When Teresa first arrived, about a year back, she’d tried to smuggle in cocaine stuffed inside a ball of knitting yarn.

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No success! Kicks, shrieks. Sobriety. Headaches. Ravenous hunger, aversion to food. These were our dear and constant companions at Twin Bridge.

Statistically, Teresa had a 50–50 chance of landing in one of two places:

1. Jail
2. Psych unit

But that’s just math, I thought, leaning against the doorjamb as I watched Teresa teach the other girls to dance; math hardly applied. What lecherous villain would compile such numbers? They’ve got no relevance to the daily trudge of Twin Bridge Residential Treatment Center, home to the traumatized/neglected/abused/criminal, oblivion addicts as a rule, where dominated a regimen consisting mainly of school, therapy, chores, sleep, the occasional screaming and drug-addled fit.

“Step back on your right leg,” she screamed at the other girls in the cafeteria, who immediately obeyed. They dropped to the floor like they’d been shot, then popped up and gyrated, Teresa looking on approvingly, chewing a tassel of hair. “Good,” she nodded.

When Teresa first arrived, about a year back, she’d tried to smuggle in cocaine stuffed inside a ball of knitting yarn. No success! Kicks, shrieks. Sobriety. Headaches. Ravenous hunger, aversion to food. These were our dear and constant companions at Twin Bridge.

Twenty-nine girls, aged thirteen to seventeen, four to a room, prowling the halls, refusing their meds, huffing glue, prying up tacks from the backs of couches to ram through their own thumbnails, malnourished and obese or skinny as a rail, all sent to Twin Bridge due to drugs, theft, truancy, neglect, etc., all under supervision, no boys, no telephones, no real fun. Although technically I held the grand title of coordinator, all those wild chickens would not be coordinated, nor corralled. They, the girls, wanted to fight all the time; I wanted to fold my leathery wings over them and hold tight until they stopped, until they calmed and the rage lifted out of them like a cartoon ghost, evaporating in the sun. But at Twin Bridge nobody got what they wanted.

“Now,” Teresa said, raising both arms to command the others. “Do everything again.”

I put on my merrily merrily face and walked the halls.

*

All the girls’ rooms were upstairs, opening off a balcony that circled a large inner courtyard, so everyone could see everyone, a panopticon nobody wanted in ugly cream vinyl tile. I circled the balconies, poking my head into rooms: get up, get up, go to school, time to learn about the Civil War, chlorophyll, long division!

Years of wear and tear had scuffed the walls. Welcome boards and murals displayed crudely sketched anatomy alongside instructions. The anatomy bore hairs, sometimes teeth. We scrubbed and repainted; impossibly, despite infinite confiscations of markers, the graffiti multiplied, toothier, hairier. The welcome desk exhibited a fist-sized hole.

I stopped at Room Four, where Amy lived. Amy had been practicing—or attempting to practice—witchcraft. She had discovered a website.

I knocked on the doorframe.

“Enter,” Amy sang.

The other three girls who lived in the room were getting ready for class; they crowded in the bathroom, sharing an old stick of black eyeliner. Amy sat cross-legged on the floor in the center of a wobbly pentagram she’d made out of salt. Incense was burning. The whole room smelled like old furniture and melted ice pops.

“Where,” I asked, “did you get incense?”

She looked at me and didn’t answer. Open flames: strictly forbidden! Incense, though, was allowed.

I always tell the Twin Bridge staff: Exhibit interest in the girls’ hobbies. I sat at the edge of the pentagram.

“What does this do?”

“It gets rid of demons,” she told me. She put her hands up to her cheeks and squeezed them. “We may be sitting in the only safe place on Earth.”

Amy had had to remove all the metalwork in her face when she checked in, and so her lips, chin, nose, and ears were dotted with piercing holes that held nothing. She was allowed to wear makeup, and she used black lipstick liberally across her sweet, pinched elf’s face. Dandruff showed in the white part of her dark hair as she looked down at her ankles.

I kneeled inside the pentagram, my knees touching hers. On a plywood bookshelf above the twin bed sat a dozen teddy bears of varying age and quality, some patchy and furless. They sat in a line and their dead eyes tunneled past me.

“That’s interesting,” I said. “What else helps you feel safe?”

