The sky was dark, the night forbidding, and he was beautiful.

She stroked her fingers down the creased photo, like she had a thousand times before. But tonight she could almost feel his cheekbones beneath her fingertips. The raging storm outside her tiny, barred window howled, and tried to lash its way in.

“Charlie, why don’t you ever come visit me anymore?” The girl spoke to the photo now, fingers tracing the outline of his lips. “You know that I miss you.”

She sat cross-legged on top of the pillow on her small twin bed. The sheets were white. So were the walls.

She never really liked white much, but they wouldn’t let her pick a color to paint over it.

“A new color? Why would a crazy freak like you want a new color in her room? White makes it less distracting when the docs give you sedatives and you go down and everything swirls.” A male orderly once said to her, in the beginning. She had told the next nurse, hoping for a different opinion, but she said the same thing. (Minus the ‘crazy freak’ part.)

“Charlie, it’s been over a month, you know.”

She was tracing his shoulders now. The too bright lights gave her a headache as always, but she barely noticed.

The doctor watched through the door. He glanced at the patient file.

Jessie MacCullin. Female, age 17. Obsesses over photos, particularly ones of a boy she calls ‘Charlie’. Attempted sucide three times in the last eighteen months, but cannot remember any episode. Diagnosis :mentally unstable, but exact causes unclear.

Dr. Bennard wasn’t sure what to make of her. He was fresh out of college. He jotted down in the margin that she appeared painfully thin, with messy tendrils of dark brown hair almost halfway down her back. Her green eyes were too bright. She was unkempt.

She was muttering again. He leaned closer to the glass to hear her.

“I wish you were here, Charlie. I know you’d let me paint the walls lilac. You’d help, and we would both be covered in paint. I would end up having to take a bath and that would make me cry, but you’d kiss me sweetly like you do, and I wouldn’t be scared of the water for you.”

Then she fell quiet. Dr. Bennerd watched a few more minutes, then walked away, closing the file as he did.

The photo album was under her bed. It was a very large one, with space for hundreds of shots. She loved them all, but the ones of Charlie were her favorite.

Sweet, sweet Charlie. He loved her like she didn’t think any one could, until they took her away to live here. She told him, late one night last summer, that she knew something was wrong with her, that she wasn’t normal. But he just held her close and whispered into her hair. “Normal is overrated, love. I wouldn’t want you any other way.”

Then he sang lullabies and rubbed her back until she slept.

Charlie was good with making Jessie feel better. Even now, when he was God knows where and so far away, just looking into those comforting brown puppy dog eyes made her calmer. She still knew that something was terribly wrong with her, but it wasn’t as scary when she looked at Charlie.

Yes, he was beautiful.

Jessie sighed. She slowly let the photo slip from her fingers onto the white bedspread, and looked at her left arm. She still couldn’t believe that she had put those horrible scars there. Some were more then an inch thick. She ran the tips of her fingers across them, and shuddered. Those were from the last time, three months ago. Right before they sent her here.

Charlie had found her, that night. It wasn’t long after the night he had soothed her to sleep. Maybe a week, maybe two. She couldn’t remember. A lot of things before coming to this white room were hazy.

It was late at night, and she and Charlie were going to rendezvous under the weeping willow next to old man Peters lake. When Charlie arrived, Jessie was slumped down the trunk of the tree, already passed out from blood loss. Her mother’s favorite kitchen knife was loosely clutched in her hand.

He saved her that night. He ripped his shirt into shreds, making a tourniquet, trying to stop the blood. Charlie knew that if help didn’t come soon, Jessie would die. He called 911.

He was shaking when the paramedics arrived. They took his Jessie away, and he followed. No force on earth could have separated him from her side. He practically lived in the local hospital for a week and a half, before she woke up. She was oh-so weak and frail, when she finally opened those green eyes he loved so well. He could barely look at her. Where was his strong, beautiful, hell-bent Jessie? The doctors said he wouldn’t be seeing that Jessie for a while, if ever again. That first conscious visit, he had bent down and kissed her forehead, whispering an “I love you” before he finally left to sleep in his own bed.

He hadn’t seen her since.

Jessie didn’t know any of that. She didn’t remember. The last thing she remembered before being wheeled into her room here, back in late August, was writing. She was sitting at her desk, occasionally glancing at her clock, writing in her journal before she was going to sneak out her bedroom window and climb down the tree. Everything in between was a blur of vague color and muted sound.

The only thing that Jessie was really and truly aware of was how empty her now disfigured arms felt without Charlie in them.

The too bright lights dimmed, and the night nurse opened Jessie’s door. Jessie took her nightly sedatives without water, as always, and gently placed the photo next to her pillow as she crawled between the sheets.

The sedatives began to work, and that guy, back when she first came, he was right. When she tried to keep her eyes open, everything swirled. Jessie had long learned that they helped traumatized patients sleep without waking up screaming, but she couldn’t help but wander why she had to take them as well.

Normally she didn’t dream, but she did that night. Charlie was with her, and she smiled in her sleep.

It was the first smile she had in months.