12: COWARD
I was going to be in trouble. You couldn’t be half naked and not get noticed. That wasn’t a thing. I knew it, the girls knew it, and everyone at New Horizons knew it. You had to have all of your clothes on if you wanted to be okay.
“It will be okay,” I said.
Karen laughed.
“What? You don’t believe me?”
“You don’t have a shirt on you fucking dumb shit,” she said.
“Yes, thank you. I realize that.”
There was no denying it. Clothes were a privilege. Clean clothes were a luxury. And I had neither. I was going to get us all in trouble.
“I don’t have a t-shirt now.” I looked at Twinner.
“Your problem is not my problem. I can’t keep track of you—that’s your own job.”
“I was out there because of you. You got sick on me.”
“You did it all yourself,” Twinner said. “You were dramatic.”
Brooke wiped a few tears off her face. But they kept flowing down, and she couldn’t hide them.
“Why are you crying? I’m the one who is nearly naked.” I held my hands out. I was still dripping wet and my hair was beading droplets of water onto the floor. There was a puddle beneath me. I smelled like a bathroom that someone had spent too much time in.
“We’re all going to get found out and we’re going to get in trouble,” Brooke said. She had tears streaming all down her cheeks. “I’m scared.”
“Are you kidding me?” I asked. “You have nothing to do with this. I’ll say it was just me. Calm down.”
“That’s not how it’s going to go,” Karen said. “You’ve screwed us all over you dumb fuck. That’s how it works here and you know it. It’s not all about you.”
“Yes it is—that’s why I’m here. Don’t be stupid.”
“That’s why we’re all here too. Have you forgotten that? Do you think New Horizons is just a little game where the bad kid gets sent to the corner? That’s not it. What you do affects everyone. It is never just about you. It’s about all of us.”
I didn’t believe that, and I didn’t want to think about it either in case it got stuck in my head. I slowly walked down the middle of the cabin to get into bed. The drops of water falling from me made marks on the floor, leaving a trail.
Tracy peered at me from under her cave when I climbed up into my bunk. I glared at her until I disappeared above her. When I got onto my back, I read the names of the girls who used to sleep in my place, and had left their mark on the ceiling. My throat burned to say something more—I could taste the mean words— but I didn’t want anyone to hate me more than they already did. It was a gross feeling, lying there, keeping quiet. Hatred was the strongest motivation for anyone to ruin your life, and I knew the girls had a good reason to hate me.
In the morning, Sharon knocked on our door to wake us up and begin our day of learning about how to smile and be more appreciative in life. I bolted up and quickly covered myself before she entered. I looked like I was wearing a grey cloak with a hood. Maybe I was in a cult.
“Hello ladies, rise and be bright. Get up to the mess hall, we will be staying inside and having group discussions instead of our normal exercises.”
“Why is that?” Twin asked.
“The weather isn’t good for group discussions outside today. So we’ll be taking it indoors. Get up there quick, it’s raining pretty hard.”
“Yeah, rise and be bright, Valerie.” Karen looked over at me. “Get up and stretch those bones.”
“Oh, I will. Don’t wait for me though, it’s not all about me.”
When she shut the door, Brooke was looking up at me.
“Stop looking at me.”
“I can’t help it. We’re screwed.”
“Calm down, crazy.”
“I am calm.” Her chest started going up and down really fast.
My hand slowly traced my initials in the wood. It wasn’t that long ago since our last storm. It was hurricane season, and just a month ago, a tropical storm blew down a couple trees in our backyard. It wasn’t crazy, and things could have been worse. The neighbour’s plastic shed had ended up in our yard, and our trampoline was in a tree. And I wondered what Mum’s new place, just a couple blocks away, had looked like after the bad winds. I bet her house was fine, and that was hard to think about.
Brooke jumped out of her bottom bunk. It startled me how she got to her feet so fast. And without even stopping to think, she pulled her shirt off.
“Are you mad?!” Karen yelled. She jumped down and picked up Brooke’s shirt and threw it back at her. “What the hell are you doing?! Put your t-shirt back on.”
