13: JENNY SHOULDERS
I wanted to say that I passed away. That I saw Jesus. That there was life on the other side. But as soon as I blacked out, I was back in two seconds.
“Valerie, you’re alive,” Tracy said from somewhere in the dark.
Maybe if nobody had told me I was alive, I would have thought I was dead. But it was nice to hear—maybe I just needed the reminder.
The girls were surrounding me when I opened my eyes, and I was on my back, looking up at wide-eyed ghosts. Larry picked me up. I closed my eyes because I couldn’t believe what was happening.
I ended up in the ward. Nurse Janice gave me stitches on the back of my head. I laid on the cot after and enjoyed the open space of the room. She touched my forehead, and I let it happen.
“You’re fine.”
That was a medical perspective based on my vitals. My internal organs were working and pumping. My limbs were attached and moving. My personality, though, was still jaded and insensitive.
Yes, maybe I was perfectly fine.
There were three stitches in my head. And I might have had a concussion too. Every time I closed my eyes, I was back in the water, bobbing up and down, being dragged down by someone I just wanted to help out.
“We have to call your father to tell him what happened to you.”
It was funny to me that life or death situations were important, and that if I stopped breathing, my parents needed to know. But if I was a little depressed—oh, snap out of it. Go do something. Get outside. Stop fermenting. Everybody gets sad.
At least I was the only one in the ward. There were rows and rows of cots. I was all tucked in and I felt completely fine. It was nice to be in a comfy place and not be expected to do anything.
“Are you feeling okay?”
I looked over at Guy. He was standing near the doorway.
“You can come in.”
He moved into the room but didn’t come close to me. He stayed near the wall, afraid to enter.
“What happened?” I asked him. I was only in my sports bra, and my shirt was still missing.
“You tell me, you were the one that got knocked out cold.”
I smiled. I had never been knocked out in my life. It was a weird thing. It was just two seconds long, and yet it was like nothing had happened. My head was sore though, the only evidence of going away for a bit.
“When can I go back to my cabin?”
"I don’t know."
"I don’t need to be here. I feel fine. For real.”
"Why did Logan do that to you?”
“Why are you asking me that? Ask her. She’s the crazy one. I’m the victim.”
“Well you must have said something. You know she has an explosive personality. It’s why she’s here.”
“So what if I said something? Maybe I told her the worst things. But you don’t always have to lose it when you hear something you don’t like. Come on.”
“You sound like a counsellor.”
I didn’t sound like a counsellor. I mainly just sounded like someone who knew what they were talking about. In reality, I was pulling stuff out of my ass.
“Whatever the case,” he said, “we don’t use violence in this program. We don’t need more outbursts this week.”
“Why, who else is in trouble?”
“No, I’m just saying—”
“No, I know what you’re saying. Who else is causing issues?”
Nurse Janice began rattling supplies in a cabinet. Nurse Janice, who cut the hospital bracelet off my wrist. Nurse Janice, who sewed up my head. What a weird idea—being stitched up.
“Am I going to live?” I asked her.
“It’s looking that way.” She delicately touched my forehead with the back of her hand.
“Lovely.” I stared at Guy.
“Are you having any trouble breathing?” Nurse Janice asked.
“I’m breathing fine.”
“You had a close call.”
“What exactly is a close call? I don’t think I believe in close calls. There’s no such thing if you think about it. Lots of things are close to something. Maybe everything is a close call.”
“You can believe what you want.”
“Well I believe I would be better off in my cabin with my pals.”
“Your pals?”
“Yes. My good friends. Nothing like good friends. Good food. Good times.”
“Oh no, you need to be here. Residents who sustain any form of injury must stay overnight in the ward for observation."
"What are we observing?”
“You.”
“I’m fine though.”
“It’s just a precaution.” She smiled.
“I get that and all—”
She walked out the door.
Guy began to follow.
“Guy?”
He looked at me.
“Who pulled me out of the water?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.” He left.
It was still raining. I was all alone and the only thing on my mind was who had saved me. Must have been Brooke. The suck up. Or Larry. It was his job. But it wasn’t that pressing of an issue to keep me awake. Even though I didn’t want to, I got tired of keeping my eyes open, and before I realized it, I was asleep.
