Gracie opened her eyes, only able to focus on the ceiling in front of her. With time she could see everything around her, but was too confused to understand where she was. The ceiling was white and so was the room. There were people running around�busy people with green scrubs on. Green scrubs? Those were nurses. Was she in the hospital?
"Looks like you're up," a nurse said, smiling. Gracie could only focus on her head. "I'll go get your family." Family? Why were they here? What was going on? She nearly cried, confused.
"Hey Gracie." Gracie looked up and saw her mother, faking a smile. "How do you feel?" she asked.
"I'm fine. Where am I?" Gracie sat up, despite her mother's orders not to. Gracie just gave the woman a look and sat up anyway.
"You're in the hospital."
"Why?" She looked around, focusing on her two twin sisters that looked like they'd been crying their eyes out. "What the hell happened?"
"Gracie, don't swear," her mother scolded. Gracie gave her another look. "Don't you remember anything about what happened?" Gracie shook her head. "Well, Gracie, you tried to kill yourself."
"I didn't try to kill myself," she said, with a slight laugh. "I think I'd remember that. " Her mother's face grew serious and she picked up Gracie's wrist, turning it to the inside to show the repeated slash wounds that were stitched up. Gracie couldn't say anything. She didn�t remember doing it, but she knew who did.
"We also found all your other ones. Gracie, what are you doing to yourself?"
"I'm fine!" Gracie shouted. "I'm not doing anything to myself! Leave me alone!" She yanked her arm away from her mother's grasp. She pulled her knees up to her chest and pouted. "I'm fine. I'm not bleeding anymore. I want to go home."
"They won't let you go home," her mother said. "It was hard enough to get us to see you. Gracie, everyone who's suicidal has to spend time in the psychiatric ward."
"Psychiatric ward? What the hell? Do you think I'm crazy?! I'm not crazy!"
"Then who's Bob?" Sarah said, speaking up from the other side of the room. Gracie scowled.
"Bob is a friend of mine. He's a better friend to me than any of you are! You don't understand me! You think I'm crazy and I'm not! He understands me! He doesn't think I'm crazy. He doesn't think I should spend time in a psychiatric ward. He thinks I should go home just like I do."
"How do you know what he thinks? You haven't talked to him yet," Sarah said.
"I know Bob. He's my best friend. He wouldn't want me locked up here with tubes and wires that monitor things that don't have anything wrong with them. I just want to go home."
"Well, sweetie, there's still some tests that the doctors have to do before you can go home."
"Tests? There's nothing wrong with me!"
"We just have to make sure of that."
"What are they going to do to me?" Gracie asked, letting her vulnerable side show for the first time in weeks.
"Nothing big, sweetie. It won't hurt or anything. It's just some questions about how you're feeling. They're going to watch you for a little while to see how you act, then they'll send you right home. They'll probably put you on medication for a little while for depression."
"Depression?" Gracie asked. "I'm not depressed! I'm far from depressed!! See the smile on my face?" She faked a bright smile and pointed to it. "See?"
"Gracie, it's for the best. You did try to kill yourself."
"I didn't try to kill myself," she said, looking down at her hands. The stitches in her wrists looked back at her. She heard Bob laughing in the back of her head. He was taunting her, like the others did before. "You know what? Just leave me alone. I'm fine and you don't seem to believe me, so I want to be alone."
"Gracie, we're not going anywhere."
"Leave me alone!!" Gracie screamed. She put her head in her hands and closed her eyes, rocking back and forth until they left. "Just leave me alone�" They were gone by now. "Bob, what the hell is going on?"
Nothing. Gracie looked up, tears streaming down her face. "Bob?" Still nothing. Her mind was clear�the silence was intolerable. "Bob!!!!" she screamed. Nothing. "Oh my God�"
"Your God can't help you now!!" some other voice screamed at her. She looked around; tears streaming down her suddenly pale face. It was so real, realer than Bob ever was. It was different.
