"It's kind of unbelievable how uneventful this week has been," Renée tells me on Saturday as we're walking around the path of the courtyard just because we have absolutely nothing else to do at all.

"I don't think that it's unbelievable," I tell her with a small laugh. "Everything is always incredibly uneventful here."

"Sure, that's true, but we usually have at least a little bit of excitement but this week was just painfully bland. Maybe now that you aren't going out with Niles, you don't have exciting stories to come back and tell us and that's why we're extra bored now, because we don't get to feed off of your excitement."

With another little laugh, I roll my eyes at her. "I'm sure that's not it. My outings with Niles weren't incredibly exciting. I mean, they were for me but it's not like we were slaying dragons or saving the princess. They aren't exciting stories to hear about."

"But it was still something," She justifies. "And now there's only two of us since Mia is with her parents. They haven't seen each other in a while, so that meeting is going to take a long time."

"I'm happy for her. I think it's nice that she gets to see her family again after so long," I say, remembering how happy Mia had been when the nurse came to get her to inform her that her visitors had arrived. She was bouncing up and down in excitement and then she practically sprinted across the courtyard and into the building to see her family.

"Yeah, I'm happy for her too," Renée agrees. "But this place is just so boring."

"Have you ever tried reading?" I ask her.

She shrugs. "Sure, but I've read all of interesting-looking books on the shelf, I had all of those read within the first two months of my stay here."

"Well, I have a book that I'm finished with if you want to read that," I offer her. "It's in my room, I'll show it to you."

"Right now?" Renée wonders when I start walking towards the door that goes into the building. It's kind of chilly outside today and I can sense the fall season sneaking up on us with a cool breeze so everyone outside is wearing a tan fleece today. If it weren't for my stint in Alaska, I wouldn't know how to handle the winter season but thankfully, I had endured enough cold weather to last a lifetime while I was up there in Alaska. "What will you do?"

"Oh, I have a few phone calls to make," I tell her as we go inside and then head towards the elevators that will take us up to the dorm area so that I can get the book for her. I had bought it when I was at the bookstore with Niles but now that I've finished it, it just sits on my desk so it won't hurt to let Renée borrow it for a little while.

"Such the social butterfly," She teases me.

"Just my dad," I assure her although I'm sure that I'll also call Penn and Niles but I don't need to go into every detail. It's not that I don't want to tell her, it's just that I don't think that she'd be very interested to know about the specific details of my phone calls. We ride up the elevators and then walk down the hallway until we get to my room and then we go inside. It's dark so I flip on the switch and we both walk farther into the room.

"I think that your room is kinda bigger than mine," Renée states, looking around the room skeptically.

"It's probably not," I chuckle, going over to the desk and grabbing the book. "I'm pretty sure they wouldn't make some rooms different sizes just to make you mad."

"They did," She jokes, following me over to the desk to analyze what's there- my open-faced journal a few drawings and some books. "This place has always had it out for me, I'm telling you."

"Sure, whatever you say," I sarcastically just go along with her. "Anyway, here's the book."

"It looks interesting," Renée analyzes the cover of the book as she takes it from my hands and then flips to the back where the summary is and she reads that. "Thank you, Ana, hopefully this will keep me entertained."

"You're welcome. When you're done we can have book talks about it because those are pretty awesome. I never get to talk about books though because nobody that I talk to actually enjoys the books that I enjoy," I explain to her.

"Yeah, and then we can force Mia to read it too and it'll be so great," She laughs, looking down at my desk where my journal is laying open to where I'd written in it earlier this morning. "What's this?"

I look down to where she's pointing at today's entry where it reads "It has been 132 days since I have attempted suicide."

"Oh, it's pretty much my daily counter, to see how long it's been," I explain to her. "It's kind of redundant but it's just a habit now. It's something that they taught me in the first place that I went, to keep track of how long it's been."

"That's strange," She comments. "But I like it. I wouldn't be able to do that, I'd always forget and then my days would be off."

"I don't even think about it anymore, I just do it when I wake up. Like a reflex or something," I explain with a shrug.

"132," Renée says the number. "That's a lot of days."

"Yeah," I sigh. "It is. I was in the seven hundreds before though."

"Well, that doesn't mean that 132 isn't any lower. It's still a really high number," She reminds me optimistically. "That's a cool idea, I wish they told me to do that when I first got to one of these places. I feel like it would keep you anchored. You know, to like real goals. Like, I can make it to ten days and then twenty and then fifty and then one hundred."

"That's how I used it," I nod. "I was actually going for one thousand earlier but you know, things happen."

"True. Things happen and then you just get back up and start again and reevaluate your goals so now, you have a brand new chance to get to one thousand. A thousand more chances, really," Renée explains.

"Sure, Doctor," I tease her as I start walking out of the room and Renée follows me so I shut the door and then we walk down the hallway toward the elevators. "But even if I don't have a thousand, more has happened for me in my 132 days than anything did in my 700-something days before. So even if I didn't make it to a thousand yet, I'm still pretty okay with the fact that I had to start at zero again."

"Of course. I'm a delight," She grins, twirling one of the pink strands of her hair between her fingers absentmindedly. Once we get downstairs, I say goodbye to Renée when we get to the phone bank and she continues on into the common area so that she can start reading her book.

I want to call my dad first to prolong the inevitable- calling Niles. It's not that I don't want to call Niles it's just that I haven't gotten the guts to call him since I read that cheesy little letter that Sarah had given me so I'm not sure what to say to that. When I'd told him that I loved him in the book store, I didn't think that it was such a big deal. I didn't mean it romantically and I also just thought that it was a fact of being human. Humans love other humans, that's just what they do. I don't think that it's incredibly shocking. However, the fact that Niles thought that it was necessary to babble about it over a note shows that he thinks that it's a much bigger deal than I do. Which brings me back to the fact that I have no idea what to say to him when I call him but I know that I have to or I'll never talk to him again and that's not okay with me either.