A huge crack of thunder shook the windows and woke me up awhile later. I couldn’t remember where I was. It felt like maybe I was back home, and when I realized I was still at the ward, I became sad.
When I was younger, Mum and Dad used to let me sleep in their bed at night when I was scared. But when I got older it wasn’t okay to be scared and I was left in my room to sleep in my own bed. Being alone in the ward made me miss my cabin and its occupants, who were maybe a little scared like me.
I made a tent with my blankets, and it made me feel a little more safe. I stayed like that for a couple minutes, just gazing at the area where the moonlight was highlighting the little designs on the sheet. It was weird being under more than one blanket again. Or having a pillow. Being a patient at the ward seemed to have its perks.
Someone coughed.
My stomach dropped and my body locked up. I was too scared to look out from under my blanket toward the sound.
“Sorry,” a voice whispered.
I was supposed to be alone. I hadn’t realized someone else had been brought in while I was asleep. I peeked out of my tent. In the far corner of the long room, by the wall, a figure was visible on the cot.
“Are you awake?” The voice asked. It belonged to a girl.
“Yeah, mostly.”
The cot was reclined upward, and she was sitting back against it, peering over at me. She had dark skin and pointy shoulders—like toothpicks. She was skinny and her head was completely shaved. Her teeth looked shiny in the moonlight streaming through the window, and the whites of her eyes seemed to glow in the dark, just like Tracy’s.
I kept the blanket over my head because I was scared for some reason. I wondered why she had been brought in. What was wrong with her?
“Are you loose?” she asked. There was a bit of shock in her voice.
I didn’t know what to say to that. I was confused by what she was asking me. Was I loose? Loose from what?
“Are you tied up or not?!” There was even more panic in her voice. She was desperate to hear an answer.
“Tied up? No—I’m just sitting here,” I whispered back.
“Why the hell are you still here then?”
“Because she’s an idiot.”
And then there were three.
On the other side of me, across the room, where I thought more empty cots sat, was another body. It was tilted up and laying still. She had a mushroom cut like a boy. She was closer to me, and I could see that she wasn’t lying there by choice. She was strapped to the bed like a mental patient. Her arms were at her sides, and her legs were locked in too.
“Please, help me,” the pointy shouldered girl begged.
“Don’t
do it, she’s a fucking maniac.” The mushroom girl laughed.
“Can neither of you move?” I asked.
“We’re buckled into the bed,” the mushroom girl said. She thrashed her arms against the braces. “See, we’re stuck.”
“Please, help me out,” Shoulders whispered. “I’ll help you if you help me.”
“I shouldn’t. I’ll get in trouble.” That was funny to me. All the sudden, when I was around what seemed like the real kind of crazy, I realized that I didn’t want to be around it in case I became infected by it.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Please! If you don’t help me they’ll do what they did to me, to you.”
“What did they do to you?”
“Don’t listen to Jenny,” Mushroom said. “She’s so full of shit.”
“Help me and I’ll tell you,” Jenny Shoulders whispered.
I had no idea why I got out of bed. Maybe in my head I thought I would just go over and see what she was doing. But when I slid out of my bed, and made my way across the room, that Jenny Shoulders looked right at me and made my stomach drop in fear.
“Hurry,” she whispered.
I reached out and undid a buckle. That was all it took to set everything in motion.
She wiggled her arm out of it too fast and she unbuckled the other one. Before I could ask her what was going on, she jumped out of her cot, picked up the chair at the end of her bed, and threw it through the window.
“Are you crazy!?” I covered my ears from the noise of the chair falling to the deck below.
“No, you are—don’t believe anything that anybody tells you!” She jumped out the window. There was no thought or hesitation to it. She just jumped out and there was a thud of her body hitting the deck outside.
I thought maybe she died. She had to have at least broken a bone. When I looked out the window, she was already pulling herself across the deck, in escape mode. I wondered where she was headed—
“Now you’ve done it.”
I looked over my shoulder at the other girl. She was still there, completely calm. The worst part was that I had helped spring a lunatic. I had no idea what I would tell the counsellors, and I didn’t have time to come up with a story.
The lights turned on in the room, and there I was, standing in front of the broken window, not in my bed, next to an empty cot.
