tuesday bourland / d6 / fin

Tuesday Bourland has spent two years in this psychiatric facility. She was in a different facility before that, but rumor has it she was kicked out for biting a nurse. She won’t tell you whether or not it was true. You’ve been friends with her for a few weeks now, and there’s something fascinating about her, you just can’t put your finger on what. You sit next to her in the art room and watch as she drags her paintbrush across paper. Her eyes focus on the watercolor streaks, dark brown irises framed by thick eyelashes observing every nuance in color. When she moves to pick another paint, her red hair shifts on her shoulders, tight curls bouncing around her face. You study her, her dark skin mottled with freckles, her cheeks flushed. Her nose slopes straight before rounding at the end, and her lips seem perpetually chapped.

She stands shorter than most of the other girls in the facility. Newer nurses have mistaken her for one of the younger kids before. Her clothes always hang loose off her frame, like they fit right once but she’s lost a lot of weight since. Sometimes, when she leans over, her shirt rides up and you can see the outline of her ribcage. Most of her clothes are hospital issued, sweaters and sweatpants with no strings in varying shades of grey. She prefers to not wear shoes when she can.

She’s sociable when she wants to be, a bit like a cat. She needs to be the person who approaches you first or else she’ll flee. You weren’t sure of her at first, but she decided you were going to be friends and wouldn’t leave you alone, so you warmed up to her fast. She quips with the nurses, exchanges inside jokes with them during meals. She turns to you when one of the group therapists says something stupid and makes a face when he turns his back. Whenever one of the younger kids starts crying, she stops whatever she’s doing and takes them to a quiet corner so she can calm them down without a nurse needing to get involved.

“What are you in for?” you asked on the first night you met, like this is a prison and you’ve both done something terrible to be here, instead of simply being two teenagers in an unfair fight against your own minds.

She poked at her forehead with her hand miming a gun. “Bad brain,” she said, and that’s all she ever says about it.

Tuesday’s file says that she has borderline personality disorder. It makes sense, with the way her moods fluctuate so violently, the way she loves you one day and hates you the next. She used to have friends, she told you, but it was difficult for her to maintain relationships. She finds it hard to trust people. She says she’s constantly worried that her friends will find better friends and leave her behind, so she clings close to them, but if she feels that a friend is spending too much time with somebody else and leaving her behind, she’ll lash out at them and end the friendship before she thinks her friend can.

She told you once that she wished she lived in a district where the people were stupid and didn’t have names for “things inside fucked up brains”. She wishes for a lot of things. There’s a part of her that wants to be optimistic, to allow herself to dream, but she tries to suppress it, push it under the surface where nobody will ever find it. You can see glimpses of it in her art— the sweeping landscapes painted in bright colors and the intricate details in charcoal portraits. She channels every emotion through her creativity. You guess it’s easier than talking about them.

“My parents are older,” Tuesday tells you, after you’ve finished explaining your own tragic backstory. “I think they were in love when they got married. Not so sure about now. I don’t see them enough to know. My mom wasn’t wearing her wedding ring the last time I saw her, so I guess that’s a hint. Anyway, they’d already had a few kids by the time I came along. Condom probably broke. That’s gotta be the only explanation for all my siblings being twenty years older.

They left me alone a lot. My parents had to work, obviously, and it’s not like my siblings could be there all the time. They had their own lives, new families. I would come back from school to an empty house most of the time. Nobody was noticing how bad my mental health was getting because nobody was fucking there. I was screwing up every part of my life and nobody saw. No, I’m not upset about it. It happened a while ago, there’s nothing I can do about it now. Don’t look at me like that. I swear I’m not still upset.

I ended up freaking out one night. Major meltdown. I don’t really want to get into it. My parents couldn’t handle it, though. Or maybe they didn’t want to? I don’t know. Either way, they put me into custody of a psychiatric facility. Not this one. The one I got kicked out of. No, I won’t tell you why. I know you want to know! Stop looking at me like that! Anyway, that hospital sucked. They punished me for everything. I was in solitary, like, all the time. It felt like they just wanted to keep me subdued instead of helping me get better. It was miserable. I couldn’t take it anymore. So now I’m here. Getting better. At least, I think I am, right?”