clarissa kennedy | district 6

“Lean back. Don’t lift your head up until you’re told.”

Clarissa is a good girl. She does what the lady says. The long steel table sits in the middle of the room, and she lays down against it, not resisting, familiar with the cold kiss of its surface. The nice lady—the one with the platinum helmet of hair and the faded eyes—uses the cuffs to strap her hands and feet in, as if she might struggle against it; but Clarissa never struggles.

The wall on the right has a big glass window, equally familiar as the cold press of the steel on her bare wrists and ankles. Clarissa can just make out the insides from the edge of her vision. Lots of panels, and monitors and dials and buttons and people in white lab coats. Everyone wears white lab coats here. She’s looking for one lab coat in particular, with a head of sandy brown hair and a scowl.

Have you missed me? I missed you.

“You’re free to close your eyes if you’d like.” The lady has finished locking her feet to the table, and now she stands, shaking her hair. It all stays together, Clarissa’s noticed. Like all the little hairs are too scared to come apart. Clarissa smiles at her, not speaking.

I have bad news. Mom’s on Morphling again.

“Thank you for stopping by to see us, Clarissa.” The lady flashes her a tight smile, her expression harried but sincere. “It’ll be over before you know it. As soon as you’re done, you can have your compensation and go.”

I told her you’d be disappointed in her. She didn’t really seem to hear me. You know how she gets that look in her eyes? They remind me of marbles. Big, soulless marbles. She just stares at that one plaster wall in the living room, counting the cracks over and over and over. I don’t try to feed her. She won’t eat—she just stares past me, like I’m not even there; like nothing is but that wall and the syringes that litter the floor. Sometimes, she looks away, and she fiddles with a couple, seeing which ones have still have something in them. But it’s always back to the cracks. I wonder what she sees in those.

There is only one door in and out of the room. It’s massive, made of the same steel everything in here is made of. The nurses always struggle to swing it out of place. It reminds Clarissa of the door to a bank vault. The lady pushes it open now, but she leaves it ajar. Another nurse will be here soon. But for now, all Clarissa has to do to lay still. She keeps her eyes on the glass window, straining to see, to find her head of sandy hair.

Kiki has a new boyfriend. I don’t think you would like him. He cleans up okay, but he has a mean look in his eyes. She says she loves him. She comes home later and later now, and she’s always covered in these little scratches—I don’t know what he’s doing to her, but she’ll get angry if you ask.

A flash. There it is.

Her heart leaps as he walks into the panel room, a clipboard in hand, his eyebrows furrowed like they always are. Clarissa checks to see if he’s changed at all, studying his hands, his shoes, his cheeks. Those pockmarked with wrinkles—maybe a few more than before. This is a stressful job, isn’t it? He points at something on a clipboard, and a woman with a raven-black head of hair leans over to see. Clarissa wishes she could hear what they were saying. Their lips move in abstract patterns, ones she can never follow. She wants him to look up and see her. She smiles, in hopes that he will.

Bella’s been doing alright. She cut off most of her hair, and she gets little jobs in town now. Enough to bring home a few groceries here and there. And soap. She tries to keep us all in order, but it makes her snappy. She never gets any sleep—she’s constantly working on something, and her eyes are always red raw, with big purple circles underneath. I think she’s stressed about Mom. Sometimes I catch Bella just staring at her, glaring, willing her to stand up. She kicks at the syringes. She hates those. I know she does.

He looks up, and Clarissa smiles bigger. Notice me. Look at me. He sees her without seeing her, and it frustrates her for an instant. The first time she ever stopped by, he looked shocked, and it filled the pit of her stomach with something akin to pride. He noticed. He saw. Now, it seems like he doesn’t . Maybe he’s just gotten used to it—the sight of his daughter the only way he sees her anymore. Clarissa is not deterred.

