The One Left Behind

I wasn’t always this way.

Half-cracked, obsessive, and paranoid.

I’d like to think I was quite sane once. Before the black crept in and the voices told me stories. I would have lost my head completely if I hadn’t found solace in writing out the words the whispers told me in the night.

If I hadn’t, I knew that the words racing through my head would have come out in more destructive ways.

I would like to call myself a writer, but the other girls would always laugh when I used that term. They’d laugh and tease and hurt when I dared to put even a remotely important label on myself. So I stuck to using terms like half-cracked, obsessive, and paranoid out loud, and a writer in my own head.

It kept the fists of others away from me.

It's not like I was afraid of a fight; half-cracked people like me scratch, bite and kick their way to victory every time; but what came after every fight was something that I tried to avoid if at all possible.

A girl who used to sleep in the room next to mine used to always sing Mary Had a Little Lamb every night to help her fall asleep. After one particular song-filled night, when I decided to be curious rather than angry at the girl’s constant signing, I asked her why she always sang that song versus any of the other nursery rhymes. The girl blinked her shockingly clear blue eyes and said that it was because her childhood pet cat was named Mary and so she loved anything named Mary.

It was a cute story, except this girl has been here for all her life and has never had a cat or a pet of any kind.

Even still, maybe it was for the best she got pneumonia and died before Madam Mary came to stay with us.

The old Madam, Madam Ellena, while firm, was kind and treated each girl here as if we weren't all completely - or half - cracked.

We all loved her, so that was why it created such a big uproar and instant dislike to Madam Mary when Madam Ellena left us without a word.

Some of the girls, the naive and the good ones, were quick to forgive Madam Ellena for leaving us. They soon forgot about the betrayal we all felt when the morning of her absence was realized. Maybe it made me wicked, or heartless, but I couldn't help but hate Madam Ellena for leaving us. Maybe, if she had given us a warning, I’d have been able to forgive her. But when she left us without a word and stuck us with Madam Mary she was forever dubbed as unforgivable and I hated her all the more for it.

I hated Madam Mary too, but for a different reason. Whereas Madam Ellena was fairly kind - reasonable - Madam Mary had zero tolerance for rule-breaking of any kind.

Those who broke curfew, made noise late at night that woke others, hid things during room searches, ate more food than their share, lied during our weekly "crazy checks," initiated or participated in fights were punished swiftly and without mercy.

There were more rules, which Madam Mary now had printed and hung up on every wall, but those were the ones that always seemed to apply to me.