My mom made me this black dress with flowers on the skirt for junior prom so at Lauren’s parents’ nail salon I got green acrylics with dark green lines on them to look like the stems on my dress and they stayed on pretty long like all of June ’cause they didn’t start falling off until a little bit after I arrived at the psych ward.

They were beautiful.

I kept them in the pockets of my scrubs till the nurses let me back in my room for quiet time and I put them in my bedside drawer ’cause it’s not like I had anything else to put in there and as they fell off each day I’d put more in and they all slid around when I opened the drawer.

I wondered if I should eat them.

On my discharge date two nurses cleaned out my room I guess to make sure I wasn’t hiding anything and it freaked me out ’cause I don’t like people touching my stuff and they took away the orange scrubs I was gonna steal and I just worried I’d done something bad and I couldn’t check what they packed and what they didn’t when they gave me my paper bag.

They found my nails.

In the nurse’s fleshy hands my ten nails looked unorganized and fell in the bulging valleys between his fingers and I didn’t like his hands on my nails and I was very scared they thought I was weird or they thought I might eat them and they asked if I wanted to keep them.

I did.

But that's weird so I blushed and laughed and told him no sorry and looked around to see if anyone saw and watched them clatter into the trash,

my nails.