“We should have each other’s backs,” she said. There were tears pouring down her face. “And I’ve already messed that up and I wanna do you guys right.” She looked at the twins. The twins looked at her. They got out of their bunks just as quick and ran out the door, where Sharon was waiting for us in the mess hall.
Karen headed for the door too. It was typical, angry Karen. It would have been more shocking if she stayed. But that was what we were there for—to make her hate herself for being her own person.
“It’s not all about you, Karen.”
Karen stopped moving. She kept her back to us, as if time had paused her there.
From where I was sitting, in my grey cloak, you could see the scars shining on the back of her arms. Thin tracks of slices that looked almost pretty if you didn’t know where they came from. Of course we didn’t know where they actually came from. But we had an idea of how they got there. The scenarios that could fit into something that looked as clean as those lines did.
Tracy crawled out of the bunk below me. Like a snake. She looked as if she was going to bite Karen. It was her chance to pounce.
I wasn’t sure what she was going to do. My hair still felt damp on my face. It was tied up with the only hair band I owned, and it was getting close to snapping. I was lucky that Nurse Janice hadn’t taken my elastic on day one, and that I was allowed to have my hair out of my face.
Tracy pulled her shirt over her head.
“Holy shit, what is going on with you guys!?” Karen yelled.
Brooke’s teeth were even more spaced out in her head than normal. She was smiling so big that you could see every single tooth. Brooke’s shoulders were covered in freckles, while Tracy’s were crystal clear. Both girls had their wooden beads wrapped around their necks, but Tracy doubled hers up so it was nice and tight.
My neck was bare, and I smiled.
“I’m not doing that,” Karen said.
“Looks like we got triplets running out the door today,” I said before climbing down the ladder. I stood next to Tracy and Brooke. None of us looked particularly good in bright, white sports bras. But when we were all together we didn’t stick out as much. We were all washed out and incredibly filthy. I still stunk the most, for reasons.
“So what you guys are doing is making me look like the bitch if I don’t do it.”
“You are a bitch either way. But if you wanna go with the twins, go ahead.”
“Screw you, Valerie.”
“No, screw you. You’re a bitch and you know it.”
Her hands balled into fists.
“I dare you.”
“Dare me what? To punch you? Because I will.”
“No. I dare you to take your shirt off.”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.”
There was no telling if it was going to work or not. There was nothing more stupid than going down with the ship if you had a chance to get out. But survivors weren’t always the heroes. Survivors were sometimes selfish. You had to be selfish if you wanted to make it out alive.
Karen took her shirt off. We had her going down with us—and that was a relief. We had hope with more numbers.
It was raining outside. The dirt paths around our cabin had turned to mud. There was incredibly loud thunder that made me flinch. The rai
n reminded me of Basinview. On rainy days, when Jordan and I were dating, we used to go to the docks and see the waves come up over the boats. It was exciting to see the fisherman trying to tie down their livelihoods. They would panic and yell at each other, terrified by the idea of losing their boats. It was exciting to watch, probably because it wasn’t happening to me.
I walked out the door and straight into the rain. The skin on my shoulders felt like it was peeling off from the pressure of the water. My hair quickly became matted to my head. I felt ugly and it didn’t really matter since I wasn’t in a place that required any kind of looks. The sky was grey, and the rain blurred my vision.
"Is it nice out?" Karen yelled. The rain pounded down in front of her.
I waved for them to come outside. Reluctantly they did. We all had on the same bra and shorts and bare feet. I looked over at Tracy who was looking up into the sky. She was smiling. That was weird for Tracy. And it got even more weird when she started to spin.
There was no explanation for what she was doing. Her arms went wide, and she went around and around. We laughed because that was not very Tracy of her.
"She looks nuts," Karen shouted.
Tracy stopped twirling.
I picked up a glob of mud in my hands. I looked at Karen and launched the mud at her. It spread across Karen’s chest and splattered across her face. She wiped her eyelids and looked up at me.
"You’re dead, Valerie." She reached down for a handful of mud.
