Read You Remind Me of Me for Free Online

Home, they call it, in the way they call the repositories for the old and the insane “Homes.”
They put her in a Home,
her father had once said about a neighbor woman who had lost her mind when she got old, and now Nora herself is in such a place. Being watched over. Taken care of. You cannot lock the door to your room in such a place, and her door won’t even stay closed, she doesn’t know why. The air pressure, maybe, the wind, something—she has no way of knowing, but sometimes as she lies in the dark the door will click open like an awakened eye, a shaft of light from the hallway will fall across her face. It happens frequently enough that she has taken to leaning a chair against the doorknob when she goes to sleep.
    In the dark, she can’t keep herself from thinking that it is a ghost. She doesn’t believe in ghosts, exactly, but if they did exist they would thrive in a place such as this. Girls have killed themselves here, she is sure of it. It is a deathly place. Silent. Cold. There is the kind of feeling you might have, walking alone through a park in late autumn, when a single leaf falls from a tree and twists slowly to the ground in front of you.
    ——
    January 6, 1966. This is her fourth day of residence in the Mrs. Glass House, her fourth day of captivity, and it is beginning to sink in. There is no turning back. She should have accepted that fact a long time ago, but instead she still finds herself bargaining vaguely with her body, with God, thinking that it’s possible that a mistake has been made. The long months stretch in front of her, and already it seems that she is losing herself. There is nothing to do here but wait, months upon months tunneled in front of her: June, they said, early June most likely. She sits in a chair by the window, reading her book,
The Collector
by John Fowles. It is inappropriate, she knows: “A brutal tormented man and the beautiful, aristocratic young woman he has taken captive,” the back cover proclaims, and the story upsets her.
I hate the way I have changed. I accept too much,
the woman says, and Nora underlines this passage as small glimmering motes of snow pass by outside, as somewhere down the hall a transistor radio is playing AM love songs, the Monkees singing “I’m a Believer!” She reads: “I’m so far from everything. From normality. From light. From where I want to be.” She closes the book and sits staring at her fingers, which don’t seem like her own fingers. It is exactly the wrong book to be reading at the moment, she thinks, though on second thought, a happy book, an optimistic, escapist book would be even worse. If she’s going to read anything at all it ought to be about suffering.
    ——
    She thinks about things that she will never tell people, ugly memories that make her wince when they enter her mind.
    Once, she punched herself in the stomach as hard as she could, hoping it would dislodge.
    Once, she put something inside of herself—a knitting needle, which is what she had heard they used. But what, exactly, was she supposed to catch hold of with it? She imagined a floating piece of yarn with a glob of cells and blood at the end of it. Hooking it, pulling it out.
    Once, she tasted bleach, but couldn’t bring herself to drink it.
    ——
    Have the others done such things? If so, they don’t talk about it. They don’t talk about much, these girls, as if they are all spies. Mostly, they glance at one another furtively—the scratch of silverware against plates, the sound of chewing, the television voices, the soft, private moan a girl will make when she walks down the hall. What is there to say?
    “This is not a sorority,” Mrs. Bibb tells them. “Let’s keep our socializing to a minimum, shall we?” It is against the rules for girls to sit in one another’s rooms and speak privately. It is requested that the girls do not reveal the names of the towns they come from, and it is best if they avoid speaking of their pasts at