. “No, thanks.”

“That’s just fine.” Then, turned to the guy sitting to her left and said, “Matthew, would you care to start?”

Matthew began to mumble about mental health, about drugs, about whatever. After about three minutes, he shrugged and said, “That’s it. I’m okay.”

The girl sitting to the left of him began to mumble on for a few minutes, and then the person on the left went, and it went like that, counterclockwise. One or two people said pass and the next person would go. And then, suddenly, my turn.

What was I supposed to even talk about? I was silent for a long moment, thinking of what the hell should I say, until the woman prompted softly, “Elena, it’s your turn to share. You don’t have to if you.”

I began, very timidly, “I cut off my finger, because I got drunk. On my birthday. That’s why I’m here, I think. I guess. That’s it.”

And then went on the slightly chubby girl to my left, talking about diets and her parents for about a minute before she said, “That’s all.”

After everyone had said something, the woman stood up and said, “Okay, take your break. I’ll be back in just a moment.” She left the room and everyone stood up, beginning to wander.

There were about twenty-five or thirty kids there, all milling around talking amongst themselves. I stood alone until a very thin brunette in flannel came up to me, with a welcoming half-smile, half-scowl, and she said, as if she already knew me, “Hey, Elena.”

“Hi,” I smiled, trying to be friendly. “You can call me Layne.”

“I’m Demi.” She returned the smile. “You’re new, I guess.”

“Yup.” I sighed, my smile fading.

“What did you do?”

I held up my left hand. “Cut off a finger when I was drunk.”

Demi laughed hoarsely. “Man! That’s really not much compared to a lot of other people here. Everyone’s fucked, honestly.”

“Well, what did you do?” I asked, eyebrows knit.

“Don’t worry about it.” Her mouth returned to that default scowl. “You look cool, though, that’s why I decided to talk to you. Everyone needs a friend in this place, eh?”

“Yeah, I guess so…” My eyes drifted to the other teenagers, wondering what they all did to end up where they were.

Demi saw me looking at the scarred punk and said, “That’s Kyle. He’s cool.”

“What’re all those scars from…?” I asked, morbid curiosity in my mind. Kyle’s entire body was scarred, what I assumed were burn scars, and surgery scars.

“He lit himself on fire.” She said it so casually that I thought I’d heard her wrong for a second.

“Wait, really?”

“Yeah. Sad, but yeah.”

“Oh, man…” Sorrow hit my chest. How fucked up was the world, kids lighting themselves on fire? My mind would often wander on that thought.

“You live in Pleasant Grove, don’t you? You look familiar.”

“Yeah, I do, I moved there in September,” I replied. A happy thought popped up: a friend in Pleasant Grove? It seemed impossible.

“Cool, I live there, too. I knew I knew you from somewhere, you’re that girl who went missin’ for a while, right? I remember you, now… We’ve got some classes together, right?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s me, I guess…” That girl who went missing made my heart fall once again. Was that really me? I guess it was.

Just then, the woman- whose name I’d found out was Mrs. Gable- strode back into the room with a stack of papers, and she whistled and told everyone to sit down. Demi grabbed my forearm and dragged me to sit beside her.

Mrs. Gable handed out the papers. All we had to do was write down a paragraph about what we’ve been grateful for this week. I wrote about Wyatt and only Wyatt. What else was there to be grateful for? Nothing.