Early update, next one will be on Thursday! Enjoy! This is actually fairly loosely based on a true story. My story.

The metal doors opened and all I could see was a long, dimly lit, and straight hallway with doors on either side. The stench hit me like a truckload of bricks. It smelled of juice left sitting in the sun for too long and dirty laundry.

“Sit there please, Irene,” said Jacque, the man who had filled out the paperwork to get me into this god forsaken place.

It was a small plastic chair with simple curves in all the necessary places. Nothing extra – like everything else I was about to lay my eyes on in the unit before me.

I stared at my hands that resided in my lap, and noticed that my nervous habit of picking at my nails was starting up again. Was I nervous? Most likely.

As I looked up, I saw that many heads were popping out of their rooms.

“It’s the new girl!” I hear them whisper to each other.

“Introduce yourself!” said voice number one.

“Why me? Why not you?” questioned voice number two.

“Ugh, fine.” I hear.

A girl trudges her way up to me from the middle of the hallway.

“I’m Jones,” said the girl who was the owner of voice number one. “Nice to meet you.”

Jones looked... messy to say the least. Her hair was unkempt and her unfocused eyes hid behind a pair of abnormally thick frames. The magnification caused her eyes to seem three times as large as they should be.

“Nice to meet you,” I echoed timidly as I introduced myself. “Irene.”

“Irene?” One of her bushy eyebrows quirked. “Good name.”

“Thank you,” I responded.

“Is it your first time here?” asked Jones.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Just do what you’re supposed to and you’ll be out before you know it,” Jones said as she stalked away.

"Okay. Irene?" a voice pulled my attention away from Jones's back. It was Jacque from before. "Come with me."

I stood from the stiff chair and entered the open door to a chaotic office. Papers piled on papers and books haphazardly stacked in a tilted tower. There were at least two doors leading to god-knows-where.

"Irene, we just need to do a skin check so please put these on and I'll be right with you," said a nurse who's nametag identified her as Angela. She was definitely Asian, but I couldn't pin her as which one. Maybe she was a mixed baby. Like me.

Angela handed me folded hospital gowns. The ones with tiny floral print that reminded you of the gross sterile smell of bleached objects and coughing patients. After I took them from her hands, she ushered me into an empty room from one of the randomly placed doors and closed it behind her. It was empty, like the hallway I saw