"W-Who are you?" she asked, looking around. "Where's Bob?"
"Bob is gone! I'm here now. You will do as I say or else!" She looked around, and she saw him. He looked like a drill instructor; he had the hat and the uniform. His face was stern but he sat on the floor looking up at her. The sneer on his face was impudent. When he opened his mouth to bark at her yet again, she saw his teeth were fangs, dripping blood that disappeared onto his uniform, waiting to kill her when he decided to pounce.
She screamed immediately, jumping out of the bed. Her monitors were ripped from her body and she threw the expensive equipment at him, but to her surprise, they all crashed against the wall, going through him. The look on his face grew angrier as she threw things at him, screaming all the way. He got up and grabbed her by her shoulders, shaking her violently. Her head began to hurt and she felt faint.
"You'll do as I say! You're an insolent selfish little bitch and you should rot in hell for what you've done! You'll pay for everything you've broken and you'll pick it up too! If I didn't want to get out of here so bad I'd rip you a new one and you'd never see the light of day again! You're a worthless little piece of shit; all you're good for is causing trouble and being rude to me! Don't you ever scream at me again! If I ever catch you looking at me, thinking about me, or acting around me in a way that I don't like you'll end up in the crazy house just like you've always feared! Do you understand?"
"Yes�" she whispered, her eyes slightly closing. She felt herself slipping back into the darkness, but he shook her awake again.
"I can't hear you! What did you say?"
"Yes!"
"You're slipping away, Gracie! Look at me and scream it out!" She opened her eyes and looked up at him.
"YES!" she screamed at the top of her lungs.
"Now get dressed and get the hell out of this hospital! You don't belong here, you belong in a cardboard box on the side of the road!" He pointed to her clothes on the other side of the room. She stumbled out of his grasp and got dressed. "Quickly, they'll come see what all the fuss is about and you're not supposed to be here when they get here!" She got dressed, opened the window, and climbed out. When she jumped down, she landed on her feet and saw the man in front of her, waiting. "Move it!"
She began to run. He stood, tapping his foot against the air. He wasn't touching the ground; he was floating in front of her so he could watch her as she ran. "Faster, Gracie! You can run faster than that!" She ran faster, slightly catching up with him. He shook his head, not approving of her rate.
She got home what seemed like hours later, the night having fallen about her and the stars her only light. She was extremely tired but she hadn't slowed since she started, this man wouldn't let her. Every time she tried to slow, he smacked her and pushed her to go even faster than before. By the time she reached her house she had tears of pain streaming down her face.
Gracie collapsed in her front yard, panting heavily and staring up at the stars in the sky. She smiled at their beauty but the smile was quickly gone when the man appeared in front of her, staring angrily down at her. "Get off your lazy ass you little bitch! No one said you could stop!"
"Lazy?" she asked, panting. "I just ran from the hospital to here!" He smacked her and she cried out in pain.
"Don't talk back to me! Now march, soldier! Into the house and up to your room! I've got something for you to do." She groaned, which only got her another slap, and got up. "Climb the tree or you'll find yourself back in the hospital. There might be someone home." She ran along the side of the house and climbed the tree outside of her window. Once she got to a branch outside her window, she tried opening it.
"It's locked."
"Break it." She took a breath and punched her fist through the window. She reached to the lock and unlocked it so she could open it and climb through. Once she got inside, she rubbed her hand. It was bleeding profusely and the blood was everywhere. Forgetting about the pain or the blood, she locked the door to her room.
"Okay, what do you want me to do?" she asked.
"Trash the room. Break everything. Don't leave anything in tact."
"Why would I do that?"
"Don't ask questions!! You just do it you little whore! Don't ever question my motives." She made a face.
"Sorry."
