Page 22 of The King of Hearts

“Who, Dara?” I take a seat in the chair beside her.

Dara has schizophrenia. Her first episode happened while she was in class her junior year. The teacher was in the middle of giving a lesson when Dara suddenly stood, clutching her hair, and started screaming about a man coming from the ground to take her away. According to her family and friends, the weeks leading up to that episode, she started acting strange. There were days when she wouldn’t leave her room and refused to walk on floors that weren’t covered in carpet. Since that first episode, she declined quickly, having episodes nearly every day. For the first six months, her family tried to care for her at home, but it became too much for them, so they admitted her here.

Her eyes look crazed when she tilts her head to the side so she can see me. “The bad man,” she says gravely. “He’s coming for me. He’ll come and snatch me away.”

An eerie sensation slithers up my spine at her haunted voice. I lean forward. “Who’s the bad man? Why does he want you?”

“He wants to eat me up, so I’m always with him.”

As soon as the words leave her mouth, her eyes glaze over. She blinks twice, appearing dazed for a moment, and then the look is gone. She sits upright in her chair and pushes away the strands of hair that have fallen from her braid away from her face. Her eyes slowly move around the room before they fall on me.

“Hey, Savina,” she says cheerily, her demeanor doing a complete one-eighty. “When did you get here?”

I smile softly at her. “Just now.”

My heart breaks for this girl. To be plagued with such an illness at so young of an age.

“How are you doing today?” I ask, setting my elbows on the table and propping my chin in my hand. “Anything special going on?”

“Not really.” She grins, and the cute dimples she has pop out on her cheeks. “I got a new book yesterday.”

“Oh yeah? What’s this one about?”

One of the first times I came to volunteer here, Dara and I discovered we both share a love of romance books. Whereas my interest lies in the dark romance category, she prefers sexy and sweet.

She gushes over her latest book, telling me about the meet cute between the two lead characters. I don’t miss the wistfulness in her eyes as she talks. It’s sad to think that she’ll probably never have her own happily ever after with a man who adores her.

As if reading my thoughts, Dara props her chin on her hand with her elbow on the table and sighs wistfully. “I wish I could have a love like that.”

Her words make me want to cry for her. “Maybe one day it’ll happen,” I tell her.

Her brows drop, and her lips follow suit with a frown. “You know that can’t happen. Dead people can’t love. They don’t have happily ever afters.”

She doesn’t say that because she thinks the bad man in her head is going to kill her. Dara’s not only plagued with schizophrenia, she’s also been diagnosed with Cotard’s Syndrome, better known as walking corpse syndrome. She thinks she’s already dead.

Loud laughter interrupts our conversation, and we both glance over at Willy, an older gentleman in his sixties. The other patients are laughing and cheering because he’s stripped off his shirt and is currently working his sweatpants down his legs. Luckily, he’s wearing underwear, or we’d all get an eyeful. Hisname, Willy, is aptly given, since he has a habit of whipping it out and twisting his hips so it flaps against his thighs. His actions aren’t in the least bit sexual. He simply does it for entertainment purposes.

Thankfully, having heard the commotion from the patients, one of the nurses rushes over before he can completely strip. The boos that fill the room echo off the walls.

Dara and I look at each other and laugh.

“I see Willy’s himself today,” I comment, trying to stem my laughter.

“A couple of days ago, he managed to get his underwear down before a nurse noticed. When she started across the room to stop him, he spun around to get away. He whacked Steven on the side of his face with his dick.” She giggles. “His underwear was still around his ankles, so when he tried to run, he tripped and fell.”

I sputter out a laugh before I can stop it. “I bet that was a sight to see.”

“It was. Especially since when he fell, there was a chair in his path. The chair caught his fall, but it left his bare ass sticking up in the air.”

“Oh, no. He wasn’t hurt, was he?”

I look over at Willy as he half-heartedly tries to keep the nurse from pulling up his pants. He laughs hysterically as he wiggles his hips back and forth, making it difficult for her. When one of the male nurses walks over, his movement stops, and his eyes grow wide.

“He was okay,” Dara says.

We sit for a bit longer, talking about unimportant things. Most days, I’m not able to have a normal conversation with her because she’s stuck in a dark place in her head, or she refuses to talk because dead people can’t speak. On the rare occasions that we do, they feel like talks between two girls hanging out. I haveno doubt that if things were normal, she and I would be great friends. I already consider her a friend; it’s just not a typical friendship.

We’re closing in on two hours and the end of my time here when Jackson, the male nurse who helped the other nurse tame Willy, walks over to our table. He’s a good-looking guy in his thirties with dark, shaggy hair and eyes the color of a rainforest. He’s tall and muscular, with a broad chest and defined arms that threaten to rip the seams of his white scrub top. Out of the many times I’ve been here, I’ve never seen him smile. He always wears a serious expression, which he uses to intimidate the patients when they’re misbehaving.

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