by Nora Price
PURPOSE. The purpose of Twin Birch is to make a safe and constructive lifestyle accessible to its patients. Located at an estate in rural Massachusetts, the program combines an innovative approach to rehabilitation with elegance and personalized care.
I reread the paragraph. It said nothing—or did it? My nose wrinkled at the knotty abstractions. I read it once more, but the vague sentences yielded nothing but further vagueness under my eye. If this was any indication, the Twin Birch “purpose” boiled down to a handful of meaningless words glued together with empty adjectives.
I read on.
APPLICATION. Twin Birch accepts six patients per session. We regret that we cannot accommodate the hundreds of applicants we receive per year. Our current acceptance rate is 10 9 percent.
I stared at the place on the page where the number 10 had been crossed out in blue ink. This was confusing. Given the high quality of the paper, I’d assumed that the paper was a brochure of some kind, but the handwritten edits suggested otherwise. Had I inadvertently grabbed an internal document of some kind? A memo never meant to leave Angela’s office?
I read the paragraph again, and this time another detail caught my attention: 9 percent. “No,” I whispered under my breath. Nine percent? Nine percent was impossible. Nine percent would make the Twin Birch admissions process not unlike the Harvard admissions process. What’s more, I was certain that I’d never filled out an application. (My memory may be shaky, but that’s not the sort of chore one forgets.) My eyes were not fully adjusted to the bright bathroom light, and as I scanned the sheet of paper, the sheer density of text began to give me a preemptive squinting headache. For now, the information itself mattered less to me than the origins of the paper. What was its purpose? Without a single image or map, it clearly wasn’t a brochure. But neither did it seem like an internal memo, really—why use expensive paper stock for a routine office document? And yet—it was hardly an advertisement for Twin Birch. If anything, it seemed to discourage applicants by accentuating the stringency of the acceptance criteria.
There was no way I’d be able to memorize all of it. Instead, I’d have to read as quickly as possible, hide it again, and then write down what I remembered in this notebook the following morning. There was no other option: I couldn’t write in the dark, and I couldn’t switch on my lamp without waking Caroline. With this plan in mind, I got through three-quarters of the packet before the sound of approaching footsteps jolted me from my research. How long had I been inside the bathroom? Please don’t be Devon, I prayed, folding the paper back up and shoving it into the waistband of my leggings. I opened the door.
“God!”
Jane jumped back, recoiling from my presence.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Both of Jane’s hands were pressed defensively to her chest, and she seemed on the verge of hyperventilating. Overreaction, much? I thought, moving past her into the hallway. “The bathroom’s free,” I whispered, lifting my chin toward the door. But Jane made no answer, and when I turned to look before heading into my room, she was still frozen solid in the hallway.
[Day Four]
Luckily, last night’s brief interaction with Jane didn’t erase the reading I accomplished in the bathroom. I’ve woken up early today, before breakfast, in order to translate the information I learned as faithfully as possible in this notebook. For organization’s sake, I will list the material in a numbered list, with my own questions interspersed throughout.
What I know about Twin Birch
1. Twin Birch is the brainchild of two psychologists, Angela and Alexandra, who founded the program ten years ago in this very house.
2. Originally, fifteen girls were accepted per session [hence all the empty rooms?] but the number was quickly narrowed to six. [Why?] Patients arrive over the course of five days, with arrivals staggered so that each patient can receive a customized initiation.
3. The program consists of four elements: Therapy, Activity, Intake, and Group Downtime.
Therapy means one-on-one sessions with Alexandra.
Activity is any supervised period of physical activity. Our activities are Cooking and Gardening, but past activities, according to the paper, have included Lawn Sports, Origami, Needlework, and Meditation.
Intake is eating.
Group Downtime is the centerpiece of the Twin Birch Experience. It is a concept devised by Angela and Alexandra and refined carefully over the course of two decades. Several articles published in psychological journals and authored by Angela are cited in the paper. Group Downtime itself has four components, the first three of which are set in motion before any of the patients arrive at Twin Birch. Angela and Alexandra select a sample of girls whose disorders and personalities will, according to a private metric, produce favorable results. They choose the girls from the pool of applicants and mail notices offering each girl a spot in one of six annual sessions. Applicants do not get to choose which session they will attend. The enrollment rate approaches 100 percent.
The second step of Group Downtime involves location. It is paramount, according to the paper’s explanation, that patients be situated in comfortable, spacious housing stripped bare of technological impediments, like cell phones or laptops.
Third, there must be ample opportunities for patients to spend time in nature.
The fourth step is the simplest. After an elite group of girls has been selected and congregated within the confines of an elegant, leafy location, they are to be left alone.
That’s it.
As far as I can tell, the concept of Group Downtime itself is simple; the preparation, microscopically complex. In essence, it is an unsupervised slot of time in which patients are left to their own devices with each other.
This is everything that I am able to remember with clarity. I have a fuzzy recollection of other details, but I’d rather not jeopardize the accuracy of this notebook with guesswork.