I don’t see the doctor’s son anymore. Did I tell you about him? He’s a little surly, but everyone said he liked me. Which is funny, ‘cause I hardly remember seeing him around. There was a while when we always stayed together after school. We went to his house—never mine. His was nice and big, brick and always warm. He’d talk to me about things. Show me things. Sometimes, he’d get this look in his eyes, like he was hopeful about something. I’m not sure what. He never snapped at me—he snapped at others plenty, but he never seemed to get angry at me. Well, not until last week.

There’s a clicking sound in the hall, and a tall nurse comes in. This one is always so distant. The only greeting Clarissa ever gets is her red heels click-clacking against the floor. She rolls in a cart of medical instruments and pulls on a pair of latex gloves, getting to work. Daddy’s left the panel room again, so Clarissa stares back up at the ceiling, lying limply as the woman takes her vitals. Blood pressure, temperature, breaths per minute. She hardly reacts.

I started seeing him a little before Mom got back into Morphling. Before then, she’d been almost a year clean—we all really thought she’d kicked it this time. But then one day I came home, and Kiki was sitting on the couch, crying, asking Mom why she’d done it. An empty syringe was by Mom’s feet. She didn’t react to either of us, staring straight ahead—her eyes had gone back to marbles. I never knew why she went back. Maybe she lost her job. Maybe it was about Vinnie; his birthday came a few days after we found her like that, you know. Maybe she missed him. Or she hated herself.

Another nurse comes into the room, this one with an IV. Clarissa recognizes her. In sharp contrast to the red-heeled woman, this one is overtly talkative; asking questions, telling stories, saying things neither Clarissa nor the other nurse react to.

“Hi, Miss Clarissa,” she says, stretching the fat pink slugs of her lips in a smile. Clarissa doesn’t look at her. “How are you doing today?”

She babbles away as she sets up the IV, the other nurse tying a piece of rubber around Clarissa’s forearm. Oh, now this is Clarissa’s favorite part. She tunes out everything else, watching as the silent nurse plunges a needle in her arm; blood flows through a tube and into a vial, thick and red, like an extension of her nervous system. Her eyes never leave the space where the nurse’s hands hold the tube, even once she’s finished and the blood disappears. Clarissa still stares. Watching as her arm is bandaged, watching as the nurse moves away, watching when there is no longer anything for her to watch.

Anyways, one day, the doctor’s son took me to his dad’s office. He had something to drop off. He introduced me to his father: a man with a handsome face, and very brown eyes. Like melted chocolate. I loved him instantly, and his office, and his clear, clinical voice. I loved how he would take us in the back, and I could see everything. All the file cabinets and empty containers and patient records. I wanted to go there from then on, every single day. His son said sure; I think he liked how excited I would get.

“All right, missy, are you ready?”

The red-heeled nurse has left. Only the chattering one remains. Clarissa sees her slipping on her own gloves, wiping off the end of the IV with a sterile towelette. Clarissa doesn’t reply. Her gaze has drifted back to the window; it’s starting soon. Daddy will come back for that. Any minute now.

His son answered all my questions about medical things. You taught me to love those, Daddy. I remembered the things you’d said to me, and I asked him about everything: hearts, brains, lungs, bones. Medicines. Those were my favorite. His dad did research, too, just like you. One day he told me about placebos. Don’t you think that’s amazing, Daddy? That our brains can turn sugar into medicine. He even showed me where they sugar pills his father would give to patients; he let me try one.

There he is. He crosses back into the panel room, and Clarissa’s face splits into a smile once more. This time, he keeps his eyes on her, though not on her face. His lips move more. She wishes on every star that she could hear those words.

I started stealing them.

“Here we go…”

The nurse wipes another towelette on her other arm, and Clarissa feels a tiny prick. The IV is in. Dad’s mouth stops moving; everyone’s mouths stop moving, actually. This is when they all go dead silent. Clarissa loves this part. She loves their enraptured eyes. Her eyes stay on Dad the whole time. He’s looking at her the way all the others are, like she’s the only thing in the whole wide universe, the only one of any interest.

