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go to the front foyer to sign my name and the time. We live by the chore wheel and the sign-in sheet. Every night the other girls sit in front of the TV but I rarely join them. I use TV time to get some hours alone in my room. Other than that, there’s no such thing as alone. We share bedrooms and bathrooms and constantly talk behind people’s backs about who left the crumbs on the kitchen counter and who dropped her bloody tampon outside the trash and who is a slut and who is on a trust fund and who has a stash of pills. Halfway house living is nothing if not cozy.
    Mostly they watch The Bachelor and other such crap, but tonight they’re watching the news. Even our little family of self-obsessed drug addicts has been watching the news lately. The girls seem unusually grave. I lean against the doorway and one or two of them give me a weak hello.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I ask the general room.
    â€œWar,” replies Althea, a pasty, somber girl who wears vintage hats and meditates on the tarot for hours every day waiting for guidance on what to do with her life. She pays the rent off her parents’ credit card. She paid for her prescription habit with the same card before she got sober. “Again. Still.”
    Buck, whose real name is Becky, says, “These are the sacrifices we make for liberty, Al. We’re guarding your freedom to be a freaky pagan and shit. Anyhow, it’s their own fault. These people are dangerous psychos. Fanatics. Their religion tells them to blow shit up. They’re going to nuke the free world if we don’t do something about it. Like, I know it’s terrible, but it’s necessary.”
    â€œYou smoked too much crack in your life, Buck,” Althea mumbles. But no one wants to fight with Buck, the Republican dyke from Alabama who has a rebel flag tattooed in the center of her chest.
    Missy sits in the ratty orange recliner and says nothing. Everyone pointedly avoids looking her in the eye. She’s been having nightmares about her brother in the Air Force. A few nights ago, she clawed at the curtains that hang over her bed and woke as the rod crashed down on her head. Susan Schmidt said it was a result of Missy’s post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD, ADD, ASPD, ADHD, GAD, DID, MDD, BAP, OCD. On top of our substance abuse problems, we’ve all got some initials that qualify us for placement at a dual-diagnosis facility.
    My initials are fairly unimpressive: MDD: major depressive disorder. CD: chemical dependency. ADD: attention deficit disorder. Mostly my problem is I like cheap chardonnay and expensive cocaine and vodka tonics and Vicodins. Or I did until the accident, after which a sympathetic lawyer helped me get into a treatment facility. The lawyer waited exactly three weeks before he started showing up with bunny slippers and cheesecake and tales of a Laurel Canyon hideaway with a killer hot tub. So much for philanthropic motives, but anyway I thanked him before I got him barred from visiting me, because I quit drugs and drinking and have stayed clean ever since and without that scumbag I’d probably be dead.
    God is really a comedian because you pray to Jesus and a lecherous lawyer is the one who shows up to help. And then you diss the lawyer but wind up breaking the treatment rules anyway because you’re so despondent and lonely you sleep with this mad handsome ex-Marine, artist guy named Jake, who’s got a cool scar across his cheek and turns out to be totally bonkers. How is he bonkers? He thinks he’s Jesus. See what I mean? Comedy.
    After treatment I arrived here at Serenity. That was over a year ago now. Seems like yesterday. Seems like forever.
    So now I am pretty much an ex-everything. Ex-Christian, ex-stripper, ex–drug addict, ex–pretty girl. Or rather I am half a pretty girl. I am mostly not so bad from the waist up, but my hands and my legs are a bird’s nest of smooth, pink keloid scars. A