I left the Killton Academy for the Insane at the small hours of the night. As a good girl, I pretended to swallow a few pills and put the pillow over my head and when they shut the lights out I shut my lights out, or so they thought, and I spit the pills like watermelon seeds on the pillow for the night nurses to find. They weren’t very smart. I befriended them and they thought I was their friend, or maybe they thought they were my friend, but it didn’t matter much. None of it did. I didn’t do well behind walls and gates and locked doors, and there were too many needles and applesauce snacks for me to sleep, and for the last eight years, I couldn’t sleep a wink.

They thought I slept well, they thought I adjusted. I attended the doctor conferences and the group sessions and I cried my eyeballs out along with the rest of the gooseberries until they thought I was one of them, they thought I embraced their paradigms and medicines and therapies and their warm fuzzy slippers. It’s what I wanted them to think. It was a lull. I’m a normal girl in a normal cage listening to normal counseling waiting for them to punch my ticket to leave. I tore up the ticket in the small hours of the night, with my three roommates snoring away and the nurse’s station dark, probably because they were doing the naughty thing in the back room with the night physician or the night attendant or perhaps it was the night alley cat that always seemed to find its way through the caged windows and locked doors. And these people thought I was the sick one.

The door creaked as I left and I kept down a giggle by squeezing my nose and chattering my teeth. The gooseberries were all asleep and the nurses were doing their wild thing and that left me and the locked door alone for a bit. The door never had a chance and I left Killton Academy for the Insane in the small hours of the night. I followed the road for miles, wagging my finger to let it know that I would have none of its slithering and curving, that it should continue straight on and leave me about, thank you very much. It didn’t take long to find the railroad tracks, two faithful iron bars that needed no scolding to travel straight into the night.

I waited in the bushes and pinched each arm when my eyelids threatened to lower the curtains and give away my position. The night critters and the swinging trees babbled and I listened carefully because you never know when a critter or tree will say something weighty. I was in a reverie when the ground shook and a tiny dot of light wiggled in my direction, the breeze not yet up and the toot-toot still silent. I waited for the large locomotive to pass before I grabbed the train and yanked it toward me, hugging the car close to my chest as it stampeded its way through Killton up north and then the back country. I slid through the nooks and into a dark car, releasing the train to go about its business while I went about my business in the corner.

The train car was cold and stacked with automobiles, a dizzying experience as I imagined the trains moving the cars moving the people moving the trains and round and round until I grew dizzy and grabbed the wall. The air was cool and cardboard armored the cars. I poked at the vulnerable spots with my long finger, leaving marks and fingerprints.

I let myself into a luxury car where I saddled up on the plastic-covered leather upholstery and made myself a good bed, where I slept for the first time in years. I knew the cure for insomnia, and it wasn’t small blue pills or darkened rooms smelling of ammonia. It was the sound of the train moving over track and the rattle of locked doors and chains as we tooted away from the Killton Academy for the Insane and into the wild wilderness of the north.

I knew it was morning when a strip of light crept along the wall. I gathered my things and poked out the door. I watched for many miles, searching my bearings, and after two abandoned stations, I realized I was close. I jumped as the train slowed and bent like a stick in the hands of a five-year-old child, the ground slanting and rolling me down, a film of dust forming on my clothes and skin, a welcome relief after a night in the conditioned air of the train box. I sat with my hands in front of my angled legs and watched my toes alight with the red glow of the train as it sped by. When all was left was its curvy backside, it appeared stationary for the longest time before I saw it shrink and toot and shrink until it all but disappeared. I remembered my manners just in time and jumped up before it vanished to wave my goodbye, a thank you for the fine journey.

I wondered what the gooseberries at the Killton Academy for the Insane would think of me at the edge of the tracks. I looked around for the first time since the small hours of the night, and filled the gooseberries’ heads with the overcast sky overflowing with the puffiest of clouds stacked one on top of another like squished marshmallows bought for the campfire, but flattened at the bottom of the sack, beneath the pots and pans and dried dinners and extra clothes. Most would think me a sight, with my sack of goodies and the train tooting its farewell. Some would think me mad, but there are worse things than to be thought mad by a gooseberry.

I followed the track until it came upon a station with wooden benches long since abandoned, and the letters on its white-painted signpost gone the way of the station manager and pop stand. An overgrown road led away from the tracks toward my destination, Dainty, North Dakota. I didn’t know if she would remember me. I hadn’t been back since before my parents moved away, this was before they shipped me to the Kilton Academy for the Insane, before the world went all topsy-turvy and left me the sole survivor hiding on the island of sanity. The town even back then was dying and my parents believed the death throes stole my sanity. I explained patiently that towns, even dying towns, don’t steal sanity, that sanity was a gift that you had to take care of, like a pet, and if you let your guard down even for a moment, it might run away and you would spend the rest of your days searching for it, holding its leash and posting signs on telephone poles and calling the neighbors to see if they had seen it run past. I didn’t bother to explain that I held my own sanity well in hand, its leash taut as it sniffed the nearby bushes for truths. My parents wouldn’t have understood because they themselves held empty leashes, tautly walking along like the invisible dog trick. Dainty would have, though. She was a fine town and to be frank, only Dainty understood me.

At the bend in the road, I stopped and studied a large green sign with Dainty’s name and population, 135 people, and a bumper sticker emblazoned in glitzy silver reading “Fastest Growing City in North Dakota.” I left Dainty in 1998, and even then, Dainty was becoming a ghost town, and by saying that I mean an old person town, since you can’t have ghosts unless you have dead people, and the surest way to have dead people is to stick a bunch of old people in a dying town.

