Suicide Hotline Butterfly

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Candice blinked hard waking up underneath the florescent light of the hospital room she was in. She had blacked out in the ambulance and she felt the stinging ache on her thigh – the reason she was there. It had been bandaged and doctored, she was sure. Not yet changed into hospital garments, those ugly paper gowns, Candice was still in her short pink slip and her long blonde hair was tied to the side. I don't remember calling them, she thought. She had been in her room alone; she was on the phone with her best, Daniel, and she was having...trouble...

She heard a nurse scurry by her room. She collected herself and tried to remember what had happened.

“I feel nothing,” she had said into the phone to Daniel. “When something good happens, I just brace myself and wait for everything to collapse into shards.” She took another gulp out of a bottle of cheap vodka. Even with no chaser, she didn't have the energy to wince.

“I don't really feel anything either! You know that...” came the somewhat feminine male voice from the other line. Daniel breathed deeply to begin his soliloquy. Candice sighed and shifted her thoughts to her thighs. Already a few little cat scratches over the old scars... “I don't have any friends. I mean, except you. I would still rather trade places with you, I would rather have my youth and beauty. Being thirty-five is a curse...” Candice began playing with the razor a bit, thinking and half listening. “Maybe even if I did have to endure a brother like Max...of course I have no brothers... but being brought up in your teens by a jail-bird probably isn't fun. Neither is sitting around alone being this me person...” Max was her brother, and he was a drug dealer, mostly of Angel-Dust. When he was home, he was violent, and when he wasn't home, he was in jail. They were half-siblings who lost both parents; Max's father died of a heart attack when Candice was three, and their mother died slowly when Candice was eleven and Max was twenty-one. He didn't really seem to mind having to watch after Candice, mostly because he didn't. And then, a drug deal went bad. Max lost his temper and shot a man. After three bullets, he was dead; Max is going to be in a cell for a long, long time.

Daniel was still talking. “I can't seem to get any sex appeal, I will never have what I wanted in life and it's just not fair that they drugged me...”

“Shut the fuck up. Just shut the fuck up.” Candice took another gulp and gripped the blade in her palm, making it bleed. “I'm tired of taking Klonopin and blood-pressure pills to be your friend. I called you because I feel I would want to die if I weren't already dead...and you're talking about your same social-status driven idiocy, you little shit.” Spoke in a flat voice, with a very strong Southern drawl like Daniel.

“You're the self-centered one, and all you've talked about doing is ruining your appearance even more with those nasty scars...Your anxiety isn't my fault so don't blame it on me.”

“I am fixin' to be homeless, my brother is in prison for murder, I only border-line function in college, and I don't care. I should care.”

“Well you said you don't feel anything.”

“You should be re-purposed.” Candice ended the phone-call without saying goodbye. She scribbled a shattered heart in her diary and put three Klonopin beneath her tongue. Dissolve them, they'll work faster. If you're going to feel detached from reality, you may as well feel calm while doing so, Candice...” She could hear her iPhone vibrating beside her.

And now she was in the hospital. She looked at the bracelet on her arm. The bracelet identified Candice Kraus as a patient of Dr. Rita Rao, her psychiatrist of nearly six years. Candice's disdain for her was immense, but something more important than her bracelet caught her attention. An IV had been placed in her left arm, a bandage over it. They're filling me with fluids, she thought. Right?

A nurse came in to check on Candice. She had chin-length brown hair and was a little chubby, not really the kind of face one remembers easily.

“You're awake, that's good!” she exclaimed quietly. Candice shifter her eyes to the sheet covering her body. She hated eye-contact. She often kept one eye covered with hair to help hide this quirk.

“What's going on?” Candice asked flatly.

“The ambulance was called to your address. You're really lucky they showed up when they did. You were bleeding profusely, and you ingested a very bad combination of pills and alcohol. You're severely dehydrated, young lady.” Her tone was one of slight irritation. Candice had encountered plenty of people who rolled their eyes at suicidal gestures and poor coping skills, and she didn't have the patience to debate with this rolly-polly about it.

“Is that was the IV is for.”

“Yes.” She lifted the blanket to check on my bandage. “How bad is the pain.”

“I feel nothing. Can't you give me water instead of an IV? I really don't like needles in me...”

“The IV is faster, we'll keep in the IV. Doctor ordered it. You're not scared of needles, you have a tattoo on your back,” she smiled.

“There is quite a difference in a phobia of injections and withdrawals versus the experience of touching a needle.” Candice shifted uncomfortably in the bed, the intense knowledge of the IV in her vein distracting her. “Who called the ambulance?”

