Bleeding Violet Read Free Page A

like.
    “Why’d you hit her?” Rosalee asked.
    “Didn’t
she
tell you?”
    “You tell me.”
    I stopped fiddling with the blankets. “She wanted to send me back to the psych ward so they could lock me away forever, and I told her I didn’t
want
to be locked away forever, but she wouldn’t listen. So I had to show her.”
    I illustrated just how I’d shown Aunt Ulla by miming a heavy blow to Rosalee’s head. Then, unable to resist, I brushedmy fingertips across the soft silk of Rosalee’s cheek. She felt feverish. Familiar. My fingers knew her. “But I wouldn’t do to you what I did to her. Forget about what she told you. You don’t have to be afraid of me.”
    Rosalee smacked my hand away as though it were a fly, the key attached to her bracelet jingling angrily. “Even if you were Hannibal Lecter himself,” she said, rising to her feet with careless grace, “around here you’re nothing special.
You’re
the one who should be afraid.” She began to pace. “You know your aunt’s packing up your stuff as we speak? Says she’s either gone ship it all here or to the state hospital.”
    “Tell her to ship it here.”
    “Only thing’s getting shipped is
you
.” Her footsteps echoed in the empty room, exaggerating the distance between us. “You think I aim to be responsible for what would happen to you if you stay in this town?”
    “You haven’t been responsible for me for sixteen years,” I said. “Why should it bother you now? It doesn’t bother me.”
    “I’ll drive you to Dallas myself if I have to,” she muttered to herself, ignoring me.
    “And then what? You come back here and live your life of solitary splendor? To hell with that. I don’t care if you don’twant me—I need a mother more than you need solitude.”
    Rosalee stopped pacing and looked down at me, tight-lipped. “What I
need
is to not have to chase after a bipolar-disordered kid.”
    If she thought that name-calling would put me in my place, she was sadly mistaken. “I prefer manic-depressive,” I told her, “if it’s all the same to you. It’s much more explicit, don’t you think? More honest? But really, you can call me whatever you like as long as I get to stay.”
    “I don’t know anything about
normal
kids, let alone …” Rosalee waved her hand at me and all my disordered glory.
    “There’s nothing to know,” I told her. “All I have to do is take some pills and everything is jolly.”
    “Your definition of ‘jolly’ includes assault and battery?
You put your aunt in the hospital!
”
    “I haven’t taken my pills in a while,” I conceded.
    Rosalee stomped to the shelf and snatched up a random handful of pill bottles. “So take ’em now.”
    She took up her Easter Island stance, so I got up and got the right bottles from the shelf—lithium and Seroquel.
    “What’re all these other ones for?” Rosalee asked, examining the bottles she’d picked up.
    “Different things: depression, insomnia, anxiety, hyperactivity, blah, blah, blah.” I held up the lithium. “This one evens me out. And this one”—I held up the Seroquel—“makes the hallucinations go away.”
    “You
hallucinate
?”
    Having her undivided attention was making me giddy. “That’s why my latest shrink decided I was manic-depressive. He said it was either that or schizophrenia, and I’m way too charming and rational to be a schizophrene. His words, not mine.”
    I washed down the pills with water, which I drank straight from the tap in the bathroom. When I came out, I said, “Is that better? Are you happy? Can I stay now?”
    “No!”
    So much for giddiness. “No it’s not better, no you’re not happy, or no I can’t stay?”
    “All of the above.”
    I picked up Swan from the shelf and cuddled her. She was cold and heavy and made of wood, but a girl like me had to take comfort wherever she could get it.
    “Why do you want me to leave?” I said. “I’ll be eighteen in two years. All the hard work of raising me