I fought through the bushes and trees that staked the road and climbed to the top of the hill separating the abandoned railroad station from the rest of Dainty. From here, the town looked miniature. I clapped and jumped as I recognized the roofs of the houses and shops. I dug the sand from my eyes and squinted this way and that and everywhere I looked, people wandered the streets, which seemed strange for a ghost town. Large silver lights and black sheets and folding chairs and walkie-talkies were everywhere. people going this way and that, and none looked the Dainty type, the harsh curious features, the instant smile as if there was nothing to show but hospitality, that is, until they got behind your back, and then you’d better watch carefully or there’d be knives sticking out in all different ways, and you might find yourself the newest resident of the Killton Academy for the Insane, I’m just saying.

But these people seemed different. I came upon a bored-looking lady swinging a talking device by its wire. She didn’t see me approach and I tapped her on the right shoulder and stepped to the left, silencing my giggle with a squeeze and a chatter. The lady wore a triangular bun and oversized pink glasses, smaller than a clown’s but larger than a person’s, the kind that makes you want to touch them to see if they’re real or plastic or just for show. She caught up with me as I stopped circling and reached for her glasses. When she saw me she laughed, which reminded me of the gooseberries who laughed at whatever I did, as if they saw deeper humor in us that the rest missed.

“Bouchard, I’m glad you made it,” she said, speaking faster than any Dainty person had a right to speak. I didn’t recognize the name, but I slipped Bouchard around my shoulders, shrugged a bit to test its weight, and stretched my neck like a cat, needing but a scratch behind my ears to find the ultimate pleasure. Snug as a rug in a coffee mug, the name was. “Dean’s been looking everywhere for you. I’m Sandy, by the way, not that you would know me, of course. Dean was worried when you disappeared.” She studied me, looking a bit struck, before she nodded and spoke into her talking device. “I found Bouchard, I’m coming to you, she’s dressed and ready.”

Static answered the talking device, and then a man’s voice. “It’s about damn time. Where the hell has she been?”

Sandy didn’t stop to answer and grabbed my dirty hand and pulled me down the hill toward the lights and the people. I always knew Dainty would provide for me. As I said, Dainty always understood me. Sandy walked fast and I skipped to keep up. We winded our way through surprised crowds who dodged from our path as if delighted that Dainty’s prodigal child had returned. I waved and spun around to look at them, making faces with my four fingers, thumb, and tongue before Sandy tugged me along. We passed old and new houses, all looked newly painted, but I could see beyond the paint that they hadn’t been used for some time. Good old Dainty, only a paint job away from oblivion.

As we moved closer to the center of town, we passed bunches of people huddled over cameras and more lights and wires that crisscrossed every part of the sidewalk and street. Sandy stopped pulling but I kept walking until I ran into a man wearing all black with a tight-cropped gray and white goatee that I wanted to grab and pull and climb in until I lost myself in the curls.

“Dean, I have no idea where she came from,” Sandy said to the man in black, at last letting go of my hand, and touching the triangular bun at the back of her head. I stretched my neck until I could study that most geometrical of hairstyles, wondering how she managed the sharp angles and points and whether maybe this time she’d let me cop a feel at her pink glasses.

“Bouchard, it’s nice you decided to join us,” Dean said.

“Glad to be here,” I said with a southern accent. With a name like Bouchard, you had to be something or you were nothing, and southern sounded like something. Dean looked at me strangely and I mirrored his expression, drilling into his skull with my eyes until I could see gray matter leak out around my eyeballs. He looked away and cleared his voice and I could have sworn touched himself in that intimate place between his legs. I obliged and copied his movement and damn did it feel good. With all that good sleep on the train, I forgot how that felt, the last time being my final night at the Killton Academy for the Insane as I pushed the time past and waited for it to run out and the lights to go on and the television to warm up and the heated cereal to pop, crack, and sizzle in the plastic bowls.

Dean cleared his voice again, and I stifled my own cough, wiping the dust and dirt of the road off the front of my slacks.

“We’ve been waiting for over an hour,” Dean said as if he had not been doing the naughty thing but a moment ago. “But that doesn’t matter much as long as you’re ready,” and here he paused and looked me up and down and I smiled most brilliantly, using my perfect white teeth as an interrogation spotlight. Perhaps I did look like riff-raff after so many years. That’s one of the things about the Killton Academy for the Insane, they don’t supply mirrors, and after a little while you forget that you even looked like someone or something. Dean peeled his eyes away from my sparkling teeth and continued, “but I guess you look ready to me.

“Set up for the first take,” Dean shouted. “Bouchard has decided to grace us with her presence. I want to roll in five. Bouchard, take your position so we can get the first scene in the can.”

I patted my bag and fell in behind Dean, close in so he couldn’t quickly get away. He smelled of lilies and oldness, like ripe Ivory soap and sawdust. He smelled of Dainty. He turned and grabbed me by the shoulders and walked me to the middle of a crowd surrounded by bright lights with cameras.

The crowd consisted of eighteen girls in groups of twos and threes. They were milling outside a large brick building. The building looked very familiar, but wrong somehow, as if I was looking at it from the wrong angle. The girls all wore pink pajamas and oversized bathrobes with green and blue emblems, like the one I wore, like the one they gave me at the Killton Academy for the Insane.

Dean yelled, “Action!”