by Beth Goobie
“You should give the key back,” Chris said suddenly.
A wave of shock washed over me. I glanced quickly at Chris, then away, so she wouldn’t see the surprise in my eyes. “I don’t have any keys,” I said.
“Yes, you do,” Chris said.
“Yeah?” I demanded. “Where are they?”
Chris pulled the set of keys I’d thrown into the washroom garbage out of her pocket. “Guess where I found these,” she said. “But the master key is gone. You’ve got it.”
“Prove it.” I sat up, my heart pounding. I had to keep that key. It was my only chance to get out of this place.
Chris just sat there and looked at me, swinging the keys around her finger.
“What are you going to do with those, Chris?” I asked.
She looked at the keys for a moment. “Oh, I might say that I found them at school in the gym,” she said. “Or I might say that I found them in the garbage in the washroom in the unit. I haven’t made up my mind. What are you going to do with your key?”
Lie after lie floated through my head, but I decided to say nothing. “This doesn’t have anything to do with me,” I said, turning my back. “You do what you want, Chris. Just leave me out of it, okay?”
Chapter Ten
That night I lay in bed, pinching myself to stay awake. I was wearing sweats over my pajamas, and I felt thick and lumpy. After that talk with Chris, I figured I had to make my break right away. The staff who worked nights always stayed awake, but sometimes they left the unit. And for some reason the extra staff who’d worked last night was gone. I listened to the night staff moving around. When I heard her leave the unit, I peered through my doorway. There was no one in sight — the staff must be checking on Pit Bull in the back room.
I slid the key out of the folded section of the poster. Then I snuck through the unit and out the back door. The stairway was very dark, lit only by EXIT signs. At the bottom of the stairs I dropped the key. It hit my foot so there wasn’t much noise, but I had to get down on my knees to find it.
My body felt full of strange whispering voices, and I kept looking over my shoulder. It felt as if someone was coming down the stairs towards me, someone I couldn’t hear but I knew he was there. Come on, come on, hissed a voice in my head. You’ve got to get away or you know what will happen.
Finally my hand bumped against the key. I grabbed it, stood up and tried to fit it into the lock. I was so nervous that it took a couple of tries to get it into the keyhole. That feeling of someone coming towards me was growing, as if he was right behind me.
After what seemed like forever, I felt the key slide into the lock. I tried to turn it, but the key wouldn’t move. I tried again, jamming it hard. The key still didn’t move. I knew this was the right key — I’d watched so many staff lock and unlock doors with it.
Then it hit me — they’d changed the locks. I’d waited too long, and now there was nowhere to run. In the dark, with all those EXIT signs around me, I backed against the door. I knew who was coming for me — someone bigger than real life, scarier. Suddenly my dad was there again, in the dark all around me. I couldn’t move. I was gripping the key so tightly it cut into my hand.
I can’t do this alone, I thought. He’s bigger than me.
After a long time under the EXIT sign I climbed back up the stairs. I waited until I saw the night staff go into the washroom. Then I climbed into bed and slipped the key under my pillow.
Chapter Eleven
The next afternoon, Chris pulled on her jacket and left to go on her big twenty-minute walk. I sat in the kitchen, playing cards and watching the clock. Some of the girls held a countdown. Even I wasn’t sure if she would come back. And the strange thing was that I wanted her to — I wanted to believe that she meant what she said. I wanted to believe someone could straighten out in here.
She was a few minutes late, but that was because a staff had to go down to let her in. Chris came over to my table, trying to ignore the fact that everyone was staring at her.
“Weather’s nice out today,” she grinned.
“We can see out the window,” snapped Pit Bull. She was back from the hospital, sitting in front of the TV, her bandaged arm across her stomach. We ignored her. Chris said that she’d gone to the McDonald’s at the corner and ordered a Sprite.
“Why’d you come back?” someone asked.
“I don’t want to get out of here for a couple of days.” Chris sounded scornful. “When I go, I’m leaving here for good.” Fran walked by and Chris added loudly, with a grin, “Just so none of these staff can ever bug me again.”
“Ever sick, Chris,” Fran winked.
The next day I asked to see Jim. I was pretty nervous walking into his office. I felt as if he already knew everything that I was going to tell him — as if he could read my mind. I laid Sister Mary’s key on his desk. “I tried this and it didn’t work,” I said. “When did you change the locks?”
