Standards - Chapter four

Standards
Chapter Four: Consequences
For the people saying that you see a white light at the end of the tunnel when you're dying all I have to say is that the most I saw was an array of odd flashes of my life, but that was probably because of the hangover and steamy room. Either that or I didn't go far enough, but considering I was sure my hell on earth was going to end I think I went pretty damn far in my opinion.
I wake up in a hospital bed, my vision is still slightly blurred but my eyes squint open enough to see the white sheets and the boring off cream walls with a small TV in the corner along with a heart monitor and an array of other medical equipment beside me. That's enough to let me know that I'm not home.
Reaching my hand up to my forehead, I notice the IV that must have been stuck in me earlier when I was out, following this I see long vertical lines where I cut myself, using my other hand I trail it over the cut, feeling a slight twinge of pain when I press to hard on the freshly opened skin. I begin piecing the memories together from the previous night; the drinking, the cutting, the steamy room; all of it was a ploy to get out of this hellhole of my life. However, it doesn't seem like it worked.
For a minute I just stare at the cut, I had been so close to ending it all, releasing me from my imprisonment in this body, but not close enough to pass through this world into the next one.
It isn't until a doctor walks in that I stop looking at the damages from my self mutilation. "Hello, Miss Del Monaco. I see you're awake." He says, I glance at him, he looks like a regular college pushed white coat wearing doctor that you see in any hospital complete with a balding head and off grey hair.
"What happened?" I ask, covering my sliced wrists with a blush on my face, not wanting him to see the cut marks. I don't need people to see that, even though he's a doctor and probably knows all the dirty details.
He gives me a cold look. "Your suicide attempt happened, Miss Del Monaco. You should be lucky that your divorced husband, Will Schuester received your text message and managed to track you down. You sustained some minor injuries on your arms and stomach but you should be alright physically. However, it is your mental status that we are worried about here." He says in a tone that makes it very obvious that he personally doesn't care if I live or die. My mental status? What's going on?
"Excuse me?" I ask, pressing a note of politeness in my voice that's fake. "My mental status is perfectly fine." I tell him, I'm not going to be anyone's guinea pig for their psychological analysis. Just because I want to die doesn't mean I'm insane, it means that I'm practical enough to know that I'm just dead weight on the world at this point.
"Not what a suicide attempt tells us. Now, please tell me why you tried to kill yourself." He says, excuse me doctor but your bedside attentiveness leaves something huge to be desired, plus why do I need to tell a complete stranger why I believe there is no reason to live? He hasn't even told me his name!
I glare at him. "You haven't even told me your name and you have no business to know what was going through my mind at that time. Please leave me alone." My voice is shaking out of anger. These university bound ingrates are the worst, they think that they know everything and we're just their drones.
His eyes flicker an emotion that I just can't quite place. "I guess there will be enough time for you to talk to your psychiatrist at the asylum." He says. This makes me jolt upright in my bed, what asylum? What is going on?
"What the hell do you mean 'asylum'? I'm perfectly fine; it's this world that's screwed up!" I shout, but he doesn't even look into my eyes after he whispers something to one of the nurses. "What are you doing? Look at me!" I shout desperately, now he's suddenly retracting from me?
One of the nurses inserts something into one of the machines that I have attached to me. "No! Stop that! Stop that now!" I begin attempting to whack the nurse away, desperately trying to prevent the sleep haze that she's trying to start, but when I start feeling woozy I know that I've lost the war. My body relaxes into a deep sleep.

