Girl, Interrupted Read Online Free

he’d be locked on his ward for a week and Georgina couldn’t get in to see him. Then he’d simmer down and resume his visits on the floor of our room.
    Wade’s father had two friends who particularly impressed Wade: Liddy and Hunt. “Those guys will do anything!” Wade said. He said this often, and he seemed worried about it.
    Georgina didn’t like my pestering Wade about his father; she ignored me as I sat on the floor with them. But I couldn’t resist.
    “Like what?” I asked him. “What kinds of things will they do?”
    “I can’t reveal,” said Wade.
    Shortly after this he lapsed into a violent phase that went on for several weeks.
    Georgina was at a loose end without Wade’s visits. Because I felt partly responsible for his absence, I offered various distractions. “Let’s redecorate the room,” I said. “Let’s play Scrabble.” Or “Let’s cook things.”
    Cooking things was what appealed to Georgina. “Let’s make caramels,” she said.
    I was surprised that two people in a kitchen could make caramels. I thought of them as a mass-production item, like automobiles, for which complicated machinery was needed.
    But, according to Georgina, all we needed was a frying pan and sugar.
    “When it’s caramelized,” she said, “we pour it into little balls on waxed paper.”
    The nurses thought it was cute that we were cooking. “Practicing for when you and Wade get married?” one asked.
    “I don’t think Wade is the marrying kind,” said Georgina.
    Even someone who’s never made caramels knows how hot sugar has to be before it caramelizes. That’s how hot it was when the pan slipped and I poured half the sugar onto Georgina’s hand, which was holding the waxed paper straight.
    I screamed and screamed, but Georgina didn’t make a sound. The nurses ran in and produced ice and unguents and wrappings, and I kept screaming, and Georgina did nothing. She stood still with her candied hand stretched out in front of her.
    I can’t remember if it was E. Howard Hunt or G. Gordon Liddy who said, during the Watergate hearings, that he’d nightly held his hand in a candle flame till his palm burned to assure himself he could stand up to torture.
    Whoever it was, we knew about it already: the Bay of Pigs, the seared skin, the bare-handed killers who’d do anything. We’d seen the previews, Wade, Georgina, and I, along with an audience of nurses whose reviews ran something like this: “Patient lacked affect after accident”, “Patient continues fantasy that father is CIA operative with dangerous friends.”

If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now
    Daisy was a seasonal event. She came before Thanksgiving and stayed through Christmas every year. Some years she came for her birthday in May as well.
    She always got a single. “Would anybody like to share?” the head nurse asked at our weekly Hall Meeting one November morning. It was a tense moment. Georgina and I, who already shared, were free to enjoy the confusion.
    “Me! Me!” Somebody who was a Martian’s girlfriend and also had a little penis of her own, which she was eager to show off, raised a hand; nobody wanted to share with her.
    “I would if somebody would want to but of course nobody would want to so I wouldn’t want to force somebody to want to.” This was Cynthia, who’d started talking like that after six months of shock.
    Polly to the rescue: “I’ll share with you, Cynthia.”
    But that didn’t solve the problem, because Polly was in a double herself. Her roommate was a new anorexic named Janet who was scheduled for force feedings the moment she dropped below seventy-five.
    Lisa leaned toward me. “I watched her on the scale yesterday: seventy-eight,” she said loudly. “She’ll be on the tube by the weekend.”
    “Seventy-eight is the perfect weight,” said Janet. She’d said the same about eighty-three and seventy-nine, though, so nobody wanted to share with her, either.
    In the end a couple of catatonics were teamed