He looked surprised, which made me feel better. I didn’t know how to get started, so I said that Chris’s story about her dad sounded a lot like mine. This was hard to say. Even that little bit made me think I saw my dad out of the corner of my eye. But I had to keep going. I held onto the arms of my chair to help myself remember where I was. It’s over, I thought. It’s not happening now. Sometimes I could feel myself crying, and I stared out of the office window while I talked.
I didn’t tell Jim everything that day, but it was a start. He did ask some pretty good questions. Sometimes they made me remember things I didn’t want to think about. If they hit too close, I didn’t answer them. Not yet.
“Would you like to tell your mother how angry you are at her?” asked Jim. He said he knew that my mom hadn’t tried to stop the abuse. Just as I’d thought, he already knew my secret. But not because he could read my mind — my mom had told him.
“She won’t listen,” I said. “She never listened to me before.”
“Your mother has been seeing a counselor for a year now,” Jim told me. “She’s been working pretty hard. Why don’t you try to talk to her? I’ll be here with you.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
I did think about it — all afternoon and evening. Before I went to bed I asked Fran to let Jim know that I’d decided to talk to my mom. Then I knocked on Chris’s door. She was sitting on her bed, reading a comic and chewing on a pen. There were ink marks all over her face. I was pretty sure she didn’t know that they were there.
“I just wanted to tell you that I gave Jim the key,” I said.
“Yeah?” She grinned. There was ink on her teeth.
“Yeah,” I said. “I talked to him today. He’s okay.”
“I dropped the key ring on the gym teacher’s desk,” Chris said. “I heard her tell someone she found it.”
I nodded. “Thanks for trying to cover for me, but they know I took them now.”
“Okay.” She shrugged and grinned.
“Do you know you have ink all over your face?” I asked.
“Do I?” Chris shrieked and ran for the washroom.
Wednesday after school I sat in Jim’s office scratching softly at my arms. Jim was talking about something, but I could hardly listen. There came a knock on the door. My mom walked in.
“Hello, Mrs. Paddik,” Jim said, standing up.
I felt a huge hole open in my stomach. I hadn’t seen my mom for four years. There was a lot of gray in her hair and new lines in her face. For a second I wanted to touch her, just to make sure she was real.
“Hello, Kelly.” She sat down slowly in the chair next to me.
“Hi.” I looked away. What was I supposed to say to her?
Somehow Jim got us talking. What really surprised me was that my mom listened to most of what I said, even when I yelled. A few times I saw tears in her eyes, and then I had to stop. Crying really gets to me, I guess. Even when I still thought that I hated my mom, I didn’t want to make her cry.
She said she was sorry and that it was
her fault that I was in trouble. “It’s because I’ve been seeing a counselor that I can say these things to you,” she told me. “Before, I knew you were right, but I felt too guilty. Your father ... hurt me too, and that’s why I wasn’t able to help you.”
Well, I knew what it was like to hurt too much to care about anyone else. I nodded. Then she told me that Jolyn and Danny were doing okay and living with her.
I could tell Jim was pretty pleased with our meeting. He invited my mom to come back the next day for Parents’ Night. I couldn’t believe my mom had said what she’d said. And I couldn’t believe some of the things that I’d yelled at her — or that she’d listened.
It was as if all those things that I’d never talked about had taken up space inside me, swelling up when I got angry. But as I talked to my mom, the memories started to leave me through my mouth. I still remembered what happened, but now it felt like for the first time the memories were outside my body, leaving space inside for me. I felt as if I could be more than what my dad had done to me. I didn’t know what that was, but I sure wanted to find out.
Later that day I sat in my room, looking at the poster Sister Mary had given me. Standing up, I went over and folded the words back out so that I could see them. LOVE YOURSELF. Ideas for stories floated slowly through my head. Love yourself, I wrote on a piece of paper. Then I wrote, Love who? Who are you? Kelly. Who is Kelly? Who owns Kelly Paddik?
I thought a minute. Then I wrote, I want to.
A little later I went out to play cards with Chris, but she was out on another one of her walks. This time, though, I wasn’t worried. I finally understood why she was going to come back.
