Then she stuffed three handfuls of pills in her skirt pocket. On the wall to the right of the window was a Dixie Cup dispenser. She was able to reach it by standing on tiptoe and stretching. She took four paper cups. She had decided on that number the night before. She carried them over, stacked, to the table that held the pill jar, set them down neatly, and filled them one at a time. Then she stood back and looked at the jar. The level had dropped to almost half what it had been. The problem seemed insoluble. She would have to wait and see what happened.
Leaving the cups, she went to the door that Mr. Fergussen used when he went to do pharmacy duty. She would leave that way, unlocking it from the inside, and make two trips to carry the pills to the metal stand by her bed. She had a nearly empty Kleenex box to put them in. She would spread a few sheets of Kleenex on top and put the box in the bottom of her enameled nightstand, under her clean underwear and socks.
But the door would not open. It was locked in some serious way. She examined the knob and latch, feeling carefully with her hands. There was a thick, heavy sensation at the back of her throat as she did this, and her arms were numb, like the arms of a dead person. What she had suspected when the door wouldn’t open turned out to be true: you had to have a key even from the inside. And she could not climb back out the little window carrying four Dixie cups full of tranquilizers.
She grew frantic. They would miss her at the movie. Fergussen would be looking for her. The projector would break down and all the children would be sent into the Multi-Purpose Room, with Fergussen monitoring them, and here she would be. But deeper than that, she felt trapped, the same wretched, heart-stopping sensation she had felt when she was taken from home and put in this institution and made to sleep in a ward with twenty strangers and hear noises all night long that were, in a way, as bad as the shouting at home, when Daddy and Mother were there—the shouting from the brightly lit kitchen. Beth had slept in the dining room on a folding cot. She felt trapped then, too, and her arms were numb. There was a big space under the door that separated dining room from kitchen; the light had streamed in under it, along with the shouted words.
She gripped the doorknob and stood still for a long moment, breathing shallowly. Then her heart began beating almost normally again and feeling came back into her arms and hands. She could always get out by climbing through the window. She had a pocket full of pills. She could set the Dixie cups on the white table inside the window and then, when she was back on the stool outside, she could reach in and take them out, one at a time. She could visualize it all, like a chess position.
She carried the cups over to the table. She had begun to sense in herself an enormous calm, like the calm she had felt that day at the high school when she knew she was unbeatable. When she set down the fourth cup she turned and looked back at the glass jar. Fergussen would know that pills had been stolen. That could not be hidden. Sometimes her father had said, “In for a dime, in for a dollar.”
She took the jar over to the table and poured the contents of the Dixie cups back into it, stepped back and checked. It would be simple to lean over from the outside and lift the jar out. She knew, too, where she could hide it, on the shelf of a disused janitors’ closet in the girls’ room. There was an old galvanized bucket up there that was never used; the jar would fit into it. There was also a short ladder in the closet, and she could use it safely because a person could lock the door on the girls’ room from the inside. Then, if there was a search for the missing pills, even if they found them, they couldn’t be traced to her. She would take only a few at a time and wouldn’t tell anyone—not even Jolene.
The pills she had gulped down a few minutes before were beginning to reach her mind. All of her nervousness had vanished. With clear purposefulness, she climbed up on Mr. Fergussen’s white table, put her head out the window and looked around her at the still-empty room. The jar of pills was a few inches from her left knee. She wriggled her way through the window and onto the stool. Standing up high there, she felt calm, powerful, in charge of her life.
She leaned forward dreamily and took the jar by its rim in both hands. A fine relaxation had spread through her body. She let herself go limp, staring down into the depths of green pills. Stately music came from the movie in the Library. Her toes were still on the stool and her body was loosely jackknifed over the window ledge; she no longer felt the sharp edge. She was like a limp rag doll. As her eyes lost focus, the green became a bright luminous blur.
“Elizabeth!” The voice seemed to come from a place inside her head. “Elizabeth!” She blinked. It was a woman’s voice, harsh, like Mother’s. She did not look around. Her fingers and thumbs on the side of the jar had gone loose. She squeezed them together and picked up the jar. She felt herself moving in slow motion, like slow motion in a movie where someone falls from a horse at a rodeo and you see him float gently to the ground as though it could not hurt at all. She lifted the jar with both hands and turned, and the bottom of the jar hit the window ledge with a dull ringing sound and her wrists twisted and the jar came loose from her hands and exploded on the edge of the stool at her feet. The fragments, mixed with hundreds of green pellets, cascaded to the linoleum floor. Bits of glass caught light like rhinestones and lay in place shivering while the green pills rolled outward like a bright waterfall toward Mrs. Deardorff. Mrs. Deardorff was standing a few feet away from her, saying, “Elizabeth!” over and over again. After what seemed a long time, the pills stopped moving.
Behind Mrs. Deardorff was Mr. Fergussen in his white pants and T-shirt. Next to him stood Mr. Schell, and just behind them, crowding to see what had happened, were the other children, some of them still blinking from the movie that had just ended. Every person in the room was staring at her, high on the miniature stage of her stool with her hands a foot apart as though she were still holding the glass jar.
Fergussen rode with her in the brown staff car and carried her into the hospital to the little room where the lights were bright and they made her swallow a gray rubber tube. It was easy. Nothing mattered. She could still see the green mound of pills in the jar. There were strange things happening inside her, but it didn’t matter. She fell asleep and woke only for a moment when someone pushed a hypodermic needle in her arm. She did not know how long she was there, but she did not spend the night. Fergussen drove her back the same evening. She sat in the front seat now, awake and unworried. The hospital was on the campus, where Fergussen was a graduate student; he pointed out the Psychology Building as they drove past it. “That’s where I go to school,” he said.
She merely nodded. She pictured Fergussen as a student, taking true-false tests and holding his hand up when he wanted to leave the room. She had never liked him before, had thought of him as just one of the others.
“Jesus, kid,” he said, “I thought Deardorff would explode.”
She watched the trees go by outside the car window.
“How many did you take? Twenty?”
“I didn’t count.”
He laughed. “Enjoy ’em,” he said. “It’ll be cold turkey tomorrow.”
At Methuen she went directly to bed and slept deeply for twelve hours. In the morning, after breakfast, Fergussen once again his usual distant self, told her to go to Mrs. Deardorff’s office. Surprisingly, she wasn’t afraid. The pills had worn off, but she felt rested and calm. While getting dressed she had made an extraordinary discovery. Deep in the pocket of her serge skirt, survivors of her being caught, her trip to the hospital, her undressing and then dressing again, were twenty-three tranquilizers. She had to take her toothbrush out of its holder to get them all in.