Okay, she’d said, smiling at him gummily, but seriously Tyler, just a few people.
Of course, Madison, he’d soothed. Then he’d patted her on her pretty yellow head, turned around, whipped out his phone and invited every person he’d ever met. The mob descended across Madison’s wide green lawn, poured into the marble foyer, and destroyed everything in sight with the casual venom reserved for unpopular girls who are dumb enough to think they can buy approval by throwing parties. Was a beloved family heirloom shattered/stolen/pissed on? Was the family parrot defeathered? Did someone drown in the in-ground pool? Whatever it was, Madison’s parents thought they could bury it by sending her here, and she went willingly, her tail tucked between her pigeon-toed legs, to work on her sense of self.
I’m so pleased with my psychological analysis of Madison’s character that it takes me a moment to notice her hands.
I’ll admit, they throw me off.
Because, well, they are horrifying.
Raw and meaty, with strips of skin around her cuticles and fingertips gnawed and peeled back to the bloody underlayer. You can’t really even describe it as nail biting. It’s more like self-cannibalization. It isn’t restricted to the fingers, either. Along the thick part of her palms, there are red sores that at first I think must be eczema until I notice her methodically gnawing on the skin there, too, like a wild animal with its leg caught in a trap.
“Doesn’t that hurt?”
“What?” She drops her hand from her mouth sheepishly. A piece of her own skin hangs from her bottom lip. “I bite my nails.”
“No, you eat your hands.”
“Whatever! It’s just a bad habit. I have a thing with impulse control, especially when I’m stressed. I’ve been super nervous the last couple days because they told me I was getting a new roommate—you!”
She smiles at me with such urgent goodwill that I half expect her to throw her arms around me, and maybe she would have, except for the fact that, brochure of girls hugging on a log notwithstanding, in actuality we are not allowed to touch each other under any circumstances.10
The lunchroom looks like a regular school cafeteria, except that its five small tables only seat about twenty kids, max, and there are no boys and out the huge picture windows there is no parking lot or football field, just wilderness, flamingly beautiful in its fall colors.
As we approach the counter, a big-breasted lunch lady in a Minnesota Vikings T-shirt smiles and greets us—both of us, even though it’s only my first day and I’ve never even met her—by name. Hi, Madison! Hi, Mia! I look down at what she’s dumped onto my tray: plain peanut butter on white bread. Unripened pear. Orange Jell-O.
Prison food.
We move to the beverage station. There is no pop or coffee—“caffeine is an addictive substance!” Madison explains sunnily—only orange juice, milk, or water, and these tiny little plastic cups, like we’re in preschool.
“Is that why you’re here?” I watch as Madison pours herself three cups of OJ. “Because of your thing with impulse control?”
“Pretty much.”
“Bullshit!”
A tall skinny girl with a long tangle of black hair and a sun-starved olive complexion bangs her tray down next to us. She’s wearing Docs and a sundress made of a thin yellow fabric that shows her nipples. She must be freezing—it’s mid-October and we’re in Minnesota—and her bare, hairy arms bristle with goose bumps.
“Shut up, Vera.” Madison bites into her sandwich.
Vera has small, straight teeth and a sharp, zit-spackled face, divided down the middle by a large beaky nose. With those features, it feels like she should be ugly, but when you put them all together, somehow, like a cubist painting, it sums up into something beautiful. She smells like men’s Old Spice and BO and unwashed hair, and despite my vow to hate everyone and everything at Red Oak Academy, I like her immediately.
“Be honest, Madison,” she says, winking at me. “Hold yourself accountable. The real reason you’re here is because you’re a stalker.”
Madison sighs. “For the millionth time, I’m not a stalker. I went through a bad breakup.”
“Lots of people go through bad breakups. Few people decide to make a homemade pipe bomb and stick it under their ex-girlfriend’s car.” Vera unpeels the crust from her sandwich bread in one long piece, like skinning a fish, and discards it onto the corner of her tray. “Luckily,” she explains to me, “this is Madison we’re talking about, so of course the bomb didn’t work right. When it exploded, all it did was blow out a tire, but the poor chick happened to be driving on the freeway, so she crashed into the median and broke her arm and like three ribs.”
“Yeah, which was exactly what I intended. I only meant to scare her. If I had really wanted to kill her, I would have constructed the stupid bomb with steel, which has a much higher concussive force than plastic. It’s not like I learned nothing in those five summers of STEM camp my parents forced me into. Jeez.”
“Come on now, Madison,” says another girl with flawless dark skin and black braids pushed back from her face with a wide pink headband, as she slides in next to Vera. “You know what Mary Pat says: ‘Only by owning our actions can we begin to reconcile them.’”
“Yeah,” Madison snaps, “like you guys are all so perfect.”
“No need to raise your voice, dear,” the girl teases, her Southern drawl morphing into a clipped, earnest Midwestern accent that’s a dead ringer for Mary Pat. “You know what I always say: ‘Anger is a secondhand emotion.’”
Madison rolls her big wet eyes and adjusts her glasses. She puts her sandwich back on her tray to resume eating her hand instead.
“I’m Trinity.” The girl with the headband is looking me over now. “Who are you?”
“Mia.”
“Where you from?”
“Chicago.”
“They take your phone yet?”
I nod.
“Dammit.”
“Did you really think they’d forget something like that?” asks Madison. “That’s like ‘standard intake procedure.’”
“Ugh,” I say. “If I have to hear that phrase one more time.”
“They search your coochie?”
I nod, annoyed at myself for the involuntary flare of heat in my face.
“You can thank this one for that.” Trinity jabs a thumb in Vera’s direction. “The squat search didn’t used to be part of the deal until she decided to sneak in a bottle of airplane vodka up her vajayjay last semester.”
“That’s why they call it nature’s pocket,” Vera says cheerfully.
Madison looks at me, scrunching up her face in disgust. “And they think I’m the freak.”
“For real, though,” Trinity says, looking around the table. “I need to get my hands on somebody’s phone. I am in serious need of access to my platforms.”
“You see, Mia,” Vera explains, “Trinity had over a hundred thousand Instagram followers when her parents sent her here.”
“I was an influencer,” Trinity says proudly. “I was making money. But I haven’t been able to post content in months. Without content, I have no personal brand. And without personal branding, I don’t have a chance.”