Brooke beat her to it. She threw a mud ball at me. I turned my back and it splattered across my shoulders and into my hair.
There was nothing I wanted more than to throw mud at Brooke. I wanted it to get in her hair and eyes, and I wanted her to cry about it. I picked up the largest glob and threw it toward her. It splattered everywhere—across her chest, and down her stomach, and into her mouth. It was a great thing to be able to throw something at someone you didn’t like.
I threw mud in every direction that it came from. Our hair was matted with it, and our skin didn't have one clear area. At least it hid that our bras were going see-through from the rain. We all looked like wild, mad girls, and I was the only one without beads around my neck or wrist.
When we entered the mess hall wearing nothing but our shorts and boots, I felt pretty foolish. And I wondered if that was what being sorry started with. Feeling foolish. But maybe regret was the pole that fished out an apology first. Regret seemed to be tied to a lot of things, and it had the ability to flip people around.
There were a lot of foolish things in my life, most of it to do with my family that I surprisingly loved.
There was that memorable night that Aunt Mary told me that I was the prettiest niece she had. She said this in front of my cousin, Stephanie. I didn’t know what to say. All I could feel was Stephanie glaring at me from across the deck. I regretted going to the family barbecue. There was no amount of food that could make being around your family worth it.
“It’s a joke, hunnie. Learn to take it.”
Stephanie had smiled but it didn’t reach her eyes.
Aunt Mary was a smoker and had bad teeth and her voice was so deep that she sounded like Uncle Gary on the phone. She was the kind of person that called over a manager when an employee was just doing their job, and informed them she was never coming back to the store. And next Saturday, you knew she was there again, doing the same thing all over. People like Aunt Mary were the scum of society, and you weren’t ever supposed to listen to them. But Aunt Mary had moments of being nice to me, and that made it hard to remember that she was a crazy, fucking human being.
“Well that’s fine. At least I’m skinny,” Stephanie had told her.
“You ain’t even that, girlie.” Aunt Mary laughed after.
“Maybe. But you’re definitely a giant cunt.”
Aunt Mary picked up a potted plant and threw it across the deck at Stephanie. That was the kind of person Aunt Mary was. It hit Steph in the face and knocked both her front teeth out. There were ten or so people on the back deck, and in an instant, everyone was paying attention to two people who deserved no one’s time.
Stephanie’s Mum, Aunt Lisa, who I actually didn’t mind all that much, had Aunt Mary in a choke hold before the old lady could get out of her lawn chair. They were both forty-something and still wild sisters in their middle age.
There were even, exact spaces between the railings on the deck, and I could see where the grass was freshly cut and had two more days of looking good before it wasn’t new and pretty. Mum called the cops, and Dad didn’t want her to.
“No Johnathon, your sisters are fucking crazy,” she had yelled.
I wished desperately for a crazy sister. All I had gotten was Amanda, who was studying in another province to be a nurse. Fucking nurses. Fucking Amanda. And her room was upstairs, waiting for her to come back. But there was no way she ever would. Why would she? She was in the city with coffee shops on every corner, and when you were in the city, you didn’t need to come back to the town that had one small pizza place as its main attraction.
Amanda and I didn’t put each other in choke holds. We weren’t close enough sisters to do that, which was really depressing when I thought about it. Instead, when I saw her over the holidays, it was adult talk between us. The how-are-yous, and asking me about work and school—she was so fucking old for only being in her twenties.
When the cops finally got to the house, it was all back and forth stuff, with nobody wanting to take blame. Stephanie wanted to press charges, Aunt Lisa said she was never coming to a BBQ again, and Aunt Mary wanted someone to pay for the broken flower pot she had thrown.
My Dad calmed his sisters down enough to get the cops to leave. There was blood on the floor and Stephenie had her two front teeth in the palm of her hand. They were shattered and jagged and I wondered if they were like that in her head before the pot had smashed them out. Stephanie had no job and no dental plan. She was going be living with that gap in her teeth for a while.
“I told you, Valerie.” Aunt Mary winked at me after.
“Told me what?”