"Hello?" He answers the phone a few rings in. I know that he has practice at three for the game tonight which is why I'm calling at 1:30, so I know that I'm not calling during his practice time.

"Hey," I chirp. "What's up?"

"Ana, wow, you haven't called in a while," He mentions, seemingly surprised that I'm calling him right now. I'm surprised by the way that my heart leaps a little bit in my chest and I didn't realize how much I kind of missed his totally awesome voice. It's even more awesome in person but this will do for now.

"Yeah, that letter kind of took me by surprise," I admit sheepishly, constantly reminding myself to be honest. It's the best policy, right? "It was a nice letter, Shakespeare."

"Shut up, I know that it was shitty," He chuckles. "And really weird probably. Sorry about that."

"I don't mind," I tell him honestly. It was a little weird but that's okay. I've dealt with a lot of weird things in my life, I can handle a little bit of awkwardness in a letter with good intentions. "It really was kinda nice."

"Well, I hope that you shredded it," He tells me.

"I hope that you aren't gullible enough to believe that we have access to shredders around here," I refute with an easygoing laugh.

"Sure but you've thrown it away, right?"

"Of course not," I chirp. "It's tucked safely away in my desk. I might need it someday."

"For what?" Niles wonders incredulously. "Blackmail?"

"Possibly," I giggle, which really surprises me because I never expected a little girly laugh to escape my lips and yet, it still happened. I try my best to pretend like it didn't happen though, and just ignore it completley. "Who knows?"

"You want to know something, Ana?" Niles wonders rhetorically.

"I know a lot of things," I joke.

"Okay, smartass," I can tell that he just rolled his eyes at me and that makes me grin a little bit, visualizing his sassy little eye roll that is usually accompanied by the hint of a smile tugging at his lips. "What I was going to say was that it's really unfair that you seem to make me kinda nervous now but you seem like you're just totally enjoying it. Completely unaffected and it's pretty unfair."

"Life isn't fair," I remind him stupidly. "But if you must know, just because I sound unaffected by you doesn't mean that I actually am. I'm just very good at hiding it."

"You're very hard to read," He tells me.

"It's part of my charm," I reply sarcastically. "I'm working on being very honest though, so if you want to know what I'm thinking without having to read me, you could always ask."

"Okay. Well then to test this out, are you sure that you didn't think that letter was completely stupid?" He wonders curiously.

"Honestly," I begin. "I never know what to say to people who need me to tell them something- like advice or anything. I can never be reassuring to people without lying and saying only what I knew that they wanted to hear. But right now. With you, I know exactly what to say and I don't even have to lie. I didn't think that it was stupid, Niles, I swear. It was a little weird but I liked it."

"I liked that answer," He chuckles.

"I'm glad," I refute. "Anyway, don't you have go get ready for your game? I don't want you to get distracted on an account of me."

"I won't be distracted," He assures me. "I still have a little while before I have to get to practice."

"Do you think that you'll win this game? I mean, I guess that's stupid since you always win and you're awesome," I say with a quiet laugh that I'm not so sure he even heard because it was so quiet.

"You know, I'm beginning to think that you're only friends with me because of the hockey," Niles teases me over the phone.

"Oh, I'm definitely only friends with you because you play hockey. Is there any other reason to ever be friends with somebody other than their choice of sports?" I wonder sarcastically.

"Good point, there really is no other reason," He goes along with me jokingly.

"Well, I'd hope that you'd find some other reasons considering I don't play any sports," I tell him.

"Yeah, you at least like hockey so I guess that's good enough," Niles jokes over the phone as I see Mia walking down the hallway from the visitors' room going towards the common area, which is away from me.

"What a compromise," I joke. "Anyway, Mia just got out of her family visit so I'm going to go see how that went because I'm a nosey friend."

"I'm not sure what that meant but okay then. I'll talk to you later?"

"Of course. I'll talk to you later, Niles," I assure him before we say our goodbyes and then I hang up the black phone to follow Mia into the common area to see how her meeting went with her family.

When I get into the common area, Mia is already sitting with Renée, who is holding her spot in the book with her finger but looking up at Mia. I appear and sit at the same table, ready to get the rundown on Mia.

"How'd it go?" I ask her.

"Hey, it was really nice to see them. We didn't talk about anything exciting though, sorry to disappoint, I just caught them up on everything that's happened and we hugged and my mom cried a whole bunch. Did I miss anything here?" Mia wonders.

"I was talking to Niles," I tell her.

"I was reading a book," Renée adds, holding the book up for emphasis. "Did you ask them about the whole travelling thing?"

"No, we didn't have that much time but I'll talk to them about it. My parents are pretty lenient, so they won't mind probably. They'll worry that I'll stop eating again probably but I mean, they always worry about that so it won't do much different if I'm halfway across the world."

"Parents are like that when you develop a mental disorder," Renée nods sympathetically but I'm pretty sure that she's just joking. "Hence, the major problem that we'll have with turning this travel dream into a reality."

"That's very true. We might figure something out though, I'm not sure," Mia shrugs. "But anyway, I had a good reuniting with my parents. They seemed really glad to see me, which was expected, I guess. I found out that my sister got engaged, so that's pretty cool."

Renée grins sarcastically and then says, "Oh man, you just miss all the good stuff."

_______________________________

What is the title of my brand new idea for a story? *Closed*