There were hallways to traverse and an elevator ride before Evan and his parents arrived at the heavy metal doors that had separated Maddie from civilian life for the past three and a half weeks.

The waiting room was small, fitted with chairs and a coffee table. A lifeless TV resided up in one dark corner. Half the lights were turned off.

They were only allowed in two at a time, so Evan took a seat while the nurse waved his parents through the doors. He thought about Lily and his audition, to keep his mind off the sterile fluorescence. The place gave him that uneasy feeling of needle pricks and starched sheets and tissue paper and bad news.

Maddie had been quite frightened when she'd awoken here—they had sedated her in the ambulance. She'd hated it at first but the friendly staff had been both accommodating and comforting. Combined with regular visits from her parents and Evan, she had begun to show improvement almost right away.

Evan didn't know what meds they were feeding her, and he didn't want to know. His parents said it was a very low dosage due to her age, and they'd been weaning her off it as she improved. He also didn't want to know how much it was costing his already-financially strapped parents to let her stay in this place.

The minutes ticked by. Evan looked through the pictures collected on his flip phone— an old car turned into a fountain at the DTE Energy Music theater, a little Disney Quasimodo doll sitting on the dashboard of one of the janitor trucks at Kensington, a pink flower beaded with rain that he'd found in his parent's garden one spring morning, a painting of a devil in a tuxedo on the back wall of the merch shop in the Chicago House of Blues. He'd snapped the devil picture when Jason had taken him to see the Pixies at the Aragon Ballroom the fall before.

The doors opened. It was his father.

"Your turn," he said. "Doctor says the CD is fine as long as you take it with you."

Evan went back and saw Maddie and his mother sitting at one of the visitor tables. The visiting space looked like a first grade classroom. Maddie had her earbuds hanging off her shoulders and her iPod and MacBook open in front of her. That was a good sign. They had originally only let her use the earbuds during the day, steadily giving her more access to them once it was proven she could get to sleep without them in. She'd been allowed the iPod after a few days, and her family had brought the laptop soon after. She only had limited internet access in the common area which meant no LimeWire or torrenting but it was a welcome distraction.

The cuts on her forehead were red and glaring the first time Evan saw her after her incident, crisscrossed over her left eye. For a few gut-wrenching hours it seemed she'd grossly disfigured herself, but once the blood flow was contained it became apparent that the wounds were only superficial. She hadn't peeled any skin off her skull and the cuts themselves were narrow. The bleeding had made them look more severe than they actually were. Now the cuts were just three faint red lines slashing diagonal down over her left eye. Evan considered making some kind of Harry Potter joke but thought better of it.

Maddie saw Evan and gave him a side hug. Over the course of her stay, her demeanor had progressed from frightened to anxious to embarrassed. She now preferred to act as though this was all a passing thing, a blip on the radar to be tolerated and then forgotten.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey," said Evan, presenting her with her new CD. "Here."

"It's only Lee and Crystal?" she asked, noting the label scrawled in Sharpie.

"Yeah, it's the studio versions of their last couple performances. I don't know if you have them or not but you do now. You can put them on your laptop and add them to the playlist."

"Thanks," she said.

Their mother stood up.

"I'm going to talk to Dad," she said. "I'll be right back."

The nurses were out in the hallway, and there weren't any other patients in the room with them. The ward had been relatively quiet, only a few other patients coming and going, and they hadn't socialized with Maddie much, at least not that Evan knew of.

"So guess what?" Evan said to Maddie.

"What?"

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"I'm trying out for Idol," said Evan.

Maddie gave him the same perplexed look he'd received upon telling anyone of these plans.

"You're trying out?"

"Yeah."

"You can sing?"

"I've been practicing in my car. And yeah, I'm gonna try out."

"Where? When?"

"In Nashville. On Saturday. I booked the hotel this morning."

Maddie looked at him, surprised but impressed.

"You know you don't get to see the actual judges in the stadium, right?"

"Yeah, I looked up how it works. And Simon's gone with Paula, now, too. So he won't even be there if I make it that far."

"Yeah, and they don't even know who's replacing them yet."

"I heard it's the guy from Aerosmith and Jennifer Lopez."

"Oh," said Maddie. "I don't know who either of them are."

There was a bit of a pause. Then Evan spoke.

"How are you feeling?"

Maddie shrugged.

"I'm feeling a lot better now. I can't wait to go home. Thank God this happened in the summer so everyone at school isn't going to know."