Chapter Twelve
Months later I sat in that same bedroom, staring out of the same window. The yellow leaves were gone and the tree branches were lined with snow and ice. For four months I’d been talking to Jim, Fran and my mom. Believe me, it was a lot better than talking to my pet rock. My mom brought Jolyn and Danny to visit me every Sunday, and we talked lots on the phone. In a couple of weeks I would be starting home visits on weekends. Then in the summer, if everything went well, I would get to move back home.
I’d also been writing down everything that happened to me. I was sitting at my desk and in my hands I held my whole life, in words, on paper. I had written down every-thing I could remember. Now it was outside of me. I could hold it in my hands, put it in a drawer, even throw it away if I wanted to. It wasn’t hiding inside me anymore, taking up space. I’d gotten it all out.
“Hey, Kelly.” It was Chris, standing in my doorway. Next week she was moving out of the unit to a group home.
“What?” I asked.
“Can you believe it?” Chris laughed. “Terri wants me to help her hold up Fran. She says she stole a fork and she’s got it in her room. She wants to hold it to Fran’s throat and get her keys. D’you think she’ll ever change? I told her to fork off.”
I had to laugh. “You’re crazy. C’mon in and listen to a story I just finished writing. I have to figure out a title for it.”
Chris flopped onto my bed and picked up my stuffed bear. “Who gave you this polar bear, anyway?” she asked.
I swallowed and looked down. “My dad, when I was real little. I don’t remember anything nice about him besides that bear.”
Chris turned the bear around in her hands. “Keep it then,” she said softly. “Now, read me your story.”
“Okay.” I picked up the last page. I hadn’t shown it to anyone yet. Suddenly I got so nervous, my voice ran away on me. I kept clearing my throat, trying to get it to come back.
“I can’t hear you,” Chris said loudly. “You’re whispering.”
“Oh,” I whispered. “Sorry.”
“Start over,” said Chris. Sometimes she could be pretty bossy. I cleared my throat again.
“Hey, Kelly.” Chris’s voice was wobbling, and I looked up to see what was the matter. She was twisting her hands and watching me, her brown eyes very large. “I think you could write just about the best book in the whole world,” she said.
A smile took over my whole body. I started again, trying not to whisper. “I’ve seen lots of movies they show about teenage girls who are supposed to be like me,” I said. “They’re mean and tough, and they work the streets and do drugs. Well, I’ve done those things, and in real life it isn’t cool. You get beat up. You go hungry, and you’re cold a lot. You do the drugs to forget what’s happening, but you can’t really forget. If you see a stray cat in an alley, don’t kick it. It’s just a street kid in another life, looking for some way to stay alive.
“I don’t want to run anymore. I don’t know where I thought I was running to anyway. You can’t run from yourself.
“Someone important once said to me, ‘Who owns Kelly Paddik?’ That was a good question. I couldn’t tell her then because I didn’t like the answer — my dad. Well, it was my dad then. Now it’s different. Now everything is different because it’s me. I own Kelly Paddik. I do. I belong to me.”
I looked out the window at the cold and the snow. “Well, that’s the last page, I guess,” I said.
“That’s good. I think that’s real good.” Chris was patting my bear gently. “Have you got a title?”
I nodded slowly. “Now I do.”
“What is it?” Chris asked.
I looked out the window. The sun had lit the ice on the branches so that they shone like glass. “Yeah, I know what I want to call it,” I said softly.
“Okay, so you can tell me now.” Chris was getting bossy again.
“I Own Kelly Paddik.” I wrote it across page one and looked at it. “Yeah, that’s right. I do.” I grinned at Chris. “Want to hear the whole thing now?” I asked.
Chris put the bear onto the floor. Then she stretched out on the bed and placed her hands behind her head. “I’ve got time,” she grinned back at me.
I picked up page one.
orca sounding
Orca Soundings is a teen fiction series that features realistic teenage characters in stories that focus on contemporary situations and problems.
Soundings are short, thematic novels ideal for class or independent reading. Written by such stalwart authors as William Bell, Beth Goobie, Sheree Fitch and Kristin Butcher, there will be between eight and ten new titles a year.
For more information and reading copies, please call Orca Book Publishers at 1-800-210-5277.
Other titles in the Orca Soundings series:
Bull Rider
No Problem
The Trouble with Liberty
The Hemingway Tradition
One More Step
Kicked Out
Refuge Cove
Sticks and Stones
Death Wind