“You’re the prettiest niece I got.”
But I wasn’t the prettiest. I was just nice compared to what was around me.
Later that night, when the festivities were done and I was sitting on my roof watching the stars, for the first time in a while, I had the biggest urge to just call someone and tell them about my night.
But I didn’t have anyone to call.
I didn’t have close friends that would listen to a quick family story, and I didn’t have a sister who was also my friend. We weren’t like that. There was no swapping crazy stories, there was no texting, there were no late night calls.
Maybe I missed Amanda more than anything. But maybe I just desperately needed a sister, or someone as a possible option to simply vent to. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about my crazy Aunt Mary, and there was no one to hear about the space between Stephanie’s teeth.
It was all mine to absorb alone.
But that was the night I saw that things were starting to come apart. Aunt Mary threw a flower pot at Stephanie, Stephanie lost her front teeth, and Aunt Lisa nearly put her sister to sleep. It was all Dad’s side of the family, and that was something Mum as an only child wasn’t used to. Mum went down the driveway with a duffel bag, got in her car, and reversed out of the driveway because she couldn’t ever get used to it. I laid on my back and listened to everything going on around me, and I became used to those nights of Mum running away. I just didn’t know that someday she wouldn’t come back.
It went silent.
My cabin mates and I stood there in only our bras and shorts. The mud was dripping off of us. The other residents were eating at their tables, looking at us, wondering what was going through our brains. They were already healed, perhaps, cured of their wild, teenager tendencies.
Larry got out of his seat and walked slowly over to us. His bald spot at the crown of his head was shi
ny from the rain.
"You are filthy and late."
“It’s raining.” I pointed over my shoulder to the door.
“There will be no falling under the radar this time." He moved toward the door. “Follow me, girls. Your entire group.”
Twin and Twinner got up from the table and headed toward us. Their eyes were both on me because they knew I was the head of the issue. I had caused them to get in trouble too.
I didn’t know what was going on when Larry led us down to the lake. All I noticed was that the ground was soft and no longer hurting my feet. Was that because of the rain? It had to be. My feet couldn’t have toughened up already. I barely noticed the rocks and twigs jabbing into my skin.
Larry seemed to know exactly what our punishment was. He walked us down to the fence, unlocked the gate, and walked us down the stairs to the dock. He stood there with his arms crossed, and his eyes weren’t focusing in on anything. I wondered how many other groups he had led down there in the past, and how many half-naked girls he had to discipline before us.
We just waited for instructions.
“Get in, girls.”
I looked at Brooke and her red hair was so dark that it looked brown. Karen’s braids were slicked, perfect, and nearly black. Tracy had wobbly legs and was the first to be brave and enter the water. It was still raining, and the water droplets bounced off the surface of the lake. When she jumped in, she went right under.
One by one we plopped in. I jumped in and kicked my feet so my head wouldn’t go under. I hoped Larry noticed. Nothing was putting me beneath the surface.
“Jump in, Logan. We’re waiting for you.”
She was looking at the water like there was something underneath it, waiting for her to jump in.
“Come on, do it,” he said again.
“I can’t swim.”
I laughed. There was no way that was true. My body shook in the water from the new knowledge I was receiving—it was unreal to me.
“You can’t swim?” Twinner asked. “How can you not know how to swim?”
“I know how to swim, I just can’t.”
“Get in, Logan. Just because you can’t swim doesn’t mean you can’t get in the water. Let’s go,” Larry said.
She slowly put her feet in. And then the rest of her body slipped into the water. She held onto the dock like her life depended on it. It probably did.
“You could die out here if you’re not careful,” Larry said. “If you let yourself.”
That was true. And maybe that was the point. That if we didn’t do what we were told, we could die. But people didn’t do what they were told all the time, and they didn’t die because of it. So it was hard to know when you would die, and when you wouldn’t.
“You’re treading water for as long as I say.” Larry stepped near the edge of the dock. “When I say to let go of that dock, you better let go of that dock or I will step on your fingers.”
“Larry, I can’t swim.”
“Right now is a perfect chance for you to learn.”