Sage, she told me. Telephones. Garlic. Cherry pits. Pudding cups. Wild thyme. Boars’ tusks, hares’ heads, chalk, music videos, blue glass, turquoise, pearls, reality TV shows about miserable chefs, eggs—especially those of an ostrich—a gland from the neck of a donkey, her bears, gold coins, a cockspur, new underwear, salt, and the best thing was to spit in the face of a child. On her bed, atop the green acrylic blanket, lay three black-and-white printed pages; they seemed to be from a website explaining the difference between Wicca and Satanism. I could make out a section title: BE YOUR OWN BARBARIAN HORDE.

“We have eggs,” I volunteered.

Amy smirked and picked one up from where it had sat hidden behind her. She cradled it near her face and whispered to the shell, if you don’t protect me, I am gonna crush you.

“All right, come on,” I smiled. “Show me a spell.”

Amy put her hands palms up on her thighs, eyes closed. She hummed, breathed in through her nose, and straightened her spine. When I put my own hands down, palms up, they were shaking.

I’d worked at Twin Bridge for three years, and for the last nine months or so, I’d begun to have doubts. I couldn’t articulate exactly what those doubts were. I think the trouble was that I sometimes understood the girls. And, that there was a goblin, squatting in my skull, rattling a metal pail full of bolts and hissing failure, rot, spoil. I wouldn’t speak to the goblin. But he shook at my hands.

“I want to be strong enough to wrestle a person,” Amy was saying. “A fat person.” She considered for a moment. “A medium-fat person.”

“Don’t say fat,” I reminded her. At Twin Bridge there were words whose utterance was forbidden, but no one could stop you from thinking them AS LOUD AS YOU CAN. Sometimes I sat, glassy-eyed in the main office, holding a cold coffee and think-shouting SUICIDE, BLOWJOB, FAT, just to assert my autonomy, my status as a twenty-nine-year-old authority figure who could go home at night.

“This spell will make us powerful,” Amy was saying. “We’re going to have muscles the size of cinder blocks. No one will ever touch us again!” She smiled wide, her face all dreamy. Then she opened her eyes and took down the printed pages. She turned to the second page and began reading.

“Money, money, come to me, in abundance three times three . . .”

I knew a little of Amy’s story, but I’m not allowed to tell you. I can tell you this: When she was a child, there were welts. Uncontrollable fits of rage in the elementary school bathroom that cracked the glass. Her mom is in jail.

Amy touched her forehead, her breastbone, both shoulders. The other girls left the bathroom; on their way out, one noisily tore through a striped shoebox beneath her bed, pulled out a spiral notebook, and flounced from the room rolling her eyes.

“Bring me wealth and prosperity, oh holy Lamia, goddess of snakes, eater of flesh.” She clasped her hands together and started whispering, listing the things she wished to buy: a boat, a dog, an island, new teeth, flip-flops, lip gloss, a mint-green Ferrari with a top that goes down.

Ferraris, islands, new teeth! What madness was this? Almost-normal desires: exactly what we aimed for, though I’d never heard of a Twin Bridge graduate making it to the echelons of upper-middle class, nor middle-middle. I stood up, scuffing the salt of Amy’s pentagram, breaking the line. Then bit my own lips hard until the painful lump went away. Where was the spell for that? Inexplicable sorrow, the lump in your throat. Snake Mom in the Sky, hand me a grimoire that will replace the urge to wail.

“Amy,” I barked, “you’re going to be late for class.”

Her face was a bank of hope, coins in her eyes, and when I scolded her, that vault slammed shut.

*

Twin Bridge sat on the plains. What was the plains. A hundred miles from anything, brown and flat and endless; wrinkly hills with no allegiance: the type of country that could be anywhere, the depths of Romania, a Mongolian wasteland. Tricks of light, palisades. Pablum and static on the radio. Heartbreaking stuff.

Once, it rained. None of that, now.

The building itself sat on the shoulder of a highway. Nearby was mostly rocks and snake holes. And a gas station. At the gas station they sold lighters and knives with camouflage-colored handles. Around us was flat land, ex-pasture, ecological deserts where soybean and corn and soybean and corn and corn and soybean and soybean and soybean and soybean and soybean once grew, crop dusters dusted, enormous metal arms trawled around pissing chemicals and then all the insects died and the land flooded and then baked and there’s nothing much you’d want out there, lately, I’m saying.

*

I followed Amy to the on-site school and took a seat in the back to help with classroom control. Biology time. Animals. The class was studying the jellyfish bloom in the Pacific Ocean. Linda, the teacher, clicked through slides with one finger. I pinched the skin around my chin and neck.