“What’s going on?” Nurse Janice asked. Her eyes flew to the window. “Where’s Jenny?!”
“Who?” I asked. I moved away from the window and tried not to look at Jenny Shoulders’ cot. “What are you saying?”
“HELP!” she screamed. “GET IN HERE!”
Two huge men entered the room. They grabbed me on either arm before she could give instructions.
“Listen, I know it looks bad, but I really had nothing to do with it.”
“Yeah right, you unbuckled her and broke the window for her to escape.”
“What?!” I turned and glared at Mushroom, who was accusing me of exactly the things I had done. It sounded horrible when I heard it out loud.
Nurse Janice left the room. The other men put me in a cot. This time, they buckled me in. Like Mushroom. Like Jenny Shoulders. Like a crazy person.
Larry entered the room shortly after. I immediately stopped struggling against the straps and laid still.
“Hello Larry. How are you?”
“Valerie, stop it.” Larry took a seat on a cot. He laid right out and put his hands on his head. I wondered if he was comfortable lying in the ward on a crazy girl’s cot. “May I be frank with you?”
“Sure Frank.”
“This place, these cabins, these groups, these activities—it’s all just a bunch of stuff. And this stuff—it sometimes doesn’t work on people like you.”
“Maybe you could tell my parents that.”
He shook his head. “No, it’s going to be harder than that. Because people like you have people back home who want to hear good things. They care about you and want to see something good for you. They want to give you a chance before getting serious. But people like you don’t react to messages of hope, or ideas that put better thoughts in your head.”
“Beautiful.”
“And that’s why this program isn’t for you—because you need a military program to beat the reality into you. The only way to wake up someone like you is with fear.”
“I’m pretty scared.”
“You’re not scared. You’re amused. And I want you terrified so you can finally see what you’re dealing with. That’s why I let you stick around—so that when you do get out of here, you see how good your parents were to you. How much they cared. You’re here for a reason.” He stared at the wall in front of him. He seemed tired and exhausted by the conversation. How many other residents had he given this speech to? “There is something about you that makes you unagreeable, but I can work with that. You’re a bad example, and bad examples make good examples out of other people.”
I looked over at the other girl who was on her side, facing the other wall. I wondered if she was hearing this talk for the second time. Maybe she was rolling her eyes.
“You don’t want to be like Jenny.”
“Jenny was scared though,” I said. “That’s why she escaped.”
“No she wasn’t. People who jump out of windows aren’t afraid—they’re motivated. Jenny isn’t afraid of what’s here—she just wants what’s out there. And that’s motivation enough to do something really stupid.”
I didn’t know if that was true. You had to be scared of something to jump out of a window. Maybe she was scared of the wrong kind of things, and showed bravery for even worse things.
“You’re going to get in trouble when you get out of here. People in the real world don’t have a tolerance for people who don’t care about anything. That is your number one problem, Valerie. You are apathetic to everything around you, and that isn’t normal.”
“That doesn’t bother me. If it’s not normal to feel how I do, then why do I feel it? And if you want to talk about the real world, I imagine you’ll get in a lot of trouble for losing a resident. She knows it too—that’s why I bet she’s out there hiding.”
“No, we got her.”
“I don’t believe you. It’s your job to lie to me.”
“Believe what you want.”
“Trust me, I always do. And that’s why the world thinks I’ve gone mad.” That was a dangerous thing to tell someone, and it wasn’t something he should have told someone like me. I knew no other way to live than to believe in what I wanted, and it had put me in New Horizons. It was my constant battle, and he was preaching about something he didn’t really believe.
All he knew was the rules of behaviour modification, and I knew that if Larry lost a resident there was no way he would ever tell me. It was one thing for someone to break out, but it was a whole other thing if they were actually free.
The sky outside the window had lightened, and Mushroom and I were still strapped to our beds. At least we had a breeze coming through the broken window. Nurse Janice had already cleaned up the shards of glass. Apparently there wasn’t an urgency to move us back to our cabins, which I didn’t like. I wanted to go back to my bunk.
I looked at Mushroom across the room. In the morning light I could see much more of her. She had short, orange hair that could be pretty if it was cut differently. But she didn’t have nice eyes. Her eyes were far apart, one on each side of her head. She was drastically strange looking, and it almost hurt to search for something smooth to focus on.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Val.”
