“If you get bored, maybe you could tutor some of the other girls. I hear you’re something of an algebra whiz.”
“I don’t tutor. That’s what teachers get paid for.”
“Did you know that ‘algebra’ comes from an Arabic word?”
“No, I did not.”
“Al-jabr. It means ‘reunion of broken parts.’”
“Oh, I get it. You’re going for profundity today. I, the broken girl, find solace in a discipline that puts broken parts back together.”
“I’m just telling you where the meaning of the word comes from. Etymology interests me. Are you always this defensive?”
“Pretty much.”
“Well,” she says, trying a different tack, “it looks like you’ve made a few friends. I’ve seen you hanging around with Vera and Trinity quite a bit. Madison, too.”
“Yeah.” I look out the window. It’s been raining constantly, a cold, steady drizzle that, the girls tell me, should be turning into snow any day now. “Vera and Trinity are pretty cool. Madison is . . . tolerable.”
“Tell me about your friends back home. What were they like?”
“I didn’t have any friends back home.”
“Really? None at all?”
“I mean, I had people. My phone was always blowing up. Dealers, fuckboys, moth girls, that kind of thing. But I didn’t have actual friends. We were just people, usually available to each other to get into some shit. That was good enough for me.”
“Was it?”
“Yep.”
Vivian steeples her fingers and shoots me her therapist’s signature tell-me-more look. I roll my eyes.
“It’s not that I didn’t want friends. But I also liked looking at people in terms of what we could do for each other. There was no messiness. No gray areas. No commitments. If that makes sense.”
“It does, though I have to say, it sounds pretty clinical to me.”
“Maybe, but at least we were being real with each other. I can’t stand fakeness.”
“You value honesty.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Would you say that honesty is one of your core values?”
“If I were the type of person who used annoying therapy lingo, then yes, I would say that. Definitely.”
“And yet you’ve lied to your parents so many times.”
“Not my parents. My dad and stepmom.”
She raises an eyebrow at that and writes something down on her legal pad.
“And anyway, you’re wrong. I used to lie to Dad and Alanna all the time. But I stopped all that a few months ago.”
“Why?”
“It was the day my dad took my bedroom door off its hinges to keep me from sneaking out. He thought he was being a badass, right? Really laying down the law. But it was so stupid! I was like, That’s what you think is going to be the thing that controls me?”
“Was he trying to control you, do you think? Or was he trying to protect you?”
“Who cares? Every time I saw my stupid door leaning up against the wall in the garage, I actually felt sorry for him. I realized my dad was just a person. Older than me, obviously, and with more money. But no more powerful. And there was nothing he or anybody else could really do to stop me from doing what I wanted.”
“Until they sent you here.”
“Yeah. Until they sent me here. But they didn’t send me here because of all the lies I told them. They sent me here because I stopped lying to them.”
“That’s an interesting take. Tell me more.”
“It’s like you said last week. Our society hasn’t figured out how to deal with difficult women. Especially difficult young women. My dad and Alanna were pissed, more than anything, that I shattered the illusion we had all agreed upon, that I do them the courtesy of putting in a marginal effort to pretend I’m not a fuckup and they do me the courtesy of marginally pretending to believe me. But when I stopped lying to them, they couldn’t pretend anymore. So they sent me here instead—punching Alanna was just the excuse they’d been waiting for.”
“That’s a really interesting perspective, Mia.”
“You know what I’ve noticed, Vivian?”
“What?”
“That when you tell me what I say is interesting, what you really mean is that I’m right.”
15
IT’S TUESDAY AFTERNOON, and it still hasn’t stopped raining. I’ve forgotten my notebook for history independent study, so Ms. Jean gives me a five-minute pass to go back to my dorm and get it. I run across the soaked, deserted quad, slide my key card in the front door, and duck into Birchwood just as a jag of lightning blazes across the sky. Mary Pat isn’t big on downtime, and the dorm is totally deserted. Or at least that’s what I think, until I walk into my bedroom and jump back, a scream gathering strength in the middle of my chest.
