Campus is quiet enough to begin with, especially when you’re a city kid like me and aren’t used to it. But once you step into the woods, it’s even creepier. It’s like all those pine and oak trees absorb any stray sound, and the silence becomes absolute. That’s why I almost never go for walks, even though the walking trails, peppered as they are with security cameras, are one of the few freedoms we’re allowed, given the Red Oak belief in the HEALING PROPERTIES OF MOTHER NATURE™. As the silence envelops me now, I think about turning back, but the air is fresh against my skin, and my limbs feel strong and twitchy. I feel like a penned-in horse, aching for movement. Two weeks at Red Oak. The longest I’ve gone since I was fourteen without smoking or drinking or pills. Physically, I feel very good and clean and strong. Emotionally, it’s more complicated.
By the time I reach the marshy edge of Lake Onamia, waving with cattails and duckweed and droning with the low buzz of insects, the sun is gone and the sky is a globe over the water. The stars are bright points of light glittering everywhere, and beyond them swirls a white veil of the more distant stars. The longer I look up, the more I can see. I sit on a damp log—perhaps even the famous log of the Red Oak Academy brochures—and watch as the whole sky becomes a lacy pattern of inlaid pricks of fire. I wonder, does the sky always look this magnificent and I’ve just never noticed? I wonder why it is that the most beautiful things are always the easiest to miss. I wonder how it is that I could go from being a real person, a whole person, a person with a soul and dreams, to being nothing but a punch line and a warm hole.
I guess it started halfway through my first year of high school, when my honors integrated science class took a field trip to the planetarium. I was the only freshman in the class; I’d been placed there because of my test scores. No one really talked to me, not even my lab partner, Scottie Curry. Scottie was on the Academic Bowl team, with big ears and even bigger glasses, but there was something sexy about him. For starters, he was older than me—a senior!—and whenever we did a lab he would push up the sleeves of his hipster-dork sweater to reveal thick, hairy man wrists. He was totally indifferent, or maybe just unaware, of his objective lack of popularity, because he walked around school with the same kind of swagger you might see on a star football player. Which I liked. But what I liked even more was the way he recognized right away that even though I was an underclassman and also sort of a deadbeat, with my black clothes and ever-present earbuds, I still was smarter than he was. It’s not like he was friendly, exactly, but whenever we got different results on our labs, he always deferred to me, and we got straight A’s on everything we turned in. We were an unlikely team, and I crushed on him, hugely and secretly, without daring to think he’d ever like me back. It was a nice distraction, fantasizing about him, especially because this was right around the time I found my mom’s autopsy report on the internet. Sometimes I thought he was flirting with me, but I figured it was probably all in my head—this was a senior, a guy who had applied early admission to Princeton and had a decent chance of actually being accepted. But then, right before our first semester exam, he asked me to come over to his house to study. I told my friend Marnie about it, and she said, “He totally wants to bang you,” and I rolled my eyes and laughed it off, but secretly I was excited—a boy had never wanted me before, as far as I knew. Before I went over there, I shaved my legs and took some extra time with my hair, painted on some lip stain and flicked mascara across my lashes. I put on my tightest jeans and my lowest-cut top and slicked shimmery jasmine-scented body lotion across what little cleavage I had.
I got over there, and when he opened the door he sort of stared at me. “You look different,” he said, and I said, “Thanks,” and then immediately felt stupid because I didn’t know whether he was complimenting me. No one was home at his house, and I thought we were going to study in his kitchen, maybe his basement, but instead he led me upstairs to his bedroom. I’d never been in a boy’s room before. It smelled like body spray and feet. We sat on his bed and took out our science stuff and studied for a little bit, but I couldn’t concentrate, and he couldn’t seem to, either. He kept shifting around and looking uncomfortable. I wondered if he was trying to cover up a boner or something. Erections were situations of the male body that, at the time, I only knew about conceptually and which I sort of considered too absurd to be a real thing. And maybe it was for that reason that I was struck by a bolt of impulsive courage, or maybe it was just a desire not to leave Scottie’s house without a story for Marnie, who had already texted me about twenty times, looking for updates. Whatever the case, I went for it: I leaned across my lab notebook and I kissed him.