She actually had missed the last two and a half weeks of classes, but it was assumed that it had to do with Jason's suicide, and nothing more.

"You shouldn't feel bad. Just, you know, get some rest. And enjoy your meds."

"Yeah," said Maddie. "I am."

She brushed a finger on the laptop's touchpad, aimlessly moving the arrow around on the desktop.

"I can think about what happened now without, you know, freaking out completely. The episode, not Jason. I still can't think about Jason too much."

Maddie was still looking at her laptop screen, clicking and pulling down a box, highlighting the clusterfuck of folders and pictures on her desktop and then clicking them blank again. She had a Justin Bieber wallpaper. In it he wore a bloated blue vest and sang on a shining stage to a stadium of riotous tweens and teens.

"I dunno, it's stupid. I started feeling, like, normal a week after I got here but they wanted to keep me here. Mom and Dad today were all, you have to go by what they say and I'm like, yeah, no shit, but still..."

"You should really stop the casual swearing," Evan said.

"Okay, Mom."

She was quiet again for a moment.

"That night I'd listened to Kiss from a Rose like a hundred times. I know cause my playlist counted it, I just kept listening to it and I knew that if I, like, saw my own roses, like I'd seen Jason's, I'd be able to sleep. Roses help you sleep, they kiss you and you get to sleep."

"So roses are blood, then."

"I guess. That's what I was thinking. They're your insides. They kiss you and turn you inside out and send you to gloryland."

"Gloryland again?"

"Yeah, like in the song, at Jason's funeral. The Johnny Cash song."

"Yeah, I know, that hymn they played," he said. "You're still thinking about gloryland?"

"Yeah, but like, I know it's not real, but I know, like, if it were, gloryland is where you go when you die. It's not heaven, it's, like, closer to earth. But if you're a good person and you do one bad thing, like Jason did, you don't go to hell, you go to gloryland. It's like heaven, it's just as happy, but it's not hell either. It's like your perfect life on earth. It's the happiest you can ever be. And you spend so much time in gloryland, you learn how to be happy again and then they can let you into heaven. Dr. Sung says that was just my way of coping with, you know, with what happened."

"Yeah, I remember you telling me," Evan said. He remembered what his parents had told him about the weird stuff that Maddie would say. Hearing her speak about it like this was very comforting. She used to only babble on and on about gloryland and how roses sent you there. It hadn't made any sense before. Now she sounded like someone explaining a dream.

"What made you want to audition for Idol?" Maddie asked him.

"I don't know, I'd been thinking about it. Just seemed like the right time. I want a weekend to myself, you know, get away from Mom and Dad for a few days, see a new place. I've never really taken a vacation on my own like this before."

"You think you can get in?"

"Probably not, but I'm doing it more for the experience than anything. Just to say I did, you know?"

Maddie nodded.

"It's really hard to get past the stadium round anyway," she said. "Like, really hard."

"I don't know, I think it might be easier this year, given how boring last season was and how Simon's gone now so people won't be watching like they used to."

"Yeah, last season sucked. Lee and Crystal were the only decent ones."

The conversation lulled as Maddie anxiously fingered her keypad.

Something was bothering her.

"Evan," said Maddie.

"Yeah?"

"Could you, like, not mention me if you do get through? I don't want anyone to see me like this."

Evan hadn't thought of that. He was struck. Then he was ashamed.

"Yeah, definitely," he said, stammering a bit. "Of course. ...I'm going to have to mention Jason, though."

"Why?"

"It'll be more likely to get me on TV."

Maddie looked uncomfortable.

"But then they'll ask who found him, and that'll lead to what happened to me, and then—"

"No, they won't. And you don't have to go on TV if you don't want to. I won't say a thing about you being in here. I promise."

Their mom came through the door again.

"Evan, you dad wants to sit with us while we talk to the doctor," she said. "You mind waiting outside again?"

Evan hugged Maddie again-- this time with both arms.

They exchanged farewells, "See you, love you," and Evan went out to the waiting room while Maddie and their parents had a lengthy discussion with one of the doctors, an affable Korean named Dr. Sung. Maddie liked Dr. Sung, and so the family liked him, too.

On the way home his parents' moods had improved.

"They say she's doing much better," Evan's mother told him. "She'll probably be out next week. She looks better, doesn't she?"

"She does," said their father. "She's rolling her eyes at my jokes again."

"That's really good to hear," said Evan.

He meant it. He thought about Maddie and how her face would light up if he could tell her he made it through at least one round of Idol.