The woman I've been sharing my room with for the past week asks me when the last time I cried was and I really can't remember. She doesn't believe me. She tells me I cry in my sleep. She tells me I toss and turn and tangle myself in the sheets until I give up. Her name is Rose Marker, the daughter of the proud Dr. Marker who now walks with his shameful eyes on the ground. Rose has scratches on the insides of her arms and along the back of her neck and around her kneecaps, but her fingernails are dull, so they don't break skin. She says the berries she's been picking in the yard during our daily walks through the grounds make her itch. We're eating breakfast and I almost spit up my milk. 

"You eat the berries in the yard?"
"Don't you?"
"Those have to be poisonous, Rose, you should stop doing that." I tell her.

"They're not poisonous. They're mulberries." Rose folds her fingers around themselves and hides her fists beneath the breakfast table.

Rose is fifteen years old. Before we shared a room, she spent three weeks at Hemerston, two months at Briar, and almost fifteen months at Royal Hills before they found a bag of shrooms in her left shoe and relinquished their responsibilities. She smokes a pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes everyday and wears thick designer sunglasses inside until someone yells at her. I don't mind the sunglasses. When she wears them, I pretend she's invisible and if she speaks to me while in her guise, I ignore her. She's beginning to think it's a game we play. She offers me cigarettes sometimes, which I take but don't finish. I've been here for nearly seven months. My lungs aren't used to the amount of nicotine in an unfiltered cigarette. They're more comfortable breathing the stale air of our sterile ward.