Come Back With a Bonus Excerpt: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

by Claire Fontaine

  “Oh,” I say, feeling stupid.

  “Claire, relax. Your daughter is fine, she’s learning every day. Now that I’m back, I’ll spend some one on one time with her. You know, it’s a big turning point for these kids to realize the world doesn’t revolve around them. When was the last time you and your husband did anything fun? You need to get a life.”

  The realization that I can’t run from here has officially tipped the life scale from pretty fucking awful to sheer hell. We do a head count every time we change rooms, so slipping away unnoticed is impossible. Plus, this place rewards people for ratting, so it’s not just the staff I’d have to watch for. Which means I have a pen, paper, and thirty minutes during letter-writing time to convince my parents to take me home.

  Dinner is Stephen Covey, fries, and something square that’s been fried beyond recognition. I get up to get a glass of water.

  “Mia!” Zuza barks. “What are you doing?”

  Shit, I forgot.

  “I was just getting more water.”

  “You cannot get up without permission, this you know by now. Self-correct?”

  This is such bullshit. Consequences are divided into five categories, Cat 1–Cat 5; the higher the category, the more points you lose, some can drop you entire levels. Anytime you’re consequented, you have the choice to self-correct, which basically means putting your tail between your legs in the name of saving points by filling out a form saying what you did wrong and what you’ll do in the future to correct the situation. If you refuse, the consequence becomes staff corrected and you lose extra points. I could give a shit, I already lost all my points this morning.

  “There’s nothing to correct! I’m thirsty and I was getting more water.”

  “Fine, staff corrected.”

  I swallow a few choice words, sit down, and start scheming. Making my mom feel guilty or sorry for me won’t work, she’s too mad, and she’s been here so she knows they don’t torture us. Logic’s the way to go, get her to see that this place is inappropriate and ineffective, a waste of retirement funds. I’ll stress the poor education, lack of nutritional food, and absence of a real shrink. But I have to do it nicely, that’s the hard part.

  Tyna reports by email:

  Mia lost her points last week so she start this week with 0 points on Level 1, but she promise me that she will be on Level 2 by 2 weeks. We will see. She was upset because she didn’t receive any letters, yesterday she got email (from Paul) and she was very happy first but today she tell me that it wasn’t so nice email…Her message for me to give you—‘I need special face soap, bras and sandals. Thank you. Write me more!!!!’ I am sorry about my bad English. I just hope you will underestand. Thank you. Best regards. Tyna

  Mia’s also written asking us to send her Harley T-shirt “to sleep in. They allow that, I asked!” She’s assuming we’re as dumb as we used to be. If she escapes, a Harley shirt won’t stand out on the streets. We buy her the ugliest, most old-fashioned flowered nightgown we can find. Even if they left a door wide open, her pride wouldn’t let her run in it.

  By now, the other girls have noticed I have a package and come crowding around me. We’re all part of a “family,” who have named themselves the Band-Aids. As they explained in unison, the purpose of the Band-Aid family is “a group of sisters banding together to aid in creating present and future greatness.” This place reaches new peaks of gayness daily.

  We’re on silence but from their big grins and wide eyes you can tell they’re dying to know what I got. Teenage girls grinning like idiots over a heinous nightgown is frightening. They all blend together into one smiling blob. No one’s distinct, it’s like one corny personality with fourteen faces, like any individuality they might have had vanished with their voice.

  It could be the silence, not being able to speak most of the time does things to you. It’s driving me nuts. I think about everything from how much it sucks here to what Ruza the cook does in her time off, to what Melanie’s doing right now, to if pygmies in jungles are happier than people in big cities. People say quiet is peaceful. They’re wrong. It’s the loudest place on earth.

  Grief is a noisy thing. It is loud and stupid in hospital hallways and funeral parlors, in pajamas barefoot in the street. It repels others, helpless against your helplessness, your embarrassing lack of control. Grief is a refusal.

  Sorrow, however, sorrow minds its manners. Sorrow has weight, grace. It confers a certain dignity; it implies wisdom. Sorrow is an acceptance. One our friends are no doubt relieved we’ve come to, and not just because Mia’s safe. We cannot have been easy companions this last six months.