As I review my notes, I see that much of the page is devoted to the kinds of clinical nuts-and-bolts that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to find in an advertisement or a brochure. I remind myself that the memos were not set out on a wicker table or handed out to patients upon arrival, but stored in Angela’s private domain. I wasn’t supposed to be reading it.
What does it mean that they don’t want us to know this stuff?
My wrist is limper than spaghetti; I need to put down the pen, though I wish I didn’t have to. Writing by hand feels like a cleansing habit—like there’s something about the physical movement of a pen across paper that hypnotizes me into being honest. I think. E-mail has the opposite effect. The speed of writing an e-mail is an invitation to embellish and omit. It’s too easy to type words on a keyboard. Too easy, also, to delete them.
Dear Elise,
I accomplished my getting-ready chores this morning—day number four—like a broken machine. With one hand I rustled around in my makeup bag for the tube of mascara. I brushed it over my eyelashes: left, then right, then left again, then right again. Even a task as meaningless as this—a task that I’ve conducted approximately 1,095 times in my life—exhausts me at Twin Birch. I stood beneath the cold bathroom light. A zit was emerging on my hairline. A minor event: maybe a 2.3 out of 10 on the zit scale. But still.
If you were here, you’d tell me that it’s actually good to have a couple of zits on your face because it makes the surrounding skin look even clearer. That’s the sort of thing you believe, and your optimism in such things is contagious. “If your skin is too perfect, it just looks like you’re on Accutane,” you would explain. “Having perfect skin actually makes your skin look worse.” Usually you’re able to win me over with your arguments. If not, you’ll simply remind me of your personal motto—“It’s not a problem if makeup can solve it”—and unscrew the pot of concealer.
It’s easy for you to say these things, of course. Your skin is perfect. Like an actress playing a teenager on TV, your face is unblemished by pimples and stray un
ibrow hairs. Sometimes when we watch TV together, I secretly compare your beauty with that of the actresses onscreen, and you know what’s crazy? You win every time.
That’s a rare exception. For all the differences between TV teenagers and real teenagers, the two might as well be a different species. Teenagers on TV win arguments with adults, split desserts in restaurants, don’t stain their shirts with toothpaste, and never get their periods. The biggest thing that’s missing on TV, though, is this one social phenomenon. It’s a single, crucial element of teen existence that goes totally undocumented. Completely ignored. There isn’t even a name for it, this thing—it’s not a zit, it’s not premarital sex, and it’s not depression or SAT prep.
It’s the reason I live in fear of Group Downtime.
It is the vocabulary equivalent of a black hole. But for me—and for you—it constituted one of the most terrifying daily experiences of high school: the twenty-minute interval between classes.
We’d have “Shakespeare” first period, then a twenty-minute break, then “Colonial Origins,” then a twenty-minute break, then “Environmental Chemistry,” and so forth. I don’t know why our school adopted this schedule, but I’d bet my savings it followed the publication of some research paper that proved a conclusive link between twenty-minute breaks and stellar SAT scores. If that is the case, every copy of that research paper ought to be pulped.
Twenty minutes. It sounds like a snap of the fingers, and it is: Twenty minutes is not long enough to walk the six blocks to get in line for a decent latte, not long enough to complete a meaningful segment of homework, or watch an episode of something on your laptop. However, it’s also not a short-enough period of time to pass idly. When you have a small group of friends—or no friends except for one other person—twenty minutes is the precise length of time it takes to become achingly reacquainted with your loneliness.
When I’m at home or wandering around my neighborhood, being alone is relaxing. I don’t have to adjust the direction in which I face someone based on the geography of my facial zits. I don’t have to worry about my hair. At school, it’s the opposite. It is impossible for a person to be more self-conscious than I was during one of those twenty-minute breaks when I couldn’t locate you in the halls. On these desperate occasions I did one of three things:
1. Speed-walked through the halls with a purposeful look on my face, as though I were meeting someone to do something.
2. Faked a cell phone conversation. (The most humiliating of social maneuvers?)
3. Hid myself in the bathroom. If nobody else was in there with me, I’d stand at the sink and wash my hands ten times in a row, just to pass time. (My social anxiety is responsible for a forest’s worth of wasted paper towels. Trees: I’m sorry.)
Usually I was able to save myself from these charades by locating you. If not, I did whatever possible to avoid standing alone, like a leper, while the rest of the school buzzed and cross-pollinated. I chatted on my cell phone (to a dead line) while browsing walls papered with announcements for plays and basketball games, asking myself: At what point does lingering turn into loitering? And which of those, really, is worse?
Girls are so skilled at finding reasons to dislike other teenage girls. It’s always easier to be pretty than it is to be unpretty—trust me—but your looks, I admit, were a problem from the first day of high school. A tall, blond freshman with no concept of—and therefore no adherence to—the school’s existing social structure? Forget it. You were toast from the inaugural bell ring on Monday, September 2. And I, your best friend, was collateral damage.
