by Sean Black
“Price?” he prompted.
“By not following my instruction to turn around immediately you have earned one penalty point. You are now at minus one. Not a great start. You obey staff at all times, not just when you feel like it.” He gave the word feel a sulky teenager/Valley girl pronunciation.
Her reflex was to object. She had just arrived. She had turned around, just not right that very second. It wasn’t like she had disobeyed. But she already knew better than to argue. He’d only give her another penalty.
“Yes, sir,” she said, a hint of sarcasm creeping into her voice without her even thinking about it.
He let out a theatrical sigh. “That’s one more penalty for using that tone of voice with me. Good job. You are now at minus two points.”
What? This was bullshit. How could you punish someone for how they said something. It wasn’t even as if she’d tried to sound like a smart ass.
“Turn around, Price,” he said. He sounded pissed off, but she guessed that was okay. After all, he was staff. This was just like school, or dealing with her mom. One rule for the adults and the rest for her.
“Got any more to say?” he asked.
She looked down at the ground. “No, sir,” she said, trying to remove any intonation from her voice.
“Better,” he said, opening the door. “Follow me. Stay three steps behind me. If you aren’t able to accurately judge a three step distance then there are distance markings on the walls. Those are the arrows. They also indicate the one way system that is employed in all our family houses. Walk against the flow at any time and you’ll also incur a penalty. Understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. She hadn’t realized until now how much effort it took to sound neutral. Even among her friends, they all spoke in a way that sounded like they were making fun of each other, or that they thought the other person was an idiot. They didn’t mean anything by it, well not most of the time anyway. It wasn’t even conscious.
The hallway stretched out ahead of them. It was freshly painted in white. Apart from some framed posters of sunsets with motivational quotes – “Be the person you’re capable of being” “Obedience is strength not weakness” “Change yourself. Change others. Then change the world” – the walls were spotlessly clean, apart from the arrows. They were black, pointed in the same direction, and were spaced out four feet apart.
The doors they passed had been painted blue. They all had the same electronic keypads as the outside door but they didn’t have a separate lock that needed a key. At least not so far as Ruth could see.
She was still in shock. But she also knew that if she wanted to get out of here that she needed to pay attention to her surroundings. Without the staff noticing what she was doing. She didn’t plan on sticking around any longer than she had to.
They stopped at a door. Ruth had to skid to a halt to avoid breaking the three step rule. The staff member turned his head towards her, his index finger hovering over the key pad. Keeping her face expressionless, she looked down at the immaculately clean concrete floor and turned around.
“Good. You’re getting it, Price. Fast learners always do much better here than students who try to fight the system.”
She heard the beep as he punched in the digits. She listened hard. Maybe different digits made a different sound? If they did, she couldn’t tell.
She heard the bolt open. She turned around, half expecting another penalty because she hadn’t waited to be told she was allowed to turn around. The staff member pushed the blue door open.
“This, Price, is going to be your new home while you are here.”
He walked into the room. She held back, hovering in the doorway.
“You can come in. The three step doesn’t apply in here.” He turned to face her and smiled. “Not enough space to keep three steps from each other at all times.”
He wasn’t kidding. The room itself was tiny. At least for the number of occupants.
There were three windows spaced equally alongside the far wall. They looked out onto a paved central courtyard. Within the room itself there were three rows of thin mattresses laid out on the floor. Each row was made up of six mattresses. Each mattress had a single, equally thin foam pillow, two sheets and a rough wool blanket. Along one wall was a series of open lockers. The contents of each locker looked to be identical. Toothbrush, toothpaste, a hairbrush, clothes, a wash cloth, and a towel.
The walls were white. No arrows, but the same range of motivational posters. On the wall opposite the lockers was a chart. Ruth couldn’t read it from where she was standing, and she didn’t want to walk over to it without permission. She stood where she was and tried not to break down in tears. That was what she wanted to do.
Apart from when she found out that her parents were divorcing, she couldn’t remember ever feeling this low before. The idea that this was her new home? Maybe for years. A week here would be bad enough.
Her mind flitted back to her room at home. To her posters, her clothes, all the things that made it home. She thought of the cat that her mom had bought her (no doubt to make up for the divorce). How she always came back home from school to find Merlin curled up in the middle of her bed. It wasn’t a replacement for her Dad being there, but it had been a comfort, something that made home feel a little less empty. She thought about all of that, looked around this bare room she had to share with strangers – room that offered no privacy – and now she really had to fight back the tears.
There was a knock at the door. An older girl was standing there. She was dressed in staff uniform, although Ruth didn’t think she could have been old enough to be an actual staff member. She looked like one of the girls that Ruth had seen earlier, walking in line.
“Rachel, this is Ruth Price. She just arrived. I was just showing her the dorm,” said the male staff member who still hadn’t told Ruth his name.
Rachel swept a hand through a mane of long, glossy chestnut brown hair. She was tan, with a perfect smile and long legs. She looked like might have stepped out of a swimsuit advertisement in a teen girl magazine.