There, placed neatly in the middle of our writing desk, face turned toward the window as if contemplating the oak trees, is a decapitated head, crowned with silky yellow curls.
I collapse against the doorframe and try to do my breaths, but it’s not working. I feel this howl pressing up through my body, working its way to my throat—
“Mia!”
A person, shaped like Madison but not Madison, shoots up from the top bunk.
“Stop! Mia! What’s wrong?”
This not-Madison is talking with Madison’s voice.
Since I can’t speak, I just point with a single violently trembling finger to the dismembered head.
Not-Madison leaps down from the top bunk and flicks on the desk lamp.
“Who—”
“It’s me,” she says, coming toward me and flagrantly breaking the Rule of Six Inches by grabbing my hands. “I have really bad cramps and Swizzie was already asleep in the nurse’s station because she has strep, so Nurse Melanie gave me permission to come lie down in our room before lunch. Hey. It’s me.”
I look at the face—it’s Madison’s face, wearing Madison’s glasses, but her hair is wispy and mouse brown and missing in giant patches. The hairline starts at the crown of the head, the forehead a long arc, smooth as an egg.
“That’s just my wig.”
I look from her face to the pile of yellow curls on the desk. She reaches over and turns the dismembered head so that it’s facing me, and now I see that the hair has been brushed carefully and arranged around a blank oval of Styrofoam.
“You’re . . .” I look at her, pull my hands away. “You’re bald?”
“I mean.” She runs a hand shyly along her gaping forehead. “In places.”
“Do you have cancer?”
“Ha! Maybe if I had cancer, people would actually have some empathy, instead of just thinking I’m a freak.” She smiles a little sadly and walks over to pet the silky strands of her wig as if it’s some sort of beloved pet. “Have you ever heard of trichotillomania?”
I shake my head.
“It’s a BFRB. A body-focused repetitive behavior. Sort of like the nail biting, just even less socially acceptable. I pull out my hair when I’m stressed.”
“Madison.” I know I’m gawking at her, but I can’t help it. Without her blond curls, she looks so defenseless, so damaged. “You must be really stressed.”
“Oh, this is nothing! This is way better than it was when I first got here. At least I’ve learned to leave my eyebrows alone. And my bottom lashes. The top ones, those are trickier. Those are just so satisfying to pull, you know? I have this whole ritual of pulling them out and then, like, lining them up on my wrist and seeing how long they can stay there without falling off. Does that sound weird?”
“Please don’t make me answer that question.”
“Well, trichotillomania is a lot more common than you’d think, judgy-pants. And anyway, I’m improving. My parents and Mary Pat and Carolyn have an agreement: once it all starts to grow back in, every last strand, then I can come home. Mary Pat thinks as long as I don’t regress, I’ll be out of here by the spring. In time for junior prom, i
f I can find anyone pathetic enough to take me!”
Before I can stop myself, I reach out and run a hand across her head. In the places where she’s torn out her hair, the skin is delicate and soft, like a newborn’s. It’s hard to believe there was ever hair growth there at all.
“Holy shit, Madison.”
“Don’t! Six inches!” She ducks away from my hand, her face twisted up in a pout. “How come you don’t judge Trinity? She wore acrylic nails from fifth grade straight through to when Nurse Melanie soaked them off at intake! And aren’t those just wigs for your fingers? Nobody thinks she’s a freak.”
“Oh, relax.” I sit heavily on my bed. “I don’t think you’re a freak. You just scared me, that’s all—I thought someone killed you.”
She pauses. “You thought I was dead?”
“Yes! It’s dark in here, this school is full of lunatics with pasts shrouded in secrecy, and your fucking stunt double of a head is just sitting there on our writing desk!”
“Wow.” She sits down next to me. “You were really upset, huh?”
“Well, yeah.”
“You like me.” A smile twitches on her face.
“If your standard of liking someone is not wanting them to be violently murdered and dismembered then yeah, Madison, I guess I like you.”
