Stolen

by Elizabeth Gilpin

  Copyright © 2021 by Elizabeth Gilpin

  Reading Group Guide Copyright © 2021 by Elizabeth Gilpin and Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Cover design by Sarah Congdon. Cover photo by Joachim Johnson.

  Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

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  First Edition: July 2021

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  Lyrics from “I Dreamed a Dream” (Les Misérables), copyright Alain Boublil Music Limited, Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schonberg, and Herbert Kretzmer, writers. Used by permission.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021934552

  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-3544-2 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-3542-8 (ebook)

  E3-20210505-DA-PC-ORI

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part II Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Afterword

  In memory of

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  For Jen

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  Author’s Note

  This is a true account of my experience of being forcibly taken from my home as a teenager and sent to a “therapeutic boarding school.” These so-called “schools,” many of which are still in operation across the United States today, offer desperate parents what must seem like a miracle cure for children they have deemed “troubled,” a term that is very loosely defined and includes what some would call typical rebellious teen behavior. It is my opinion that the methods these schools employ are, at best, debasing and, at worst, completely destructive. I hope to start a conversation for those who have been hurt by these institutions and not known where to turn. If by telling my story I can convince one parent to avoid this dangerous path, I will feel like I’ve accomplished something.

  In recounting my story, I primarily relied upon my own recollections, personal letters, and journals, as well as conversations with others who shared this experience or portions of it with me. I want to stress that this is my story and my story alone—I do not purport to speak for my former classmates, friends, or acquaintances from this period of my life; nor do I mean to imply that they reacted to these experiences in the same manner that I did. In fact, I am aware that there are some individuals who credit their time at Carlbrook for improving or even saving their lives.

  Given the sensitive nature of the material presented in the book, I have changed the names and certain identifying characteristics of individuals. In some instances, I also have created composite characters and altered the timing and/or locations of events. I left only two names unchanged: my own, Elizabeth Gilpin, and that of the institution that forever changed my life.

  Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

  —Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

  Prologue

  SOMETIMES I THINK I was born afraid of the dark. Hall lights, bedside lamps, a flashlight hidden beneath the covers—nothing made me feel safe in the middle of the night. The setting sun filled me with dread, and twilight came with an impossible choice. Waking life and dreaming life were both unbearable at night. I was afraid of my own shadowy thoughts and even more terrified of the faceless man who haunted me in my nightmares.

  Inside my picture-perfect brick house on my quiet Southern street, where the hand-striped walls matched the custom-tailored curtains, was my pink room. It was perfectly appointed, the sheets and pillowcases monogrammed with my initials: E.L.G., written in cursive. I would lie in my bed night after night, paralyzed with fear but too embarrassed to admit it.

  I had been right to fear the dark. The faceless man came for me after all, only in real life he had a faceless partner. They kidnapped me from my own home in the middle of the night, and no one stood in their way.

  At fifteen, I was angry and defiant, in trouble more often than not. So my parents hired the man from my nightmares to take me away.

  This is what I remember from the night my whole life changed:

  First, there’s light. Bright and blinding, it shoots fear through my body before my brain knows how to react. My vision is fuzzy and there are shadowy faces leaning over me. I blink. Two strangers come into focus, and their hands clasp around my wrists and ankles, holding me down. My brain is hazy, hungover. I can’t move and I’m terrified.

  “What’s happening?” I say. “Who are you?”

  The strangers in my room are adults. A man and a woman, large and dressed in black. I’m wearing powder-blue pajama pants and an enormous white T-shirt bearing the logo of a youth tennis camp. I’m fifteen years old and my nightmare is coming true.

  “Let’s go.” The man is pulling me from my bed.

  “No.” I kick my legs wildly.

  “I’m not asking.”

  I realize that I’m screaming. That I’ve been screaming this whole time. The shock has made me inarticulate and wild, my voice like an animal’s. I focus and call out for help. Again and again I scream for someone to come save me. The strangers don’t try to stop me. They understand it doesn’t really matter.

  “Your parents know we’re here,” the woman says. “And you’re coming with us.”

  “Fuck that.”

  She grabs my shoulders and yanks me from the bed. I reach for a pillow to fend her off.

  “Where are you taking me?”<
br />
  I’m on my feet now, still trying to wrestle away from my kidnappers. I’m not wearing shoes. I need to pee.

