Chapter Text
When the episodes started, they said that it was just shyness. Extreme shyness, perhaps, but nothing more serious. Newt had always been more reserved than other boys his age. His parents said that he would grow out of it, but it only seemed to get worse the older he got. It started with him being afraid to talk to people he didn’t know; by his junior year of high school, it was much, much more than that.
The first attack happened on the first day of junior year. Despite the building being as familiar to him as his own home, when Newt reached the front doors of the school, he found himself unable to walk inside. Anxiety bloomed in his chest at the thought of stepping over the threshold. When he imagined sitting down in a classroom, surrounded by his peers, he felt nauseated. Unable to overcome the panic that seized him at the thought of going inside, he turned on his heel and walked home, where he lied and told his mother that he had a headache.
Skipping school became a frequent habit as the apprehension about entering the building grew. Some days, Newt was able to get inside with only the slightest quickening of his heartbeat. Other days, just spotting the school in the distance as he walked towards it was enough to make him turn tail and run.
He stopped making plans with friends. He took to shutting himself up in his bedroom.
When his parents asked why he was skipping school, he kept quiet, afraid to reveal to them his irrational fears. Because logically, he knew that they were irrational. But logic couldn’t dictate his body’s response at the thought of social situations.
It was shyness, they said, and maybe it was at the start, but by junior year, it was so much more than that.
The final straw came when one of the teachers spotted him leaving. It was a test day, so there wasn’t even a full class load, but still the thought of going into school made Newt’s chest seize up with fear. Before, it had been easy to escape school grounds unnoticed. He’d never been caught, his absences only noted after the fact. But on this day, the chemistry teacher caught him heading for the gates. Newt was marched to the principal’s office and then to the exam hall, his anxiety building all the while.
By the time he was pointed towards his desk, Newt couldn’t take it any longer. He started to hyperventilate. He began to feel as if the walls were closing in on him. When a well-meaning student abandoned her test paper and touched his arm to ask if he was alright, his entire body tensed as if he’d received an electric shock.
He passed out. When he woke up, he was in the nurse’s office and she explained that he’d had some sort of panic attack. His parents had been notified. They were on their way. From the school, they went to see a clinical psychologist, who took Newt’s parents aside after talking with him for an hour and spoke in hushed tones.
The following week after a meal of spaghetti, Newt’s favourite, the brochure for the Glade Youth Institution was presented to him instead of dessert.
“A mental ward?” he said, looking down at the glossy leaflet with its pictures of teenagers wearing pale blue scrub pyjamas and too-wide smiles. “You’re sending me away?”
“The doctor said that they have an excellent program for helping people like you,” his mother said. “It’s only temporary, love. Just until you’re better. Then you can come home.”
There was no arguing. The next morning, Newt’s bags were packed and he was on his way to the Glade Institution, that all-too-familiar anxiety gripping onto him with an iron fist. His parents left him in the care of a nurse with a dull gaze and a haircut reminiscent of the late eighties, and it was the nurse who took him to meet his new therapist, Dr. Ava Paige.
It was only then that Newt learned the clinical term for his problem.
Social anxiety disorder, the therapist explained, and a very severe case. Left untreated, it was highly probable that Newt would deteriorate until he could no longer function properly in society. Without the proper care, the anxiety would overtake every particle of him until the idea of leaving the house was terrifying and the concept of speaking to people seemed impossible. It wasn’t possible to cure anxiety, according to Dr. Paige, but it was possible to control it. With a regimen of therapy and a course of anti-anxiety medication, she was hopeful that he could go home in a few weeks.
That had been February of his junior year. Now, it was September. Newt should have been starting his senior year, but here he was, still at the Glade, still trying to learn how to navigate everyday human interaction without losing control. He had made progress, but not enough to let him go home. He had friends on the ward now, but still balked at new staff members and patients. Group therapy was often overwhelming. Dealing with the therapy exercises assigned to him by Dr. Paige was excruciating.
They said it was shyness, but after months of trying and failing to overcome it, Newt could testify that it was so much more than that.
His first few weeks at the Glade had been spent in quiet isolation. Being in an entirely unfamiliar place was frightening, and honestly, Newt thought it was the worst possible thing to do to someone who was suffering from what he was apparently suffering from. But the Glade had a policy that said all of its patients were required to have a roommate, and despite his attempts to remain a loner, Newt was eventually drawn into a tentative friendship with the boy who shared his room.
His name was Alby. It didn’t take a genius to figure out Alby’s problem—although they were all required to keep their rooms clean, Alby’s space was organised with military precision. When he came into the room, he turned the lights on and off until Newt’s eyes hurt. There was a smooth grey rock on his nightstand that he touched every time he exited the room, without fail.
Despite his compulsions, Alby was excellent company.
Drawing Newt out of his shell wasn’t easy, thanks to the nature of Newt’s disorder, but Alby was persistent. Newt thought that it was because Alby also knew what it was like to constantly fend off feelings of panic and dread. Alby dealt with it by performing rituals—Newt hadn’t yet found a way to deal with it, but with Alby by his side, he was able to avoid it taking him over completely.