“Well, I like you, too, Mia.” Her smile widens into such a wedge of earnestness that I have to look away. She reaches over to hug me, and I try to bat her arm away, but she is here for this hug, so she feints past and wraps her arms around me anyway.
I will admit this to no one: it feels pretty nice.
16
TRINITY HAS THIS giant bin of nail stuff, and on the Friday of my second week, during constructive relaxation, Vera borrows it and invites me down to her room to give ourselves pedicures under the surly supervision of Dee, who is straddled at Vera’s desk chair, scrolling through her phone and loudly eating an apple. I still have some chipped red paint on my toes left over from the summer, but when I dig through the bin, I can’t find any nail polish remover.
“Banned substance,” Dee barks, looking up briefly from her screen to glare at me. “Didn’t you read your handbook?”
“That’s dumb. How am I supposed to take this red off my toes?”
“Nail polish remover contains alcohol,”15 Vera says as she shakes up a bottle of jet black organic polish. “Girls might try to drink it.”
“What kind of psycho would drink nail polish remover?”
“I’ve had it a couple times,” says Soleil. Vera’s roommate is a shifty-eyed blond junkie from Los Angeles who makes her own clothes—or used to, before she came here and lost access to needles, both the sewing kind and the vein-injecting kind. When you ask her a question, it takes her so long to respond that when I first met her I thought she’d somehow smuggled in some edibles or something.
“Are you serious? You drank nail polish remover?”
“Mm-hm.”
“What did it taste like?”
Soleil fixes her limp stare on me for so long I’m about to repeat myself. Finally she says, “Worse than mouthwash, better than pruno.”16
Dee makes a little grunt of disgust and turns her attention back to her phone while Vera bursts out laughing. “Oh my God, Soleil. They can say what they want about me, but for my money, you’re hands down the wildest bitch at Red Oak.”
Soleil’s face breaks out into a slow grin. On my first night, Madison pointed Soleil out to me as she brushed her teeth dreamily at the communal bathroom sinks and told me that her dad was some sort of big-time music producer, the kind whose name you don’t recognize but who owns half the beats on Top 40. She grew up in a glass palace in the Hollywood Hills, complete with an infinity pool that fed directly into the Pacific Ocean, and before she came here she attended that famous school all the Kardashians went to. With her heroin-chic good looks and her trust fund/burnout vibe, it occurs to me that Soleil and Xander would probably make a great couple. I wonder how much she knows about rare French Bordeaux.
“See, Mia,” Vera says, furrowing her brow with concentration as she brushes the glossy black paint across her toenails, “Soleil and I have this East Coast–West Coast rivalry thing going. She’s Tupac, I’m Biggie.”
“Don’t make that comparison, baby,” Soleil drawls from her perch on her bed, legs in the lotus position. “We’re white, and that’s culturally appropriative.”
“First of all,” Vera says, moving onto her other foot, “you’re white. I’m Arab.”
“Half.”
“Still. Not the same. Second of all, you’re a white person with dreadlocks, so you don’t get to yell at people for being culturally appropriative.”
Soleil sniffs, uncrosses her legs, and reclines back on her bottom bunk with her hands folded behind her head.
“And third,” Vera continues, “we are like Pac and Biggie, not racially, not culturally, but simply due to the fact that I’m pretty positive neither one of us will make it out of our twenties alive.”
“Vera!” I look up from my toenails, which I’ve painted red to match the chipped layer beneath. “Way to be morbid.”
“Seriously,” agrees Dee.
“What? It’s true!”
Soleil looks up at me with her big blue California eyes and nods sadly in agreement.
“Look,” Vera says. “I know Mary Pat goes out of her way to try and differentiate Red Oak from, like, prisons or drug rehab facilities, but the fact is, we have about the same recidivism rates as those places. Isn’t that right, Dee?”
“Leave me out of it.” Dee picks at a curl of apple skin stuck between her teeth. “I’m just the muscle.”
