"That's because you never bothered to reach out after you left." I say cooly.
She blinks her eyes open a little to look at me, her eyes flat and blank, holding no emotions. "You would have told them where I was."
"Of course."
"I didn't want to go home, Hayden, or back to rehab or back to that institution. They'd have had me put away for good this time. You know that."
"But wouldn't that have still been a better option than this?" I point out. "Better than being wherever the hell you've been all of this time?"
"No." She says quickly, without even having to think about it. "I wanted to be able to do what I wanted to do."
"Like drugs?" I snap, my anger at her bubbling to the surface after all this time I've stamped it down.
"Yeah." She says, her skeletal hand gripping her pillow under her head. "Not the ones they wanted me on, but the ones I like."
"I hate you so much." I say, my eyes welling with tears. "You could have chosen to get better but you wanted this instead."
"Yeah." She says again, her eyes falling shut. "I wanted to be me."
"This is the you you wanted to be?" I laugh sardonically. "Look at where you are! Look at what you did!"
"You don't understand." She tells me dryly. "You don't hear them like I do. They never stop, Hayden. They never stop...."
Her mouth stays open but I can tell she's fading out.
"You could have gotten better." I continue to argue even when I'm not sure she can hear me anymore. "Lots of people have your diagnosis and find the right medicine for them and live totally normal lives. They don't have babies in alleys and abandon them and their families."
"I'm...sorry you feel that way."
Not sorry that she did it. Not sorry that this is what her life has become. But sorry I don't understand. Maybe I don't, but that doesn't negate everything she's done.
"You don't even care, do you?"
I came all this way to see her, and I guess in my head I thought it would go different, but of course not. She's not normal. She's not the Alice I grew up with. She's the Alice she turned herself into.
She made the choices that got her here and she doesn't even care.
"I'm glad you came." She tells me again, a tiny smile tugging at the corner of her lips.
This is pointless.
She's drugged down out of her mind.
Exactly the way she likes to be.
I bet she'd tell me she's happy right now, even though she looks like a corpse barely hanging onto the soul inside of it.
"Tell me where she went." I demand.
"Who?" She licks her lips lazily.
I want to slap her.
"Your baby!" I snap, standing out of the chair and looking away because I can't stand to watch her any longer.
She swallows a few times, her dry throat working to produce words.
"She's with the father."
"And where is he?" I ask. "Is he one of your drug buddies? Some dude you met on the street?"
"He's a good guy." She says but I don't believe her. I don't trust her judgment on this. "He will take care of her."
"I don't know that!" I yell. "Neither do you! I'm shocked you even know who the father was!"