"You better be. Now do it." She sighed, thinking of where to start. She had a sudden inspiration and grabbed the frame from one of her pictures. She used it to knock the trinkets off her desk and threw them against the wall so they would break into pieces. She left them on that side of the room and with a surge of energy pulled the drawers out of her dresser and dumping the contents onto the floor. There she broke the drawers with all her strength and pushed the dresser over, jumping on top of it and breaking it under her feet.
She went next to her bed. She pulled the mattress off and put it on the floor. She broke her mirror quickly and with one of the shards she began to tear the mattress to shreds, the fluff scattering all over the room. She pulled her box springs out of the lower half of the bed and broke off the pieces to her headboard. With a large piece she ran into the bathroom and used it to break down the closet door and broken off parts of the sink and all the various things on the sink. She pulled off the door to the medicine cabinet and threw it through the window, breaking the glass.
She ran back into the bedroom and broke off the doors to her closet, yanking the clothes off the hangers and throwing them about the room. She ripped the majority of them into shards in the process, the pieces either falling to the floor at her feet or flying out to the room with the rest of the clothes. Anything valuable she made sure to rip or break either against the wall or by her hands.
She tore up her chair and ripped off the curtains. She grabbed the chain to the ceiling fan and broke it off, then jumped up and broke the blades off to the ceiling fan. She threw them through the window and anywhere she hadn't destroyed yet.
Satisfied, she wiped the sweat off her forehead and cautiously opened the door. Nobody was around. If there were anybody home, they would have come up and wondered what all the fuss was about, because she did make a lot of noise. "Hello?" she called out. No answer. She shouted a little louder. "Hello? Mom? Dad?" No answer. "There's no one home. They must all be at the hospital."
"That gives you a chance to trash the rest of the house." She smiled.
It was an hour later when Gracie was just finishing up her destruction. She couldn't seem to break the television, no matter how hard she tried. "Dammit!" She screamed. "It won't break!"
"You know your father owns a gun," the man said, appearing on top of the destruction in the corner of the room. She looked over and shrugged.
"But I don't know where he keeps it."
"Well you've looked everywhere. What's the only place you haven't been yet?" She thought about it. "The hallway closet. I bet you he keeps it in there." She ran over to the hallway closet. That must be why Dad always kept the door locked, because he had a gun in there. She kicked the door open, in which the force broke the door off the hinges and she had to move quickly so it wouldn't fall on her. It hit the ground with a loud bang, and she smiled.
She searched the closet first for the gun and found it quickly. She picked it up and with her other hand trashed the closet. Then she ran back to the living room and raised the gun to the television. She fired a shot then dropped the gun. "That's loud!!" she screamed.
"Keep doing it, brat." She picked up the gun and fired a few more shots at the television and at the other various things in the house. She saw one bullet hole in the couch and stopped. "Why'd you stop? Don't stop!"
"What am I doing?" she asked, taking a step back and looking at the destruction. Whoever was telling her to do this must have just taken a break. "I just destroyed my entire life!" she screamed. "Why the hell did you let me do that? I've got nothing left!" She collapsed to the ground, crying.
"Get up you incompetent little excuse for a human being! Get up and finish the job you started!"
"My family is going to be so upset�my sisters lives are ruined and so are my parents. I just trashed my entire house and we don't have the money to replace anything much less clean it up." She looked at the gun in her hands. "Why am I still here?"
"Are you going to shoot yourself? Cause if you are I want to see it." The man appeared in front of her, a bag of popcorn in his hands. "Go ahead, I'm ready." She put the gun to her head. "God, Gracie, two suicide attempts in two days. You really are crazy."
"I'm not crazy!" she screamed at him. "I'm not!"
"Yes you are. At least now you're beginning to act like it."
"Shut up!" She squeezed her eyes shut. Behind the man the front door opened. Sarah and Ren� ran inside and immediately saw Gracie with a gun to her head.
"Gracie, no!!" Ren� screamed. Gracie tensed as she pulled the trigger and�nothing happened. The two girls let out a sigh of relief, realizing the gun was out of bullets. Gracie jumped up.
