The nurse waves the girl down the hallway with her clipboard and to the right, shoves her into a room and closes the door gently with a small click.  The girl stumbles and falls to the floor.  Sitting up against the thick door, she clenches her teeth in pain and examines her knee.  It is not broken, but it is sprained.  It pulsates with tears as she pulls from her pocket a container smaller than the ragged nail on her thumb.  She dabs a finger in it, and pulls out half of the liquid.  The liquid is a shade of dark green, one of her own concoctions.  The liquid’s viscosity is thin, and thus a small amount easily covers her finger.  Gingerly she touches her knee at several of the joints.  At each one, she presses and exhales with a sigh of relief that blows sultry strands of hair from her face. 
It is uncomfortably cool in the room.  Numbness begins to creep in her body, starting in the bones of her fingers.  The girl remembers long, winter nights in which she would huddle under blankets with her mother and sister under the warm brown blanket from her mother’s bed.  The wind would groan and shriek just inches away, but they would be warm sipping tangy cider that sent furrows of warmth into their toes.  Even when the power was out and they couldn’t heat the mugs of cider, they still flushed from laughter and spirit. 
The warmth the memory brings to her is fleeting, no sooner finished than the last bits drain away.  She rises to her feet and begins to examine the room she is in.  It is white.  Completely and utterly white.  There is no other way, in the girl’s mind, that it can be explained.  It is not as if nothing is in the room, or even that it is all white, but rather that every single item in the room has a pale, somewhat sickly aroma about it.  It is spotless, at that.  It is completely and utterly perfect.  A loud cry shocks her from her fantasy.
“Maybe it will be painful.  Suppose I will never age. Maybe, they will dispose of me when I am of no use to them.  Perhaps, it will be nothingness.”  A large and menacing machine leers at her from a corner.  It is big, impressive even.  But, it is as welcoming as the prospect of a dark and gloomy day, or as a Doberman with inadequate restraints.  The name of the machine is unknown to the girl.  It is probably as large and menacing as the actual object.  She fingers some of the strange instruments on a small tray near the sink.  They are all perfectly aligned, to the slightest degree of discrepancy.  It is a small imperfection in a room full of utmost precision.  She finds that thought comforting.
The girl picks up one of the strange and unfamiliar instruments, cups it in her hands.  It is cool and smooth to the touch, the sensation of which sends fleshy goosebumps running down her spine.  She turns it over in her hands, and is surprised to see that the entire side is corroded in a powdery rust.  Startled, the girl drops it, and the metallic sound made clanking on the tiles rings throughout the room.  Immediately, she bends down to pick it up off of the floor.  It is a product of her upbringing.  She scowled darkly and instead flings it across the floor. The instrument lands with a scratching clank.
For the first time, she notices that the room is suspiciously silent.  She wanders around the room with an air of a small child lost in a grocery store.  She is unnerved and yet delighted to find that she is undoubtedly alone.  Alone.  But yet, she knows, she is not alone.  There are pictures on the wall, on the literature lining the counter.  On the ceiling.  It feels to her as if they are watching her.  As a matter of fact, she hopes they are.  Watching her.  It would be what she wanted in their place.  Each of the people are different, though many of them preach the same causes in bold and convincing fonts.  They lie rigid and strained in their two dimensional confinements. 
The girl walks over to the small sink, pulls out a paper cup, and began to fill it with the sound of the water from the sink.  Her cats used to drink faucet water.  One preferred it from a paper cup, the other straight from the sink.  His fur used to always leave dark rings around the edges, stains that were impossible to remove.  On some level, she didn’t even try to remove them.  They were a true - and legal - manifestation of the concept that the world didn’t need to be clean and orderly and neat. 
There is cabinetry in the room.  It is plain and simple, not unlike the ones in her own kitchen.  But, despite the similarities, her cabinetry, if she can even refer to it as such, is a rich velvet brown with milky knobs, lined with faux gold like her grandmother’s “good” brooch.  Her cabinetry is worn, with creases and broken hinges from when she drunkenly smashed her mother’s favorite glass figurine.  It was the night her mother gave her the ultimatum; the night she made her decision.  She was angry then.  Now, she feels empty.  Empty, and lifeless.

Without her noticing, the paper cup overflowed and sent crystalline water down the drain.  It has no temperature adjustment, which the girl finds peculiar as the sink is obviously meant for more than a drinking fountain.  Hand sanitizer and the literature line the counters.   The bottles of sanitizer are half full, as if the people in the brochures had lain themselves in a bisecting angle to the liquid and sliced out the perfect measurement.  But, that is probably her imagination. 
A small movement across the room sends her whirling around in surprise.  There is no one.  But, where she flung the instrument, there is nothing.  The dent in the floor is even missing.  She slowly turns around, shuffling her feet as the dread builds.  The brochures are normal, lined just as they were in alphabetical order.  She lets out an anticipated sigh.  Relief.  But, the instrument is back on the counter.
Furrowing her brow, she fingers the strange instrument, looking for her fingerprints.  All common sense dictates that there be fingerprints, or at least, smudges, on the surface of the instrument.  There are none.  The heavy door opens wordlessly.  The girl doesn’t have time to call out before a man in a shrug similar to that of the nurse lays a gently warmed hand lightly on her arm.  His touch puts her in mind of a mascot trying to wheedle a small child into an uncomfortable photograph.  She jumps, and instinctively, her hardened fist meets his face.  He remains smiling, although at a somewhat more strained level, rivaling the smiles on the photographs of the people.  The man takes the girl’s arm with the soft touch of his latex gloves drawing ice from her wrists and palms. 