It was for me, at first. But one day, I came home, and there was a bottle spilled all over the floor next to Mom. She must have thought they were Morphling. Bella flew at me, sobbing, screaming at the top of her lungs. What were those pills, would they kill Mom, where had I gotten them. Her eyes were all bloodshot, Daddy, but they looked so awfully pretty with little red streaks. I almost didn’t want her to calm down. But she did, of course—they were only sugar pills, I told her, that I got from Dr. Suchet. Harmless. He used them to trick patients’ brains into thinking they were medicine.

Bella got quiet after that. Her breathing steadied, and she turned to stare back at Mom, who had taken at least a quarter of the bottle. She just stood like that for a while, staring.

The next day, she asked me to steal more. So I did.

The room is quiet apart from the nurse’s breathing. Clarissa can’t even hear her own. She stares at Daddy, her Daddy, with his sandy hair and brown eyes and 5 o’clock shadow. She doesn’t look much like him, not really. She wishes she did. The only similarity they share is their hair, which Clarissa treats as a lifeline. It ties them together, him and her. He’ll never be able to leave her, not as long as she still has hair on her head.

Bella started taking them from me, and she gave them all to Mom, encouraging her to have more and more. That was the only time she looked something other than angry. She looked so…desperate. So full of hope, like my doctor’s son. Maybe she thought she could wean Mom off of the Morphling. Mom still did it, of course, and the empty syringes still littered our floor, but Bella had faith in those little pills—she thought Mom’s brain could cure itself, if she just had enough. It lifted all our spirits, even Kiki’s. Even mine.

Clarissa does not notice as the needle leaves her arm. She only realizes it's over when the mouths of the white lab coats start to move again, discussing things, writing things on clipboards. “All done, Miss Clarissa,” the nurse says cheerily, laying a bandage over the puncture.

Clarissa does not reply. She keeps looking at Daddy, who’s moving again, taking notes with that same raven-haired woman.

But the doctor’s son caught me last week. He’d seemed so disgruntled lately, and then he found me taking a bottle of the sugar pills. He looked so angry. I promised him that’s all I took, but he wouldn’t listen—he thought I was stealing other medicines, to sell them off. He was so, so angry, Daddy. I had never seen him so hurt. He told me to go, so I did. I ran home, and I told Bella that there would be no more sugar pills.

“Stand up, honey. You're all set. Look, they’re bringing the chair in now.”

Daddy has disappeared from the panel room, and that’s when Clarissa finally turns her head, watching as another nurse rolls in a wheelchair. The chattery nurse continues babbling away, unlocking her hands and feet from their cuffs. Clarissa has little red imprints on her wrists from where the steel held. She runs a fingertip over the little divots, not making a move to stand. The place where the IV touched is already bruising.

Once or twice, the skin around it turned yellow; most of the time, it goes purple. Clarissa can’t quite remember what exactly they’re testing. Something experimental. Some kind of...medicine. With all the trains, it’s easy for things to come and go, and that includes test results sent straight to the Capitol. Clarissa touches the bruise, blinking slowly.

“Come on, honey. It’s time to go.”

Blinking slowly, Clarissa rises. With the help of the nurses, she is settled in the seat of the wheelchair.

It’s gonna be somber when I get home. Today is Vinnie’s anniversary. Do you remember that day, Daddy? I remember it. I remember so perfectly, I think I could even go back, if I tried. I was the one who found Vinnie, remember? Mom had her marble eyes on, sitting in the living room, and there was little Vinnie’s body next to hers. Dead. Remember? That line of blood ran from the corner his infant mouth, and it looked a little like those plaster cracks in the wall.

They wheel her into the hall. Her eyes drift back to the window as they cross through the door, closing it with a deep thud behind her. The panel room and Dad are gone.

You came home, and things get a little fuzzy then. I remember you crying. I remember you clutching his little body, screaming at Mom, who didn’t react. She just sat there, like she was in a different world than the rest of us. I remember you left with Vinnie, and the door was still open, but I didn’t close it. You didn’t, either. I don’t remember what happened after that.

The waiting room has pale pink walls, and the light from the windows seems awfully bright. Clarissa squints as they bring her in, settling her next to one of the fading armchairs.

I just remember you never came back.