“I’m from the Upper West Side, first of all,” sniffs Vera. “And second of all, we don’t. That shit’s toxic. If it doesn’t straight-up kill you the first time you try it, which it very well might, it gives you like a ten-second high that turns you into some foaming, inchoate vegetable. What’s fun about that? Plus, it’s trashy. I don’t want to have to go to, like, OfficeMax to get my fix.”
Trinity starts to retort, but I cut her off.
“I don’t dust, okay? I don’t do practically any of the stuff you guys just listed. The only reason I’m here is because my stepmom is a bitch and she didn’t want to deal with me anymore.”
The three of them exchange a look before bursting into gales of derisive laughter.
“What?”
“That is classic first-day talk,” Vera says, collapsing back in her chair and laughing horsily. “The whole world is against me and I did nothing wrong!”
I’m about to turn it around on Vera, ask her what she did to get here, but then she reaches up to brush a hank of black hair from her face and that’s when I see the ridged white mounds of scar tissue that jag across the inside of her delicate wrist, and other scars, smaller but numerous, slicing up her thin forearm, methodical and self-inflicted. I feel a grim sort of satisfaction then, because my secrets are all on the inside, which means I can guard them for as long as I want.
10
MY SECOND NIGHT, I’m awoken by thunder. Outside, the rain is lashing down, hissing against the wall of trees that surround campus. I’m lying on my back, listening to the sound, and to Madison’s shallow, even breathing in the bunk above me.
Eventually I get up, my feet cold on the creaking tiles, and tiptoe over to the window. I try to push it open, but it only goes up a few inches before locking in place, to prevent anyone from trying to get in or out, I guess.
But I’m not trying to run away.
I’m just trying to feel the rain on my face, that inside-outside feeling, the way I used to do when I was a kid.
When I was five, my dad bought me this princess bed, with a canopy and everything—the kind of indulgent gift a widowed man buys for his motherless daughter—and he set it up right beneath my bedroom window. I used to lay there at night with the blankets pulled up to my chin and the nighttime rain misting through the screen, dappling my face. And when it got to be too cold or too wet, I’d slam the window shut and burrow down under the covers, overcome with this delicious feeling of safety, with the rain pattering outside and a sturdy roof over my head and my dad alive and snoring across the hall.
When I got older, that window became my passage into the night, my portal for sneaking out, because I no longer wanted to be safe, it was no longer enough just to taste the rain; I wanted to feel the water over my whole body.
My dad, thinking he could solve the problem by taking away my privacy, got out his wrench and took my bedroom door off its hinges. And his tactic worked, kind of. I did stop sneaking out.
Instead, I just started leaving. Right out the front door, right in front of their faces, whenever I wanted to. Which didn’t feel good, not at all. But it still felt like a victory.
11
STARTING TODAY, I’m going to be forced to meet with Vivian St. John, PhD, for one hour every Monday and Wednesday afternoon until I get out of here. She tells me, at my first appointment in her tiny office in the back of the admin building, that she was born and raised here in Onamia. She says she’s half white, half Ojibwe, then points out at the stream running past—so close I can hear its burbling even with the window closed—and tells me that her father’s people have lived on Red Oak land for over five centuries.
“Well, no offense to your father’s people,” I say, “but this place sucks.”
“Most of our girls think that, at least at first.” She has still-black hair, good skin, and two deep dimples in the middle of her cheeks. You can tell that she was pretty before she got old. “I bet you have a lot of questions for me.”
“Just one, actually. When the fuck am I getting out of here?”
“The journey is the important thing here, Mia. Not the destination.”
“Huh. I think I read that once on a decorative poster. It was in the home decor aisle at Michaels, right next to the Live Laugh Love signs.”