“Your full name.”
“Valerie Campbell.”
“I’m Lisa Hatcher. How funny is that?”
“What?”
“Lisa Hatcher and Valerie Campbell. It doesn’t make any sense on either of us.”
I glanced at Lisa Hatcher. Lisa hatcher was mad looking with her orange mushroom cut and blue eyes.
“I bet
Jenny is free.”
I laughed.
“Why is that funny?”
“Well, there’s a fence. So I doubt she’s free.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
The straps were tight around my arms and legs. I had never been strapped to anything before. Never held against my will. It was for my safety, they told me. So I couldn’t hurt myself or anyone else. I found that funny. It was hurting me more to have me held down like that.
Lisa Hatcher was staring at me.
“What?”
“There’s a hole in the fence.”
“And where would that be?”
“The farthest side, in the very right corner, where the two sides come together.”
“Says who?”
“Says Jenny. She found it. And she’s probably through it now.”
“Why didn’t you ever go through it then if you knew where it was?”
“Oh I will, it’s something I dream about. I dream about a lot of things. Like killing Breanna Maclean. But you know why I can’t? Besides the fact that I have no idea where in the world she is, of course. It’s that she doesn’t remember that she was a bully. Because she’s different now. You know, the only worse thing than a bully is a bully who doesn’t remember it.”
“Well maybe she was a kid. People change.”
“So was I. Breanna Maclean was evil. She used to tell me my breath stank. And then she made fun of me when I’d go and use the bathroom at lunch time. I was terrified of sitting on the toilet because I knew she and her little friends would go outside the stall and laugh at the sound of my piss. Who does that? I was scared to take a piss. Nobody should ever be scared to take a piss.”
I didn’t have a bunk bed to jump up into and pretend I was asleep. We were both on the same level of cots lined up along a wall, one after the other. I had no idea when I was going back to my group. All I knew was that I didn’t want to talk to Lisa Hatcher, or have anything to do with someone so weird. I didn’t want her to rub off on me.
Nurse Janice came in with a clipboard. She had counsellors on either side of her. One of them stepped in front of my cot and looked right at me.
“How is your head?” he asked.
“Fine.” I had no idea who he was or why he was talking to me. “But I’m kind of hungry.”
Nurse Janice marked some scribbles down on top of her clipboard.
“Nurse Janice, I said I’m hungry,” I repeated.
“If you keep misbehaving out there, you will never progress to anything before you leave.” She pointed her pen at me. Maybe she was going to throw it at my face. “And if you don’t learn anything here, your life outside this program is going to be even harder.”
“I realize that. Thank you so much.”
When she left the room, the counsellors went with her. I was back to being alone with Lisa Hatcher. She was still watching me from across the room.
“What?”
“She thinks you give a shit about this place.”
I looked away from her. The wall was white, and there wasn’t a crack of anything in it. I wanted there to be a speck of dirt to notice, but my eyes wondered the room instead.
“I bet you blame a lot of people for your bad hair and shitty skin and fucked up teeth. You go around all sad pretending there’s some crazy reason for it all. But you don’t really want to get anything fixed. Not really. And I can tell why—because there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re dramatic, and you feel different. I’ll tell you right now, there’s nothing special about that—everyone feels different. You could change yourself on the drop of a hat—what does that tell you? But I know you won’t change, because it’s so much better to pretend to be broken than to realize you’re pathetic for no particular, exact reason,” Lisa Hatcher said.
“That was beautiful.”
Lisa Hatcher slid out of her bed.
“You’re not strapped in.” I tried to pull my arms out of the straps. But they were tight and secure. They were doing their job.
Lisa Hatcher smiled.
“What are you doing?”
“I want to help you.” She began to walk toward my cot.
“No thank you, I’m fine.” I kicked my legs, but they were stuck.
Lisa Hatcher jumped on top of me. Her legs straddled my waist, and I had no way of stopping her.
“HELP ME! SHE’S GONNA KILL ME!” I screamed.
Lisa Hatcher wrapped a sheet around my throat. Maybe that was why we weren’t allowed sheets in our cabins—so we couldn’t hang ourselves or kill each other with them.
