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E . J . S CHW A R T Z. J . S CHW A R T Z
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chosen and running with. “And don’t hesitate. Stab as hard
as you can. Right here.”
“Don’t you mean slit?” I ask. I’ve heard of people slit-
ting throats before. Sylvia Plath when she was ten. A man in
Houston last month to his girlfriend right in the middle of a
KFC. Dean during his epic suicide in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

I’ve never heard of anyone stabbing a throat.
Rowan hits her fist against the ladder’s worn wood. “Stab,”
she corrects. “The knives in there won’t be sharp enough for
a clean cut and I don’t need you sawing off my windpipe. I’m
faking suicidal, Shoshana, not sadistic.”
Rowan uses the word faking a lot. Sometimes I wonder who
she was before all this, before becoming a Recovery and Relief
patient—everyone here calls it RR—and even before that,
when she wasn’t sick at all. On her first day at RR, she chopped

off her hair, then dyed it eggplant purple with a Kool-Aid
packet snuck from the Gray kitchen. The story I heard upon
arrival put Britney Spears to shame. In my head, it plays closer
to Demi Moore in G.I. Jane than Robin Tunney in Empire Records.
Still, the image of pre-Rowan, Barbie’s doppelgänger, never
settles. Rowan agrees. She says she came out of the womb
early, eager to sin, but never fully met herself until she hacked

a pair of scissors two inches above her scalp.
We decide to make Rowan’s death swift and painless as
we head for the stairs, halted by the sight of the other Gray
girls. They’re huddled by the bottom step, whispering and
glancing at the staff room door like nervous school children.

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