The man guides her out the door, occasionally tightening his grip on her arm as other patients listlessly wander around the hallway, looking misplaced without nurses at the crooks of their arms.  They feel empty to the girl.  Hollow, as if they were pumpkins gouged out into jack-o-lanterns.  Pretty, but awful just the same.  The man senses her discomfort, and tries to amend it with conversation.
“I’m Dr. Henry D. Thibodeaux,” he says proudly.  Clearly, his medical degree makes up a large part of him.  Her first reaction is to snort.  As if she couldn’t see that.  An awkward silence follows that makes the girl wonder if she should respond.  She decides better of it. Better to make him squirm. 
“And you are?” Dr. Thibodeaux asks uneasily.  The girl gives him a hard, cold stare.  Doctors, she believes, should always know their patients' names.  It is a fact that her name, Mia Henderson, is on a file in the portfolio he swings back and forth in his free hand.  If he would just get it over with!
“Mia,” she responds callously.  It wasn’t the first time a person had made her uneasy, and she had learned to be cautious.  Especially in this situation.  Something tells her that this just might have the potential to be a bit worse than a surprise frog attack from the neighbor boy.  However, this man seems to have retained the utterly impersonal personality that got him through medical school.  She amends her previous decision.  She is getting out of here.
She leaves him hurriedly and darts around a corner.  A plaque on the door at the end of the hallway bears his name.  The girl looks both ways, and slips unseen into his office.  “Perhaps,” she thinks, “I could stow away here.”  A small card rests on the single table in the room.  There is nothing else.  She steps carefully to avoid any creaks in the floorboard.  It is a sad reflection on her life that she has the ability to tell which of the floorboards will not trust her weight. 
The card is simply a prescription in handwriting so neat and fresh the ink stains her hand in a mirrored image when she touches it.  It has words on it.  Words that the girl can see, follow the curves and lines with the corner of her eye, with her fingertips, but not digest.  They are unfamiliar to the illiterate.  A nurse, absent-mindedly reading a chart on a black clipboard, starts when she sees the girl in the office.  It is a different nurse than the one that guided her into her room.  The nurse has dark red lips, obviously in a wishful attempt to match her locks that at a first glance look to be fire, but lie dull at a bun in the curvature of her head.  She opens her mouth in a perfect ‘o’ and presses madly at a button at the side of the wall, inconspicuous to the ordinary eye.    Thibodeaux is soon behind her.

“Mia!  I have been looking for you!  You are to come with me immediately.” 
“But - I changed -” 
“You have already signed the contract.  It is done.”  said Thibodeaux, wearily.  “I cannot help you any more.” 
Thibodeaux adjusts his latex glove on her arm.  He pulls a small device, a radio, to his pursed lips.  “We’ve got a live one.”  He draws her in closer.  “Okay, Mia, let me explain this to you for the last time,”  he calls out loudly.  In a hushed monotone, he replies.  “Okay, here’s the deal.  I can get you out of here.”
“What?”
“No, seriously, I can get you out of here.  Away - far away.  It doesn’t matter where to.  Just to where you’ll be safe from these inhuman people.”
He grabs her arm, shouts, “You’ll be fine; it is a necessary operation performed by the finest of doctors.”  Pulling her along, he motions to the flame-colored nurse, who pulls the cushion on the table upwards.  A large cavity is revealed, curling with burnt bits of its hollowed, stuffing-lined walls.  She grabs the girl with surprising strength and hoists her into the opening.  It is closed over her head.  The girl is forced to crouch inside, feeling at every breath that it is physically being ripped from her lungs.  It is dark, stuffy, and just tall enough for her head to practically graze the walls above in her crouched position.  There is no source of light, and so she waits in darkness.
She waits.  For days, for hours, for minutes; she cannot tell.  She cannot fathom time, nor space when the lid is finally opened.  Hesitantly, she raises her head above the opening.  She is hit with an overcoming bout of nausea - she has not eaten for ages - and her sand-filled legs buckle beneath her weight in her attempt to rise.  Dr. Thibodeaux is in here.  Bound, and gagged, the nurse shamefaced at his side.  The girl suddenly realizes what has happened, and makes a move toward running toward the door. 
“Sit,” a male nurse instructs her.  The girl, expecting to be gagged, kicks off her shoes and hops up onto a table.  It is oddly warm.  Most likely from the legs of another patient.  The nurse and his consultants gaze at her, making her blush a dark crimson.  She begins to protest, but as the other doctors pull on their masks, the female nurse with the blue shrug forces her into a lying position with restraints.  Thibodeaux’s face looms above her.  At that moment, it dawns on her.  He has betrayed her. 
“Sorry Mia.  He flashes her a falsely sympathetic smile.  “I told you, there was nothing I could do.”
The people begin to work, molding her mouth into an uncharacteristic grin, and putting slips of glass into her eyes so that they might appear bright and cheery.  They comb her hair out and splay it beside her.  Makeup artists pluck and paint.  A bright white light is above her, and it blinds her, making her eyes run with both tears and sweat, which the manicurist wipes away to keep it from ruining the mascara.  Someone catches sight of the writing on her hand, and removes it with a deft swipe of rubbing alcohol.
Then, they are done.  They set their hands down and step away from the girl to admire her.  She feels dirty, and fake, even though they have made her as pretty and clean as a picture in a magazine.  The light slowly lowers itself until it barely grazes the girl’s nose.  She tries to squeeze her eyes shut, but finds it impossible with the slips of glass.  Incessantly, the light presses on, to a point to where it passes from slightly uncomfortable to excruciatingly painful.  Every fiber of her very being feels as though she is being compacted into a flat surface.  Mia suppresses a high-pitched scream.  The last words she hears as she loses consciousness are from Dr. Thibodeaux. 
“Smile, Mia.”