“You know, Mia, your feelings of anger are perfectly normal. I’d be more concerned about you if you weren’t furious at your parents for sending you to Red Oak. It’s a drastic step, and one that can be hard to reconcile. But for most girls, that anger fades with time, and—”
“Let me guess—then the brainwashing begins, and two years later you’ll send me home, normal and happy and emotionally lobotomized?”
“Ha! I won’t say Red Oak is perfect. We might have forcibly removed your tongue piercing, Mia, but we’re not going to forcibly remove your prefrontal cortex. Even if we were a medical facility, which we’re not, a lobotomy hasn’t been performed in the United States since the 1970s. And thank goodness for that, because the procedure is as close as human beings have ever come to the surgical murder of a soul—and, no surprise, the large majority of them were performed on women. You see, even though we’ve gotten better about it, our society has never quite known how to deal with a woman who refuses to toe the line. Which is partially why schools like Red Oak exist.”
I slump back in my chair. I was wondering what kind of therapist Vivian was going to be, and now I know: the kind that loves to hear herself talk.
“Now, in terms of our ability to make you ‘normal,’ the idea of normalcy varies so wildly from culture to culture and person to person that there’s no actual benchmark that could ever be useful. So in some sense, everybody’s normal and nobody’s normal. As for happiness, of all the things Western culture has gotten wrong, this obsession with happiness might be the silliest. Trying to teach someone to be happy is about as effective as trying to cut water with scissors.”
“I thought we weren’t allowed to have scissors here.”
“I’m glad to see you’ve read the school handbook. Your dad told me you love to read.” She taps her pen against her notepad. “What’s your favorite novel?”
“Moby-Dick.”
“Wow. That’s a big one.” She arches an eyebrow at me. “Are you just saying that to impress me?”
“Why would I try to impress you when I don’t give a shit about you?”
My insult glances off her without so much as a twitch.
“What do you like best about Moby-Dick?”
“Have you read it?”
“Nah. I spent my school years reading nothing but dead white men. Now I read what I want.”
“Well, Melville was a genius. He definitely had some opinions on whiteness, that’s for sure.”
“Is that so?”
I’m expecting her to test me now, to ask me what some of those opinions were so that I can launch into a long disquisition about the whiteness of the whale that will leave her feeling both impressed and intellectually inferior, but instead she pivots the conversation completely.
“You ever read any Native lit? Louise Erdrich? Tommy Orange? Layli Long Soldier? Joy Harjo?”
I don’t answer her. I won’t give her the satisfaction of knowing that I haven’t read those authors. If she thinks that makes me ignorant, that’s her business.
“We have a wonderful little library here on campus, just behind Conifer House. Have you gotten the chance to check it out yet?”
“You mean between group chat and chores and classes and mandatory lights-out at nine o’clock? No, I haven’t.”
“Well, the next time you do get some free time, I think you’d like it there. It’s always unlocked, even at night—like a church. It’s the only place on campus, other than the walking trails, that you can go without permission during designated constructive relaxation hours.”
This interests me—slightly—but does this woman really expect me to demonstrate excitement about the prospect of being allowed to go sit by myself in a li
brary? Me, who was once the proud owner of a fake ID so authentic it had worked everywhere, not just the skeevy strip mall liquor stores but in Whole fucking Foods itself? Is this how pathetic my life has now become? So instead I just shrug and stare out the window at the moving stream.
It isn’t until forty minutes later, when I’m walking out of our session, the main two topics of which are literature and lobotomies, that I realize Vivian didn’t ask me one question about my dad or Alanna; Xander or my other boyfriends; my failing grades or my drinking or drugging or what happened to my mother. I wonder whether she’s trying to pull some Good Will Hunting shit on me, or whether she’s just dumb. I decide it’s the latter. Who cares if she’s got a PhD diploma from some fancy East Coast school hanging on her wall? I would easily be able to get into any of those Ivy League colleges, too—if I could just get the chance to go back to freshman year and do everything all over again, differently.
