Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen Read Free Book Online

would say.
    Then the line would go dead.
    But there was still the quiet dusty phone booth and the old-fashioned black receiver with its sharp dorsal ridge.
    The Lisas had phone conversations. Each one got in a booth, folded the door shut, and yelled into her receiver. When the nurse answered, Lisa yelled, “Off the line!” Then the Lisas got on with their conversation. Sometimes they yelled insults; sometimes they yelled about their plans for the day.
    “Wanna go over to the cafeteria for dinner?” Lisa Cody would yell.
    But Lisa was restricted to the ward, so she’d have to yell back something like: “Why do you want to eat that slop with all those psychotics?”
    To which Lisa Cody would yell, “What do you think you are?”
    “Sociopath!” Lisa would yell proudly.
    Lisa Cody didn’t have a diagnosis yet.
    Cynthia was depressive; Polly and Georgina were schizophrenic; I had a character disorder. Sometimes they called it a personality disorder. When I got my diagnosis it didn’t sound serious, but after a while it sounded more ominous than other people’s. I imagined my character as a plate or shirt that had been manufactured incorrectly and was therefore useless.
    When she’d been with us a month or so, Lisa Cody got a diagnosis. She was a sociopath too. She was happy, because she wanted to be like Lisa in all things. Lisa was not so happy, because she had been the only sociopath among us.
    “We are very rare,” she told me once, “and mostly we are men.”
    After Lisa Cody got her diagnosis, the Lisas started making more trouble.
    “Acting out,” the nurses said.
    We knew what it was. The real Lisa was proving that Lisa Cody wasn’t a sociopath.
    Lisa tongued her sleeping meds for a week, took them all at once, and stayed zonked for a day and a night. Lisa Cody managed to save only four of hers, and when she took them, she puked. Lisa put a cigarette out on her arm at six-thirty in the morning while the nurses were changing shifts. That afternoon Lisa Cody burned a tiny welt on her wrist and spent the next twenty minutes running cold water on it.
    Then they had a life-history battle. Lisa wormed out of Lisa Cody that she’d grown up in Greenwich, Connecticut.
    “Greenwich, Connecticut!” She sneered. No sociopath could emerge from there. “Were you a debutante too?”
    Speed, black beauties, coke, heroin—Lisa had done it all. Lisa Cody said she’d been a junkie too. She rolled her sleeve back to show her tracks: faint scratches along the vein as if once, years before, she’d tangled with a rosebush.
    “A suburban junkie,” said Lisa. “You were playing, that’s what.”
    “Hey, man, junk’s junk,” Lisa Cody protested.
    Lisa pushed her sleeve up to her elbow and shoved her arm under Lisa Cody’s nose. Her arm was studded with pale brown lumps, gnarled and authentic.
    “These,” said Lisa, “are tracks, man. Later for your tracks.”
    Lisa Cody was beaten, but she didn’t have the sense to give up. She still sat beside Lisa at breakfast and Hall Meeting. She still waited in the phone booth for the call that didn’t come.
    “I gotta get rid of her,” said Lisa.
    “You’re mean,” Polly said.
    “Fucking bitch,” said Lisa.
    “Who?” asked Cynthia, Polly’s protector.
    But Lisa didn’t bother to clarify.
    One evening when the nurses walked the halls at dusk to turn on the lights that made our ward as bright and jarring as a penny arcade, they found every light bulb gone. Not broken, vanished.
    We knew who’d done it. The question was, Where had she put them? It was hard to search in the darkness. Even the light bulbs in our rooms were gone.
    “Lisa has the true artistic temperament,” said Georgina.
    “Just hunt,” said the head nurse. “Everybody hunt.”
    Lisa sat out the hunt in the TV room.
    It was Lisa Cody who found them, as she was meant to. She was probably planning to sit out the hunt as well, in the place that held memories of better days. She must have felt