Dedication
For Beth,
in loving memory
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Arriving
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
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
Leaving
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Becoming
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Mia’s Red Oak Poetry List
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Jessie Ann Foley
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
Arriving
I TOLD YOU I WAS TROUBLE
YOU KNOW THAT I’M NO GOOD.
—AMY WINEHOUSE, “YOU KNOW I’M NO GOOD”
1
MY NAME IS MIA DEMPSEY, and I am a troubled teen.
I’m a sleep-with-random-boys-I-meet-in-the-Fullerton-underpass kind of troubled.
A 1.7-grade-point-average kind of troubled.
A stick-and-poke-heart-on-my-upper-left-boob kind of troubled.
A peppermint-schnapps-in-my-water-bottle-during-first-period-American-history kind of troubled.
A punch-my-stepmom kind of troubled.1
Of all the ways that I am troubled, it’s this last one, so far as I can tell, that has landed me in here.
Maybe if I had just apologized to Alanna, I’d still be in my own room at home, surrounded by my books and journals, my laptop and my closetful of shoplifted clothes, instead of lying on this creaky aluminum bunk bed, staring up at rusty springs while, above me, some weird stranger whimpers in her sleep.
But I am not good at apologizing.
For me, every time I try to say I’m sorry or I love you, the words dissolve on my tongue like tabs of emotional acid.
Still, in my defense, how could I apologize after what she said to me?
That day, as Alanna held the bag of frozen corn over her face, her lap piled high with bloody Kleenex, my dad—called home from work in the middle of the day once again to deal with a Mia Crisis—kept asking: Why, Mia? Why? Why would you do this?
I knew why, and so did Alanna, but I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t repeat the words that had come out of her mouth and had triggered my fist, because I knew there was a chance he might agree with those words. And if he did, it would slice into me so deep I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep acting like I didn’t care.
2
“TROUBLED TEEN.” What a stupid phrase. First of all, you’ll never catch any self-respecting human between the ages of thirteen and nineteen referring to herself as a “teen.” “Kid,” “girl,” “person”: those are all fine. “Teen,” however, is a social construct, a word that should never be used to describe actual people but instead reserved for all those not-too-childish but also not-too-sophisticated products that adults in marketing meetings are always trying to convince us we can’t live without: Fuzzy, utterly functionless beanbag chairs. Glittery phone cases. Rainbow-striped scrunchies. Crop tops that claim to be a size six but are actually the size of a Post-it note. Pretty much anything with pom-poms on it.
And “troubled”? To me, this is a word that brings to mind someone sitting in a library, staring off into space, thoughtfully stroking her chin as she ponders a difficult—a troubling—algebraic equation. I wish I were troubled. Instead, what I am is enraged.
At what, exactly, I couldn’t tell you. The world, my place in it, and everyone who populates it—does that narrow it down? Anyway, it doesn’t matter, since “Red Oak Academy: A Therapeutic Girls’ Boarding School for Chronically Pissed-Off Humans Between the Ages of Thirteen and Nineteen” doesn’t flow off the tongue nearly as well as “Red Oak Academy: A Therapeutic Girls’ Boarding School for Troubled Teens.”
Seriously, what is it with adults and their euphemisms? Why are they so terrified of calling things what they actually are? For example, why does Alanna get all bent out of shape when I call Lauren and Lola my half sisters? Why can’t you drop the “half”? she asks. They’re just your sisters. But that isn’t true. It’s not like I don’t love the twins, but the fact is, they came out of Alanna’s vagina, and I didn’t. End of story.
And why have all my teachers insisted, since I was six years old, in calling me “gifted”? I’m not gifted. I’m just smart. I read a ton, I test well, and I like writing almost as much as I like cutting class to smoke weed in the parking lot behind the bankrupt Sears at Six Corners. So what? What does “gifted” even mean? How is it a gift, being bored as fuck at school my whole life, having to pretend to fumble over words like “prodigious” and “irrelevant” when I’m asked to read aloud so the other kids won’t think I’m a freak? Feeling like my brain is always cranking, like it can never shut off, like the only thing that can calm it down is to inhale a book or a drug or a boy?
“Perhaps Mia is troubled because she’s so gifted.”
This was Mr. Cullerton’s brilliant assessment of me when I had my last suspension hearing.
“Or maybe,” Alanna had said, because she just couldn’t help herself, “it’s because of what happened to her mother.”