“I can take care of that for you,” said Rachel.
She may have been smiling but the look in her eyes was far from friendly. Ruth recognized it from the popular girls in her classes at high school back home.
“That’d be great if you would. I’m supposed to have a meeting in a few minutes.”
“Leave it with me, father,” said Rachel.
Father? The guy didn’t look old enough to have a daughter Rachel’s age. Not just that, they didn’t look related. Then there was the way she had said it. It had come off creepy.
Rachel glanced back at Ruth. “Mr Fontaine is our house father. We call him father. Staff can address us by our family name or our first name.”
“We’re like one big family. Isn’t that right, Rachel?”
“It is. One big happy family,” said Rachel.
Fontaine walked out of the room. Ruth could hear him whistling to himself as he walked back down the corridor. Ruth stood awkwardly in the middle of the room. Rachel walked over to her, circling her slowly, looking her up and down.
“What are you here for?” she asked Ruth. “Dope? Booze? Whoring around?”
Ruth shook her head. She hadn’t done any of that. She wasn’t sure a few puffs of a single joint made you a doper. “I don’t know,” she said.
“No reason?” Rachel sounded incredulous.
“No,” said Ruth.
“There has to be a reason.”
“ I guess there does,” said Ruth. “But I don’t know what it is.”
“Oh wow, that’s really sad.” Rachel tilted her head back and laughed. It was a real mean girl laugh. “Hey, maybe your parents just don’t like you.”
13
Donald Price paced up and down outside the entrance to the Four Seasons hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.. In one hand, he held his cell phone, pressed hard to his ear. In his other hand was a lit cigarette.
&nb
sp; Along with weight gain, and a stomach ulcer, smoking had been another unforeseen consequence of being separated. He’d gone from being a former smoker of fifteen years standing (he’d stopped when Ruth was born) to a pack a day habit in a little under six months.
He brushed a stray cone of ash from the lapel of his sports coat and took a breath. “I’d like to speak to Ruth. I haven’t spoken to her since the weekend, and I don’t want her thinking that I’ve disappeared off the radar.”
On the other end of the line his soon to be ex-wife, Sandra, offered to take a message.
“She’s not there?” he asked.
“Not right now, no. Or haven’t you been listening.”
“You just said she couldn’t come to the phone. I thought that maybe she was doing homework or something.”
“I’ll tell her you called.”
“No,” he said, cutting her off. “Not good enough. I want to speak to her.”
From other friends of his, guys who were either separated or divorced, he knew that he had to make a concerted effort to maintain a relationship with his daughter. If he didn’t, it would slip away. Leaving messages, which would suit Sandra down to the ground, would be the start of it.
He’d already had to spend tens of thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees just to be able to see Ruth one weekend a month and have two weeks with her over the summer vacation and a week at Christmas. It was money he’d hoped to use towards her college education but the system was so hopelessly weighted against fathers that he’d had no choice but to use it to pay his attorneys’ kids college tuition.
It could have all been avoided if his ex had been reasonable. But she hadn’t been, and it didn’t look like she was about to start now. If anything, over the past few months, she had gotten worse.
Their relationship was now one of mutual contempt that was no longer even thinly disguised. Thinly disguised contempt had been about three months back. Now, openly hostile would have been the more accurate description. And in the middle, despite Donald’s best efforts, and maybe Sandra’s too, was their daughter. The one thing that his ex knew she could use to hurt him like he had hurt her. It was messed up, but hardly new when it came to couples splitting up. Children as the battleground for their parent’s failed relationship.
“She’s not here,” Sandra said finally.
“Where is she?” Donald demanded. Wouldn’t it have been easier for her to tell him where she was? Rather than making every single thing an uphill battle.
“Don’t speak to me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like that.”
It was like they were both reading from a script that they’d run through so often that the pages must have been dog-eared from use and covered in coffee stains. “I tried her cell but it was switched off, or out of service,” said Donald.
“She’s at a friend’s. She probably turned off her phone and forgot to turn it back on again. You know how forgetful she can get sometimes.”
“Do you have a number for this friend?”
Sandra hesitated. There was something off. He could sense it. You lived with someone for as long as they had, and you knew when they were lying. Or at least holding something back, and not telling you the whole truth.
“No.”
“You let her go to a friend’s but you don’t have a number for them?”
“I do, but listen I’m really busy right now, okay. I wasn’t expecting you to call.”
“Sandra, stop. What are you not telling me here?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do.”
“This is harassment, Donald. Am I going to have to go talk to my attorney again, see if he can ask the judge to take another look at your visitation rights.”
Donald looked up. He had stopped in front of the hotel’s valet parking stand. A well dressed D.C. couple were staring at him. He didn’t blame them. He must have looked like a maniac, standing there, almost screaming into a cell phone while in his other hand his Marlboro burned down to the filter.