But for the most part, it didn’t matter because we had each other. It was during one of those first infernal twenty-minute breaks that we found a little yellow note stuck to your locker. We deciphered the note together in muted awe: It was from a senior named Alex whom we knew by looks alone. He was handsome, nice, and generally excellent at being a seventeen-year-old male, with broad shoulders and a lanky, lopey stride. Written on a torn sheet of binder paper, Alex’s note was written in a spidery boyish hand that made my heart flutter. He was asking you out to dinner on Saturday night—the night after Ahmed’s party. The note was just a few words long, with his phone number written hastily at the bottom. It looked as though he’d almost forgotten to include it.
“Alex!” you mouthed.
“Dinner!” I whispered.
“Jesus Christ,” we said in tandem.
We stared at each other, our eyes googly with disbelief. My head felt as bubbly as a glass of champagne.
In our mind the restaurant date was a relic of the past; most people we knew simply made vague appointments to hook up at a party. But a real date—at a restaurant where waiters and other people would witness the whole thing! What a flattering omen. If this was the kind of thing that could happen on the first day of high school, how could the next four years fail to deliver on such a promise?
“How does he know who I am?” you asked.
“Never underestimate the efficiency of the grapevine when it comes to transmitting news of hot freshmen,” I said. “It’s like fiber-optic cable.”
People swarmed around us as we examined the note, trying to figure out what the best way to respond would be.
“You’re gonna go, right?” I asked.
“I’d be retarded not to.”
We pored over the note seeking clues about how to respond. The discovery was so exciting—and the hallway so packed with moving traffic—that I hadn’t noticed a girl standing on the stairs nearby, watching the entire episode unfold. Katie Lord was her name, though I didn’t find that out until later. All I knew was that a person with curly blond hair and an adultlike briskness to her manner had been observing us as she plucked a pack of Marlboros from her purse, and when she finally swept past on her way out the door, she turned around and addressed you.
“You know that’s a joke, right?” A cigarette already dangled from her lips.
Was she talking to us?
“The note,” she said, pointing to your hand. “It’s a joke. J-O-K-E.”
She left.
As soon as she said it, we knew it was true. We’d seen Katie with Alex; it was likely they were even hooking up. Of course the note was a joke. Why would Alex ask a freshman out to dinner? Why would anyone? We’d been idiots to believe it.
A quartet of Katie’s friends down the hall had witnessed the prank and were cracking up. Your cheeks flushed so dark it looked physically painful, and I watched, stricken, as you folded the note, walked slowly to a trash can, and threw it away. The bell rang, and we hoisted our bags to go to class, forging an unspoken agreement never to mention the incident again.
It was a watershed moment, though. A milestone. From that moment on, we understood that high school was an arena where acts of cruelty happened as casually as high-fives and sneezes. Alex’s note was an accurate indicator of the social landscape. In fact, it was far more accurate than an actual love note would have been.
I don’t mean to imply that there weren’t nice people and acts of generosity at school. There were those, too. But nothing sticks in the mind like humiliation, and so humiliation remains definitive in a way that kindness does not.
In light of such episodes, twenty minutes can seem an awfully long time. For those on the margins of the social galaxy, twenty minutes offers exactly the right amount of time to feel lost and mortified, like an errant asteroid hurtling through space without a steady course. I suspect that every high school offers its own version of the dreaded twenty-minute break. For some, it is gym class. For others it may be lunch, or that terrible interval of waiting for your parents to pick you up after school while everyone else splits off into couples or groups for post-school socializing.
At Twin Birch, it’s Group Downtime. I guess it’s not so different here after all.
Maybe we should write a book about similar phenomena when I get home. Teenage Purgatory: A Medical Encyclopedia of Common High School Ailments. A definitive work for future genera
tions, with entries on coffee breath avoidance, the perils and pleasures of blogging, how often to wash bras, backpacks versus totes, etc. A summer project to keep us busy.
Twin Birch is supposed to be the inverse of high school, but instead of feeling cozily safe, I’m soaked in a different version of the anxiety that dogged me at home. Here, I’m one of six patients occupying a house with a 1:2 ratio of girls to adults. Even when I’m alone, I have the distinct sense that I am being watched. That my behavior is being tabulated. I’ve been sleeping poorly, and often I wake up feeling as though my body has been preserved in syrup.
We are officially woken up at seven o’clock by Devon, who strolls up and down the hallway ringing an antique brass bell until everyone is up. The bell is heavy and unpolished, and loud in a way that suggests it may have served, in some past century, as a primitive PA system for a very large house like this one. In its present use, it lends Devon the ability to function as a walking analogue alarm clock. She’s very effective in this capacity. Today I was particularly groggy upon waking, and it was only when Caroline poked me in the shoulder that I came to consciousness. Even then, the elements of daylight and activity failed to serve their usual orienting purpose.
Please write back. I miss you.