And that’s the thing. Alanna gets all butthurt that I won’t drop the “half” from “half sisters” when I talk about Lauren and Lola. But she has never once asked me to call her Mom.2 She loves bringing up the stuff with my real mom, because for her, it ties everything up in a nice little package. It gives an explanation for why I am the way I am, because if there’s one thing adults love, even more than euphemisms, it’s the concept of cause and effect. If Alanna and my dad can believe that what happened to my mother is the cause, and my being a Troubled Teen™ is the effect, then they can avoid the two alternative explanations: (1) that people like me are just born bad for no reason at all; or (2) that they made me the way I am, by some central mistake in how they raised me. You don’t have to be gifted to see why it’s easier to simply blame it all on a dead woman and move on.
3
YOU DON’T WIND UP at a therapeutic boarding school until you have run entirely out of second chances and your parents have run entirely out of patience.3 I’ll b
e the first to admit that Dad and Alanna tried plenty of other tactics before it came to this: phone restrictions and confiscations, curfews, grounding, consequence charts, behavioral contracts, chore wheels, sending me to volunteer at a soup kitchen, sending me to pound nails and carry wood at my uncle’s contracting job. This is not to mention all the consequences I got at school—attendance contracts, detentions, in-school and out-of-school suspensions, endless lectures from teachers about “wasted potential;” not to mention all the various therapists I’ve been sent to since what happened to my mother happened; not to mention all the drugs said therapists have put me on over the years—Adderall and Ritalin and Zoloft and Ativan—and those are just the ones I can name off the top of my head.
But none of it worked.
I’m still me.
I’m still bad.
So now I’m here.
4
WHEN YOU ARE SENT to a therapeutic boarding school like this one, there is no orientation, the way you might have at a normal high school. That’s because there is no regular start date to the school year. Every girl arrives at a different time, at whatever point in the year her troubledness becomes too troubling for those around her to deal with anymore.
So they don’t call it orientation. They call it intake, which sounds much more clinical and scary because, as I soon learned, it is much more clinical and scary.
My intake occurred in the middle of October my junior year, three days after I punched Alanna in the face.
It was a Saturday, and I’d spent it as I often had over the past few months, hanging out with Xander.
Xander is my Xanax dealer.
Yes, you heard that right.
Xander is also—well, I guess was also, since I now live several hundred miles away from him and don’t have access to Wi-Fi—someone I hooked up with from time to time. One of those times happened to be the same day Alanna forgot her lunch in the fridge. She stopped home from the school where she teaches to grab it, which is how she stumbled upon Xander and me under a blanket on the family room couch when we should have been in fifth-period Spanish. Xander pulled up his pants and literally just ran for it, which left me naked and alone with a very angry stepmother who had now forgotten, for the second time that day, all about her Tupperware of minestrone soup. That’s when she said the thing she said. And then I punched her. And then, three days later: intake.
5
XANDER IS THE RICHEST KID in school. His dad is from Germany and owns a semipro basketball team in Düsseldorf, which is why he has a full-sized basketball court in his basement with the team’s logo—a snowy owl with its wings spread wide—painted onto the floor in the middle of center court. This is ironic because Xander himself failed PE last year, as did I, which is actually how we met. Coach Townsend was making our class run the mile, but neither Xander nor I would do it. For a week straight, we both refused to change into our gym uniforms. Coach was more confused than angry at our behavior.
Every day he’d say to us, “You guys know you have to run the mile to pass gym, right?”
We’d nod.
Then he’d say, “So, basically, by choosing not to complete this one simple task, you are ensuring your failure of this course.”
We’d nod.
“And there’s nothing I can do to help you from here on out.”
We’d nod again, this time sympathetically, just so he understood it was nothing personal. We both liked Coach Townsend well enough; we just didn’t feel like running the mile. Shaking his bald head, Coach would then jog off, and Xander and I would spend the next forty-five minutes sitting together in the bleachers, flirting happily while the other kids ran around the gym, showing off for each other like unneutered cocker spaniels at the Westminster dog show.
It goes without saying that Xander hates his dad. Kids like Xander always hate their dads. But actually, I’m a fan of Mr. Konig. Not that I’ve ever met him or anything; he works, like, ninety hours a week. I just like the idea of him—I like his style. I like the fact that the basketball court isn’t even the most ostentatious aspect of his home, or even of his basement. That designation goes to the wine cellar, which is adjacent to the basketball court, just off the laundry room. It’s a wide space, dimly lit, with limestone walls and carefully regulated cool air that smells like crushed grapes and money. There are so many rare bottles of wine in there that there’s actually a code to open the door.4 A guy like Mr. Konig could choose to donate his cash to cancer hospitals or famine relief or even snowy owls, which I’m pretty sure are endangered, but what does he do with it instead? He stockpiles expensive booze. He doesn’t even try to pretend like he’s a good person, which makes him different from most other adults I know. Give me an unapologetic greed monster over a hypocrite any day.