  “There are plenty of bathrooms on the road,” the woman says in response.

  The man tightens his grip as he drags me out into the hall. I understand now why my mom chose this weekend to take my brother and sister out of town. How long has she been planning this? Did she have “Elizabeth gets kidnapped” written down in her calendar?

  “Ow.” Beefy fingers dig into my flesh. “You’re hurting me.”

  The strangers march me down the long corridor, past studio portraits of three well-groomed, blond children. With manufactured smiles, we could have been in the stock photo that came with the frame. I see another figure looming in the shadows, right by the front door. It’s my father. He’s in his pajamas, standing tall and calm with his arms folded across his chest.

  Has he slept? Did he brush his teeth and get into bed? Did he set an alarm for the arrival of his daughter’s kidnappers?

  I look at him now, my eyes wet and pleading. I want him to intervene, to tell my abductors there’s been some kind of misunderstanding.

  It’s okay, my daddy is just trying to scare me.

  And it’s working. I’m terrified, desperate to stop whatever has just been set in motion.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I ask when I reach the door.

  My father says nothing. He just stares at me with unblinking eyes. If those irises contain any emotion at all, it’s resolve. His mind is made up: This is what I deserve.

  Finally he mouths a single phrase: I’m sorry.

  And that’s it. The strangers drag me through the front door. A black SUV is parked in the driveway, taking up the spot normally occupied by my mom’s car. I tumble into the backseat and pound on the reinforced window. I scream and flail as the car pulls out of the driveway and takes me away, forever.

  I don’t know it then, but I will never set foot in that house again. As the SUV logs mile after mile on the highways of South Carolina, I sit so silent and angry that the female escort joins me in the back, afraid of what I might do. I feel all hope slip away as we cross the state line and head toward the mountains.

  There is another nightmare waiting for me deep inside the woods of Appalachia, a mean and twisted version of reality. And something unimaginable after that. I lost control of my own life the moment those strangers pulled me from my bed, and it would be many years before I’d get it back.

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  MY MOTHER HAS a saying that nothing good ever happens after midnight. Growing up, I must have heard those words a thousand times. Always in the same tone of voice, her high Southern lilt dropped down an octave, less proverb than warning. And really, I should have listened. My whole life might have turned out differently if I’d only bothered to heed her advice.

  Or at the very least, if I hadn’t tried quite so hard to prove her wrong.

  It was about 12:15 when the cops arrived to bust up our little party in the woods. It wasn’t exactly a rager, just a dozen teenagers hanging out by the train tracks on a Friday night. Enjoying the fresh South Carolina air and a case of Bud Light.

  I was sitting on Nick’s lap. At fifteen, how good I felt at any given time was directly related to my proximity to my crush, this tousle-haired junior who wasn’t exactly my boyfriend. I’d been sharing his foldout chair for most of the night and my head was spinning, though I’d had only a single beer. I was drunk with infatuation—and that made it all the more annoying when the cops showed up.

  “Oh, shit!” someone said. “Cops.”

  I leapt off Nick’s lap.

  Headlights flashed from the other side of the tracks. They blinded us as we scattered and made a run for the row of cars parked on the road. I dashed across the clearing. I must have reached the cars before Nick because I didn’t see him anywhere.

  As I looked around frantically, I felt someone grab my arm and push me into the passenger seat of the nearest car. I scrambled to close the door as the engine started up. We peeled out of the woods in a cloud of dust and screeching tires, and careened alongside the tracks for a few frenzied minutes.

  “Fuck. That was close.”

  It was Jason talking. I’d known him for years, even though I was a freshman and he was a junior. He was in the same class as Nick and my brother, Philip. He and Philip were friends, but it was my father who knew him best. My dad, a surgeon and a sports buff, was the unofficial team doctor for the school football team, and Jason was the star player. If I were any other girl, I would have been thrilled to find myself in the passenger seat of that silver 4Runner.

  “Are we sure they’re gone?” Rebecca said from the backseat.

  I looked around. It was just the three of us in the car, and the road behind us was dark. Either the cops were on the trail of another group or they hadn’t bothered to follow us at all.

  “I think so,” Jason said, grinning with adrenaline. “Man, that could have been bad.”

  As we drove, Rebecca fielded calls from the other cars.

  “Cool. I’ll tell them,” she said. “So everyone’s going to Hannah’s.”

