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Lucy had her own. Most of the rooms included two twin beds, bedside tables, and matching wardrobes. Lucy’s room had a mattress and a single blanket, that was it.
    We’d learned the hard way that the shatterproof glass on our eighth-story windows didn’t always hold up to an enraged child armed with a twenty-pound nightstand.
    Lucy was a primal child. That meant she’d been so severely and continuously abused that her humanity had been stripped from her.She didn’t wear clothes, use silverware, or tend to basic hygiene. She didn’t speak and had never been potty-trained. According to her file, she had spent most of her life in a disconnected freezer unit with bullet holes for ventilation. Her time out of the freezer had been worse than her time in. The result was a nine-year-old girl who existed like a wild animal. And if we weren’t careful, she’d train us to treat her like one.
    First hour she was admitted, Lucy greeted our nurse manager by defecating into her own hand, then eating the feces. Twenty minutes later, a milieu counselor—MC—observed her ripping out the insides of her pillow and stuffing it into various orifices. The pillow was removed; Lucy wouldn’t allow us to tend to the stuffing. An hour after that, she scratched open her arm with a fingernail, then drew patterns on the wall with her blood.
    First observation of our new charge: Any form of attention seemed to trigger a need to debase herself. If Lucy had an audience, she had to hurt.
    By four in the afternoon, we agreed to confine Lucy to her room and assign one staff member to monitor her. Rather than the five-minute check system, where an MC accounts for every child’s whereabouts every five minutes, one staff member would observe Lucy as discreetly as possible, noting every twenty minutes.
    Tonight, that was lucky me.
    It took until eleven for the kids to settle down. Some were sleeping on mattresses in the well-lit hall; these were the kids who were terrified of the dark. Others could only sleep alone in a pitch-black room. Others still required music or white noise or, for one child, a ticking clock simulating his lost mother’s heartbeat. We set up everyone accordingly.
    For Lucy’s first night, I did nothing special. Just sat with my back to her doorway and read stories to the other children. From time to time, I’d catch Lucy’s reflection in the silver half dome mounted in the ceiling above me. The mirrored half domes dotted the broad hallway at strategic intervals—our version of a security system, as they reflected back activities from inside each patient room.
    Lucy seemed to be listening to the story. She’d curled up on the floor, waving one hand through the air, the way a cat might study itsown paw. If I read faster, her hand moved faster. If I read slower, her rhythm adjusted accordingly.
    Then, twenty minutes later, she’d disappeared. In the dome’s distorted reflection, I’d finally spotted her foot sticking out from beneath the mattress. When she didn’t move, I turned around to study her room directly. It appeared that she’d pulled the mattress over her body and had finally gone to sleep. From time to time, her foot would twitch, as if from a dream.
    I settled in myself, sitting on the floor with my back against the wall. There were over half a dozen other staff members scattered down the hall. Nighttime in the unit was paperwork time. Gotta catch up while you had the chance.
    None of the kids would sleep for long. Some of the more manic ones required food every three hours, though you’d never know it to judge by their skeletal frames. Others just couldn’t sleep.
    Nighttime meant old terrors and fresh fears. A subconscious buffet of every evil thing ever done to them. Kids woke up crying. Kids woke up screaming. And some woke up primed for battle. Fight or flight. Not everyone was born to run.
    I flipped open the first patient chart, and felt my eyelids already getting heavy. I’d been working a lot lately.