10: THE STRAY
Sharon came and knocked on our door in the morning. Each knock was a light, quick, and happy tune. Did she not feel the morning like we did? Maybe that was something old people didn’t notice—that there was a different kind of ache when the sun wasn’t up yet. Old people’s bodies didn’t know the difference when it was all one, giant pain. When she entered the cabin, her wrinkly skin was lifted into a smile. It wasn’t contagious. Nothing about her was contagious around people like us. We were immune to everything she was about.
“Why are you smiling?” Brooke asked. “It’s not even bright out yet.”
“It’s your shower day for your group,” Sharon said. “Get your toiletry bag and follow me. This is something your bodies need.”
It hurt to even think about moving. But there was a point when you were so dead to the environment that your body could switch into autopilot and help you do a version of whatever you were supposed to be doing. Without even thinking about it, I was climbing down my ladder and slipping on my boots. Autopilot me didn’t bother with socks or tying up my boots—my naked feet got into those tight boots and set me to follow the girls. I stayed in the back of the line and tilted my head to the right so nobody would look at me.
“Everybody stop.”
When I looked up, Sharon had her hands up in the air. We were in front of the fence. Where the gate opened to the stairs. Where the stairs led down to the shoreline.
I smiled.
“Stop smiling,” Guy said.
I flinched. I hadn’t known he was even around.
Guy stayed behind me at the back of the line as Sharon led our group down to the dock. It was freezing. There was a fog across the water that made the morning seem more damp. There were loons yelling at each other from across the lake, and I imagined they were arguing. I would’ve liked to see one, but there was no view from where we stood. It was too early to see much of anything.
Brooke stripped down to her underwear first. She carefully took off her wooden beads around her neck before she jumped into the water. She screamed when she came through the surface, shocked that water before sunrise was terrifyingly cold. I was too tired to find that funny. Everything that everyone was doing was bothering me, and that was how I knew it wasn’t even 6:00 a.m. yet.
“Valerie, you have four minutes left!” Sharon yelled. She held up her watch that was on her wrist and tapped the glass in case we had no clue where four minutes were coming from.
Twin and Twinner were shivering and I could hear the stutters in their whispers. I bet they could still understand each other because they had that bond that only twins had. They could feel each other’s pain and knew what the other was thinking and all of that. I wondered if I would survive having a twin. It had to be both hard and wonderful.
Karen stripped down into her underwear. When I saw that, I quickly slipped off my shorts and t-shirt and clumsily jumped into the lake before she could. I regretted it as soon as the water touched my toes. I kept my eyes shut because I didn’t want to see that I couldn’t see anything under the water. I tried not to scream when I came through the surface.
“Wow, oh my God. Wow.” I wiped the water from my eyes and there were blurry versions of the girls looking at me. I wanted to jump out of the water as quickly as I had jumped in, but Karen was there, judging me. I pretended I didn’t feel the cold stab into my skin, and I floated there like it was a summer day at Mum’s new house—that I had finally gone to her lake and jumped in the icy water like she wanted me to.
“How does it feel? Refreshing?” Sharon asked. “Blue Lake is known to be on the chilly side. But you’ll get used to it.”
There was nothing refreshing about cold water. It chilled every bone in my body and reminded me of mean things about decent people. I could recall every bad thing that happened to me in my life just by being cold. Why did freezing your tits off have a way of changing your entire outlook on things? Was that the refreshing aspect of being cold?
At the end of the dock, Guy was watching me. Maybe he knew what I was thinking. That I could just back-crawl, and kick hard, and swim to the other side of the lake. Maybe I could make it there before he could get to me.
“Come on out, Valerie,” Guy said.
I treaded for a second longer before I pulled myself onto the dock. The other girls eventually waded in from the side. Karen stayed on the rocks and threw the water onto her like some kind of rinse. I lathered myself up with the bar of soap. There were suds falling off of me, and the soap turned a brownish colour from being on my body. When I jumped in again there were bubbles all around me. I dunked under the water to make sure the soap rinsed out of my hair. It was weird using a bar of soap in my hair. But I didn’t care about my hair anymore because it wasn’t really mine. It was brown and boring and I didn’t care if it all fell out.