~

My eyes awaken once again, but this time I find myself in a white room. I don't mean just the usual cream white you see in houses, I mean blinding arctic white. I stare at myself; I'm in a very simple white uniform. An odd addition is the fact that my shoelaces have been removed from my shoes. There is a door in the corner with a very small see through window, I automatically run to it and begin screaming, begging for answers.
This obviously wasn't the hospital.
My fist pounds against the window; it's not one of the fragile glass ones so it doesn't break and shatter. A plastic thud sounds as my hand makes contact. Two men are walking down the hall chatting to each other. I make a bolder effort get their attention and pound harder on the glass.
"Hello! Hello!" I yell, even though my voice is strong in the room, it probably doesn't travel well past the wall. One of the men stops just shy of my door and bids farewell to his friend, then turns his attention to me.
He's ugly. No, I don't mean just plain unattractive, I mean repulsively ugly. The way his double chin jiggles and swiped back thinning dyed black hair only makes him look fatter than if he had just left it down, his features are sharp but the pounds on the side of his face outweighs the prominence of said features. It's not like he's old or actually even that fat, but the fact that his black suit is a size too tight and his belt creates a muffin top doesn't help his cause to look nice.
And yet he still has a mature nature about him, he's as ugly as hell but the way he carries himself is like the master of the house would. I take a few steps away as he injects a key into the door and turns it.
"Hello Terri." He says calmly, offering a hand to me that I don't accept. I have no idea who he is but I'm not touching that filthy hand of his. I have a bit more respect for myself than that thank you very much.
"Who are you and why do you know my name?" I ask, glaring at him as he retracts his handshake. With a swipe of his product induced hair (that looks awful on him) he chuckles; his voice is deep and carries a slight English accent which usually I would find attractive but on him is just creepy.
"I know your name because it is on my clipboard in my office. My name is Bryan Swalie and I am the head psychiatrist here." He says, although something seems to click out after he says psychiatrist. Oh god, this is an asylum, I'm not crazy, I'm really, really not! I don't need help from these fat, ugly assholes in lab coats!
My breaths quicken in anger. "I'm not insane!" I shriek, knowing that yelling probably was probably not my best idea to express that thought, but I don't care, I hate being called this insane girl because I'm smart enough to see when I should end my own life. I mean, it is my body, I should know what to do with it.
He places a hand on my shoulder, I automatically tense up. "I'm sure you aren't." Bryan says in a way that I guess was supposed to be comforting, but only sends an uncomfortable shiver down my spine. Although I'm glad he's not saying that I'm a mad girl. "We just need to keep you here for the next seventy-two hours, they call it suicide watch but let's just say it's a…a bit of a vacation for you."
I give him a long look; he hasn't given me reason not to trust him, though I can't shake off the feeling that something isn't right. Then again, it's not like being in an insane asylum is exactly right in the first place. "Well…what do I do for the next seventy-two hours then?" I ask my voice hoarse from all the yelling I had been doing. God I could use a throat candy right at this moment.
He releases my shoulder and walks out of the room, suggesting that I should follow him. "Well there is a small room down the hallway with television and where your other inmates are most likely relaxing, and on your right." He stops just shy to a room where a dozen people are waiting in a lineup for small cups of pills, each one looking more pale-faced and scatterbrained than the last. "Is where you can go if you need a refresher, things can get intense here so if you need to calm down just ask the nurse for your pills for the day; they'll be sure to help you."
He says it such a passive way that I'm only just a little bit fazed when a middle aged man nearly passes out on the ground and is picked up by two nurses. It's at this point that Bryan continues walking in a pace so fast that I have to run a bit just to keep up with him. He shows me a couple more rooms and instructs me on where I'm allowed to go during the day and where I am not. If this is just for seventy-two hours, then I think I can handle it, I'll just have to make sure I do myself in next chance I get.
"I have to have a simple therapy session with you tomorrow at nine in the morning. It's not really as much of a therapy session as it is a checkup so we can let you go, do you understand, Terri?" He says, I nod to him and wave goodbye before walking into the main room with the television. Maybe I'll be able to catch a good show on TV while I'm here, it's not like there's anything else to do.
I walk in, there is a small couch with two recliners on either side of it with a TV planet in the middle and people shoved in so tightly I doubt they can even breathe while watching Ellen dancing on the television, there is a small table in the corner with crayons and paper where five people are seated, a good chunk of the said people in this room look like they are seriously out of it. Like the people you'd see sitting in a corner, not looking anyone and is seemingly unapproachable.
Deciding that sitting on a group couch would be less comfortable than taking the last spare seat at the table I sit beside a woman with brittle light brown hair who looks about fifty and is writing with the crayons.
Is this supposed to be some joke? Why would I be put with these crazy people? I understand that Bryan made it very clear that I would only be here for the next seventy-two hours, but does that really mean I have to be with the crazy lunatics that are only kept here because they are too offensive to put on the street.
Taking in a breath I manage to keep silent, motionless in the hopes that maybe some of these freak's eyesight potential are based on movement. It's when the old lady bothers to look at me when I know my plan has failed. "Suicide attempt, huh?" She says, I finally bother to look at her eyes. They are intense, electric blue with almost yellow specks flickering around in them and shockingly large, like someone had used CGI on them.
I stare at her for a moment. "How did you k-know?" I ask, wondering if she's a creepy obsessive stalker and I should start running right now. She must have seen the fear in my face because she breaks into a cackle like laughter that is as annoying as it is scratchy in the back of her throat.
"Because the ones who are told that this is temporary are always the ones who manage not to break into tears on the first day, plus I can see those 'tattoos' you have on your arm." She gestures to my wrists; I flip them around and place my hands on my lap so that no one else sees that sight. "They'll fade within a few weeks, huns." She says with a southern accent on her words, it seems comforting.
"What if I don't want to be here in a few more weeks?" I ask, knowing that the question has two meanings but doubting she'll understand the real, morbid reasoning behind it. I mean she's just a crazy woman, I seriously doubt logic is a high point for her.
She continues doodling with her crayons. "Tell me, do you know why you have no shoelaces or why we're writing with crayons?"
I give her an odd look; well that was a sudden topic change. "No…I don't." I say, raising an eyebrow to give her a warning that she's absolutely nuts. Oh wait, we're in an insane asylum, of course she knows that.
She smiles at me. "Well, huns, it's because they don't trust us. If you had your shoelaces you would choke yourself with them and if you had your pencils and pens then you would stab them into your neck."
I raise my eyebrows and snort. "I guess you've been here for awhile to figure that out then." I say sarcastically, not really liking the fact that she's adding me together with all these lunatics who would be willing to use a pencil to kill themselves.
She nods calmly (weird, I thought she was going to flip out.) and says. "Twenty five years, I'm what you call a secret keeper. My name is Beth by the way, what is yours?"
"Terri." I respond, though it's not like she'll be needing to remember it for long, I'll be out of here before she overdoses on some generic sleep drug tomorrow.
"Well it's nice to meet you, Terri." She says with a smile so warm, so motherly, that I almost think that she actually cares. I send her back a half hearted attempt at a grin but I fail miserably.
I guess I better just wait my turn until I'm out of this place.

~Chapter end

A/N: This chapter was hard to write, namely because I've never been to an insane asylum (let's hope that I stay out of one) and also because I have to introduce two very important characters in this chapter.
I could have continued this chapter farther, but I figure since the next chapter will hopefully have a lot of plot in it I thought that this could be the adjusting chapter before the plot really kicks in.
There's really not much to say, I wanted to write this chapter so badly and yet I had no idea how to write it, but I figured that I can get adjusted to this. So anyways I hope that you guys enjoy this!

~Shecka