Linda had been the teacher at Twin Bridge for about two years, and this had taken its toll. At some point, she’d taken on an apocalyptic bent, insisted on teaching the genocides, Titus Andronicus, imaginary numbers. I was growing concerned, but also, interested in where all that would go. Revelations, Jonestown studies? Anything was possible. No one ever came to check on the syllabus. No one was listening at all. Hello, hello out there! Echo! We could maybe do anything we wanted.

“Jellyfish,” Linda coughed in her high, musical voice, “are remarkable animals. Most of their natural predators,” she went on, with a tremor of delight, “have gone extinct. Salmon, for example, haven’t been spotted in years, since this particular bloom of billions of mauve stingers wiped out the last known school off the coast of Alaska.” Click: a photo of a slime field, roiling with plastic bags and ribbons of flesh, which I slowly understood was a mass of jellyfish in the Alaskan gulf. Next to me a student wrote in her notebook: SAMMON??

She began to explain about the Gulf’s dead zones, where nothing could survive except—you guessed it—jellyfish. Someone put down her pencil and began to clap.

“Sh!” I hushed.

“In fact,” Linda went on, “in Precambrian times, jellyfish biodiversity dominated the seas. So we have restored balance. In a sense.”

“What’s Precambrian?” asked Amy.

“Four-point-six billion years ago,” Linda enunciated. She began to write it on the board, all the zeroes intact.

She was interrupted by a knock on the door. Carmen, the other counselor, all daisy overalls and melanoma-scarred cheeks, was there, motioning for me to come into the hallway.

“We need you outside,” Carmen said quietly.

“What for?”

She answered, in a voice so careful it betrayed a dizzy tick of joy: “A kid is up on the goddamn roof.”

*

The roof! A kid on the roof! Miracle of miracles, in fact, that it hadn’t happened before, given that the windows stayed unlocked due to fire safety regulations; in truth incredible that teens didn’t blitz themselves on the daily via gutter plunges, but yes, at last, Carmen repeated, a kid was up on the goddamn roof.

I ran outside. A few others were already standing around, gawking; a few visiting family members about to trudge for the bus. Somebody’s dad discretely pulled a Fanta from his bag and opened it with a fizz. When he saw me staring, he lifted the bottle and silently offered some. I turned around.

“Jesus Christ,” somebody said, and then I realized it was me—I said it.

Teresa was standing on the edge of the roof, the very edge, in front of the AC units. She had that look. Ratty pale jeans, band T-shirt. Clenched jaw. Dirty hair in strings around her face. Jaundiced-looking skin, dime-sized bruises on the arms.

So she wanted to get closer to the sky. Or really, it seemed, move rapidly away from it. Who could blame her? Sometimes the things we did for the girls’ well-being constituted such awful acts of mental violence that I basically had to stop thinking and move around using only my most basic physical senses, like some nocturnal, subterranean animal. A mole, maybe.

Teresa shifted forward a bit, so her toes peeked over the edge of the roof. This was, of course, upsetting. The tile could crumble at any time, and then: presto, splat, disaster and news cameras. Teresa rocked back and forth, slowly, running her eyes over the crowd.

“Call an ambulance!” wailed a woman behind me.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Carmen scowled. We had to ration our ambulance calls or the operators got tetchy.

The building was three stories tall. Would that kill you? Probably you would break both legs. Would you die? If you were trying, I decided, you could die. You could throw yourself on your head, and die.

“How did she even get up there?” I murmured.

“Honey?” called the same woman from before. “We’re going to get you down, okay?”

Teresa breathed in a deep breath, raised her arms. “Stop talking about me!” Her voice was half–carried off by the dry wind. It was too hot to breathe; in the sun, the heat was a boot on your neck.

On the off-limits third floor, around the corner from where Teresa stood, I could see a window that’d been swung open. I dipped inside and ran up the stairs two by two. The window turned out to be the window of the men’s bathroom. Rarely used, it smelled faintly of piss and fake lemon; dead flies lay thick in the rubber lining of the window. I set myself in the frame and swung a leg out. Down below: the parking lot, mute and heartless.

Just before me was the top landing of the fire escape, a disintegrating platform of dust-blasted rust. I could see how she’d gotten up there, but I could also visualize myself trying to copy her, tentatively shifting onto the platform before it suddenly gave way, crushing me under its weight, my eyes bugged out, skull cracked, and then, later, standing in heaven’s mudroom, asking for permission: What good deeds have you done, they’d say, and I’d say, if you could actually just let me wait right here I’d be fine. I feared this vision, and additionally I wasn’t confident enough about Teresa’s jump being imminent to take that sort of risk. No one had ever—ever!—successfully suicided at Twin Bridge before, and so it would have been quite the achievement for Teresa to upset that record.

