“Nah. Just sprain it.”
I was halfway up the tree by then. I tried to mimic Allison’s move, but my instincts took over and my other foot came down at the last second.
“Dammit!”
“Guys, there’s no point.” Marissa grabbed the back of Allison’s shirt to keep her from the tree.
“We can totally make this work,” I said. “Maybe a higher tree?”
“There’s no point,” she repeated. “Best-case scenario, you’ll get x-rays and a real doctor. Worst case, some guy in town who thinks he knows how to set a bone.”
“Or Nate,” I said. “He seems like the type.”
Marissa shrugged. “Either way you’re only gonna end up right back here. Hiking in a fucking cast.”
“At least you’d get to sleep in a real bed for a while,” Allison said. “Oh god, and take a shower.”
“Hardly.” Marissa shook her head. She craned her neck to make sure the staff was still clustered around the radio. “Wanna hear about the time I got West Nile?”
Marissa launched into her story. Really, it was about the time she didn’t get West Nile, but that’s just getting technical. It was only her second week in the woods when the illness hit. Fever, rash, swollen glands. At first the staff accused her of faking her symptoms. They made her hike with a fever and wouldn’t let her eat hot. Marissa kept getting sicker and sicker and the other girls were convinced she had West Nile virus. Finally, the staff decided to take her into town where a doctor let them know she actually had a kidney infection.
“The worst case he’d ever seen,” Marissa said. “Said that out loud and everything.”
The doctor ordered a week of bed rest. The staff gave her forty-eight hours to recover. She spent two days in a run-down motel with a counselor on constant guard. She put cardboard over the windows and covered the bathroom mirror.
“And after all that, they wouldn’t even let me take a fucking shower.”
“Holy shit,” I said. “That’s insane.”
It was insane. And it really killed the mood. By the time the staff called us over, we’d lost all sense of excitement. Things didn’t get any better when we heard Stephanie’s fate.
Kendra cleared her throat. “Stephanie will no longer be a part of our group. She’ll remain in the woods with two dedicated staff members, but she won’t have the privilege of remaining a part of this unit.”
It was a serious consequence. It reminded me how high the stakes really were. Maybe Stephanie really did remain in the woods. But we never saw her again. More likely she ended up in lockdown.
Nine
Nine felt right. Familiar. It was the number on all my old soccer jerseys, Mia Hamm’s number. She was wearing nine when her team won the World Cup, when they secured Olympic gold. It’s right there on the poster taped to my bedroom wall, the one I placed directly at my eye line so I’d see it first thing every morning.
I really thought I could be just like her one day. I thought I could be like all the women on my wall. Tara Lipinski. Dominique Dawes. Brandi Chastain. But I was nothing like those women and I never would be. I was suddenly embarrassed to yell out that I was Nine.
I didn’t deserve it. I was no Mia Hamm.
Eight
“Packs unzipped, right now,” a staffer yelled. “Don’t make me say it twice.”
All six counselors stared us down, pacing the area on high alert. They were like detectives, hot on the trail of a missing knife. It had been in the staff tent and now it wasn’t—stolen, they were convinced, by one of us.
“No one moves until we find it.”
They went through our packs one by one. All of our things, folded just so, were dumped straight out onto the ground. At first, the thought that one of the other girls had stolen a knife was kind of exciting.
Maybe we can stage a mutiny. Or hold the staff hostage while we eat all their bacon.
But as they searched the piles over and over again I started getting restless. I hopped from one foot to the other to keep my legs from cramping. Sitting down, of course, was out of the question.
“It’s obviously not here.” I kept my voice low so only Marissa could hear me.
My friend nodded. “Probably buried out by the latrine or something.”
“Who do you think it was?”
“No idea. Carolina?”
“Maybe. Or one of the new girls.”
“Oh my god.” Marissa’s eyes went wide. “What if it was Stephanie?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And that’s why she disappeared. She tried to stab her guardians.”
But the two staffers who’d remained with Stephanie had been back for days. They were there right in front of us, taking apart bear bags and turning sleeping bags inside out. And they both seemed completely unstabbed.
“Holy shit.”
Marissa and I had the thought at the exact same time. We tried to keep from laughing.
“What if they stabbed Stephanie?”
The knife never turned up. Who knew if it was ever even missing at all? It was possible the whole thing was another game, a way for the staff to mess with our heads and maintain control.
Seven
I’ve always hated green peppers. As a kid, I refused to eat them. After many dinner table standoffs, I finally wised up and started hiding them in my napkin. Even in the woods, half-starving and deficient in every vitamin not found in ramen, green peppers were the one vegetable I couldn’t stand to eat.
At first it didn’t matter much. Most weeks our veggie was a cucumber, or maybe a few pieces of cauliflower. But as the season turned, the ever-durable bell pepper entered heavy rotation. I would hide my weekly ration and bury it as soon as I could sneak away. Which was a fine strategy until the random pack searches started in the aftermath of the missing knife.
“What is this?”
Kendra held up my bear bag like it was contraband. Inside, a week’s worth of uneaten peppers had gone limp and wrinkled.
