There was nothing to do in the Crazy Ward—nothing to do but sit, and watch, and listen. She was a plant: unnoticeable and unnoticed, absorbing information through her skin. Over the course of a few hours, other patients drifted in and out of the waiting room. One girl was so thin her head, by comparison, looked like an enormous balloon about to pop; a fine fuzz of hair grew over her arms and even over the jutting peaks of her collarbones. Another girl—Kaitlyn, according to the nurse who eventually called her back to her room for a bath—shuffled back and forth across the worn carpet in her slippers, her head tilted to one side, as if listening to an inaudible symphony. Then there was Roddy, a grown man with the smooth, hairless face of a baby, who plunked right down next to Dea and explained that he had once been secret service for the president.

In the late afternoon two more visitors arrived to the ward, identifiable because they were dressed normally instead of in the paper gowns or soft cotton pajamas the patients wore. The anorexic stood up to greet them. They disappeared together into her room. An hour later, Dea watched the visitors—mother and sister, she thought—reemerge. A member of the cleaning crew released them back into the general wing; the janitor barely glanced at them before punching in the key code. She didn’t even ask for their guest IDs. She didn’t have to; they were wearing street clothing, which meant okay to pass go.

At six o’clock there was a long lull, a shift change, when the day nurses were released into the world and the night nurses came on—a quick half an hour when the hallway was mostly empty, when the day nurses had fled back to their cars and homes and boyfriends and kids, when the night nurses were getting ready in the break room, slugging back awful coffee, reviewing charts, complaining about the long night to come. All the night nurses were old. Or maybe they weren’t old, and only looked it. That must be the effect of years on the Crazy Ward, and long, dark hours filled with unnatural light, the stink of bleach, and the cries of people whose brains had turned traitor.

Dea didn’t judge. She knew, better than anyone, that reality was a tricky thing: shifting, tissue-thin, difficult to grasp.

In the evening, she repeated her magic trick, keeping her palm cupped around her pills even as she pretended to swallow. Those pills went under her mattress. For a long time after lights-out, she lay awake, listening to the murmurs and footsteps, the dull thud of something hard banging rhythmically against a closed door. Whenever she closed her eyes, she pictured her mother’s face, her mouth torn open in a scream, and the men with their ragged mouths of darkness behind her. She pictured rainstorms made of glass, and snow that fell silently and smelled like human ash.

Every time she moved to the window, hoping to see a break in the darkness, a chink of light, she saw nothing but a narrow wedge of black between the steep gabled sides of the hospital roof. She began to worry that dawn would never come.

It did, of course. The sun clawed apart the dark. Light bled down the hospital walls. The nurses changed shift again. Carts squeaked down the hall. The air smelled like burnt eggs and old yogurt. Toilets flushed and showers ran. Slowly, the ward woke up.

This was reality: the day came, whether you wanted it or not.

She would have only one chance to escape. If she screwed up, she’d probably be strapped to her bed, like she’d heard a nurse say they did to Roddy at night and when he went into one of his rages. But she couldn’t wait any longer. She needed to get out. She needed to find Connor.

And then she needed to get into his dreams.

Nina, the Latina nurse, returned a little after noon, wheeling Dea’s lunch tray. “How’re you doin’, baby? You hungry for something good?” Nina said that to all the patients. Dea could hear her singsonging it down the hall and had always assumed it was a rhetorical question, since the food in the Crazy Wing was even worse than regular hospital food. But she dutifully pronged a few grayish spears of asparagus, massed like elongated slugs at the edge of her plate. She needed the strength. She hadn’t walked much in days, and she could feel it: she was weak, dizzy, nauseous. She could barely choke down her lunch.

Nina beamed at her. “I wish everybody on the floor was as good as you, sweetheart.” She was sweating a little, even though the ward was always chilled to an exact sixty-nine degrees. Dea felt as if the whole hospital was just a giant refrigerator, and she and the other patients were vegetables, shivering silently inside of it. “Make my job a whole lot easier.”

“Thanks,” Dea said. She took a deep breath. Now or never. “Nina? I need to ask you a favor. A big favor.”

Nina didn’t stop smiling, but her posture changed almost imperceptibly. She was alert now, watching. She’d been in Crazyville a long time. She knew how quickly things could shift. “What’s that, honey?”

“It’s my best friend’s birthday today,” Dea said, looking down at her lap, because this lie was the hardest. Not because she was being deceitful, but because before Connor, before Gollum, she’d never had best friends—she’d hardly had any friends. And now she didn’t know where she stood with either of them.

She just had to pray that Connor would help her. He was the only one who could. Gollum was out of the question. She couldn’t drive, and didn’t even own a cell phone.

“I was hoping . . . well, she’s my best friend, you know? And I haven’t spoken to her at all. I was hoping I could maybe just send her a quick text . . . ?” She looked up, holding her breath.

Nina was still smiling, so wide Dea could see the lipstick on her teeth. “There’s a phone in the hall, honey. Why don’t you ring her up there?”

There was a phone in the hall: an ancient rotary phone, sitting on the counter by the welcome desk—stupidly named, since there was nothing welcoming about Crazyville. The patients were allowed to make a single call a day. Roddy sometimes spent an hour or more on the phone, the cord twisted around a fat finger, ranting about the government or EPA regulations or bioengineered corn. Dea had been vaguely jealous that he had someone to call, until Eva, the anorexic, had told her that he never dialed any numbers—just picked up and started speaking.

“She never answers,” Dea said. “Besides, her number’s stored in my phone. Please,” she added. “I haven’t talked to her—I haven’t been able to see her. She’ll never forgive me.” Dea thought of her mother, breathing words silently onto the glass, and blinked back sudden tears. “Please. I have to get through to her.”

Nina hesitated. Her lashes left black dust on her cheekbones whenever she blinked. “All right, honey,” she said. “One text. Let’s be quick about it.”

Dea was too afraid to say thank you—afraid she might sound too grateful, too eager, and give herself away. When Nina bent over to work a key in the old padlock, Dea waited several feet away, worried that if she came any closer Nina might hear her drumming heart, feel her nervousness, and suspect something. But she didn’t.

“Go ahead,” Nina said. In the small space, Dea’s belongings looked pathetic, like the possessions of a bag lady on the street: her battered leather bag, which she hadn’t even remembered taking into the car, piled on top of a stack of rumpled clothing—all of it sheathed in plastic. Nina had backed up several feet, so she could give Dea privacy and still make sure she didn’t grab a hidden knife or razor blade. Dea reached for the bag and pulled out her phone, panicking a little when she saw the screen was dark. She’d been in the hospital for nearly a week—her battery was most likely dead. But when she pressed the power button, the screen flickered to life. Someone must have powered the phone down before stashing it.