“Teresa,” I called. “Teresa!”

Her face appeared suddenly over the edge of the roof, preceded by a shower of tiny black pebbles.

She pressed her chapped lips together. If she could have spit far, she would’ve spit in my face. I waited. She was a champion of not blinking. Finally I couldn’t stand it.

“Will you come inside?” I asked. “We can talk just us two, if you want.” The glare from the white sky made it hard to look at her. “You’re making a lot of people nervous as hell.”

I glanced down and saw Carmen, in the shade, sweating with anxiety. I looked back up and her face had disappeared. Then a shape soared off the edge of the roof.

I shuddered and grasped the ledge tight, turned to look—her shoes; both her shoes were lying in the lot below. Beyond the lot, the dead brown land. I could see jackrabbits scurrying around out there, nibbling the last of the grass.

“Those are your shoes!” I yelled idiotically. Down below I heard the same woman holler: her shoes!

“I’m not a convict,” Teresa cried from above. “You’ve got no right to keep me here, I’m not in prison, this is America!”

Only partly true. Okay, it wasn’t a prison-prison, but we did have custody of them. An anecdote: One time a girl, Lucy, left a tampon in for two weeks straight to give herself TSS because she was so determined to leave. What’s the lesson you take away from a thing like that? Me, I think: Angry young women are the most goddamned resourceful people on the planet.

After the shoes came the rocks. Why the rocks? From where the rocks on the roof? There are some mysteries we’ll only get answered after death. Chunk, chunk: bits of asphalt went flying, like confetti from a dark god of construction. Teresa grunted as she hurled a fist-sized piece out into the void, tracing a black parabola. I waited for the crack of a skull, but there was just shrieking as the crowd shied away, ducking behind cars. One landed on the hood of an SUV, leaving a dented bowl that flashed sun in our direction. The car alarm blared once, twice, three times, then quit.

“I am the sun god! The only machine!” yelled Teresa.

“Didn’t somebody call an ambulance?”

“You all look like shit!” she added.

“Look, Teresa,” I called, “Standing up there is only going to make things worse. It won’t make them better.”

Her feet appeared over the edge, kicking near my face, and then she dropped down and kneeled on the metal grate of the fire escape, a foot from me, glaring.

“Tell the truth,” she said, still crouched. “Are you going to strip-search me when I get inside?”

For a minute I was too surprised to answer.

“Okay, Teresa,” I said. “I’m going to tell you the truth.” I kept talking while I stretched my arm out, offering my hand. “We aren’t going to search you, but you are going to go back on basement duty. And if you do this again, we’re going to send you to the hospital.” My hand remained empty. “We do this because the number one—the most important thing—to us is keeping you safe. As long as you’re here with us, you’re safe. Okay?” My hand hung in the air.

“I don’t want to be kept safe,” she growled. “I want to throw rocks.”

But then she looked at the window, down at the crowd, back to the window. She waved me away, and before anyone could protest she was climbing across the wall, fingers gripping the brick, one bare foot edging in the window while the other swung wide through the thin air. She was already inside by the time somebody screamed. I was so keenly relieved that she was back safe indoors, that before I realized what I was doing, and though spontaneous hugs are strictly forbidden at Twin Bridge, I’d clapped her to me with both arms and Teresa proceeded to pull her fist back, aim, and punch me in the stomach as hard as she could.

I released her, coughing, as Carmen rushed in to help. I let it all play out while I watched the sky, from the ground where I had chosen to lay and catch my breath. I considered Linda’s jellyfish as Teresa was dragged away, howling. They are so successful. They are so successful, the jellyfish, because everything that goes wrong—the hypoxic seas, the pollution, the decreased visibility, the rising temperatures and acidity and overfishing—only helps that boneless animal to thrive. That was the lesson under the lesson. To thrive, you must need nothing. Survive on nothing. Somewhere below us, the futureless girl began to howl. Steady money. Safe beds. Clean water. None of that. None. The ones who live need none.

__________________________________

From Happy Bad by Delaney Nolan. Used with permission of the publisher, Astra House. Copyright © 2025 by Delaney Nolan. All rights reserved.