I tried to get away from her but I was strapped down. I wasn’t allowed to have control of my arms or legs. Only normal people were allowed that kind of control.
Lisa Hatcher tightened the sheet.
I couldn’t take a breath. It was exciting. My life was possibly about to end. I was going to die. And it would be funny that my parents sent me away to get better in a little, friendly program, and instead, I died. That would be amazing. I wish that could happen to someone just to show the world that bad things could happen in what was supposed to be a good place.
But I didn’t die.
A counsellor ripped Lisa Hatcher off of me because it was their job to pull the crazy girls off of the other crazy girls. It was all pretty easy, you just had to keep an eye on things in case someone wrapped something around someone else’s neck, or maybe, around their own.
The sheet fell to the ground.
“I hate girls like you, Valerie Campbell. Want to know why?”
“Not really.”
“Because unlike you, and everyone else here, I’m actually crazy. And you’re just a fucking faker.”
When the counsellors got her strapped back up, and everything calmed down, they released me from my cot. It felt good to leave the ward because I didn’t believe that I belonged there.
They walked me down the hall, and I smiled when I saw an old woman at the end, sitting in a chair. She stood up when she saw me.
“Sharon,” I said. “Can I go back to my group?”
“Are you going to behave?”
“Yeah, I am.”
I was telling the truth. I was going to behave. Because I didn’t want to be like Lisa Hatcher. I didn’t want to be crazy, and I definitely didn’t want to be crazy and know it.
Sharon walked beside me to guide me back to my group in the woods. There was a breeze that rustled the tree branches, and almost made the place seem serene. I was five feet from cabin 519, and if I didn’t know it as a program for troubled youth, it was just an adorable looking cabin in the woods. The wooden door was chipping paint, and there was a crack at the bottom that let in the cool air.
From where I was standing I could hear the girls fighting about what day of the week it was. It was between Thursday and Friday, and even though nobody could remember for sure, they decided to fight over it. When there was a loud thud from one of the girls jumping from their bunk, I entered the cabin.
It went quiet.
“Hi guys.”
“Where the hell have you been?” Logan said. She was standing up in the middle of the cabin. Maybe she had been the one to fall out of her bunk. She positioned herself so that I couldn’t enter the cabin.
“Step aside, Logan,” Sharon told her. “Let’s be more welcoming.”
“Welcome home,” she said. “Now let’s hear about your adventure.”
“Oh it was quite the time, let me tell you.”
“I will be back in ten minutes to grab you ladies.” Sharon closed the door. We were on our own in cabin 519.
I pushed myself around Logan, and I walked over to my bunk like it was just a normal day at the cabin. My 49 was on the floor, where I had left him, and it was nice to know that there was still some water for me to drink. I jumped up on my bunk and wrapped my grey blanket around my shoulders. It felt good to be in a clean t-shirt. My old clothes wer
e lost somewhere else and I hoped they stayed there forever.
“Are you going to even say anything?” Brooke asked.
“Good to see you too, Brooke.”
Logan began to climb up my ladder.
My first day at the program, Logan and the girls seemed crazy. And they were, because they were different to me. But crazy had all kinds of recipes. Logan’s was brewed in a crock-pot, over years of abuse. Her hard shell could possibly still crack, and the inner warm stuff could ooze like the package suggested. Lisa Hatcher was the same. She was microwaved on high, and since she came from a tight, little, sealed package, she burst everywhere. Her buck teeth and orange hair and wide nose were all a clear target for teasing, and mixed with other things, Lisa Hatcher had exploded.
I wondered when I was going to explode.
“How are you?” Logan was at the top of my ladder.
“What do you think?” I put my foot on her shoulder to prevent her from getting up onto my mattress.
“Get your fucking foot off me,” she said.
“Get off my bunk.”
She jumped down.
“Thanks so much.”
“We just wanna know what happened to you.”
“Hello. You saw what happened. You tried to kill me.”
“You’re unbelievable. I didn’t mean to do that. We were just fighting. You know how it is.”
“Why am I unbelievable? I’m the only sane one in this place. You’re all the unbelievable ones.”
“Why are you saying that kind of stuff?” Brooke asked. She was picking at her braces. “She didn’t mean to nearly kill you. She just has a temper.”