Alby had other friends in the ward who Newt slowly grew more comfortable with. There was Minho, a slightly older boy who seemed well-adjusted, but apparently suffered from severe depression. Gally, his roommate, was prone to mood swings but wary of discussing his actual diagnosis with the other patients. And then there was Frypan, affectionately nicknamed for his eating disorder, which he had gotten a handle on since coming to the Glade. Newt thought the name in bad taste, but when he mentioned it, Frypan shrugged and said that it was important to be able to laugh at yourself.
When he spoke of his friends in therapy, Dr. Paige said that she was impressed with him for overcoming the obstacles that his anxiety put up when it came to forging relationships. Newt smiled and let her think that he was making progress, but the truth was, he knew why it was so much easier for him to make friends in the Glade.
Here, everyone was just as damaged as he was.
* * *
“Your move, Newt.”
Friday afternoon in the Glade was free time, where the patients who weren’t confined to their rooms could do as they pleased, as long as it wasn’t harmful to them or anyone else. Newt usually spent it alone in his room, although lately, Alby had been coaxing him into the rec room to play board games. It was a practice that Dr. Paige encouraged—every time Newt hid himself away when there was a social opportunity, she said, he was depriving himself of the chance to get better.
So here he was, sitting on one of the folding chairs in the rec room and poring over a checkers board with Alby. A few feet away, Gally and Minho were playing a game of Go Fish. Frypan was watching some kind of Latin soap opera, although Newt was almost certain that he didn’t speak a word of Spanish.
Newt frowned down at the board.
“I hate checkers,” he said.
“There’s Monopoly on the shelf. And the Game of Life. I loved that one when I was a kid.”
While he spoke, Alby was tapping his fingers on the table rhythmically. Newt counted the beats, one, two, two, one, two, two. Shaking his head, he moved one of his pieces.
“May as well finish. Your move.”
While Alby considered his next move, Newt’s attention was drawn to the door of the rec room, which had creaked open tentatively. He could spot a short, slightly round figure hovering on the threshold and knew immediately who it was.
Chuck was fairly new to the Glade. He had arrived just a few weeks previously and spent most of his time in his room since then. He was younger than most of the boys on the ward and hadn’t spoken up much in group therapy, so his reason for being here was still somewhat of a mystery, but after a few months of living with his own diagnosis, Newt was fairly sure that he recognised the signs of some kind of anxiety disorder.
As he watched Chuck standing in the doorway, clearly debating whether or not to come inside, Newt thought that he should go and help him out. But his legs wouldn’t move; that hateful little voice at the back of his mind whispered that he was in no position to help anybody, and even attempting to do so would just make him look like a fool.
So he stayed where he was, swallowing back a feeling of guilt when Chuck turned and fled.
“Are your parents coming this week?”
Alby’s question made Newt frown. He shook his head as he slid another little red counter across the board.
“They can’t make it,” he said. “They’re visiting relatives in England.”
Visits from his parents had been rare in the past few weeks. When he first arrived at the Glade, they came every week. His mother brought care packages and his father brought news of sports teams, and even though Newt had no interest in the games his father spoke of, it was touching that he wanted to keep Newt connected to the outside world. When it became clear that there was no quick fix for his anxiety, however, the visits became less frequent. Each week, it seemed like there was a new excuse.
It had been two months since the last one.
“Seems like something you should check out for,” Alby said. “Why didn’t they get you a weekend pass?”
Newt shrugged, pretending that he didn’t know that the reason his parents hadn’t taken him with them to England was because they didn’t want anyone to know just how screwed up he was. At first, they’d been supportive, but as Newt’s treatment continued, he was beginning to realise that his parents might never understand what he was going through.
The atmosphere between him and Alby was growing melancholy, but then a distraction came in the form of Gally pointing out the window.
“Greenie,” he said, and all eyes were immediately drawn to the courtyard outside.
Greenie, Newt had discovered, was the patients’ way of saying that there was fresh meat coming to the hospital. Abandoning the checkers board, Newt wandered over to the window to get a better look at the new patient. He was too late, though; the door was already swinging shut, the patient having already been led inside the building.
“Think he’ll be on our ward?” Minho said, picking up his cards again.
“There’s a spare bed in Chuck’s room,” Frypan said. “They’ll probably stick him in there. Wonder what his deal is.”
Newt and Alby returned to their game, and Newt tried to focus on the checkers rather than the anxiety fluttering in his chest at the thought of the newcomer being placed in their ward. It had been the same when Chuck arrived, although realistically he had known that he had nothing to fear from the younger boy. Newt was finally at ease, more or less, with the friends that he had made in the Glade. The thought of a wildcard being placed among them made him falter.
New patients were an unpredictable variable. There was no telling how their arrival would upset the environment. Chuck was the only newcomer since Newt himself—he’d gotten lucky then, since Chuck didn’t seem eager to interact with any of the other boys on the ward, but what if this new patient was the social type?
He tried to quell the panic that was taking hold of him, and when his efforts proved fruitless, he tried not to be too discouraged.
After all, as the good doctor herself constantly liked to say, it was all about baby steps.