I kissed him.
Whenever I think about this day—which is not often, because what’s the point of picking at an old crusty wound?—I always remind myself of this. It went so wrong so quickly, but I was the one who put it all in motion. Which I feel like is probably a good metaphor for my life in general.
Anyway. So, yeah, I kissed him. His eyes opened wide at first, and I stared into them, brown hurricanes behind fingerprint-smudged glass frames, and then they fluttered closed and I knew I didn’t have to feel stupid anymore—I had made the right decision. I was worried I wouldn’t know how to kiss, but what I realized was that everybody’s born knowing how to kiss, just like everybody’s born knowing how to breathe, how to cry. We kissed for a while over our notebooks, and that was nice, really nice, but then everything started to move very fast. The best part of the whole experience, when I think about it now, was the last second before he pushed himself into me, when I looked up at him, my hair loose around my shoulders. At that moment, I sort of felt like an actress in my own life. But, like, a good actress. In a good movie. What I mean is, I felt like a real grown-up. A real woman. But then, as Scottie began to lower himself on top of me, the feeling passed. I understood that I wasn’t an actress and this wasn’t a movie and I wasn’t a woman, at least not yet, and I wasn’t ready to do this, at least not yet. But Scottie had already taken his glasses off and was looking at my body with something that I recognized as desire but thought might definitely also be love. How was I expected to know the difference? How was I expected to know anything about boys or relationships or sex or love? Isn’t that the kind of thing you’re supposed to learn about from your mother? And besides, I was a freshman. I’d been to a million sessions with school counselors, talking about consent, about how no means no and yes means yes and the yes must be an enthusiastic yes, and that all felt so obvious, sitting at my school desk and looking at an awkward PowerPoint being delivered by an equally awkward teacher in a festive scarf and sensible shoes, but now that I was in it, living it, tangled in a boy’s actual bed with a boy’s actual hands on my actual body, none of that mattered. When I tried to find the words—“No.” “Wait.” “Stop.”—they wouldn’t come.
“Um,” I tried. But he wasn’t listening. My body felt frozen, like a dead moth pinned inside a display case. I turned my face away and squeezed my eyes shut and went quiet and still as he fumbled with the condom he’d dug out of his nightstand. I felt like, if my body went quiet enough, that would be the screaming no that my mouth couldn’t find the courage to say. I kept my eyes closed against the building pressure of tears and stayed very still as he lowered down and pressed inside of me, and it hurt, but I could stand it, and then nearly as soon as it had started he was trembling, then mumbling an apology, and that’s how I knew it was over.
When I got home that night, I was sure that my dad would take one look at me and know what I’d done. He was my dad, and not just a regular dad but a widower dad who had raised me on his own for six whole years before he met Alanna. We had once been as close as two people could be. And even though that had faded a little, he still knew my moods, my behaviors, my soul, better than anyone on the planet. I prepared for this reality on the walk home from Scottie’s house through the holiday-lit streets. I decided there was no point in lying or even obfuscating. When he looked at me and asked what had happ
ened, I would simply tell him everything. It would be embarrassing, obviously, and he would not be happy, but I would tell him anyway because I knew he was the only person who could help me make sense of it, what it meant, who I was now. Maybe he would even tell me that it didn’t mean anything at all. How could it, when the whole experience from the moment Scottie and I started kissing to the moment he wrapped the used condom in a Kleenex and tossed it onto the floor next to his bed, had lasted no more than ten minutes?
