In the last room on the left, everything is white. The bed is white. The floor is white, the ceiling is white, the walls are white. The lights, the table, the chair, they are white. Even the papers that cover the walls are white.

But the papers that cover the walls are filled with drawings. All of the drawings are black, done in pencil, sketched hastily because the single words used to create them appear like magic and vanish like left-behind dreams.

All of the drawings belong to a boy. The boy is the only occupant of the last room on the left, but he would argue otherwise. This is because his drawings talk to him--or so he claims. It is hard to be sure, because they only talk to him, never to anyone else, and never when anyone else is around. Similarly, they only talk to him while he is drawing them--easy on the graphite, a little less shadow, a little more figure if you please.

When he has finished the drawings, he sets them aside; the nurse will come by later to hang them up in open spaces with clear tape. He ignores them in favor of his next drawing, because there is a word in his head and he needs to keep it, must hold onto it until the drawing is finished or it will never, ever, be complete, and then if he wants it to be quiet enough for him to sleep at night he must scribble it out and then rip the paper into shreds as tiny as he can manage.

The drawings on the walls have seen how he ignores them when he is finished with them. They have seen how, when a word vanishes from his head, he freezes in the middle of a line. They know the agony that washes over his face, scratching out his focus until there is nothing he can do but to tear the paper to shreds. So they ignore him, as he ignores them, to save themselves from suffering a similar fate.

He respects them, however. He is proud of them, and this gives them presence. And so in his mind, he is not the sole occupant of the last room on the left. There are a hundred people or more, all of them nameless, but not needing a name because it is their clothes and expressions which give them character and personality.

So it stands that the last room on the left, while the whitest of them all, is the most friendly in the entire complex.