  “Everyone?” I said. “So they all got out okay?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  Okay. So that must mean Nick isn’t hurt or in prison.

  But it also means he left without me.

  “Jason,” Rebecca said, “did you hear me? I said Hannah’s house.”

  Jason nodded. But he was driving in the wrong direction.

  “Are you, like, lost?”

  He glanced at Rebecca in his rearview mirror. He raised an eyebrow and smiled. “No, I’m not lost.”

  “Then where are you going?”

  “I’m making a stop,” he said. “We should pick up weed.”

  Rebecca shrugged and leaned back. Jason was driving farther away from the area we all lived in. He seemed to be heading downtown, near the college.

  “Um, how much longer?” I said.

  “Close. Like half a mile. I know a spot.”

  We had just escaped a close call with the cops. Wasn’t that enough excitement for one night? I wanted to get back to Nick, but I couldn’t exactly say that. I couldn’t claim I needed to be home for curfew either. Everyone already knew I was spending the night at Melanie’s, which was basically like saying, “Drop me off sometime before the first bell on Monday.” Melanie hadn’t had a curfew since middle school—the year her mom got sick and her dad became permanently overwhelmed. Now that it was just her and her father, she basically lived without rules. She didn’t have to worry about coming home a little tipsy, or not at all. Which meant that for tonight, neither did I.

  We pulled onto a darkly lit block just as my phone rang. It was Nick. Sure, he’d abandoned me, but at least he was checking in.

  “Hey,” I said. “You going to Hannah’s?”

  “Already here. Where are you?”

  “I’m with Jason and Rebecca. Buying weed.”

  “Seriously?” Nick said. “Where?”

  Jason shifted to a slow roll. He stuck his hand out the window and held up his pointer finger.

  “What are you doing?” Rebecca said.

  “That’s the sign,” Jason said. “A number one.”

  “Some shady house,” I said into the phone. “Where Jason knows the sign.”

  “Bullshit.” Nick laughed. “He’s gonna get played.”

  As ridiculous as it seemed, Jason was right. He knew the sign. A minute later, a twentyish guy in a hoodie came outside.

  “Yo,” the dude said, glancing around. “How much?”

  “Let’s do an eighth.”

  “Forty,” the guy said. “I’ll be right back.”

  The guy headed back inside to retrieve his product. Jason pulled two crisp twenties from his wallet.

  “Wow,” I said. “That actually worked.”

  “We’ll see,” Jason said. “Sometimes they try to rip you off. Especially if they thin
k you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  So maybe that’s what “the sign” is for. To identify chump teenagers who don’t know what they’re doing.

  The guy came back and passed a baggie through the window. Jason started to open it right there in the car.

  “What the fuck are you doing, bro?”

  “Checking the quality.”

  “No, man,” the dealer said. “Pay me and get out of here.”

  “Chill. I just gotta check it.”

  “Give me my fucking money and go check it somewhere else.”

  “Then you’ll have my money and I’ll have shit weed.”

  “What are you trying to say?” The dealer leaned forward, attempting menace. “You insulting my product? Punk-ass kid.”

  By then, Jason had the bag open. He sniffed it and shook his head. It was dirt weed after all.

  “Fuck this,” he said.

  The next few seconds were a blur. Jason put his car in gear. The dealer jumped onto the 4Runner’s running board and grabbed the rack attached to the roof. Suddenly Jason was driving, the guy was clinging to the car, and none of us knew what to do next. Jason pounded his window, trying to shake the guy off, but he wouldn’t let go. I screamed for Jason to slow down, Rebecca just plain screamed, and Nick was still on the phone, asking for an explanation.

  “Elizabeth. Talk to me.”

  And then: silence. Not the relative quiet of turning the volume knob down or a temporary lull in the mechanisms of the world. This was a truly empty sound, the kind of silence you’re not supposed to come back from. But I guess I’m just lucky that way.

  “Oh my god, oh my god, holy shit.”

  After the sonic cocoon of total unconsciousness, Rebecca’s shrieking was especially alarming. I opened my eyes slowly. The first thing I saw was the splintered windshield of Jason’s 4Runner. Then it was a clump of my own hair suspended in the spiderwebbed glass. It took a moment to realize those images were directly connected. The third thing I saw was the imprint of my own head in the glass. I had caused the windshield to crack when I slammed halfway through it.