The other girls, especially Twin, looked like they were used to routine and regiments. She had caves for eyes and a shapeless face that was probably used to pounds of makeup. Twin had the kind of face that needed lines painted onto it for shape. Twinner was probably doing a little bit better since she didn’t really have much hair. But she sure did have a lot of holes in her face where metal used to be. I was completely at home with having only five minutes to wash up. I hadn’t given a shit in a while.
“Get up to the mess hall, Valerie. You’re done,” Sharon said.
I rinsed off and gathered my things. There were no towels. I put my clothes back on and the wet crevices of my body sucked the dryness out of the cotton. There was nothing more uncomfortable than wetness in certain areas, and dryness in others.
Guy followed me down the dock. I walked with a quick pace, just to see how closely he would follow. He was right at my heels.
“I ran track my first year of school,” I said.
“Me too,” he said.
I stopped at the end of the dock, where the wood met the sand. There were rocks scattered across the shore. It wouldn’t be a fast, clean run. There were many obstacles to get over. Huge, slippery rocks, and water beds.
“Get moving.” Guy touched my shoulder.
I walked up the stairs and back through the gate. There were more counsellors on the other side of the fence, which Guy left me with. I walked up to the mess hall with wet spots on my ass and sat down at our table like I was supposed to do.
Murray got up out of his seat and came over to me.
“You’re going to get in trouble,” I told him. He wasn’t supposed to leave his group or go to anyone else’s table.
“I just wanted to see what you look like.”
“What I look like?”
“Yeah, you’re all clean.”
“Murray, get back to your table,” Rick said. He walked over to us and touched Murray’s shoulder.
“You look amazing,” Murray said.
“I feel amazing.” I tapped my nails on the tabletop. I looked at Rick.
“Move it,” Rick said.
Murray left and went back to his table. But he watched me from across the room, as if I would disappear if he didn’t keep his eyes on me.
My group came up ten minutes later. Things got worse when we found out it was porridge day. There was nothing I would rather eat less than porridge.
“I don’t mind porridge,” Twinner said.
I hated Twinner right then, and Twin could die for all I cared too, just for association. But Twinner was officially dead to me.
When I was 7-years-old, there was a week that I had been sick with the flu, and porridge was all Mum made for me. When I’d throw up, it was a river of porridge coming out of my mouth. There was no flavour of porridge that didn’t taste like vomit anymore. Porridge meant something had to be wrong with you to eat it.
I watched my group chow down their breakfast instead of joining them. I didn’t have an appetite. I wasn't the only one who noticed this. Sharon was watching me from across the room at the counsellors table. It only took her one whisper to her ne
ighbour, Larry, for things to escalate. Fucking Sharon. I hoped right then for her to fall out of her chair and die from not being able to get up on her own. Maybe I could chuck her to the ground again—
“Oh here we go,” I said. Larry got up from the counsellors table. I knew why he was coming over.
Tracy sunk down in her chair. It had nothing to do with her but someone so scared all the time didn’t know stuff like that. In her head it was all about her, which would kill her someday.
"Valerie, why aren't you eating?" Larry stood in front of me.
“Word on the street is that I’m anorexic.” I looked at Karen. “I wish I could eat something but it’s going to stick on my ribs, and I’m already packing it on as it is.”
"You’re not anorexic. But you do need to put a little meat on you.”
“Sticks and stones, skin and bones.” I looked at Karen.
Larry went away. I watched as he cut into the food line, and slopped a bunch of porridge onto a beige plate. He was back in front of me after a minute and handed the plate to me.
“What’s this?”
"It's breakfast, and you'll eat all of it. I'm tired of you breaking the rules."