  It’s summer and they flood us with invitations, to parties and dinners, to picnics in the mountains, to the Hollywood Bowl. We’ve suddenly acquired a dark glamour. Inevitably, at one point someone says, oh, you’re the couple! That couple, the Hopkins girl living in a van?…shooting up?…ran away four times, kidnapped?…that school? What an unbelievable story, how did you manage, and oh, how they admire us. Our strength, our courage! I’m given qualities I don’t have and feel stripped of those I do. No one ever does the usual commiseration thing, the I-know-what-you’re-going-through thing, my kid this or my kid that. Nobody’s kid holds a candle to Mia.

  We cross into the dining room and Ruza beams at us from behind her counter. A pretty Gypsy with long black hair that occasionally wanders into someone’s meal, she’s my favorite of the two cooks. The other, Jenka, a middle-aged woman with dirty blond hair, is as somber as Ruza is cheerful and boisterous.

  I grab the bowl slid out to me and stare at the watery gray-brown liquid. Behind me I hear Sunny’s now familiar whisper of “Kakao, Kakao, tac, tac.” “Tak” is a word you learn very quickly if you ever plan on filling up—more. I could cry hearing Ruza tap out extra cocoa powder into Sunny’s oatmeal. When everyone has been served and stands silently behind their chairs, Zuza gives a hand signal and we take our seats and begin eating.

  From breakfast on, the day crawls by. It’s the same schedule day in and day out. Wake-up; shower; cleaning; class; fitness; breakfast; class; PE; class; lunch; class; group; class; spelling or music, depending on the day; dinner; class; letter-writing; shutdown. When time’s no longer your own, you think about it in new ways. Here, everything revolves around food and mail. 2 p.m. isn’t 2 p.m., it’s two hours until mail time and three hours until dinner.

  Like clockwork, Tyna walks with a large stack off axes and envelopes. Immediately, the mood changes as girls wait anxiously for their name to be called.

  Mail is like a sentencing here, dividing the room into haves and have-nots. With no communication from the outside world, no magazines, newspapers, TV, or radio, mail is the only proof we have that we’re not floating in some third dimension while back on earth Madonna’s become president. It’s also our only form of communication with our parents, whom most of the kids really miss.

  As usual, my name’s not called. I’ve only gotten three emails since I’ve been here, short, angry ones from Paul, making sure I know I’m here until I graduate.

  PE here is a total joke. The girls vote between games like Mother May I and Red Light Green Light, then giggle like a bunch of third graders while spinning around to see if anyone frozen moved out of turn.

  Today, a miracle happens and a girl named Roxanne suggests soccer. With long, thick, poker-straight golden hair, a sparkling smile, and a peppy attitude, she could have stepped out of a Pantene commercial. She’s one of the more vocal girls—by vocal I mean she’s constantly making facial expressions and hand gestures behind staff’s back. You sort of have to change your definitions of things here.

  Katrina dribbles the ball my way. For someone who’s barely post-anorexic, she’s fast. She has dark hair, deep olive skin, and a cute crooked smile; her thinness makes her big eyes even bigger.

  I pass the ball to Sunny, who makes it about a foot before Roxanne charges and she runs away squealing. If anyone else did that I’d think they were a complete idiot, b
ut Sunny cracks me up.

  Her personality seems to have formed to fit her face. Round with high cheekbones, she has such smiling half-moons for eyes it’s hard to believe she’s Irish and not Asian. Sunny’s obsessed with nature and anything female and has her head permanently stuck in a yellow submarine where everything is fluffy and fabulous. She used to be a really big cutter and even when she shared about that in group yesterday, she was laughing.

  “I’d just make a little slash here and another there. Oh, how silly! And with a Lady Bic, too, isn’t that just faaabulous!”

  She got the feedback that she was smiling things off, but I liked that she saw the irony in self-mutilating with a pink razor with butterflies on it. At least she keeps it light. After Lupe, we needed it! She was crying so hard it took her five minutes just to stop shaking and form sentences. She was in a gang back home and had a boyfriend who used to beat the living shit out of her and force her to have sex with his friends. She was gang-raped and, still, she stayed. She acts so tough it’s hard to imagine her letting someone do that to her.