"God! I can't do anything right!" she screamed and threw the gun at the television. It crashed the screen and Gracie tried to storm out of the room, but Sarah and Ren� trapped her in between them. Ren� quickly grabbed Gracie's arms and held on tight. "What the? Let me go!! Goddammit let me go! I'm ending my life and you can't do anything about it!"
"Gracie, it's not worth it," Sarah said. "We can't afford for you to be gone. You're our twin, you're part of us! Don't end your life for whatever reason you're ending your life!"
"I have to! I don't know what the hell is going on with me! I'm acting all weird towards everybody and I don't know why! I don't even know how I'm functioning right now because I haven't eaten or slept in a week! Look at me!" she screamed, forcing one of her arms out of Ren�'s grip. "I'm slashing myself for no reason, I'm hearing voices that control everything I do and tell me to kill myself all the time. They don't go away! The have complete control over everything I do and I can't stop them!"
"No, Gracie, you don't say anything about me to anyone!" the man said, appearing in front of her. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her again. She closed her eyes and let her body be shaken, but it didn't do anything to help her from saying things.
"Go away!" Gracie screamed at him when he stopped shaking her. She opened her eyes, seeing Sarah completely confused out of the corner of her eye. "You can't control me! You're not real!"
"Gracie, you're scaring us," Ren� whispered.
"Leave me alone!" Gracie screamed at him. He smiled and shook his head. "Ren�, kill him. Get rid of him!"
"Who?"
"Him!" she screamed, pointing at the man. "Can't you see him?" Sarah looked at where Gracie was pointing.
"No, Gracie, we can't." The man in front of her kicked her over. She fell back onto the floor, glancing up at her sisters. They were watching carefully. She felt her stomach lurch and she began to cough. She couldn't seem to catch her breath and she immediately began to panic. She couldn't stop coughing so she couldn't breathe. Quickly she felt faint and before she knew it, everything had faded to black.
Gracie woke up and found herself back in a hospital. "Shit!" she said, banging her fist on the bed. She lifted it to scratch her forehead in confusion, but she felt a tug on her wrist and she couldn�t move it any farther than a few inches off the bed. She looked down and saw her wrists and ankles tied to the bed. Something had happened since she passed out. She couldn't remember anything but she knew this wasn't the first time she woke up.
She began to scream at the top of her lungs, kicking her legs and pulling at her wrists. The elastic around her wrists stung as she pulled as hard as she could, trying to get out of the restraints. The room was spinning and all she could hear was the sound of her own screaming voice. She was screaming something�even she didn't understand what it was but it was her voice. She was confined in her own body, wondering what was going on with herself. This had happened before.
The door opened across the room but she didn't stop screaming. She only calmed down when she felt the prick of a needle into her flesh. It stung as the nurse injected a tranquilizer into her body.
"Let me out! Let me out of here!" she screamed, breathing heavy. The nurse didn't say anything as she left the room, bolting the door once she was gone. Gracie continued to scream, ripping at her skin with the straps around her wrists.
It was few minutes before the tranquilizer began to work and Gracie entered a subdued state. She'd stopped screaming was now watching the IV drip nutrition into her veins. The man who told her to trash the house was gone now, but Bob was back. He spoke to her lightly, still as bad an influence as ever, but at least he wasn't yelling at her.
"So, Gracie, you finally blew a gasket, huh? I always knew you had it in you." She didn't move. "Yeah, these tranquilizers are sweet. I'm swimming around up here. I still think you should be screaming your head off but I know you can't. I can't. I have no energy anymore. Damn nurses�always have to get you better. Well, at least there's not a doctor in here."
"There's doctors watching me," she responded, her voice a light whisper. "Through the big window." She looked out the window. There was a doctor by it with a clipboard and a pencil. He'd been there taking notes since she got there. "Bob, I'm so scared. I don't know where I am but this isn't any hospital I've been to."
