Evergreen Everleigh - The Wattys 2020

Chapter Twelve - All She Was Before

Chapter Twelve

All She Was Before

Several days pass before I see Wister again for another session. Instead, he sees us all in rotation, though from what I can tell, I think he spends the most time with Aloe and Aster.

The occupants of Freesia Fields, when not occupied with therapy, function in perfect synchrony with each other – so much so that by the fifth day I begin to feel like the squeaky cog in an otherwise well-oiled machine. Willow bakes, Aloe sucks, Perennial paints and Sweet Pea writes poetry. Yarrow and Cedar have a habit of disappearing for hours on end and in an effort to look deeply uninterested, I don't ask where they go.

More importantly, over the next few days, I begin to piece together the jigsaw pieces that classify us as a group of damaged youths. I had entered Freesia Fields expecting to see the paperdoll girls from my previous in-patient stays. In those institutes, we had always been in quiet competition with each other, always wanting to be the least messed up person in any group therapy session. There had been other competitions too – ones I'd always won. 

Thinnest, saddest, most desperate.

I remember a girl called Evelynn once peeking at the weighing scales as I stood on them one morning in the nurses' station and pronouncing me the weirdest type of crazy she'd ever met. This made me grin so hard my face hurt. Here things are different.

I spend my days being distinctly unforced to eat, yet encouraged to eat just enough by Lady Lavender at meals. She calls us all flowers and tells the other flowers not to stare at my wrists. Wister had removed the bandages on the third day as per the hospital's instructions as

the wounds needed to breathe. They're hideous and jagged and I find myself wishing it was winter when I could layer myself in thermals and woolen jumpers and no one would bat an eyelid.

But I am not winning any competitions for most crazy here anytime soon. On the day after Aloe shouted at me to stay away from Juniper, I accidentally walk in on Willow in the bathroom, hunched over the toilet bowl after dinner. Don't ask questions, that was the golden rule for these kinds of places. If you ask questions, you get a backstory, and sometimes it can be hard to remember which problem is yours and which is the girl next door's.

I walked out straight away, closing the door behind me. Perennial stopped speaking to me after that. I was egotistical enough to take this personally until Sweet Pea told me that sometimes Perennial got so anxious that she couldn't speak for days or weeks at a time. Nowadays, the silent wispy Perennial spends much of her days studying, even though it's summer. She curls up outside on the grass or on her bed in our room surrounded by books.

Worse than any of these revelations, was today when I saw Yarrow at breakfast, he didn't speak to me either. Every day previously, he had been bordering on annoyingly conscientious with me. More than once he had interrupted my reading of Jayne Ellis or my journaling by snatching the book or journal from my hands and asking me how I was finding Freesia Fields so far. Every time this had happened, the light had caught his floppy, caramel curls and his single dimple had quivered as though he was always on the verge of laughter. Not today, however. Today he was sullen and sunk low in his seat at the kitchen table. He only spoke to mutter a half-hearted joke with Teasel before walking from the room without eating.

Don't ask questions. I'd had to remind myself of that rule when I saw the intensity of Yarrow's sadness. Now, outside in the baking heat of the polytunnel in the garden with Sweet Pea and a silent Perennial, there was earth lodged under my nails as I began planting some tomato seeds into the soft soil. I had never grown food in my grandmother's garden, only flowers. It was