“Stop saying it like that,” Logan yelled. “I didn’t try to kill her. I tripped her. And then she was the one who knocked herself out from falling back.”
“I didn’t fall,” I corrected her. “I was pushed.”
“That’s crazy. You weren’t pushed, you were tripped,” Brooke said.
“Oh please,” I said, “you’re the craziest of all. I honestly don’t want to keep talking about how crazy you are because I know where Logan didn’t kill me, you’d actually finish the job.”
“I obviously didn’t mean for you to trip like that on the dock,” Logan said.
“Apology accepted,” I said.
“I wasn’t apologizing. I was just saying.”
“I know, but I’m accepting it for when you do because you’re a fucking bitch.”
“You’re the bitch,” Logan said back.
“No, you are—you tried to kill her,” Brooke said.
“Who the hell do you think you are, Brooke?” I jumped down from my bunk and landed on my knees. Within a second, I was across the cabin, in her face, and pointing at her. It was exactly like cabin 519 again. Everyone was everywhere. “Shut your goddamn teeth. You’re just so full of shit that I bet you can taste it.”
Brooke opened her mouth. It was wide enough to see a hint of her braces. She had green and blue elastics around the brackets. Bright green, and bright blue. I had no idea why she was getting between Logan and I, and making it worse.
“What?” I said. “Say something. Let’s hear what stupid Brooke has to say.”
“Why are you being like this? You’re so mean.” Brooke’s face got ugly from holding in deep, heavy breaths. She looked so much like Lisa Hatcher. Maybe they were cousins with their orange hair.
“Oh here we go.” Logan leaned her shoulder on the edge of her bunk.
Brooke looked at Logan. Her lips were parted and you could see the space in between her teeth. It was so dark in that space, and I wondered when the hell her braces were going to kick in and start straightening up her face. She looked like she thought she was innocent. Like she had just appeared out of nowhere in a cabin full of fuck-ups. Like she didn’t know why she was there. She knew why, the liar.
“Why the hell are you looking at her like that?” Twinner asked Brooke.
“Like what?” Brooke’s voice cracked. She was trying to hold back her sobs.
“Do you not see that when you don’t get your way, you cry?” Twinner asked.
“I just wanted to know where Val’s been,” Brooke said. She began to wail. She sat down on her bed and covered her mouth and it sounded like she was hyperventilating. “I can’t…help…it.”
I grabbed 49 off the floor. I took a long swig of him and picked up my toiletry bag. “If you assholes must know, I was at the ward the whole night.”
Twin rolled her eyes. I caught it even though she was staying quiet under her bunk, quietly smoking her toothbrush.
“Hey you.”
Twin looked up at me.
I rolled my eyes so many times that it felt like they were going to fall out of my head.
“What was that?” Twin asked. Her nose went up and I could see her nostrils and how big they were.
“That was you.”
The cabin laughed. It began with Logan. It came from her belly and it was loud and thunderous. Then Twinner, who was supposed to be on her side, echoed the laughter coming from all sides. Brooke had a smirk on her face and wiped a tear from her cheek. Tracy was silent.
I turned around to see what Tracy’s deal was.
She watched me. Her eyes were small for once and they sliced me up and down.
“Hey Tracy, ever gonna find something funny?”
“Maybe.” Her eyes went to the floor.
“You must know the construction of that floor inside and out by now. Tell me—did they bolt it down or is there just a few rusty nails to hold everything together?”
“Hey Valerie.”
I turned around—
Logan slapped me. Her hand made a cracking sound against my skin.
I tumbled backward, and tripped over my own feet. My ass hit the ground, and then I was flat on my back. I closed my eyes to keep the tears in, and when I opened them, everyone was headed for the door at once—even Tracy. I blinked until the blurriness went out of my vision. There was a small tingling sensation in my face, and my cheek felt huge.
I wanted to cry for a lot of reasons. And it hurt to hold it in. I bit my lip and the world went blurry again from the tears welling up in my eyes. My breath felt shaky.
“What are you doing on the ground?” Sharon asked as she entered the cabin.
“I fell.”
Sharon offered me her hand. I took it, and even though she didn’t pull me up, it felt nice to know that there was someone around who could steady me while I peeled myself off the ground.