Culture

‘I’ve ambitions as lively as drying paint and gone-off milk bottles’

Fighting Words 2020: An extract from 9:30am, a story by Abbie Foley

Illustration: iStock

Abbie Foley
Tue May 12 2020 - 00:00

Name: Abbie Foley
Age: 16
School: Dunshaughlin Community College, Dunshaughlin, Co Meath

9:30am [Extract]

Abbie Foley

Group Therapy.

There are five of us. Six if you count Miss Nancy, but she doesn’t have a sick mind like ours.

Not one of us is a bit alike – even if you take away our labels.

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I’m all honeyed hair and dark eyes and skin that’s pale for days.

And I’m short, one of the smallest, with ambitions as lively as drying paint and gone-off milk bottles. I have a watch that I wear around my ankle, but it stopped ticking a long time ago.

To my left, is Squig.

Squig is short in structure, somewhat like myself, with rounder cheeks and plumper fingers and a smile that could light up a thousand suns and moons and all the planets aligned.

The thing about Squig is that he doesn’t look like his disorder – but it’s as soon as he starts talking you can tell.

Squig has taken the bottom of my bunk, so it’s me that gets to hear his midnight ramblings and conversations to nobody but his own self. Not to mention I’m usually present during his morning hallucinations – it’s just part of routine. Roll over, blink twice, breathe in, wait – ah yes, here comes the mumbling. Then the hissing. Then, the screaming.

And, look, Squig’s not a bad guy. He’s distorted, I guess – what do I know? – he sees things a lot. He’s delusional. I guess the big thing about him is that he’s so misunderstood, I can’t even see him getting out of this place, really. But then again, I can’t see any of us getting out of here. At least not any time soon.

He talks about this rose garden. With thorns and vines and flowers that smell like sun-licked ponds and freedom.

Freedom.

He wants peonies and daffodils and honeysuckle that soaks up raindrops, he wants lilies as white as snow, blue-budded bellflowers that spread across the land like rich petals fallen from the sky.

He talks about this a lot. I think he deserves it.

Squig has a big brain and a big heart to match, and I think, despite his twitching left eyebrow and bursts of hysteria, he has good heart.

We all do.

In front of me is Lune – the addict.

Lune is 19 and older than the rest of us, with her own stories and never-ending tales that keep us up at night. She’s been here the longest.

Lune’s hair is so long that she’s able to sit on it, and her ears are elfish, pointed and long and smarter than her mind.

Her struggle with drugs is a battle she’s had for years – and probably the first thing you’ll learn when you come here, to Aegerhill.

She’s not pretty. She looks like she used to be, but she’s missing a bottom tooth and has bruises painted across her arms – her arms, once a fresh white, a blank canvas, now dotted and dimpled with delirious darks. Her mouth is scabby and chewed dry. She looks dull. Soulless. Emptied, like there’s nothing really there.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Lune. She’s funny, sometimes. She has this whole I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude thing going on. And it’s . . . fascinating. In a stubborn, irritating kinda way.

She’s not always approachable. In fact, she can be kind of mean sometimes. She has this coy little smile that drops down into a tight, dry smirk when she’s being particularly nasty, and she doesn’t ever really bother to care about anyone besides herself.

But she’s basically our big sister here, and sort of all we’ve got.

Next, on my right, is none other than Rails.

Rails looks like maybe what you’d imagine, grey-black ashy hair scraggly and mop-like atop his head. He grows it out and doesn’t ever comb it, unless he’s threading through it carefully with his hands.

Rails is 14, the youngest. He’s smaller than I am, with a baby face and pigskin, ruddy eyes that seem to hold the world’s deepest darkest mysteries behind them. He has a tooth gap and a stubby little nose and fingers that pinch his skin red raw.

Rails is just a kid and heavily delicate, described as easily broken and tough to be mended.

But I don’t think we’re broken. I don’t think we need fixing.

We are just wired differently, that’s all.

And then last, right to Lune, is the girl that doesn’t eat.

Rue is 16 like I am, frail and sick-looking. She, out of us all, looks the most like what they tell her she is.

Rue’s hair is thin and brittle and never brushed. When she smiles, it doesn’t reach her eyes – her eyes, sunken and bloodshot, spoiled dull from their jasper-green.

Rue has shivering bones and dancing fingertips and blue-black flesh and yellow nibbled nails and a heart so kind if you closed your eyes, she’d seem like an entirely different person altogether.

She’s sick like the rest of us. Maybe not the same, but it’s 9:30am, and for now, that doesn’t matter.

9.30am is published in The Mind's Penumbra, an anthology of short stories by transition year pupils in Dunshaughlin Community College in May 2020 as part of Fighting Words' Book Project programme

Fighting Words