“Please Larry—”
“Let go of the dock.”
We all dropped our hands from the edge and pushed away. Brooke immediately went to her back, Tracy had a slow tread with the water covering her lips, Twin and Twinner stayed near each other and did variations of stomach and back floating, and I bobbed up and down. In front of us, and directly in front of me, was the white knuckled Karen, gripping the dock.
“Karen let go, I will help you,” I said.
Before she could let go on her own, Larry stepped on her fingers.
Karen panicked. She screamed and let go, and then she was somehow on top of me. Her arms wrapped around me, and that only dragged us both beneath the water.
I struggled against her body, and the dark water was all around, ready to swallow the two of us. It was funny that I could let her drown us and kill two birds with one stone. But I didn’t want to drown with her. I managed to get one of my arms free from her tight clutch, and kicked us through to the surface of the water.
"LOGAN!" I yelled.
She clutched onto me again and pulled us both under. I could almost see the ground of the lake, but it was so murky that maybe it was even farther down than I thought. I kicked us back up again, and slapped her across the face after she took a huge breath.
Logan stopped struggling, and kicked her own feet to stay above water. She had finally stopped climbing onto me.
“You’re going to kill us if you climb me again like that,” I told her.
“I can’t do this.”
"You can float. You're fine. Just lay on your back.” I tried getting her onto her back, but she sunk every time she tried. “You have to relax. Stop tensing up. You have a lot of fat on you that floats.”
“I hate you so much.”
“I hate you way more than that. You’re a fucking bitch, and you’re digging your nails into me. I’m going to let go of you if you—”
“Okay! Please don’t let me go.”
“I’m not going to.” I held her back as she laid on top of the water. “I got you, Logan.” My legs burned trying to keep her steady as I treaded. Tracy kept away from me, and Brooke was now on her stomach, watching the scene. Twin’s hair was slicked back, like a model without a model face, and her eyes were deep in her head somewhere, watching me. Twinner was on her back, ignoring me.
“Thanks for your help, guys.”
“Well do you want help?” Brooke asked.
“Obviously, I’m drowning. I shouldn’t have to ask for it. It’s the one time you’re allowed to intervene without question.”
Brooke swam over and helped Logan stay on her back. And then Tracy was next to me, doing the same. We were a little huddle, and there was Larry, watching us. The twins, though, stayed back to themselves, angry to have been brought into the mess.
Twenty minutes later, Larry blew his whistle to get out. Brooke quickly doggie paddled for the dock, and Tracy eyed me before following after her. Logan immediately seized up, and down we went. I swallowed a lot of water before I came up through the surface again.
“Fuck off, Logan. Relax.”
I got Logan to the dock. She grabbed on and pulled herself out faster than I thought possible. It was amazing what adrenaline and fear could allow a body to do. I laid with my head on the dock and tried to catch my breath.
“Thanks for the swim, Valerie,” Twin said. She was safe and sound on the dock. She and Twinner’s clothes were slicked to their bodies. I think the rest of us had it easier swimming in just our shorts.
“You’re welcome.”
Tracy just watched as Brooke offered to help me out. I declined her hand and got myself out.
"What's with her?" I looked down at Logan who was lying on the dock. Ice pellets were suddenly falling from the sky and smacking her in the face. Her eyes were closed. I bent down to her level. “Logan, wake up. You’re not dead.”
“Fuck off,” she said.
“Glad to see you're thankful." I stood up and tried to remember why I had brought her back to the docks. I should’ve left her there to die.
“Ladies, what you did out there was teamwork,” Larry said. “And I didn’t even ask you to help each other out. But you did. In a time of need, most of you came together.”
"You hear that, Logan? We came together and saved you. That means you’re fine. Stand up." I tried to pull her up.
“Don’t touch me.”
“Come on, what kind of person doesn’t know how to swim, anyway? And you called me a coward—”
Just as the last word left my mouth, my feet were taken out from under me. I fell backward onto the dock, and I heard the thud of my head smashing the wood before slipping into the water. The rest of my memory went dark.