But when I got home, it turned out that the twins, who were toddlers at the time, had picked up some nasty bug at their daycare and were both engaged in Exorcist levels of vomiting. Alanna was bathing them while yelling frantically into the phone at urgent care while my dad was busy stripping their beds and stuffing everything down the laundry chute. He gave me a quick kiss on the top of my head as I stood in the middle of the front hall, watching this hive of activity, of parents caring for small, sick children, and suddenly my problems felt meaningless and my life felt small and silly. I went upstairs, crawled into bed, and slept for twelve hours. When I woke up in the morning the twins were still sick and my dad was still distracted. He never noticed a thing.
I thought I could try to put it behind me, maybe somehow work up the courage to ask Mr. Henderson for a new lab partner second semester and just pretend like nothing had ever happened. But that was not to be, because as it turned out, Scottie Curry had a girlfriend.
And apparently she somehow found out what we’d done.
A theater nerd, she was the head of the tech crew on the fall play. Not exactly Mean Girl material. But she had friends in our integrated science class, and they more than made up for it.
They were the ones, when we were on the bus riding to the planetarium the day we returned from semester break, who cough-shouted “Whore!” when I walked past them on the bus. Who twisted in their seats to pelt me with tampons and Cheez-Its and fruit snacks.
To Scottie they said nothing. Scottie and his girlfriend had worked it out. He had apologized or bought her flowers or told her I had seduced him and maybe I even had? I’d kissed him first. I’d kissed him first.
Whatever the case, Scottie and his girlfriend were cool.
With me, though, it was different.
These girls may have been seniors, but they weren’t necessarily at the top of the pecking order of the social hierarchy. But I was lower, by a long shot. I was a freshman, not unpopular but worse than unpopular, because I didn’t play sports or do clubs and I was also sort of trashy, a nobody with a murdered mom who dyed my hair weird colors and hung out with budding criminals like Marnie. What was I even doing in their honors class, let alone having sex with one of their guys, one of their friends’ boyfriends? They took it very personally. That day, their heckling was like a dull throb, and they kept it up through most of the guided tour, grew bolder in the model space shuttle after Mr. Henderson announced we were free to explore on our own as long as we met up at the school bus entrance at one thirty.
“Slut.”
“Pig.”
“Cum dumpster.”
“White trash.”
At first I ignored them. In the model space shuttle, while they machine-gunned me with their words, I just stared up at the sleeping bags anchored to the wall and figured it could be worse: I could be an astronaut, forced to sleep standing up strapped to the wall every night for months and years as I hurtled at unimaginable speeds through the hostile cosmos.
I thought I could just continue ignoring them, but they kept getting closer to me. A few times they stepped on my heel and I had to lean down to pull my shoe back on. I started to panic—they were actually going to kick my ass, weren’t they?—and then I ran. I literally ran away from them—which, of course, was the absolute worst thing I could do, because it showed my weakness and my fear. As soon as I took off they started to chase me, laughing, screaming their insults more loudly so other kids were laughing, too, bolder and bolder, and the hallways of the space shuttle got narrower and darker, and then I turned a corner and came upon a heavy rubber curtain, the kind you see in car washes, and I pushed it aside and ducked through.
And somehow, miraculously, I was free of them.
I had walked straight into outer space.
It was pitch-black, darker than anything I’d ever experienced in my life. The darkness had texture and weight, and all around me were the sounds of ambient whooshing and faraway explosions—the sounds of contracting stars, or of the womb. I had stepped into the quiet distant edge of the universe, or maybe into the past, back into my mother’s body, but either way I was alone, alone. Scottie did not exist, and neither did those girls, or anyone or anything anchored to this world. I thought that if I called for my mother, she would hear me. I felt sure of it. I said her name into the darkness. Mommy, I crooned, the word rusty on my lips, it having been eleven years since I’d uttered it. Mommy. Help me.
That’s when I walked into a carpeted wall, and it thunked me right back into real life. I dug my phone from my pocket and fumbled for the flashlight app. Saw that I had not, after all, stepped through a rip in the dimensional fabric but only into a very well-constructed space-simulation booth—a part of the exhibit, just like the vertical sleeping bags.
