7
MARY PAT SHOWS ME to a seat in her office while she goes to get my paperwork. When she leaves, she takes along her letter opener and her marble paperweight—“Just out of an abundance of caution,” she says with a mild smile—and locks the door from the outside. As I wait for her to come back, too shell-shocked to feel the full extent of my hangover, I pick up a glossy brochure from a pile on her desk. On the cover is a picture of three girls with their arms thrown around each other: one black, one white, one Asian, all gorgeous. They are sitting together on a giant log while a picturesque sunset lights up the pine trees behind them. They are each smiling these ridiculous big-toothed grins that are obviously meant to assuage the fears of prospective parents who are having doubts about sending their daughters away to a prison camp in the middle of nowhere. Not only have we been thoroughly brainwashed into compliance, the girls on the log seem to be saying, but we’ve had fun doing it!
I open the pamphlet and begin to read.
Parenting isn’t easy.
But it should never be this hard.
Let us help.
Welcome to Red Oak Academy, a therapeutic boarding school for troubled teenage girls. We are a fully accredited high school located on ten beautiful wooded acres in east-central Minnesota, just outside the Rum River State Forest—a one-of-a-kind facility that combines the latest in therapeutic pedagogy with the ancient healing qualities of Mother Nature. Our program is designed to help your daughter find her way back to the life she was meant to lead and the person she was meant to be. Our pledge is that when we return your daughter to you after her program has reached maturation, she will be like the red oak for which our school is named, and by which our school is surrounded, growing straight and tall and proud in the forest of her life.
Our treatment approach is distinctly holistic and tailored to each individual student’s needs. Unlike some more traditional therapeutic schools, we do not engage in practices that are rooted in patriarchal, militaristic systems—e.g., uniforms, honor codes, “levels,” traditional academic grades, etc. We believe this holistic, individualized approach is what distinguishes us from other therapeutic boarding programs. In this spirit, please be aware of what we are NOT:
A wilderness program
A drug rehabilitation facility
A mental health facility
A boot camp
A lockdown facility
This last bullet point is sort of a comfort. If it’s not a lockdown facility, does that mean I can leave whenever I want? But when I look at the locked door before me, or out the window behind me, with its thick wall of forest on every side, filled with trees growing straight and tall and proud,5 I wonder where it would be that I could even go.
Who Is a Red Oak Girl?
She is your daughter: a smart, loving young woman, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, who has simply lost her way. She may be:
Making poor and dangerous choices
Acting entitled, selfish, or detached
Manipulative
Lying
Sneaking out
Rebellious
Depressed
Withdrawn
Self-destructive
Narcissistic
Histrionic
Eating-disordered
Violent
Promiscuous
Academically unmotivated
Using/abusing drugs and/or alcohol beyond the experimental stage
Experiencing grief and/or trauma
Experiencing attachment struggles
Engaging in school refusal
Unable to adhere to rules or limits
Unable to regulate her moods
Expressing suicidal ideation
Self-harming
Easily influenced by others; lacking a solid sense of self
Oppositional
Fire-starting
Huh.
Like, okay.
I admit: some of these apply to me. I make poor and dangerous choices. I manipulate, I rebel, I’m promiscuous, I’m defiant, I use/abuse drugs and/or alcohol beyond the experimental stage, I’m academically unmotivated, and while technically speaking I am able to adhere to rules and limits, I usually choose not to. But honestly, that also probably describes a good chunk of the people I hang out with. I mean, look at Xander! He’s a burnout, a thief of rare aged wines, a man whore, and a drug dealer. So why am I the one who got sent away?
And what about this other stuff?
Suicidal ideation?
Self-harming?
Fire-starting???
I mean, even if I admit that I’m bad, I’m not, like, arsonist bad. I’m not hurting-myself-and-others bad (Alanna’s nose doesn’t count; that was one time, and if you’d heard what she said to me, you would agree that she completely deserved it).
I look around Mary Pat’s office with its wood-paneled walls, its folksy tchotchkes lining the bookcases, its cozy braided rug, its framed oil paintings of ducks. The place looks like some kind of sinister, alt-universe Cracker Barrel. And my dad thinks this is the kind of place I belong, with these kinds of people? As I wait for Mary Pat to come back, an awful image forms in my head: of him and Alanna sitting late at night at the kitchen table, heads pressed together, pens in hand. I picture them going through this list and ticking off box after box, each checkmark an affirmation that the only solution they have left is to farm me out to a band of psychology-degree-wielding, non-militaristic, non-patriarchal strangers. And with each checked box, even though they won’t admit it—even to each other—both of them feel a growing sense of excitement. With me no longer in the picture, they can finally be who they’re meant to be, the Dempseys: just a mom, a dad, and their two adorable and fully biological children. Without me around, they can finally be a normal family. A nuclear family, as they say, but with its nuclear piece, which has threatened for years to blow them all to pieces, finally defused for good.
8
AFTER MARY PAT HAS handed me a clear plastic backpack filled with a couple notebooks,6 a Red Oak student handbook, and my small purple duffel bag from home, filled with clothes Alanna must have packed and shipped in advance of my ambush, she leads me to a windowless cinder-block room down the hall from her office. The floor is concrete, the track lighting is harsh yellow, and there’s nothing in the rectangular space except for two chairs and a long table with a plastic bin on it, the kind you see at airport security where you have to put your keys and jacket. There are two women sitting in the chairs. The one with long flat-ironed hair is tall and mom-like, in her Dansko clogs, craft fair earrings, and blue scrubs. The other is short and shapeless, young enough to still have acne, with unevenly applied eyeliner, a messy bun tied at the top of her head, and a wavy blood-colored line at her hairline where her drugstore dye has bled into her scalp. She’s wearing a T-shirt that reads RED OAK STAFF across the front.
“Mia,” says Mary Pat, “let me introduce you to Melanie, our school nurse practitioner, and Dee, our assistant team leader.”
Both women stand to greet me; I look past them like they aren’t even there.
“Nurse Melanie is going to weigh you and take your vitals, and then I’m going to do a quick search of your person.”
My person? I don’t actually hate her weirdly formal choice of words. It dissociates me from my body—my body is my person, and I’m me. Two separate things: and these bitches can only search one of them.
When I go to step onto the scale, Nurse Melanie stops me.