"I'm not breaking the rules. It's take what you like, but eat what you take. I didn't take anything, so I didn't eat anything. Problem solved." I offered the plate back to him.
"Nope. It's clear your plate. That plate is now yours. Now clear it."
There was no look of amusement or anything on his face. He was entirely blank while he waited for me to do what I was told. It was his job to tell me what to do, and Larry being probably in his late fifties, early sixties, had to be sick and tired of telling teenagers—no, troubled youth—what to do. He had his role though, and I had mine.
I threw the plate on the ground.
The noise was louder than expected. Probably because the room was already quiet. The plate didn’t break, but its contents went everywhere. It made me glad to see it make a mess at least. I watched and waited for his reaction.
But Larry stayed the same. It was like there wasn’t a pile of porridge on the ground. I couldn’t have been the first resident to do something like that to him. And I wouldn’t be the last. What was it like to be Larry? To see the same kind of kid every couple weeks, and wonder where they went off to after the program was finished.
When I got out of the program, I wanted him to know that I had never needed him in the first place. That it was a mistake for me to be in that program. That none of it would ever matter to me, and I had already realized everything there was to realize about myself.
But Larry would never know anything about me, and that was probably the exhausting part of his job. That the crazy kids went away, and he would never know how they were actually doing in the real world. If they had gotten better. If he was making a difference or not.
"It looks quite cleared now,” I said.
The mess hall had already been quiet. But it was obvious that people were interested to see what was going on in my little corner. I looked up and saw Murray. His eyes were on me. I really was never going to change. There was nothing wrong with not changing. Change was hard, but staying the same was even more of a commitment.
Larry motioned Guy over to my table. He escorted me toward the mess hall door, and I kept my eyes forward. I wasn’t bothered by the glares coming my way because I had asked for them. Guy held the top of my arm but dropped it once we left the building.
“Are you taking me to the isolation box?”
"Just follow me, and don't run away."
I walked beside him along a dirt path toward the lake. I wondered what my punishment would be for the day, and dreaded it possibly being push-ups. I had seen a group of boys and their counsellor out in the field doing workouts. Sprinting and push-ups. Horrible things that destroyed both the body and the mind simultaneously.
"We're going to be moving the canoes and locking them up.”
“That’s it?”
“They're quite heavy, and it should take us until lunch."
When we got to the dock we immediately began moving the canoes. And it was hard work. We were taking the canoes from the docks and bringing them up onto the shore where they’d be locked. They were the same canoes that we’d used on the trip to the island. There was a yellowish one that we all fought over as kids. And then the brown one too. Everyone loved the brown one because you could barely see it when it was far out on the water.
“Are we never going to use these or something?”
“Yes, it’s just to keep them out of the water. They’re already chipping and old and haven’t been taken care of.”
Chipping and old had been my favourite thing about Camp Hedgewood. Guy and I lifted up the canoes and carried them down the shoreline, where we leaned them vertical against a wooden stand. Guy was on one end of the canoe, and I was on the other, and then we both pointed the bow of each one into the sky. It took a while, and it was exhausting going back and forth. It was the kind of work that made your body ache, but I knew the pain would feel good after it sank in.
“It’s almost like I’m still at home,” I said.
“Why’s that?”
“Dad liked to use me as his worker around the yard, especially since I don’t have a job and I’m not in school. His motto is that physical work is the medicine for anything. Maybe if I stack wood high enough I’ll snap out of my stupidity and get a GED. Either way, I don’t think he knows my sister and I are girls. I like that. There aren’t many girls on my street who know how to turn on the lawn mower. Not that I like mowing or anything, but it’s nice to know that if I ever woke up one day and had the crazy urge to mow the lawn—like if someone held a gun up to my head—I could easily do it.”
Guy had a little smile on his face. I liked Guy’s little smile. I almost didn’t mind talking to Guy right then. He didn’t seem like he was supposed to be a counsellor at New Horizons. The people that were the best at their jobs, I guess, made it seem like they weren’t even working. They were just living in it.