12
ALL MY CLASSES HERE except English are independent studies. This means that you go into a classroom and sit in front of a computer that’s programmed to block any website that isn’t a part of your personally tailored distance-learning curriculum. Math is the only period of the day that all the girls from my dorm, Birchwood House, are together, so it’s a no-brainer as to where I’m going to sit.
On Friday, the last day of my first week, Vera and I are doing more gossiping than problem-solving while across the room Ms. Gina squints at the master computer, pretending like she’s checking our work when really we can all tell she’s just scrolling through social media.
“So you’re from Manhattan,” I say to her. “Does that mean you’re rich?”
“Oh, you mean you haven’t heard my joke yet?”
“Uh—no?”
“What’s the difference between a troubled teen and an at-risk youth?”
“No clue.”
“Money.” She laughs, and submits a wrong answer on her precalc exercise. The computer bloops at her, and she gives it the finger.
“But seriously, how could my family afford to put me up at this place for two years and counting if I wasn’t disgustingly loaded? It’s kind of embarrassing, actually. I have so much privilege that if I tried to check it, it would take up the whole bottom of the airplane. My dad comes from Bahraini oil royalty. And my mom’s your prototypical Connecticut WASP. Her great-grandmother was British. Like the upper-crusty kind. Here, look.” She leans down and reaches into the clear front pocket of her backpack. She hands me an antique-looking pocket watch, with the clock face on one side and a compass on the other. It looks like it’s made of solid gold, and it’s inlaid with all sorts of swirling floral designs.
“This was hers. Both she and it survived the sinking of the Titanic.”
“Damn.” I turn the watch over in my hands. It’s as heavy and cool as a stone freshly scooped from the ocean. “So she was one of the few to make it onto an escape boat?”
“Are you kidding me? Of course Imogen Swift got a spot on an escape boat. She and her buds were draped in fur blankets and served champagne while all around them, the peasants thrashed and froze in the North Atlantic.”
“Ladies,” calls Ms. Gina, her eyes flicking up from what I can only presume is some sort of cat meme, “it better be exponential functions you two are discussing.”
“I’m just showing her the formula for growth and decay,” I answer, pretending to type something on Vera’s keyboard. “You see, Vera,” I say loudly, “y = a(1–r) to the x power.”
Ms. Gina, who I can already tell is lazy and doesn’t actually care what we’re doing as long as we do it quietly, especially on a Friday, returns to her scrolling.
“I do take some consolation in the fact that not dying on the Titanic seemed to really fuck my great-great-grandma Imogen up,” Vera continues at a lowered volume. “She wasn’t totally soulless apparently. She made it to New York and married some equally aristocratic dude when she got there, but for the rest of her life she suffered from ‘nervous fits,’ as they called them back then. Which is probably as good an explanation as any of how I inherited my issues. They were passed down to me from some corset-wearing snob sipping her bubbly and bobbing along in the ocean while all around her, drowning Irish children used their last breaths to scream for their mothers.”
I consider this for a moment as I submit my own answer to a word problem.
“So what are you saying? That trauma is hereditary?”
“Of course it is! Living through extreme guilt or trauma: that shit alters you on a cellular level. It can be suffered by our ancestors and then bleed down into us, as hereditary as hammertoe or heart disease.”
“And that,” Trin chimes in, “is just another reason why the descendants of slaves should be entitled to reparations.”
“What are reparations?”
“Shut up, Madison,” we all yell in unison, followed by an explosion of laughter, for which we are all punished with an extra half hour of homework.
13
THAT EVENING, during constructive relaxation, I decide I need a break from all my new classmates, their bickering, their drama, their rapacious need for attention. After I’ve finished my homework, I take Vivian’s advice and head over to the library. The building is nothing more than a tiny A-framed log cabin right at the edge of school property, with two narrow front windows and a red painted door, which, as she promised, is unlocked.
