Stealing Snow
Authors: Danielle Paige
To my family, Mommy, Daddy, Andrea, Josh,
Sienna, and Fi, and every girl who wanted
to be a princess but became a queen …
First kisses sometimes wake slumbering princesses, undo spells, and spark happily ever afters. Mine broke Bale.
Bale burned down a house when he was six. He was a patient at the Whittaker Psychiatric Institute like me, and he was also my only friend. But there was—he was—something … more. I told him to meet me where we could be alone, at the one place where we couldn’t see the iron gates that hemmed us in. Our kissing would have a time limit, though. The time it took for the White Coats to notice that we were gone.
Bale met me in the darkest crook of the hall, just as I knew he would. Bale would meet me anywhere.
We were clumsy at first. My eyes were open. He had not leaned down quite far enough. And then we weren’t clumsy at all. His lips were warm, and the heat washed over me. I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears. I leaned into him and felt his body against mine. When we finally broke apart, I rocked back
on my heels and looked up at him. I felt myself smiling. And I rarely smiled.
“I’m sorry, Snow,” he said, looking down at me.
I blinked up at him, confused. He was kidding.
“It was perfect,” I asserted. I was not the type to be mushy. But he was not allowed to joke about this. Not ever this.
I pushed his shoulder lightly.
“I see what you are now,” he said, grabbing my hand and holding on a little too tight.
“Bale …” I felt something snap in my palm, and a sharp pain ran up my wrist and arm. I cried out, but Bale just looked at me with steady eyes, his grip and gaze suddenly cold and unyielding.
Not like a prince at all.
It took three orderlies to get him to let go of my wrist, which I later learned was broken in two places.
As they pulled him away, I noticed through the double-paned windows down the hall that it was snowing. It was too late for snow. It was May. But it was upstate New York, and weirder things had happened. The snow stuck to the glass and melted. I touched the cold pane. If things had played out differently, the snow would have been a perfect punctuation to a perfect moment. Instead it made it that much worse.
Bale went on the cocktail after that. I went on it, too, after they refused to let me see him. That was the usual procedure for Whittaker kids who never outgrew their imaginary friends, the dream catchers and time travelers, the cutters and kids who couldn’t eat or couldn’t sleep. And for me, who tried to walk through a mirror when I was five. I still have the scars on my face,
neck, and arms from the shards of glass, though they’ve faded now to faint white lines. I assume Becky, the girl next door who I had dragged through the mirror with me, still has them, too.
Dr. Harris said they’d found pills under Bale’s bed. He hadn’t been taking his meds. He couldn’t help what he did to me.
I wasn’t sure that was the whole truth, and I didn’t care. The broken bones were temporary. What stuck with me was that perfect first kiss. And the shock of what he had said.
That was a year ago. Bale hadn’t spoken since.
In the distance I could see a tree that seemed to scrape the sky in every direction, with gnarly branches and the strangest, almost luminescent white wood. The bark was covered from top to bottom in intricate carvings. I had seen this tree before. I felt a pull to walk right over to it and run my fingers along the carvings. But instead I turned away from the tree toward a loud, constant crashing sound: water. It was running fast and deep. I looked down and saw that I was hovering on the edge of a steep, rugged cliff, when something or someone came at me from behind, shoving me hard.
I fell and fell and fell until my body hit the water. It was freezing cold. Cold like none I’d ever felt. The water cut at me like little needles piercing my skin. And then when I could not stand it a second longer, I opened my eyes and saw something in the murky deep: tentacles and gills and gnashing teeth coming at me in the icy blue.
My arms flailed. I needed air. Which was worse? That thing in the
water or drowning? I opened my mouth to scream as the thing reached me, wrapping its icy tentacles around my ankle.
When I woke that morning, Vern, one of Whittaker’s orderlies, was standing over me.
“Hush, child,” she said quietly. She had a syringe in her hand, and she was prepared to use it.
I caught my breath and threw back the covers to check my leg for the mark made by that thing in the water. The sheets were drenched. But it was my sweat. There was no mark and no water creature to blame.
“Snow?”
The orderlies—or White Coats as we liked to call them—weren’t really our friends even though they were the only people we saw every single day. Some of them spoke to us. Some mocked us. Some laughed and moved us from locked room to locked room like furniture. But Vernaliz O’Hara was different. She treated me like a person even when I was a completely drugged-out vegetable and even when I had the shakes. She didn’t know which person I was at the moment, hence the syringe.
“I’d rather not knock you out today. Your mother is coming,” Vern said in her maple-syrupy Southern accent. Her low, long brown ponytail swung behind her as she stepped away from my bed and slipped the syringe back into the pocket of her scrubs. Looking up at her, I marveled at how close her head came to the
ceiling. At six feet nine, she was an abnormally tall woman. I half expected to feel a breeze from the whiplash of Vern’s hair.
Depending on which patient you asked, Vern was a giantess. Or an Amazon. Or a Jörd, the giant Norse goddess who gave birth to Thor, the god who sometimes shows up in comic book movies. I’d looked up Vern’s condition in Dr. Harris’s collection of old encyclopedias in the library. Vern suffered from acromegaly, a hormonal condition that occurs when too much growth hormone is produced by the pituitary gland, which resulted in a larger-than-everyone-else Vern. But “suffered” was the wrong word. Vern owned her size, and it made her the perfect muscle for Whittaker. No patient could find his or her way around the wall of woman she was. Not even me.
I held out my hand. “Fine,” I mumbled.
“She speaks,” Vern assessed, her oversize green eyes lighting up with surprise.
Vern wasn’t being sarcastic for a change. Because of the meds, I didn’t speak often these days except for swear words. And also because I didn’t have anyone I wanted to talk to. Except my mother when she was visiting … and of course, Bale.
Vern was the only one of the White Coats I could even stand to be around.
I had bitten Vern once—right after Dr. Harris had told me I couldn’t see Bale last year. I had expected Vern to treat me differently after that, but she didn’t. She was the same kind Vern. I always wanted to ask her why. But I never did.
“Did you have the dream again?” Vern asked with the same level of anticipation she had for the next episode of
The End of
Almost
, one of her “stories” that we watched during supervised recreation hours.