My Hockey Alpha

Nina

I don’t know how long I was asleep. All I remembered was an immense amount of pain, Edward’s face looming over me, and then… darkness.

When I woke up, I was back in that same room that I was in before. My wrists and ankles were bound to the table, and the lights were blindingly bright. My brain felt as though it was in a heavy fog, like I had hit my head against a wall countless times. I wanted to sleep again, but the lights were too bright — as though he was trying to keep me awake.

Even though the lights were so bright it hurt through my closed eyelids, I still occasionally fell unconscious from time to time. I would fall into a half-asleep state, during which I would feel as though my body was floating through space, and then I would come back to consciousness again with a pounding headache from a combination of the electroshock therapy, the drugs that Edward gave me, and the bright fluorescent lights.

I started to cry, but as time went on, no more tears eventually came. I couldn’t even lift my hand to wipe them out of my eyes; I could only lay there and feel them slowly dry on my cheeks and in my ears, where they had pooled up from my laying down position. Was Edward going to keep me like this forever, all over a simple file taken from his basement?

Just as I was beginning to think that I was going to die in here, alone and afraid, I heard the mechanical door slide open. I weakly lifted my head to see Edward standing in the doorway.

“Good morning, Nina,” he said. His voice was as sweet as honey, as though I was just another patient sitting in his office of my own volition and not a prisoner being kept in some strange medical facility with no windows. “Did you sleep well?”

“Sleep?” I croaked. My throat felt dry and hoarse from the time I had spent screaming when he shocked my brain. “How can I sleep like this?”

Edward clicked his tongue disappointedly as he approached my bed. He stood at the end of the bed, so that I had to continue to hold my head up to see him.

“You’ll find it’s not so difficult to sleep here soon,” he said. “You’re safe here. You can trust me.”

“Where am I, then?” I replied. “Where is Enzo?”

imaginary friends. Enzo this, Enzo

ceiling. Enzo was

this,” Edward replied. “You’ve been here for months. Why

“He disappeared for weeks, and when he came back, he was

scoffed. “Justin? As in your

“Bunkmate?”

your hallucinations when you thought you saw him outside of here… He’s perfectly fine, and is

stool. He sat on it and took my hand in his. I tried to pull away, but

werewolves, the talking skeletons… These are all fantasies of yours. Things you’ve made up in your mind to protect yourself from the horrors of your past trauma. None of it is

started to believe him. Everything he described felt so fuzzy and far away, like a bad dream… Maybe he was right; maybe these were all just

have I been here?” I asked. My

comfortingly and reached up to brush a hair out of my eyes. “Four years,”

“So does that mean…”

he interjected with a solemn nod. “Everything — everyone — that you think you’ve come to know in this fantasyland you’ve created in your head, ‘Mountainview University’, isn’t real.

tears came to my

comforting because he had comforted me just like this so many times — I could remember it, now that I thought about it. Edward

after me,” he continued. “My

n-name is

being cared for at Mountainview Psychiatric

cared for at