“Well, it is true, okay? When they get out of here, the vast majority of girls fall right back into the crazy shit that got them in here. It might take a week, it might take a year—but the odds are against us. Just look at the three girls who came to Red Oak the same month I did. They all maturated17 last year. And today? Jackie’s a stripper, Olivia’s a junkie, and poor Makayla’s dead.”
“Stop gossiping,” Dee yawns. “I could write you up for this.”
This elicits a brief moment of silence from all three of us. I concentrate on finishing my nails. I want to ask how Makayla died, but I don’t want to get written up and I’m also not sure I really want to know.
“Now, when I get out,” Soleil finally says, “I don’t want to roll with the same old crowd, get back into hard drugs and all that . . . and I’m gonna try not to. I swear I am. But it still might happen. And if it does, that will suck. Because I really don’t want to die.” She shrugs, stifles a yawn. “I probably will, though. What can you do?”
“Yeah,” Vera says quietly. “What can you do?”
“Um,” says Dee, looking incredulously between them. “A lot?”
We all burst out laughing at that, because one of the things about the outside world that you miss in a place like this is the chance to shock people. But later, as I walk back to my room on my heels so my pedicure doesn’t smear, I find that our laughter wasn’t enough to dislodge the dark feeling that began welling up inside of me when Vera first bought up the question of dying young.
17
WHEN I WAS IN EIGHTH GRADE, my homeroom teacher, a harried but well-meaning geriatric named Mrs. Jones, recruited me to join the math scholars club. This involved weekly meetings, word-problem-athons (don’t ask), and matching T-shirts,18 culminating in a research project that we had to present to a citywide competition.
I did my project on the Twenty-Seven Club—the group of famous musicians who all died suddenly and tragically at the age of twenty-seven. My goal was to find out whether there was a real statistical significance to the number of famous people who died at that age, but my findings determined that only 1 percent of rock-star deaths since the 1950s occurred to twenty-seven-year-old people. In other words, the whole idea of twenty-seven being a cursed, mystical year of death was more of a cultural myth than a mathematical reality. Which, anticlima
ctic as that was, didn’t stop me from winning first place and a thousand-dollar college scholarship voucher. What an interesting topic! One of the panel judges had said as she pinned a ribbon to the heinous floral blouse Alanna had purchased for me for the occasion. What made you choose it?
Well, some of the coolest people of all time died at that age, I answered in a tremulous voice. Kurt Cobain. Jimi Hendrix. Kristen Pfaff. Janis Joplin. Amy Winehouse.
My mother.19
Tonight, I’m thinking about the Twenty-Seven Club.
I’m thinking about how ever since I got to Red Oak, I’ve reassured myself again and again that I’m not like these other girls. I’m normal bad, you see, and they’re bad bad. Crazy bad. Mentally unstable bad. But after my conversation with Vera and Soleil tonight, it occurs to me that maybe I’m not as different from these girls as I first thought.
Because I, too, have always held a secret belief that I’m fated to die suddenly, tragically, and way too young.
I think about how my life these past few years has been a kind of dance around this belief, how so many of my actions have been a dare to see if it’s really true. If I was back home right now, take any given weekend and I’d probably be squeezing myself into something tight and short, getting ready to head out for the night—school night or not. I’d have my Juul charged up, my hair curled around my shoulders in long waves, my fake ID and cash I’d stolen from Alanna’s wallet nestled into the pockets of my cropped faux-leather moto jacket.20 Do I miss those kinds of nights? Not really, to be honest. What I miss is the beginning ritual, blasting music in my bedroom—Kesha or Cardi, Nicki or Ari, Gaga or King Woman, my dad’s old Guns N’ Roses and Zeppelin albums, or my mom’s Hole and Bikini Kill CDs from when she was my age. I miss sitting on the edge of my bed as the beats pulsed around me, pulling black nylons up my freshly shaven legs, the way my stockinged feet slipped so cool and smooth into my boots. I miss the blending of the shadow, the smudging of the liner, the gentle squeeze of the lash curler, the minty tingle of plumping gloss as it slicked over my lips. I miss that first step out the door, the quiet unfurling inside of me, the giving of myself to the game of chance that was the night.
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