Strangely enough, my therapist didn’t regard this list of accomplishments with as much pride as I did. When I finished, she cocked her head like a cocker spaniel and asked, “Why do you find this self-destructive behavior so appealing, Margaret? What is it you find so compelling about risking your life, and causing your parents so much stress? Are you angry with them?”

Personally, I felt the thing stressing my mother the most was the stress of having to appear stressed all the time, and my father’s biggest worry was that their weekend visits would cut into his Saturday television marathon. I tamped down on my knee-jerk reaction to respond with “And are you angry because your parents actually named you Kitty?” and slouched back in my seat.

Kitty Monty’s office was decorated with the kind of art you would expect to find in a nursing home or in a playschool for mentally handicapped children. Puppies and babies seemed as out of place at Tidewater Psychiatric Institute as an AA meeting in a bar. It just seemed unfair to plaster the office with images of things most of the patients who sat in it would never have. I mentioned that to Dr. Monty, but I guess she didn’t find my appeal to justice all that convincing because she just tolerantly waited for me to answer the question.

I sighed. “What was the question again?”

“Why do you persist in committing these reckless and irresponsible acts?” she asked for the third time. I had heard the question the first three times, but it was one of my favorite games to play with her; in one of our biweekly one-on-one sessions, I had managed to force her to repeat the phrase “erratic behavior” no less than twelve times.

“My mother quickly became disinterested in me when she realized my feats weren’t of the variety that she could brag about at the water cooler to her lawyer friends, and my father once told me ‘You didn’t turn out like I’d hoped’. I’m not sure what he hoped for, because I didn’t think he’d had the time to worry about my future in between working eighty hour weeks and my brother’s football games. He broke my heart, but he also set me free. No matter what I did to redeem myself, I could never reverse all the times I’d let him down, so what was the point in trying?” None of this was necessarily true, but I’d heard it on a soap opera once, and I was pretty sure I hadn’t already used it in a previous session. She seemed to buy it, because she nodded sagely, adjusted her bifocals, and scribbled something in the margins of her notebook. I had the sudden urge to snatch the glasses off her nose and throw them out of the window. Instead, I sat on my hands and waited for her response.

Finally she looked up. “Well, Margaret—“

“Maggie,” I interrupted. “My parents are rich, not me.”

“Okay then, Maggie, you made some excellent progress today…I think we’ve gotten pretty close to the heart of the distressing lack of concern for your own well-being and the feelings of those who care about you. A couple more sessions like this, and we can talk about your release.” Yeah, right. I’d heard that every week for the last six, but today I was able to look her in the face and smile, knowing what I had in store for later. I had decided that I was taking a more active role in my release, which hopefully, with the aid of my old college friend Joe Miller and without any unforeseen delays, would be tonight.

Her earnest expression provoked an uncontrollable desire to snicker, and I bit my lip and looked down into my lap, shaking with suppressed laughter. Luckily, Kitty didn’t seem to notice and she stood up and held out her hand for a handshake, her typical gesture of dismissal after every session. I jumped up and slapped it in a lopsided high five, and gave her a jaunty salute.

“Later, Doc”, I said as I tried to walk out of her office as fast as I could without giving the impression of a victim bolting from a burning building, I once again encountered the sterile air of the hospital, I breathed a crisp, clean sigh of relief. And promptly lit a cigarette. I inhaled as if it were my very last breath on Earth, exhaled, and counted to six. As I murmured slowly “five…six…” I heard the familiar sound of footsteps and heavy breathing that accompanied the bulky form of Doris.

“Maggie? Maggie!” she gasped. “I’ve told you millions of times! There is no smoking in the corridor!” I smiled and took another drag before dropping the cigarette to the floor and crushing it with my foot.

Blowing the smoke into her face, I cheerily replied “My bad, Dor, forgot. Silly me.” I grinned into her twisted, fuming features and headed off down the hall.

Tidewater was a hotbed of contradictions. Half of the patients were just like me, who had what I like to term “quirks”, and the other half was completely batshit insane. I’m not referring to the kind of easily spotted insanity, given away by muttering to walls or dragging fruit around on a leash. Some of the women in my ward seemed completely normal. Until you found Rosalie hovering over your bed late at night, cradling a loaf of bread like it was an infant and hissing “Why isn’t my baby BREATHING?”, or Ellie in front of the TV, mindlessly pulling out clumps of hair without even flinching.

Tidewater was for the truly hopeless, or for those who had abandoned it so long ago they didn’t even recognize what it was anymore. I was an anomaly. I had neither resigned myself to life at Tidewater nor was I trying to pull out my own teeth with tweezers, the way CiCi did when Doris gave her Lithium instead of Depakote. I simply had a disregard for both the socially appropriate and the legally acceptable. If you asked me, I was just like Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan, without the looks or money to get myself out of trouble. I relied on my ability to manipulate the truth, especially with cops. “See, Officer, how it happened was: I was out for a stroll when…” and so on and so forth. I never really knew myself how my own sentences were going to end, so if I managed to actually create a plausible explanation for whatever pointlessly reckless and illegal behavior I’d been caught in the middle of, I was just as surprised as the police officer.

After the fourth arrest, an abortion, and my unsuccessful attempt at suicide, both the legal system and my parents decided that I was too much for them to handle, and I had no money of my own to move out. A hasty search for a reputable mental hospital far enough away that my mother could tell people I was studying abroad and close enough that she and my father could visit resulted in my stay at Tidewater. My therapist threw around a lot of phrases like “borderline personality” and “bipolar” disorders, and I’d heard the words “hysterical” and “dramatic” from my parents, but if you asked me, which nobody did, I was just bored. Eternally and desperately bored.

