After breakfast, I packed all my stuff. Every stupid sparkly jogging suit and every fluffy pair of socks. My copy of Brave New World, and my handwritten, fifteen-hundred-and-twenty-two-word essay, each word counted, just to make sure. Three times.

I was ready to go.

Nurse Nancy noted my packed bag and my neatly made bed with a single raised eyebrow, but said nothing as she checked me off on her clipboard.

By lunchtime, I was fidgeting uncontrollably. I tapped my fork on the table and stared out the window, watching the visible portion of the parking lot for my uncle’s car. Or my aunt’s. Every time I glanced up, I found Lydia watching me, a silent frown painted on her face, along with a now constant grimace of pain. Whatever was wrong with her was getting worse; she had my sympathy. And I couldn’t help wondering why they didn’t give her stronger pain pills. Or if they were giving her any at all.

I’d been working on the puzzle for nearly an hour after lunch when a loud crash echoed from the boys’ hall, and startled aides took off in that direction. As they ran, that familiar grim panic grabbed me like a fist around my chest, squeezing so hard I couldn’t breathe.

Despair settled through me, bitter and sobering. No! Not again! I’m getting out today…

But not if I started screaming again. Not if they had to strap me to another bed. Not if they had to shoot me so full of drugs I slept through the next fifteen hours.

My heart pumped blood through me so fast my head spun. I stayed in my seat while the other patients stood, edging eagerly to the broad doorway. The screaming hadn’t started yet. Maybe if I stayed completely still, it wouldn’t. Maybe I could control it this time. Maybe the pills would work.

Down the hall, something heavy thudded against the walls, and dark panic bloomed inside me, leaving my heart swollen and heavy with a grief I didn’t understand.

Lydia rose from her chair with her back to the boys’ hall. Her eyes closed, and she flinched. As I watched, frozen, she fell forward, bent at the waist. Her knees slammed into the vinyl tile. She held herself off the floor with one hand—the other pressed to her gut in obvious pain—and cried out softly. But no one heard her over the splinter of wood from down the hall. No one but me.

I wanted to help her but I was afraid to move. The shriek was building inside me now, fighting its way up. My throat tightened. I gripped the arms of my chair, my knuckles white with tension. The pills weren’t working. Did that mean my panic attacks were neither schizophrenia nor anxiety?

Wide-eyed, I watched as Lydia hauled herself up, using an end table for balance. One arm wrapped around her stomach, she held her free hand out to me, tears standing in her eyes. “Come on,” she whispered, then swallowed thickly. “If you want out, come with me now.”

If I weren’t busy holding back my scream, I might have choked on surprise. She could talk?

Isucked in a deep breath through my nose, then let go of the chair and slid my hand into hers. Lydia pulled me up with surprising strength, and I followed her across the room, through a gap in the cluster of patients, and down the girls’ hall, while everyone else stared in the opposite direction. She stopped once, halfway down, bent over in pain again as a horrifying screech ripped through the air from the other side of the unit.

“It’s Tyler,” she gasped as I pulled her up and pressed my free fist against my sealed lips, physically holding back my screams. “The new guy. He hurts so bad, but I can only take so much…”

I had no idea what she was talking about, and I couldn’t ask. I could only pull her forward, moving as much for her benefit now as for mine. Whatever was wrong with her was somehow connected to Tyler, so surely distance from the commotion would be as good for her as it was for me.

At the end of the hall, we stumbled into my room as the shouting grew louder. Lydia kicked the door shut. My eyes watered. A deep keening had started at the back of my throat, and I couldn’t make it stop. All I could do was hold my mouth closed and hope for the best.

Lydia dropped onto my bed and held her hands out to me, her face pale now, and damp with sweat in spite of the over-air-conditioned room. “Hurry,” she said, but as I stepped forward, that terrible grayness swept into the room from nowhere. From everywhere. It was just suddenly there, leaching color from everything, thickening with each second that high-pitched squeal leaked from my throat.

I scrambled onto the bed with her and used my shirt to wipe tears from my face. It was real! The fog was real! But that realization brought with it a bolt of true terror. If I wasn’t hallucinating, what the hell was going on?

“Give me your hands.” Lydia gasped and doubled over in pain. When she looked up again, I took her hand in my empty one, but kept my mouth covered with the other. “Normally I try to block it,” she whispered, pushing limp brown hair from her face. “But I don’t have the strength for that right now. This place is so full of pain…”

Block what? What the hell was going on? Uncertainty pitched in my stomach, almost strong enough to rival the dark fear fueling my uncontrollable keening. What was she talking about? No wonder she’d quit speaking.

Lydia closed her eyes, riding a wave of pain, then she opened them and her voice was so soft I had to strain to hear it. “I can let the pain flow naturally—that’s easiest on both of us. Or I can take it from you. That way’s faster, but sometimes I take too much. More than just pain.” She flinched again, and her gaze shifted to something over my shoulder, as if she could see through all the walls separating us from Tyler. “And I can’t give it back. But either way, it’s easier if I touch you.”