Inside, it’s totally quiet, except for the autumn rain pattering on the two wide skylights overhead. Dust motes swirl around in the book-scented air. It’s warm and dry, and best of all, most of the girls are playing in an interhouse Uno tournament,13 so nobody’s here but me.
At one end of the cabin, a fire burns low but steady in a black marble fireplace. I think of the fire-starter girls who go to school here and wonder why Mary Pat would flirt with disaster this way. But when I get closer, I realize that the fire is just a little flat-screen TV mounted inside the fireplace, and the screen is playing an endless loop of computerized flame. Which is so typical of adults: they like to give you the idea that they trust you, but when you step closer you realize it’s just an illusion.
Still, it’s cozy in here, with the radiators along the baseboards ticking and sighing. I walk between the narrow rows of bookcases, running my fingers along the spines, scanning the titles. One name jumps out at me because I remember Vivian mentioning it at our first session. Joy Harjo. I slip the book out from the shelf and look at the cover. Poetry. Not really my thing. It always feels so self-important: all Look at my gorgeous words with all their indecipherable deep meanings! Novels are what I like—the bigger the better, hence my love of Moby-Dick—long enough for me to get lost in. But I figure I’ll give old Joy a shot, for Vivian’s sake, because I’ve always liked doing nice things for people in ways they don’t know about and will never see. I toe off my wet shoes and curl up next to the fake fire in one of the two creaky velvet chairs on the hearth, flip to a random poem, and begin to read.
Ah, ah slaps the urgent cove of ocean swimming through the slips14
And before I even mean to, I’m thinking about her again, the most and least important person in my life: my mother, who was buried in a cove of ocean.
Well, a key, technically. Waltz Key Basin, in Florida. The water there was shallow and calm, and it spit her bloated, waterlogged body back on shore four days after Roddie put her there. I was three years old at the time, so of course nobody told me any of this. All they told me was that I wouldn’t be seeing my mom anymore because she was in heaven now. We weren’t a religious family, so I had absolutely no idea what that meant. I still don’t.
Ah, ah beats our lungs and we are racing into the waves.
There was no water in her lungs, according to the autopsy report I found when I was fourteen and got good at Google. Which means she was dead when she was dumped. She was drowned before she drowned, and I have spent many morbid hours since I read that report researching what exactly it feels like to be stran
gled to death. If Roddie compressed her carotid arteries, she would have blacked out and died quickly. But if he crushed her windpipe, it would have been long and tortuous and she would have been awake for all of it. Did you know that if your attacker is using his bare hands, as Roddie did, it can take you up to five whole minutes to die? Five minutes. At my old high school, five minutes of Mr. G’s British lit class could feel like a thousand years. So even though I have tried, I can’t imagine what five minutes of relentless pressure on your airway must feel like, your brain screaming for oxygen, and all the while as you kick and struggle and claw in a losing fight for your life, the face of your murderer—the man you thought you loved enough to run away with, abandoning your husband and your kid for—hangs over you. This is why, whenever teachers and counselors and therapists and whoever else try to lecture me about how bad choices have consequences, I always have to laugh. Who knows this better than I do? My mom made a bad choice when she chose to blow up her family and take off with some creep she met at a real estate conference. And, damn, did it ever have a consequence.
I snap shut Joy Harjo and consider Vera’s theory of hereditary suffering, of how pain is passed down like a mutated gene from one generation to the next.
If it is true, then I am fucked.
14
“SO,” VIVIAN SAYS. “You made it through your first week. How’s it going so far?”
“Well, let’s see.” I’m sitting cross-legged on her big leather chair and picking at a piece of dried granola from breakfast that’s stuck to my leggings. “I hate my dad and stepmom. I want some McDonald’s and a cup of coffee. I want to look at Instagram. I want to look at a male human. Not even touch one, necessarily. Just look at one.”
“On the bright side, I hear your classes are going well.”
“They’re independent study. It’s not like they’re hard. You just, like, sit in front of a computer and answer practice questions.”
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