"You're in a mental hospital. Do you think you'd actually be chained to a bed at a regular hospital? They care too much about your well-being than to strap you down. No, Gracie, you've been sent to the crazy house."
"What?! Why? I'm not crazy!" she began to squirm in her bed again. "I want to get out of here."
"There you go, Gracie, let it all out again. Maybe they'll give you another tranquilizer. Those are just as fun as those drugs you've got at home." Gracie got the energy to turn over and begin to kick when there was another voice in the room.
"Gracie, calm down."
"What? What is that?" she asked Bob. "Bob, did you hear that?" She looked around the room for the owner of the voice.
"Gracie, this is Dr. Ward. I'm over here by the window." She looked over at the window. The man with the clipboard waved his hand. "I'm sure you're wondering what's going on. I'm going to come in and tell you what's wrong. Is that okay?"
"No."
"Fine, then I'll stay out here. Gracie, I can explain why you're here and why everything's been going on with the voice in your head and why you feel so alone."
"I don't have a voice in my head," she snapped.
"Well I've heard you talking to him and you mentioned him to your sisters. You can't lie to me, Gracie. I understand what you're going though. Gracie, you have schizophrenia."
"No I don't. I don't have more than one personality. You're wrong."
"No, Gracie. You're confusing it with something else. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder where the person feels not included, in their own world and has delusions and hallucinations such as hearing voices and seeing things that really aren't there. You feel that no one understands you and you think everything you're going through is real."
"Ha! I don't think it's all real. There. I don't have schizophrenia. Okay�you can these things off me and I can go home. I'm fine."
"Gracie, you're not fine. What you did to get in here is called a psychotic episode. You destroyed your house and didn't even have control of it. It was all that voice in your head or that vision you saw that you had to listen to. It had control of all your movements."
Gracie looked away from the doctor. "I'm hitting close to home, aren't I?"
"No."
"I think I am." She heard the door open. He'd come inside. "There's a few ways we can help you get better. There's no guarantee that we can get you one hundred percent cured, but we can help you feel better."
She turned and looked up at him. "What?"
"Well there's medication you can take�these antipsychotic pills that'll help you out. I'm on those."
"You have schizophrenia?"
"Oh, yeah. I've had it for at least twenty years. I'm a lot better than I started out. Now I'm on medication and it's helped me indefinitely. It could help you too."
"What's the other way?" she asked, looking up at him. He had a gentle face, like he really wanted to help her. She wanted to be helped�but she didn't have any say it anymore.
"Electroconvulsive therapy. That's only if the medication doesn't work. But I don't think we'll have to do that. You seem willing to get better. If you stay this way, you're already fifty percent better."
"Whatever. I want to go home," she responded, feeling Bob's influence on her yet again. She'd pushed him away for as long as she could and she was feeling quite tired.
"Not yet."
"Why? You told me what's wrong; you told me you could give me something for it. Fine. Let me go."
"No, there are still some things we have to clear up. Then, if you're able to function on your own without these straps on your body, we'll let you go home."
"Can we hurry up?"
"All right."
Gracie found herself alone in the room again. She sighed and looked up at the ceiling. Those dots on the ceiling could make her crazy by themselves. She didn't need the voices in her head to be here in the crazy house.
"So you're actually going to believe that screwball? He doesn't know what he's talking about."
"He's got the same problem."
"No he doesn�t. He's just playing around with you. Don't think he really knows what's going on. Schizophrenia? I don't think so."
"Well I think so."
"Nobody cares what you think."
"I care what I think," she said, looking at the restraint on her wrist. "And I want to get over this. I'm sick of how I feel."
"I'm not going to let you. Scream."
"No�" she whimpered, feeling her body toss on the bed. "No�stop�" Her body twisted on the bed. She grew tired of constantly fighting him. At that point, she lost control.