He hit the end call button on his cell. He was only going to say something that would make an already bad conversation even worse. He could call back later, speak to his daughter then.
He looked across at the couple, and shrugged an apology. “Sorry. Soon to be ex-wife,” Donald Price said to them with a nod to his phone.
The man shot him an understanding smile. His female companion caught her companion’s smile and glared. The man’s smile evaporated.
Donald walked past them and back into the hotel’s lobby. He had a meeting in five minutes about a deployment of security personnel to the Turkish/Syrian border and he still hadn’t finished writing the brief.
14
“So Chris already told you about the levels?” Rachel asked Ruth.
So that was his name. Chris Fontaine. Although he expected to be called dad, or father. There was no way Ruth was going to call him that. She already had a dad. She didn’t need some creepy replacement.
“Yeah. You start at one and go up to six. When you hit level six Gretchen will start preparing your exit plan.”
“You mean that’s when you get to go home?”
“If you want to, once the exit plan has been agreed, then, yeah.”
If you wanted to? This girl was cracked.
“So you’ll be leaving soon?”
Rachel shrugged. “I guess so. I turned eighteen a few months ago, so I could have gone then if I’d really wanted to.”
The conversation was getting more and more bizarre. Who in their right mind would choose to stay here? A place out in the middle of nowhere, where you had to sleep in a room full of other kids, on a mattress.
Rachel seemed to sense Ruth’s incredulity. “If you leave without an exit plan, you get a one way ticket, and fifty bucks in your pocket. If your parents don’t want to take you back, which they won’t if you haven’t finished the program then you’re better off staying here.”
That made a little more sense. Even a mattress on a floor probably beat living on the streets.
Rachel twirled a finger through her hair. “Anyway, you’re like a million miles away from all that. It usually takes kids at least a year or two to move up to level six.”
Ruth’s heart, not for the first time in the past twenty-four hours, sank again. She wasn’t sure how she’d handle a month here. Never mind a year. She reminded herself that she wouldn’t have to. Not when her Dad found out what had happened. What her Mom had done.
But for right now it would better if she just played the game, went along with the program. No matter how crazy it seemed.
“The best thing you can do is to take one day at a time,” Rachel continued. “Do what you’re told, when you’re told to do it, and everything will be fine.”
These were almost the exact same words Chris had come out with. Rachel had delivered them in exactly the same robotic way that he had.
“That’s what you’ve done?” Ruth asked.
“Yeah, I guess,” said Rachel.
Ruth tried not to stare at her. She already had the idea that if Rachel wanted to, she could make her life even more miserable than it was now. Who in their right mind could like a place like this?
15
An hour later the other girls who lived in the room began to filter back. Although filter might not have been the right word. They appeared in a marching column that only broke up when they stepped into the room. As best as Ruth could tell, they ranged in age from about thirteen to seventeen. They all wore the same uniform that Ruth had been ordered to change into.
The uniform was white and consisted of a long skirt, and a hideous, puffy blouse. Instead of shoes or sneakers, each girl wore red or yellow flip flops. The red or yellow seemed to be the only colour variation that Ruth had seen. No one wore make-up, and apart from girls with short hair, they all had their hair tied back in a ponytail.
A couple of the girls began to chat as they came into t
he room. A few of them nodded at Ruth or said hello. When Rachel appeared behind them, they clammed up. They all seemed wary around her. Ruth was starting to regret asking so many questions. She had wanted to ask what was up with the red and yellow flip flops, but didn’t dare.
In the corner of the room, Ruth noticed a girl who seemed to be around her age sneaking glances over to her. The girl had red hair cut into a short bob, and was overweight. She also looked, thought Ruth, completely miserable - even by teen girls standards. Her shoulders slumped, and apart from darting glances at Ruth, the girl looked down at the floor, not making eye contact with anyone else in the room.
If no one else was going to introduce themselves, Ruth figured that she would have to make the first move. Even if she didn’t plan on sticking around, it might be useful to make a few friends while she was here. If nothing else she might be able to get some information that would help her escape.
Ruth walked across to the girl with red hair.
“Hey,” she said.
The girl looked up at her. She looked like she might be about to burst into tears. It seemed like a strange reaction to someone saying hey.
“I’m Ruth.”
“Mary,” said the girl, her eyes darting back down to the bare concrete floor as she said it.
Ruth glanced around the room. Rachel had disappeared. Some of the girls had gone back to chatting, although they kept their voices down to a low whisper, speaking just loudly enough so the person they were talking to could hear them.
“So what you in for?” Ruth asked.
Mary blinked her eyes. “In for?” she asked.
Now that Ruth was closer to her, she could see that the desert sun had brought out a mass of freckles on Mary’s face.
“Yeah, why did you get sent here? What’d you do?”
Still no answer. It was as if Ruth was speaking French or something.
“I’m here because my Mom’s a crazy bitch who thinks she can punish my Dad by sending me here. At least that’s all I can figure.”
