“Are you gang affiliated?”
“Are you a kleptomaniac?”
“Are you a huge slut?”
“She definitely associates with an unhealthy peer group.”
“I’m telling y’all, it’s drugs. But which ones?”
“Cat? Horse? Amy?”
“Molly? White Girl? China Girl?”
“Sizzurp? Special K? Oxy? O Bombs?”
“Adderall? Ritalin? Vicadin? Demerol?”
“Weed? Wine? Whippits?”
“Dusting?”
“Hold up.” Trinity lifts a hand, and her nails are beautiful—just short enough to be handbook compliant, but perfectly filed and painted an impeccable, glossy pink. They are in every way the opposite of Madison’s chewed nightmares, and I wonder how she maintains them in the midst of this deranged Girl Scout camp. “What in the name of the Lord is dusting?”
“You know those cans of air that you use to spray out the dust from between your keyboard keys?” says Vera. “People huff them.”
“That’s a thing?”
“Sure.”
“I didn’t think Upper East Side girls fucked with that kind of nonsense.”
“I’m from the Upper West Side, first of all,” sniffs Vera. “And second of all, we don’t. That shit’s toxic. If it doesn’t straight-up kill you the first time you try it, which it very well might, it gives you like a ten-second high that turns you into some foaming, inchoate vegetable. What’s fun about that? Plus, it’s trashy. I don’t want to have to go to, like, OfficeMax to get my fix.”
Trinity starts to retort, but I cut her off.
“I don’t dust, okay? I don’t do practically any of the stuff you guys just listed. The only reason I’m here is because my stepmom is a bitch and she didn’t want to deal with me anymore.”
The three of them exchange a look before bursting into gales of derisive laughter.
“What?”
“That is classic first-day talk,” Vera says, collapsing back in her chair and laughing horsily. “The whole world is against me and I did nothing wrong!”
I’m about to turn it around on Vera, ask her what she did to get here, but then she reaches up to brush a hank of black hair from her face and that’s when I see the ridged white mounds of scar tissue that jag across the inside of her delicate wrist, and other scars, smaller but numerous, slicing up her thin forearm, methodical and self-inflicted. I feel a grim sort of satisfaction then, because my secrets are all on the inside, which means I can guard them for as long as I want.
10
MY SECOND NIGHT, I’m awoken by thunder. Outside, the rain is lashing down, hissing against the wall of trees that surround campus. I’m lying on my back, listening to the sound, and to Madison’s shallow, even breathing in the bunk above me.
Eventually I get up, my feet cold on the creaking tiles, and tiptoe over to the window. I try to push it open, but it only goes up a few inches before locking in place, to prevent anyone from trying to get in or out, I guess.
But I’m not trying to run away.
I’m just trying to feel the rain on my face, that inside-outside feeling, the way I used to do when I was a kid.
When I was five, my dad bought me this princess bed, with a canopy and everything—the kind of indulgent gift a widowed man buys for his motherless daughter—and he set it up right beneath my bedroom window. I used to lay there at night with the blankets pulled up to my chin and the nighttime rain misting through the screen, dappling my face. And when it got to be too cold or too wet, I’d slam the window shut and burrow down under the covers, overcome with this delicious feeling of safety, with the rain pattering outside and a sturdy roof over my head and my dad alive and snoring across the hall.
When I got older, that window became my passage into the night, my portal for sneaking out, because I no longer wanted to be safe, it was no longer enough just to taste the rain; I wanted to feel the water over my whole body.
My dad, thinking he could solve the problem by taking away my privacy, got out his wrench and took my bedroom door off its hinges. And his tactic worked, kind of. I did stop sneaking out.
Instead, I just started leaving. Right out the front door, right in front of their faces, whenever I wanted to. Which didn’t feel good, not at all. But it still felt like a victory.
11
STARTING TODAY, I’m going to be forced to meet with Vivian St. John, PhD, for one hour every Monday and Wednesday afternoon until I get out of here. She tells me, at my first appointment in her tiny office in the back of the admin building, that she was born and raised here in Onamia. She says she’s half white, half Ojibwe, then points out at the stream running past—so close I can hear its burbling even with the window closed—and tells me that her father’s people have lived on Red Oak land for over five centuries.
“Well, no offense to your father’s people,” I say, “but this place sucks.”
“Most of our girls think that, at least at first.” She has still-black hair, good skin, and two deep dimples in the middle of her cheeks. You can tell that she was pretty before she got old. “I bet you have a lot of questions for me.”
“Just one, actually. When the fuck am I getting out of here?”
“The journey is the important thing here, Mia. Not the destination.”
“Huh. I think I read that once on a decorative poster. It was in the home decor aisle at Michaels, right next to the Live Laugh Love signs.”
“You know, Mia, your feelings of anger are perfectly normal. I’d be more concerned about you if you weren’t furious at your parents for sending you to Red Oak. It’s a drastic step, and one that can be hard to reconcile. But for most girls, that anger fades with time, and—”
“Let me guess—then the brainwashing begins, and two years later you’ll send me home, normal and happy and emotionally lobotomized?”
“Ha! I won’t say Red Oak is perfect. We might have forcibly removed your tongue piercing, Mia, but we’re not going to forcibly remove your prefrontal cortex. Even if we were a medical facility, which we’re not, a lobotomy hasn’t been performed in the United States since the 1970s. And thank goodness for that, because the procedure is as close as human beings have ever come to the surgical murder of a soul—and, no surprise, the large majority of them were performed on women. You see, even though we’ve gotten better about it, our society has never quite known how to deal with a woman who refuses to toe the line. Which is partially why schools like Red Oak exist.”
I slump back in my chair. I was wondering what kind of therapist Vivian was going to be, and now I know: the kind that loves to hear herself talk.
“Now, in terms of our ability to make you ‘normal,’ the idea of normalcy varies so wildly from culture to culture and person to person that there’s no actual benchmark that could ever be useful. So in some sense, everybody’s normal and nobody’s normal. As for happiness, of all the things Western culture has gotten wrong, this obsession with happiness might be the silliest. Trying to teach someone to be happy is about as effective as trying to cut water with scissors.”