  I didn’t even notice I was doing it. I was finishing a homework assignment in class when suddenly there’s a bushel of armpit hair in my face and my paper is taken away. All because I was doodling.

  “But I’m doing my homework, this whole page is done.”

  “You were not focusing on your work if you were drawing all over the page,” the teacher, Miss Suska, says. “Begin again and you have Cat 1 correction for being off task. Self-correct?”

  “Fuck you, you hairy bitch! How is recopying a perfectly good page of work learning anything? If you had even half a brain, you wouldn’t ask me to waste my time doing mindless shit!”

  Miss Suska is frail and proper, and she’s trying hard to keep her composure.

  “Okay, staff corrected,” she squeaks.

  “And would you also like to self-correct your Cat 2 major disrespect?” Sasha pipes up from across the room.

  Sasha is a Level 4, aka junior staff, and, as such, she’s expected to consequent us lower-level peons. She has her own room, can wear makeup and jewelry, and can roam around by herself. I never thought I’d be envious of someone’s ability to go to the bathroom on their own, but that was before I had two minutes to go in a room where every drip and drop echoes for a line of girls to hear.

  “Do you ever mind your own business, Sasha?”

  “Okay, staff corrected. Come on, I’ll take you up to worksheets.”

  I’ve been here about a month and at least two-thirds of it has been spent in worksheets. When you get a Cat 2 or above, you go to a room the size of a matchbox and listen to “educational tapes.” Right, as if listening to shit I read two years ago is educational.

  When I get up there, another repeat offender named Lara is listening to Robinson Crusoe. Last time we were in here we scraped some paint off the walls and snorted it when staff went to change the tape. I got a very minor buzz, but at least it was something. Some days I miss dope so much I don’t even want to get up.

  From the girls’ faces you’d think every Sunday was Christmas. Why, I have no idea. After we shower, we spend FOUR hours cleaning the facility top to bottom. And by clean they mean immaculate, a single dust fleck or stray hair means redoing the whole area. Scrubbing for hours is awful enough, but being on silence on top of it’s overkill so I start making melodies with the scrub brush. Sunny hears me, starts giggling and, thank you very much Zuza, we both get breaking silence, my fifth one of the weekend.

  The whole silence thing is unnatural—even an involuntary laugh or burp is considered breaking it. The only times we don’t need permission to speak are during group, cleaning and PE, but it has to be “on task” or they slap you with a fat Cat 2, bye-bye 50 points you just worked four days to earn. I’ve given up on ever reaching Level 2.

  After cleaning we watch a movie, an activity that proves the dangers of taking away all media; girls are excited by The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins. Then we get two hours of free speech. After a week of silence, it’s like the Tower of Babel erupts out of fourteen conversation-starved girls. It’s weird not to see cliques in a big group of girls. Instead, they group together over various activities—cards, watercolors, games.

  One girl, Samantha, usually sits alone in the corner, working intensely on some drawing. She’s a petite, nervous girl with black hair that always hangs over her brown eyes. The girls playing cards wave me over.

  “And is our lovely Morava Academy everything you’d hoped for?” Roxanne asks, batting her eyelashes and donning an English accent.

  I roll my eyes in response.

  “Yeah, it sucks,” Roxanne says, “but once you accept that you aren’t leaving anytime soon, it actually does get better. Except for the pants.”

  Lupe gives me an exasperated look and explains, “Her first two weeks here, all we hear outta this one’s mouth is the pants! oh, the pants!”

  “I will NEVER get used to these pants.”

  After Abercrombie and Bebe, no wonder. I thought she was going to be a real bitch, but she’s not only down to earth, she’s hilarious. Now that I know her I can totally picture her toking up to Sublime, blowing hits in her dog’s face.

  Sunny giggles. “Maybe not the pants but you sure as hell got used to the dinner rolls!”

  We all crack up—yesterday morning Roxanne gave an elaborate blowjob to the long, skinny rolls they serve at every meal when staffturned their backs.