“No clue sweety. Press the button if you need anything.” The nurse left the room quickly, leaving Candice alone with her IV. She looked at it. She pulled at the thick white tape a bit. Ow. Ouch. She pulled a bit at all corners and heard a knock at the door. She collapsed, faking sleep. No one came in after several moment and Candice continued to pull at the tape until it was removed, and she could see the wretched needle pieced through the layers of her skin and into her blue vein showing brightly through her pale skin. She squirmed in discomfort.

“Fuck...this...” she put a finger on the needle o the fluid IV to test the sensitivity. Some. She breathed in deeply and tilted her head to move her blonde hair from her eyes. She held her breath and pulled gently upward with two fingers on the needle, and it was removed.

The machine she was hooked up to began beeping. Beep. Beep. Beep. And then one long, flat beep. It was so loud Candice wanted to retreat into a ball and cover her ears. I can't have a nervous breakdown and a a meltdown in the same night, she thought. She slid out of the bed in her pink slip and ran towards the door. The nurses certainly heard the sound, that sound everyone knows means someone has flat-lined. I flat-lined a long time ago, bitches! Candice thought as she turned and an clumsily down the white hallways of Hell; she didn't know where she was going but she needed to get there fast. She barely noticed the five nurses and orderlies closing in behind and in front of her. She was invincible, she could walk through these fuckers, she would get out of this hospital via fifth-story window and a beautiful star-lit free-fall.

She wasn't running anymore. Everything swirled, everything turned blue. She stood unsteadily, not knowing she was being held up by a black male nurse, holding her still even though she was too dehydrated to move anymore. He did this so a nurse could quickly inject Candice with Valium. She continued to swipe at the air for a moment, the orderly pulling her slip back down into place after her escapades.

Candice's wrists were strapped a bit too tightly to the wheelchair as she was pushed to the Psychiatric and Behavioral Unit of St. Christina Hospital. She was being cooperative now, but was standard procedure. Her clothing had been replaces with the light-blue paper gown that made Candice feel increasingly aware of the temperature in the room. Unbind me, she thought aggressively. In the hallways, people walked back and forth from one day-room to another, and down the hall there were doors on either side of the wall. One tall, pale man dressed in regular clothing was leaning against one of the doors talking enthusiastically to someone Candice couldn't see.

“Alright, you'll be seeing Dr. Rao shortly to discuss what we'll do,” said the voice from above and behind Candice. The owner of the voice walked away and a short male nurse with red hair freed her from her restraints. She crossed her arms and pulled her knees up to her in the chair.

Dr. Rao was a short Indian woman with a harsh, loud voice and strong accent, and she startled Candice out of her dreamworld when she spoke her named from the doorway nearest to Candice.

“Candice Kraus. Candice come in.” Candice blinked harshly and removed herself from the wheelchair, walking with a hesitant stride into the office where Dr. Rao sat in a brown chair and flipped through a tan folder. She sat in a smaller chair opposite Rao and waited.

“Candice, you were not suicidal two weeks ago,” she said sharply, keeping her eyes on the notes in the folders. Candice wonder what all had been written about her over the years and bit her lip. “What happened?”

“I just got into a fight with my best friend...” she said quietly, looking at everything in the room except for Dr. Rao.

“What else happened?”

“My brother is in prison and I'm going to have nowhere to go soon. I got stressed.”

“You drank a lot.”

“Tends to happen when I want to forget things.”

“I thought you stopped self-injuring yourself last year,” she said as she turned the page in her notes.

“I did. It happened again. It was just a small relapse, I'm fine.”

“I have a therapist who specifically wants to work with you, given your interesting history of diagnosis’s. His name is Dr. Tibideaux. You'll be seeing him in the morning.”

“When can I get out of here?”

“When you're doing better. That is what the continuation of your Klonopin and Risperidone will do with the help of Dr. Tibideaux.” She doesn't know I stopped taking the Risperidone, thought Candice. Dr. Rao closed up the file and began pulling out the file for her next patient. Candice stood and walked out of the room. So that's it, she thought. I'm stuck here until this psychologist says I can leave. He doesn't know what he's gotten into.

After a very disappointing hospital meal, medicine time, and an embarrassing shower in which Candice had to be watched by a female night-staff worker so she could shave because that was something that was required by Candice, she was taken to her room to go to sleep. Two narrow hospital beds were side by side. The room was a dull yellow and the beds were gray and white. She turned off the light and curled up with the crunchy pillow wrapped in her arms rather than under her head. I can't believe Daniel did this to me, she thought. What a backstabber. She sighed and stretched her legs. But Daniel doesn't know my address. Who knew I needed an ambulance?