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Cherry’s pretty sure), sucks in his smoke quickly, puffs it out, sucks it in, fast fast fast. Cherry’s breath quickens in her throat; even though she doesn’t smoke anymore, he makes it look so damn good. His green eyes are pools of vulnerability, like Sam Sterling’s, so long ago. Another project there for the taking, like Sam or Marian or her tapestry. Michael doesn’t tap his ash, so the spent tobacco becomes a long charcoal ghost, just ready to fall. Cherry wonders how she looks to him. Old, probably. The first time she was in here, she would have made a pass. God, it sucks to be thirty-two when you really still need to be seventeen.
    As far as she can tell, she’s made no progress in convincing them she’s been cured. It isn’t like the last time, when even if they didn’t exactly want to give her a chance, they were at least willing to watch her, to assess. Now it feels like a life sentence. It’s been six years since she lost control at that Marshall Field’s, pressed the knife to the cashier’s throat; she remembers hearing they locked up all sharp objects after that. Weirdly enough, her “episode,” as they called it, hit her right after her gorgeous flawed Princess died in a car crash. Why did she care so much about a Princess she’d never know? The grownup, the Diana that Cherry would never become?
    The police were called, and then came the blur of the second trial, the same old same old with the attorney, the greasy-haired public defender who stared at her tits instead of listening to her. Except of course this time everything happened without the guidance counselor,without the school psychologist, without all those little safety people who made the first time feel important. Almost six years it’s been since they threw her in here again.
    Cherry Diana Winters—Chronic Case.
    She still doesn’t have off-unit dining privileges; the chicken breast and spinach she ate for lunch were delivered to the locked ward on a hard blue plastic tray. It isn’t fair. She didn’t hurt anyone that day Maybe it was because of the other—
    And she can’t think about that anymore.
    The doctors, she’s almost certain, still think she’s a danger to herself, maybe to others too, still don’t trust her to leave the unit, still don’t dare send her for a walk outside all by herself. Dr. Baum is gone. Now they’re sending her to a woman, Dr. Anders, some fifty something garbage brain who looks just like Marian and says things like
Yes, Cherry,
and /
see, Cherry,
and
I’d like to hear more about that, Cherry.
    Last time it didn’t take long for her to smile her way to off-unit privileges, despite the charges (and after she was so sure she’d never be tried as an adult!), the court case, the evidence, and the whoosh of relief as it was this and not prison. Last time, it was so easy. It was only two years before she was pronounced “cured.”
    She twists another knot, tighter than ever. Squeezing the last bit of ease out of the yarn sends a rush through her, a whirlwind that starts in her stomach and twirls to a stop in her head.
    Maybe it’s the cutting. That’s harder to quit than smoking. Through a half-lidded eye Cherry gazes at her sliced arm, red welts pulling up from skinny pale flesh, slowly healing. They took away all knives and sharp objects the first day, of course, just like they did before. And she’ll never get her precious glass Bitch Posse jar back. They won’t even let her have a can of Coke for fear she’ll rip it up and use it to cut herself, and she still gets only a plastic knife with her meal. But she smashed her watch, used the crystal inside to slash at her arm,hid it in her pillow, and lied and said she’d fallen down. No one believed her, of course, but it didn’t matter. They turned her room upside down, shook out her sheets, all her clothing, her underwear strewn about the floor, to look for the knife or razor blade they were sure she had.
    They haven’t found it, after six