Page 51 of Ward D
I stop myself before I say the last word in that sentence, but it’s too late. Jade already knows what I was going to say.
“You’re notcrazy?” She spits at me. “Is that what you were going to say? It was, wasn’t it? That’s what you think of me, isn’t it? I’m just your crazy old friend from high school who messed up her whole life because she’s justsocrazy.”
“Jade, come on…”
“No excuses!” She stomps her foot against the ground. “When we were kids, you were my best friend in the whole world. We promised each other we would be friends for the rest of our lives, and our kids would be friends. Andtheirkids would be friends. And the second shit got real, you acted like you didn’t even know me. Do you know how lonely it was when I first got hospitalized? How scary it was for me?”
She’s being unfair. It’s not like I didn’t try to be there for her, despite what she did. But she made it sodifficultfor me. And what she did…
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I should have tried harder. I… I was wrong.”
She stands there in the middle of the room, considering my apology. “How about after I get out of here, we can have dinner sometime?”
“Oh,” I say.
“You can meet my boyfriend,” she says. “We can double with you and Cameron.”
The smile I manage to paste on my lips feels very fake. “Cameron and I aren’t going out anymore, remember?”
“Oh, well, then it can just be the two of us.” She raises her eyebrows. “What do you say, Amy?”
I hesitate just a bit too long, and Jade’s expression darkens. “Oh, I get it,” she says. “Never mind.”
“No, I want to do it,” I insist, even though I’m absolutely lying. The last thing I want is to get sucked into Jade’s web again. “I’m just really busy right now. I mean, medical school is a lot of work…”
“Of course. How could I forget?”
“Maybe in a few months, when my schedule calms down. Family medicine is supposed to be pretty light. Maybe then we could…”
“Forget it,” Jade snaps. “You don’t want to have dinner with me. You don’t want to be my friend anymore. I can take a hint, believe me.”
With those words, she storms off. Part of me wants to follow her but it’s better to just leave it be. The thing is, she isn’t wrong. When I think back to the early days when Jade and I were kids, I have so many good memories of our friendship. But then she changed. And there was no bringing her back.
I don’t want to have dinner with Jade. I don’t want to meet her boyfriend. I don’t want to be her friend at all, honestly. I want to steer clear of her as much as humanly possible.
Worse, I don’t entirely trust her. If there’s one thing I know about Jade, she’ll do anything to get what she wants. I have to protect myself.
For my own safety, I have to know exactly what Jade is capable of.
And the only way to do that is to look at her chart.
30
Hours Until Morning: 5
Technically, I’m not doing anything wrong.
Jade is my patient this evening. Yes, we do have a prior relationship. But that was a very long time ago. And it’s not like Jade told me Icouldn’tlook at her chart. She seemed to assume I had already looked.
It’s completely quiet at the nurses’ station. Even Ramona has disappeared somewhere. And of course, Cameron is gone for the night. I can’t even imagine what the family emergency could have been. I hope his parents are okay. I met them once, and his dad got short of breath just from walking up the steps to their front door. He looked like a walking heart attack.
I push away thoughts of my ex-boyfriend as I grab for the chart in the rack labeled CARPENTER. I sit on one of the stools and spend a second just staring at the chart. This is it. Once I open this, I have crossed a line.
Then again, I’ve crossed lines before.
I flip to the first page, where the emergency room notes are stored. Sure enough, there are several pages from her initial intake. She came in the same day Will did, but her diagnosis is different. Jade’s diagnosis is right at the top, and it hasn’t changed from when we were sixteen: bipolar disorder type 1.
I start reading the entire sordid story of Jade’s most recent manic adventure. Apparently, she was not alone on this one. She and her boyfriend decided to rob a string of banks in the area. She would be in jail right now facing theft charges, except the two of them were armed only with beer bottles that they were pointing at the poor bank clerks like weapons, and they didn’t leave any of the banks with any actual money.