But the weird thing was, I wasn’t disappointed. Because fake or not, when I took a deep breath and stepped back through the curtain into real life, something had shifted inside of me. My scattered rage had gathered like the darkness, had coagulated into something I could now grab a hold of. Maybe my mother—strangled, discarded, unavenged—had heard me after all.
I knew that from now on, if somebody tried to fuck with me, I would never run away again. Not ever. I would turn around and I would fight. Every. Single. Time.
I found Scottie in the Explore Our Solar System! interactive exhibit. He was standing beneath a giant foam hanging model of Saturn, leaning forward, his glasses slipping down his nose, reading the placard about the planet’s sixty-two moons.
“You have a girlfriend?”
He blinked at me, biding for time.
“Um,” he said at last. “Yeah. Jeez—uh. Sorry.”
His face was as blank and smooth as the swirling plastic surface of Saturn dangling above our heads. He wasn’t just the first boy I’d ever had sex with. He was the first boy I’d ever kissed. The first boy who had ever touched me. He was all of my firsts. And he was already turning back to his placard.
Before I really even knew what I was doing I had ripped the glasses off his face, tossed them into the crater maker, and pulled the lever. And oh, what a satisfying crunch it made.
Back inside the fake space shuttle, I ran into Scottie’s girlfriend’s friends again, standing in front of the astronaut’s toilet. It had a seat belt on it, I guess so you wouldn’t float away in the middle of doing your business.
“HeybitchIheardyouletScottiedoyouinthe—”
I didn’t let her finish her comment. Instead, I grabbed her by the hair and stuffed her face in the astronaut’s toilet. There was no water in it—this was just a model, obviously—but when I pressed down on the flusher, it worked. It made a loud whooshing noise, and I heard her scream, and when I yanked her back up she looked dazed and terrified and one of her earlobes was bleeding pretty badly—the flusher had sucked one of her pearl studs out, torn it right through her ear.
She was rushed to the hospital to have her earlobe stitched back together, and I got kicked out of honors integrated science the next day. My counselor had nowhere else to put me, so she stuck me in basic biology, and it was boring, so I started playing hooky, and I failed the class. I discovered that once you fail a thing and the world doesn’t implode, it becomes much easier to fail everything. You realize there are worse things than failing. You realize that most of what adults try to sell you as important and necessary is really just bullshit, and that everything you always thought mattered actually kind of doesn’t. By the time sophomore year started, I wasn’t a nobody anymore. People knew me now, or thou
ght they did. I had become a bottom-feeder—even Marnie kept her distance. I don’t care, was the song inside my head the first time I had sex with a random boy I met at a party. There were no lyrics, only a chorus: I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.
It became the song of my whole life.
23
IT’S THE BEGINNING OF NOVEMBER, and even though red and orange leaves still cling to most of the trees, the ground is already covered with a fine layer of snow. I’ve discovered that my cravings for physical substances have subsided. But they’ve been replaced by other cravings, deeper and harder to explain, that are equally impossible to satisfy in this place. And after my shitty family therapy session, there’s something I need to know.
“Why did my dad send me here?” I ask Vivian the question before she’s even sat down.
She settles into her armchair, flips to a fresh page on her legal pad.
“I’m interested that you’re asking me this. Do you not already know the answer to that question? Last week, you told me you were sent here because of your decision to stop lying to your dad and Alanna.”
“I know, but I want to know what he said. Like, when he called you guys to order the transport or whatever.”
“What do you think he said?”
“Can you try for once to not answer a question with a question?”
“Sorry,” she laughs. “Bad therapist’s habit.”
“I guess what I want to know is, was the last straw really punching my stepmom? Or was it the other stuff?”
“What other stuff?”
“Don’t play dumb. You know what I mean.”
She watches me, her pen hovering above her pad of paper. I sigh.
You Know I'm No Good Page 7
