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my toe stubs the leg of her chair. Milk sloshes out of my glass and down the back of her sweatshirt.
    “Jesus!” She practically spits out the word. “Why don’t you watch what you’re doing?” She’s wiping her sweatshirt with a paper napkin. They all look at me, six sick girls in two straight lines, waiting for me to do something.
    Somehow I navigate through the sea of tables and chairs and more chairs until I’m finally at the conveyor belt.
    The lunchroom attendant, a heavy woman who sits guard over the trash cans to keep track of how much food the anorexics throw out, gives me a bothered expression, then goes back to her paperback.
    Across the room, a dish explodes on the floor; there’s the obligatory smattering of applause. The attendant gets up, turns her book face down on her chair, and brings a broom and dustpan over to the girl who dropped her dish.
    I stand in front of the blue trash can marked “Recyclables” and finger the edge of my aluminum pie plate, aware that no one’s watching me, that all I’d have to do is rip the pie plate in half to get a nice sharp cutting edge. The clatter of dishes and conversation dims to a hush as I slip the thin, impossibly light disk of aluminum into my pocket. I’m calm, finally, because I know that even if I don’t use it right away, I have what I need.
    That night, Sydney tosses and turns and fusses with her blankets for almost an hour after lights out. I lie on my back and count the seconds, praying for herto fall asleep, so I can hear the sound ofher steady in-out breathing—so I can fall asleep.
    She rolls over, facing my direction.
    “Callie?” she whispers. The space between our twin beds is only a foot or two.
    I hold my breath and try to pretend I’m asleep.
    “Callie? Callie,” she says. “Do you still do it?”
    I hold very still.
    “I mean, are you still, you know, cutting yourself?”
    From down the hall comes the faint squeaking of Ruby’s nurse’s shoes as she makes her rounds. From the sound of it, Ruby’s still four doors away. I think of it as a problem on a standardized test: if Ruby’s shoes squeak every 2.5 seconds and she’s four rooms away, how long till she reaches our door?
    “Lookit, Callie.” Sydney blows out a gust of air, the way she does when she’s smoking an imaginary cigarette in Group. “It’s OK with me if you don’t want to talk.”
    Just a few squeaks until Ruby’s at our door. People who aren’t asleep when Ruby comes around have to take sleeping pills. Everyone is afraid of those pills—even the substance-abuse guests.
    Sydney sighs. “Just don’t, you know …please don’t hurt yourself.”
    Tears, warm and sudden, sting the corners of my eyes, but I don’t cry. Sam cries. My mom cries. I don’t cry. I roll over as Ruby passes by. She pauses outside our door a minute, a brief interruption in the steady squeak, squeak of her shoes. Then she moves on. And after a while I figure Sydney must have fallen asleep, because finally I can hear the steady in-out of her breathing.
    On the way to your office the next day Ruth clears her throat. She puts her hand over her mouth, then says she has something to tell me, that this is the last day she’ll be my escort. Her voice is small, unsteady. “I’m graduating,” she says. “Tomorrow.”
    She smiles a practice smile, and one of my dad’s favorite dumb jokes comes to mind. The joke is about a family riding along in a brand-new convertible. The car hits a bump, and one of the kids, a girl named Ruth, falls out. But the family keeps on driving. Ruthlessly. “Get it?” he would say, grinning. “Ruthlessly?”
    Sick Minds will be a Ruthless place once she’s gone. I would like to tell Ruth this, give this joke to her as a graduation gift. But then she is gone and I’m sitting next to the UFO—Ruthlessly—and wondering how she got better without looking any different.
    You furrow your brow and ask me to please look at you a minute. I look past you, out