Ultraviolet by R. J. Anderson Page A

brooding over my failure and start thinking about how to overcome it, but once I did, it wasn’t hard to figure out where my appeal had gone wrong. I’d thought my best chance of getting out of Pine Hills was to convince the board that Dr. Minta was mistaken about me. Only now did I realize that the person I really needed to convince, the one I should have been working on all along, was Dr. Minta himself.
    But how could I persuade him that I was capable of making my own decisions? In my mind, he was still the enemy, and he knew it. And no amount of pleading or reasoning was going to change his belief that I didn’t really understand what was best for me, that my thinking was “disordered” and only his magic pills could make it right.
    Then it came to me. The perfect way to prove to Dr. Minta, and my mother too, that I didn’t need antipsychotic medication to keep me sane. It would take time and patience, but since I was going to be stuck here until the end of July anyway, what did I have to lose?
    So when the nurse came around with the medicine cart that evening and handed me the familiar paper cups, I tossed the pills into my mouth and followed them up with a swig of water as usual. But it was only the water I swallowed, and the moment she stopped watching me I spit the tablets back into my hand.
    I’d figure out what to do with them later.

SIX (IS PURPLE)

    My second week at Pine Hills blurred into the third, and my fellow patients came and went. I’d just managed to talk myself into forgiving Kirk for the chocolate incident when he plummeted into a depressive phase, and started spending most of his free time in bed. Around the same time, Micheline came back to Yellow Ward, but then she found a paper clip in Mr. Lamoreux’s classroom and sliced up her wrist so badly she needed stitches. And a couple of days later, Sanjay sneaked out and got half a kilometer up the highway before anyone realized he was gone.
    But even with all of that going on, I managed to stay out of trouble. Soon I was allowed to walk the halls without supervision and even enjoy courtyard privileges. I was still cutting back on my meds, but carefully—for the first few days I even broke the pills and took half, just to make sure the withdrawal symptoms didn’t get too much for me. Little by little the fog over my senses began to lift, and the world regained its proper shapes and colors. During my sessions with Dr. Minta, I kept my eyes down and said little, but every day I felt a little more alive.
    Meanwhile my father came back to see me as promised, but not my mother, and the Family Counseling part of my schedule remained mercifully free. I had an uncomfortable feeling that Dr. Minta was working on that, though. He’d asked me to write a short essay about my childhood and turn it in by next week, so that we could talk about it at a future session.
    Later that week, I was on my way to the cafeteria when I noticed a stranger standing by the nurses’ station. From the back, he looked so ordinary that I almost passed by without a second glance. But then he turned and I stopped dead, my heart colliding with my ribcage.
    His eyes were violet.
    I’m not exaggerating. They weren’t just blue or blue-gray. They were that deep bluish purple you only see when refracting light through a prism—or when someone is wearing tinted contact lenses.
    And yet the man in front of me didn’t look like he cared about fashion, or had even bothered to make its acquaintance. Not only was his shirt wrinkled and partly untucked, but he’d paired it with a shapeless cotton sweater vest and slacks in exciting shades like Old Filing Cabinet and Dryer Lint. His hair was the color of a thunderstorm reflected in a mud puddle, and looked like he’d cut it himself with blunt scissors several weeks ago.
    And yet he was clean shaven, and the apple-green tang of his scent told me he’d showered recently as well. His face was full of angles and wry humor, and he was