Whisper to Me by Nick Lake

“Is the voice talking to you now? Does it want you to hurt me?”
    “PUT YOUR HANDS AROUND THAT ******* ******’S NECK AND CHOKE HER. DO IT NOW. KILL HER BEFORE—”
    “Drugs,” I said quietly, as loudly as I could manage.
    “I’m sorry?”
    “Drugs,” I said. “Please. Now.”

 
    They started giving me risperidone.
    This is the good thing about risperidone: it stops you hearing voices, most of the time.
    This is the bad thing about risperidone: everything else.
    You start sleeping all the time, you can’t remember things, the walls of your mind become slippery as if oiled. You feel tired every second of every day, perceive the world through frosted glass.
    Anyway, I was outside looking at the roses—because what else is there to do when you’re in a mental institution—when I felt the presence of someone behind me. I turned around and there was this preposterously beautiful girl standing there. She sort of flicked a cigarette into her mouth from a packet of Lucky Strikes in a move that seemed almost magical, and lit it with a match. She took a deep drag and blew smoke over the roses.
    “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
    I blinked at her.
    She gestured at the walls of the hospital encircling us. She was too thin—her wrists were rails—and she had dark bags under her eyes, but those eyes were fat almonds and her lips were a bow. She looked like a model doing an old-school heroin-chic photo shoot.
    “Not a talker, huh?” she said. She was maybe five years older than me, twenty-two, something like that. She blew a perfect ring of smoke that rippled over a red rose.
    I shrugged.
    “That’s okay,” she said. “I talk enough for two anyways.” She stuck out her hand to shake mine, like a businesswoman or something. I was surprised so I took it without thinking.
    “My name’s Paris,” she said as she pumped my hand up and down. “But really I’m more of a Delaware. An Atlantic City at best.”
    “What?” I said. I couldn’t help it. I was living in a fog, but this girl was like a wind machine; she blew the fog away. I don’t know, she just had this energy. You wanted her attention on you as soon as you met her; it was like sunshine. Which was surprising because everything about her was dark—black hair, almost-black eyes, black clothes.
    She smiled, and I realized there had been a thin cloud over the sun all that time; now she was blasting rays at me, beaming, in the real sense of the word, and it was like being floodlit. “A lame joke,” she said. “Commenting wryly on the hyperbolic romanticism of my name. And shit.”
    I laughed. I didn’t know anyone who used words like “hyperbolic.” “Cassie,” I said. “Short for Cassandra. My parents weren’t romantics. Or big readers of Greek myth, evidently.”
    “Ha,” she said. “Cassandra of the disbelieved prophecies. Okay. You predict ending up in here?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Figures. What’s the deal? Depression? Self harm?”
    “I don’t know. Psychotic dissociation. Schizophrenia, maybe.”
    She raised her eyebrows. “Impressive.”
    “You?” I asked.
    “Bipolar. A bunch of shit.”
    “Bipolar?”
    “It’s what they used to call manic depression. Doesn’t matter. Just know that it sucks. Well, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you feel great. That’s kind of the whole entire problem.”
    “Sorry,” I said.
    “Not your fault,” she said with perfect equanimity.
    “Of course,” I said. “We’re always alone with our inner voices, we Cassandras.”
    Paris laughed and stubbed out her cigarette on a low wooden wall that was holding in the earth and the roses. “You’re cool,” she said. “Most people in here can only talk about the Kardashians and Jersey Shore. Hopefully I’ll see you around.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “You too.”
    She turned and started to walk away. Then she stopped. She came back to me, hugged me tight, and automatically I hugged her back, as if someone putting their arms around you