“I don’t like raw peppers,” I said.
“And I don’t care. You should have eaten them by now.”
I nodded, hoping that if I seemed sorry enough Kendra would move on. As if Kendra ever moved on from anything without doling out some sort of humiliation.
“Would have been a whole lot easier for you,” she said, “if you’d eaten them with your meals. Instead of all at once.”
“There’s no way I could possibly do that.”
“Better figure it out. Until you finish every last bite, no one can start hiking. Don’t make me have to tell Rick you are being difficult again.”
Just the thought of all those peppers made my stomach churn. But Kendra meant what she said, and I didn’t want to be the reason everyone else got stuck with a night hike. So I sat down with a jug of water and began to eat. It was that or maybe I’d end up like Stephanie.
I figured the quicker, the better. The more water, the better. I felt like throwing up after the first bite and I just wanted it to be done. So I chewed and swallowed and chugged. The food rose back up and I forced it down. I’d eaten almost all the peppers along with half a gallon of water when it finally became too much. I leaned forward and vomited up a bright green concoction. My half-chewed pepper bile sat in a neat pile on the ground.
At least that’s the end of it.
But it wasn’t. Kendra examined the mess.
“You did that on purpose. You didn’t even chew.”
“Yes I did,” I said.
She shrugged. “Eat your vegetables, Elizabeth. No one hikes until you do.”
She looked at the ground. It took me a moment to realize what she meant. She wanted me to eat my own vomit, right off the ground.
This has to be my low point. No way it gets worse than this.
Six
“What are Separates?”
It was one of the new girls talking. She was fresh off Earth Phase and overly enthusiastic about being allowed to speak. The girl still had the shine of shampoo in her hair and he
r face wasn’t filthy, and her legs were shaved. Stubbly, but shaved. It was something I hadn’t even thought about for ages.
“Pretty much what it sounds like,” Kendra said. “For the next three days each of you will be confined to a plot of land. We will bring your meals directly to you. There will be no speaking, not even to staff.”
“What if we have an emergency?” the new girl said.
“Unless it’s a matter of life or death, no speaking. Any thoughts you have, write them down in your journal. You may read. You may write. I recommend you do both. This is a time for silent contemplation. It’s an opportunity to reflect on the choices you’ve made thus far and the choices you plan to make going forward.”
The new girl groaned. But Separates sounded more like a gift than a punishment to me. Three days without the staff hovering over my shoulder? Three days off from hiking? It was practically a dream come true.
“Any questions?” Kendra said. “Well, write them down in your notebook.”
I was taken to my section of the woods. I set up my shelter and looked around. None of the other girls were close enough to identify by sight, but I could see their orange T-shirts peeking out from behind the trees. It was nice to be alone, and my setup actually felt a little cozy. Immediately, I thought about how nice it would be to fall asleep with the warm sun on my face. But napping didn’t qualify as self-reflection and was thus forbidden. Given how frequently they checked up on us, there was no point trying to get away with it.
We definitely couldn’t run. They had taken our boots, leaving us with just those Crocs. I had my journal and the book we’d all been given: Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl’s account of surviving a World War II concentration camp.
I didn’t feel like bullshitting deep thoughts in the pages of my notebook—I had a feeling anything I wrote would travel straight from my pencil to the staff and possibly even to Rick. My initial bliss was beginning to curdle. It was too much solitude with nothing to do but throw rocks at the trees.
Bull’s-eye. That makes six games for Elizabeth and four for the tree.
Once I’d mastered tree darts there was nothing left to do but read. So I finally cracked open Man’s Search for Meaning. It was, to my great surprise, an incredibly inspiring book. I kept reading even as the sun was going down and my eyes had to strain to make out the words. The fact that these people had survived under such terrible and cruel conditions almost made me angry at myself. As bad as the woods may have been, it wasn’t a Nazi concentration camp. Not even close.
I still have choices. I still have some control.
As I read on, I realized that Frankl was actually making the point that survival is relative. That even in the darkest situations, an individual’s attitude has a real effect on whether or not they make it through. The message really spoke to me. I couldn’t control my circumstances, but I could control my own reactions. I could choose to let my rage fizzle out instead of exploding every time I was provoked. I knew the staff expected me to be angry. That it was part of the reason I was still in the woods with no end in sight. They were looking for the girl who had nearly jumped out of my parents’ car into oncoming traffic, the girl my escorts thought they’d have to restrain.
The anger hadn’t gone anywhere. It was still simmering inside me, always threatening to boil over. But all of a sudden, it felt like fuel. It meant that I was strong, that part of me still wanted to survive. I didn’t write any of this in my journal, of course, but I thought about it all night.
Five
The weather took another turn when the sky got cloudy and stayed that way for a long time. Late summer had transformed into early fall. Appalachian monsoon season. This is what all the storm drills were for. Every time the sky cracked open we’d all gather in an open field to sit on our packs, feet planted on the ground in case lightning struck. We’d stay like that for hours until the rains finally stopped and we could go off and eat our dinner or bundle up inside our sleeping bags. Coziness, I was learning, was a relative concept.