On this particular night, the night of my intake, Xander was furious because he’d just learned that his dad had kicked him off the family phone plan.
“He says I’m spoiled and I’ve never had to work for anything and I don’t understand the value of money,” Xander fumed. “Well, who does he think made me this way?”
“You know,” I said, “things haven’t been so great at my house, either, since my stepmom walked in on us. Thanks for asking, though.”
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, running two hands through his wild Teutonic curls. “God. I hate the way they control us.” He drummed his fingers on the polished hardwood of the basketball court, then leaped up suddenly.
“Come on!” He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me to my feet. “I have an idea.”
“What is it?”
“We’re gonna drink my birthday bottle tonight.”
“Wait—I thought your birthday was in March.”
“It is. I’m talking about my birthday bottle.”
I was confused.
“When I was a baby,” he explained, leading me across the court toward the wine cellar, “my parents bought this French Bordeaux that was bottled the year I was born. It’s been down here aging ever since. The idea is you open it on your twenty-first birthday and it’s supposed to be this way of starting your adulthood with something beautiful and rare and classy instead of, I don’t know, ten shots of Fireball or whatever.”
“God,” I said. “That’s—I mean, that’s kind of cool. Do you really want to ruin that over a phone plan?”
“Yes.” He tapped the code into the security system and pulled open the door. “Screw him. And anyway, it’s already been aged seventeen years. It’s still going to possess a gorgeous mouthfeel.”
I rolled my eyes. I had no idea what “mouthfeel” meant, but I certainly wasn’t going to give Xander the satisfaction of asking. He loved to show off his wine knowledge to me because oenology was one of the very few fields that he knew more about than I did. He rummaged around the wall until he found the bottle, coated in a fine layer of dust. Rubbing it with the hem of his polo, he explained to me that back in the year of our birth, the Bordeaux region of France was incredibly hot—crazy, record-breaking hot—and also incredibly dry, with droughts that didn’t break until mid-August. This meant that most of the wines from that year and that region turned out to be crap. But this one, he said, was meant to be, for complex reasons having to do with clay and soil and shade and shadow, utterly sublime.
“I don’t think we should do this,” I told him. “By the time you turn twenty-one, you might not hate your dad anymore.”
But it was too late. Xander had already sliced off the foil at the top and was attacking the cork with an opener he’d lifted off a hook on the wall. There were crystal-stemmed glasses above us, hanging upside down and twinkling like chandeliers, but he took the first swig straight from the bottle.
“Whoa,” he said, handing it to me and closing his eyes as he swallowed. “Incroyable.”
If someone had told Xander that twenty-year-aged Cheetos were a delicacy, he would have eaten a handful and had the same reaction. The thing about Xander was that he had no mind of his own—no real taste. I thought
to myself, as I took the bottle from him, that I couldn’t wait to get out into the world, the big world, the world outside of high school, where I could meet guys who actually knew something about life and didn’t have to fake it.
I took a long drink of the stuff, and you know what I tasted?
Dirt.
Heat.
Dry wind.
Gravel and clay and loam and worms.
I know, it sounds disgusting, right?
It wasn’t.
It was, in fact, incroyable.
I kept thinking, as we passed the bottle back and forth, our lips and tongues staining red, that this Bordeaux from France was bottled when Xander and I were just a couple of newborns who’d never hurt anyone or done anything wrong, who were made of nothing but love and milk and hope and promise. The wine was an inversion of us. It just kept getting better and better, while Xander and I kept getting worse and worse.
By the time the bottle was empty, the heat and dirt and clay of it had settled directly in my head, so that when we had sex on the floor of the wine cellar I moaned dutifully, even though I could barely feel it. Afterward, we split a joint, a king-sized bag of Twizzlers, and a couple benzos Xander had stolen from his mother. Then I walked home by myself, bare-armed in the October rain, too fucked-up to feel the cold, and passed out in the basement before the soothing pink flicker of Real Housewives reruns.
6
THE BIRTHDAY BOTTLE and the pills and the weed and maybe even the overdose of licorice all contributed to the fact that I wasn’t able to fight back very well when the transport men came for me.
I’m not joking—that’s their official title. Transport Men. Like we’re living in a Marvel franchise or something.
I thought I was dreaming when they grabbed me at first, their voices soothing but their grips firm. By the time my brain had caught up to my circumstances, it was too late to do anything about it. I was already strapped into the back of what I now know was the Red Oak Academy Abductionmobile, and out the window I could see Dad and Alanna, Lauren and Lola, huddled together at the end of the driveway.
You Know I'm No Good Page 1