  The door opens and in struts Sasha, perfectly made up and not a hair out of place. She walks up and taps Lupe on the shoulder.

  “Want to talk now?”

  “Cool, thanks. Here, Mia, take my hand, and don’t fuckin’ lose on me now!”

  “Lupe!” Sasha raises her eyebrows.

  “Dag! Yeah, sorry, self-correct, I won’t swear in the future.”

  They walk off to a corner and we resume our conversation. When I look over a minute later, I don’t believe it. The Lupe that was sprawled out across the table laughing and joking around now has her knees tucked up to her chest as she rocks gently and tears roll down her face. I can’t hear what’s being said but Sasha’s gesturing and looking at her with a mixture of concern and frustration. I shake my head.

  “I’ve never seen people talk about shit as much as you guys.”

  “Oh, you’ll get used to it,” Sunny says.

  “Are you just in here for cutting yourself?” I ask.

  “I actually put myself in here.”

  “You what?” She seemed normal.

  “Yeah, Genius here even saved up to buy the plane ticket over!” Roxanne adds.

  “I thought I found this cool boarding school in Europe. I could do some backpacking, stock up on Belgian chocolate…Wrong! By the time I realized what sort of place it was, my mom was all gung-ho on the idea, so here I am.”

  “Damn, that sucks. Why’d she think you needed to stay?”

  Sunny giggles. “Oh, you know moms! Some pot—”

  “LOTS of pot. And hippie drugs,” Roxanne adds.

  “Wasn’t doing well in school, self-mutilation,” Sunny adds. “I was sort of anorexic—”

  “She weighed a hundred pounds!”

  “And I sort of hated myself!” She finishes with a grin.

  “What’s her deal?” I ask, looking toward Sasha.

  “Oh, Sasha’s a doll. Not sure why she’s in a program, but when they opened Morava last March, they brought her here so there’d be at least one upper level. She makes an excellent shrink.”

  Like they need one. It’s weird and annoying how people talk about their “issues” 24/7. It’s like they forgot there are subjects other than themselves. Even during free time, they talk about shit they shared in group a day before. Just getting through a day here is emotionally draining, and it’s not even my shit I’m getting drained over!

  Karin comes to stay with us while her boat, which she lives on, is under repair. She knows the effect Mia’s letters have on us. She opens Mia’s letter
s before we do and takes out the sting.

  “…Thanks for emailing me, Paul,” she reads, affecting teenage snottiness. “It’s good to hear from home, though three times in two months isn’t the best track record. It really makes me feel great when all the other girls get long, nice letters from their parents—both of them. I thought you sent me here to work on our relationship…”

  “Your ‘relationship’? What relationship would that be, Mia?” Karin interrupts her reading, then continues, “Items number five and eight on her list of ten things you MUST send…” She bursts out laughing. “Dermalogica face gel and Victoria’s Secret Pear body soap! Hah-hah!” she roars. “She wants to live on the streets with scumbuckets, fuck you Mom and Dad, I hate you! But please send me a bottle of thirty-five-dollar face gel!”

  She’s practically rolling on the floor. “Dermalogica, yeah, right!” She’s right, it is ludicrous. It’s also pathetic. That Mia can be so smart yet so clueless. She’s been so cruel that sometimes it’s hard to remember that she’s reacting to a cruelty done to her.

  Still, it is pretty funny. For the first time in what seems like eternity, I start giggling, then laughing. Pretty soon, I’m laughing so hard no sound’s coming out and I can’t sit up. I even join Paul and Karin in a toast an hour later at a sushi bar.

  I can hear my mother already: mayonnaise on your bread, now you’re drinking—you’re starting to act like a shiksa, and what’s to toast, look at your life.

  I’m actually looking forward to group today, it means a break from pre-calc. Katrina starts with how hard it is to eat knowing she can’t throw it back up. I feel like I’m back at the psych ward, minus the ass-wiper. Tyna turns to me.

  “It’s two weeks you are here now, Mia. Do you want to share with group?”

  “No.”

  She keeps prying. “Maybe why you are here, how you feel about it?”