I’ll admit that boredom landed me in trouble, but in all fairness nobody ever even thought to ask me why it was that I felt the need to steal the car sitting on the corner of 15th and K outside the strip club (it had the keys in it. Shame on you, rich folk); why I had gotten involved in so many casual relationships that resulted in my brief pregnancy (guys treat women like tools all the time. Why is it so strange that it should work both ways?) or why I had tried to kill myself (I hadn’t, but apparently muscle relaxers and vodka aren’t meant to be taken together. Lesson learned). So here I was, watching Rosalie trying to brush the teeth of her bread loaf baby, and pondering my escape. My therapists, Dr. Monty and my group leader, Lorraine, constantly referred to my impending release but neither ever actually set a date, and so I made my own. I was one of the few patients who had grounds privileges and my friend Joe was visiting me tonight and it was my intention that he wouldn’t be leaving alone.

I walked into the living area and stood behind Marilyn, my best friend at Tidewater as well as my roommate. Marilyn was a cutter, or as I liked to think of it, she had a romantic attraction to sharp objects. We had met on my first day at the Institute and had hit it off immediately when we realized that we had the same initial instinct for excessive behavior and the burning desire to remind ourselves every once in a while that we were still alive. It manifested differently; I stole cars and Marilyn used her mother’s finest silverware to cut herself under the table. Currently, she was watching Seinfeld reruns and absently spinning her hemp bracelet around her wrist. The rough canvas had rubbed her skin raw in patches that often opened up and bled, perpetually making her look as if she’d been crucified. I leaned down and whispered, “Meet me in the room. I have something for you.”

Five minutes later, she walked in while I was throwing as much as I could possibly fit into my backpack. A couple pairs of jeans, a sweatshirt and clean underwear went in with my toothbrush and a couple of my favorite books. I had told Joe to bring an empty backpack with him, and we’d switch them out in my room, because it would look odd for me to take backpack on a stroll about the grounds. Marilyn watched me for a few minutes before tentatively asking, “What are you going to do, once you’re out?” I stopped and looked at her; her eyes were welling up with tears.

“Oh Jesus Christ…when you get out, you can come visit us. Joe and I are going to go live in Arizona, He got a job on a ranch there and he says he can talk to the owner about getting me a job as a cook. This isn’t real life, honey. I can’t stay here anymore, you know that.” I looked in her eyes and silently pleaded with her to understand that I wasn’t ditching her, but I was ditching Tidewater. She nodded and wrung her hands. I reached under my mattress and pulled out the bound journal she had always coveted and put it in her hands. She looked up at me, startled, and I smiled at her. “You always wanted to read my journal, right? Well now you can, and there’s plenty of reading material there for you. You know how Doris always confiscates the food from Greta’s room? She hides it in the nurse’s station, and she eats it at night. Once I caught her sleeping and there were Milky Way wrappers everywhere!” Despite herself, Marilyn’s tear-stained face creased, and she broke into wobbly laughter. This anecdote wasn’t even remotely true, but I liked coming up with interesting stories about uninteresting people and I’d been writing them down for months. Why shouldn’t Marilyn get a kick out of them too? Poor thing was going to be bored here without me anyway. Once she started cackling, I did too, and we giggled for a good ten minutes, managing to restrain ourselves only to start laughing again.

We were interrupted by a sharp rap on the door and I threw my backpack under the bed just before Doris poked her head in. “Visitor”, she said gruffly and threw open the door to reveal Joe, looking as refreshingly and scruffily familiar as ever. I ran into his arms and Doris rolled her eyes and left.

Joe was the only souvenir of my failed attempt at community college, save for a couple English credits and a collection of drunken memories. He was also one of those rare people whose opinion I remotely respected, even if it wasn’t enough to actually affect any of my behavior. Joe could listen to my rambling thoughts on everything from love and sex to my need for adventure without pointing out the obvious flaws in my excuses and explanations, probably because he’d been in love with me from the first day I sailed into our Religion 101 class, one that I only passed because Joe wrote both our final papers. Once we were sitting in a Waffle House in the wee hours of one of the final nights of exam week, talking about how we should probably quit smoking and doing other equally unnecessarily hazardous things to our health. I looked at the blazing cigarette in my hand and shrugged. “Ah well, it’s not like I want to live too long anyway. I mean seriously, could you see me as an old and feeble woman? What the hell would I do at eighty years old?”

Joe looked at me affectionately and replied “Probably sit in your rocking chair and wonder why all the things you’ve done haven’t killed you yet.” I started to laugh, then promptly felt a pang of sheer terror. That would be my fucking luck.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t had too much opportunity to turn my life around since then, since shortly after I dropped out; I followed that up with both an arrest and a hospital visit. That was all going to change. Like a born-again Christian, or an alcoholic once the hangover’s worn off, I was viewing the world and all it had to offer with crystal clear vision. There was no way I was going to end up like Rosalie, with her yeasty infant, or Marilyn, rubbing against picture frames, hoping to break skin. I didn’t know if we were actually going to Arizona, but I didn’t care as long as it was thousands of miles away from Tidewater and its hollow, broken occupants. I kissed her on the forehead, grabbed Joe’s hand and pulled him out of the room.

“Let’s go.”