It often rained for days on end before a reprieve came in the form of a sunny morning. Dry weather was a double-edged sword. It meant longer hikes even though the days themselves were getting shorter. Sometimes we wouldn’t reach our new campsite until sunset and we’d rush to set up our shelters in the dwindling light.
One night I climbed into my hastily arranged sleeping bag without bothering to look around. I was exhausted and cold, ready for sleep’s numbing embrace. I turned onto my side, expecting my head to touch down in dreamland. Instead it landed on something slimy and wet, something that squished. I sat up immediately.
That was an alien. I just touched an alien.
It was much worse. It was a slug. A long, fat slug that left a trail of mucus on my sleeping bag.
Another bedtime disaster came after a week of clear skies, so cloudless I convinced myself the stormy season must be over. A routine day of hiking brought us to yet another identical campsite. A seasoned veteran when it came to finding the best sleeping areas by now, I was particularly excited whenever I came across a ditch or a crevice between two trees. The right trench could make you feel almost like you were sleeping in a hammock, or on colder nights, nestled inside a cocoon. It was a bonus that on this particular evening the perfect crevice happened to be right next to where Marissa was setting up her own tent. That meant we’d be able to talk a little before bed without staff overhearing and chastising us for telling “war stories.”
These nighttime chats had become as important as food. As brief and infrequent as they were, they sustained me. With Marissa, I could actually speak my mind. I was a regular fifteen-year-old having a normal conversation with her friend. Not a prisoner or a flight risk, not the girl with limited access to her own shoes. Sometimes I was even able to forget, to step outside the nightmare and just exist. For a few moments at a time, the woods receded and I remembered what it was like to feel free.
That night the woods asserted itself with extra force. It was like a punishment. Reality’s revenge because I had dared, even briefly, to escape it. I was nestled inside my cocoon, protected from the cold and as comfortable as I’d been in months. My eyelids grew heavy and I felt sleep coming toward me. The next thing I knew, I was drowning.
It took a moment to realize what had happened. I registered the water and my instincts kicked in. I leapt out of my shelter and found myself under a sudden, torrential downpour. The sky had cracked wide open, and the rain had turned my perfect, cozy crevice into a river. Everything was soaking wet. My sleeping bag and my extra clothes were completely drenched. I was soaked from head to toe.
“Come on, girls.” The staff was rushing around with flashlights. It had started storming. “This is what we’ve been drilling for.”
I shivered violently as I ran toward the road with the other girls. I put down my pack and hunkered down to wait out the thunder and lightning.
For the next three days I hiked in wet clothes. For the next three nights I slept inside a trash bag. On breaks from hiking I hung my sleeping bag in the sunniest spot I could find, hoping it would just hurry up and dry before I caught pneumonia. There was no sympathy from the counselors, who refused to let me wear the dry clothes Marissa was offering. It was my fault for picking the ditch, they said. I should have known better.
I didn’t argue and I didn’t complain. Not even once. I was beginning to control the way I reacted and it felt a little like power.
Four
But the staff didn’t like power. They didn’t like that it was getting harder to provoke me. Not that it kept them from trying anyway.
One night after a full, hard day of hiking, I was called out to handle the bear bags. I’d done it before, the nightly ritual of tossing a rope over a tree branch for our food to hang. Usually any branch taller than a bear was acceptable but not tonight. I was told to reach a specific branch, one way up the trunk of the oak tree.
“That’s too high,” I said. “I don’t think I can rea
ch it.”
The staffer smiled. “Oh, I think you can.”
I spent almost an hour trying to toss the rope over the branch. Until I got it right, no one was allowed to go to bed. So I flung it over and over, even as my arms got weaker and each toss was lower than the last.
They’re trying to provoke you. They want you to snap.
Eventually it was clear that I wasn’t going to lose my temper and I most definitely was not going to reach that tree branch. So I was relieved of my duty and another girl was brought in. She flung the rope a few times. It caught on a much lower limb, and we all went to bed.
Three
I had been dreading life in the woods without Marissa. It felt like she was my only friend in the world, and once she graduated I’d really, truly, be all alone. At the same time, I was happy she was finally getting the fuck out of this place. She was sent off to a military school in Florida, some second-tier place I’d never heard of before and would likely never hear about again, but she seemed happy.
I still think about her sometimes and hope things turned out okay for Marissa. But I never spoke to her again.
Two
Eventually, even Carolina had to graduate. She’d been there for so long, always one tiny misstep away from lockdown, and the fact that she avoided it seemed like an achievement. A pair of escorts loaded up Nate’s truck and Carolina slid into the back with barely so much as a good-bye. When the sputtering engine finally caught, Nate stepped on the gas and headed down the mountain.
I felt like I’d been in the woods for an eternity. Like whole lifetimes had gone by while I’d been hiking the same endless circle. Even still, the realization that I’d been there longer than anyone was startling. It was so hard to wrap my head around, and yet it was the truth.
One
I said it out loud just to hear what it would sound like.
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