“It’s true, the girls in Basinview don’t do shit. They sit on their boyfriend's cars and drive around with them all day, and park outside gas stations to catch up. That’s all they do. It’s depressing, and it’s what you do to get through the days. And I’m tired of it.”
“Basinview, you say?”
“Yes. Same house since day one. On a little dead end, gravel road. Dad and I live there now. Mum moved out about six months ago.”
“I grew up in Basinview.”
“Did you really?” I was shocked.
“Yes,” he said. “I went to Prospect High school.”
“Jesus, that’s my high school too. You’re telling me I could find your grad picture in the hallways somewhere?”
“Sure, if you looked hard enough.”
I was never going back to that high school though. If I ever woke up one day, I wanted to get my GED on my own, out of a classroom setting. School was so much easier if you didn’t have people around you asking about things. Like what you were doing, where you were going, and wanting to meet up for stuff. There was no way I could finish if I had to be around all the exhaustion of people and their problems. I didn’t know what happened to me—all I had was half a semester left. And the fear of finishing just ruined me.
I didn’t really drop out of school. I just stopped going. There was a huge difference in my head. No one else saw it like that. I knew I was going to finish someday. I knew I was smart. And I knew I could do it. I just wasn’t in a rush like everyone else seemed to be.
It took us about an hour to stack all the canoes. My hands had blisters and my arms felt like they could float. The final step was locking them up with a chain that guy was threading through what he called the yoke of the canoe. The yoke was a thin, curved beam near the middle of the canoe. He sealed up the chain with a combination lock and gave it a quick spin after. He pulled it tight to check that it was locked.
“Easy as that,” h
e said. “I just need to grab my water jug from the dock. Where’s yours?”
I pointed at the rocks where 49 sat ten feet away. He was baking in the sun. I bet my water tasted like warm plastic. Somehow, it would still be refreshing.
Guy slowly moved down to the dock, and his body was more hunched than normal. He was an old, sore man, and he reminded me of how Dad used to be when he’d come in from shovelling the driveway. Getting old meant everything could ache at the exact, same time. Maybe that’s why Dad didn’t want the ache of Mum in his life on top of everything.
Apparently Mum was doing fine without him. She had a nice house that was two storeys high and on a lake. So far, she had invited me out every weekend since moving out. Maybe a visit someday would be fine. But I would never live with her. It meant me moving out. It meant me leaving Dad. It meant me acknowledging that our house wasn’t our house anymore. It meant change.
It was sad to see the old canoes all chained up. I leaned back on the stand. Guy had finally made it to his water jug, and was pouring it over his head. That was when something shifted. The moment I put my body weight on the stand, a canoe moved. I immediately stood up straight to see what happened.
The second last canoe at the end had slid on an angle, but it hadn’t fallen since the chain kept it in place. I moved toward the canoe and pushed it back in place, so it was straight like the others, but when I looked down the line, an error jumped out at me.
There was a stray.
We had forgotten to loop the chain through one of the canoes. The little green one in the middle was leaning on its own, free.
“You all set to go?” Guy yelled.
“Yeah!” I ran toward him, afraid he would come over and think an honest mistake was a scheme for something larger. I hadn’t done it on purpose, and I didn’t want him thinking anything was going on. Maybe the best thing to have done was tell him our mistake—because it was both of ours. But something told me not to bring it up. To leave it alone. The canoe was fine staying how it was since it wasn’t going anywhere.
“You have talking circle,” Guy said.
“Excuse me?” I stopped walking.
“Talking circle.”
“What the hell is that?”
“Something required to progress in your levels.”
“Sure, because that’s something I really care about.”
“Maybe you will some day.”
There was nothing fun about talking and there was nothing fun about circles. But Guy pointed to my doom. In the distance, up by the gate at the top of the cliff, was Sharon, waving at me, beckoning me back to my group.