14: KENZIE
It was our shower day down at the lake. With Sharon’s help, I peeled myself off the floor and caught up with the girls down the path. I kept a good distance back, and tried not to hold the side of my face and look pathetic. I’d never gotten attacked until New Horizons, where the odds of getting the shit beat out of me weren’t in my favour.
The girls waited at the gate for Sharon to unlock it. Her shaky, old hands fumbled with the lock, but she managed to get the key in the hole and turn it. We walked in single file down the stairs, and when I got down to the beach, my stomach had butterflies in it.
I wanted to run.
The girls were all ahead of me, walking up onto the dock. Sharon was with them, shuffling in the wet sand, telling them to be quick with their washing. I looked to the left and right at the wide, open space of shore. At the very end, down to the right, was forest.
“Get going, Valerie.”
I flinched from Guy’s voice. When I turned around, he was right behind me standing at the bottom of the stairs. I waved innocently, like I didn’t have ideas running through my head.
We stripped down to our underwear, and Brooke and Twin were the first to jump into the lake. Logan stayed on the side, rinsing with her hands. It should have been obvious before that she couldn’t swim—we had to find out the hard way.
I slowly took my clothes off but kept watch on what everyone was up to. Where Sharon was. What Guy was doing. If the girls were looking suspicious too.
Logan had suds all over her arms and legs. She took her braids out of her hair and dunked her head under the water. When she came up, her hair had a swoop.
Brooke did a pencil dive. The soap stayed on the water while she sunk beneath the surface.
“Valerie since you’re the only Stone you only have one more minute at the lake,” Sharon said.
That was amazing to me. Everyone in my cabin was a Dandelion and I was a Stone with no privilege to do anything. I was behind and it might as well have been the first day. And it didn’t bother me not participating in things, but when Sharon said things to try and bother me, that bothered me.
I stood up.
“Aren’t you burnt out yet, Stone?” Logan asked.
I kicked her jug of water into the lake. 72 floated on the top. I hated 72 so much.
“What the hell!” she screamed.
“Oh come on, it’s right there. Reach for it.”
She leaned forward. Her fingers stretched across the water. She began to paddle the water toward her, like a current would bring 72 closer to her. She was so concentrated on getting 72 back. All it took was a little nudge with my knee—
Logan went into the lake, face first. She disappeared beneath the surface.
“Valerie, help her!” Sharon screamed.
Logan popped up immediately. She was in shallow water, just barely over her head. “Help me up!” she screamed.
“Oh jeez, Logan.” I reached out my hand. “Only because you asked.”
She grabbed my hand and I pulled her out.
“Did you see what just happened there? I pushed you in. And I still helped you out. Because I’m a fucking asshole, but I’m not an asshole that wants you dead.”
“You’ve lost your mind.”
“I have?” I looked over my shoulder at Brooke and Tracy and then the twins. There were so many issues spread out around me to choose from. I looked back at Logan. “No. You guys have lost your minds. You’re all going with this little system of being butterflies and shit. Why? You’re gonna get out soon either way. What is the fucking difference if I get out being a rock or whatever? There is no point to anything. We all go home. Our lives are waiting for us. What is the difference?”
“The difference is this place is our last fucking chance at something different before we go back,” someone else said.
I looked over my shoulder. It was little Tracy who had spoken up. Little Tracy, who had found a voice.
“I know that you come from somewhere that makes this place seem hard, and that’s why you’re such a bitch,” Logan said. She stood up. “You're that privileged, snot rag with parents that love you and that’s your only story—and that isn’t even a real story. That’s your problem.”
“Guys, quit it,” Sharon said.
But I stood in front of Logan, straight on, and I listened to what she had to say. Even though it was starting to hurt.
“We will never know anything about you because there is nothing about you to know. You’re a normal, fucking person. Nothing is wrong with you, and you’re absolutely miserable about it. You’re just like everybody and that’s going to fucking kill you.”
I didn’t know what to say. Logan was red in the face and that was normally Brooke’s job. But there she was, fists balled and she wasn’t even throwing them at me.
“New Horizons isn’t a terrifying place,” Logan whispered. “What’s terrifying is knowing you have to go back. You have to leave one day and go back to the way of the world. Schedules and hours of shifts with minimum wage and a mum that beats the life out of you without even raising her hand. And it’s shit here but it’s kind of nice too if you think about it. Because it’s bullshit. But bullshit is so much better than actually living with things.” Logan grabbed me by the throat.
I closed my eyes and waited for her grip to tighten.
“Separate now,” Sharon said.
Separate. Because when you separated from someone, that solved all the problems. But that was what people who didn’t get along did. That was what people who hated each other did. That was what Mum and Dad did, and then they were able to be happy. There was nothing left for me to separate from that would get me happy again.
Logan dropped her grip from me.
I smiled.
“Yeah, keep smiling, Valerie. It’s all you’ve got.”
“No, it’s just funny that you think this place is a safe little place. If this place offers such a chance for us fucked up kiddos, why is somebody missing from it?”
“What are you saying?” Logan said.
Sharon came up between our bodies and held out her hands to put some distance between us.
“I bet you know what I’m talking about, Sharon. A girl got out.”
“There is no girl missing, I assure you,” Sharon said.
“No. You’re wrong. There’s a girl that got away. She escaped. I saw it happen when I was at the ward. And she’s out there now.”
“There is nowhere to go out there,” Logan said. She picked up 72. “We are locked in here. She’s just hiding.”
“No, she’s not the one hiding. We are. She’s out there and she’s free.”
“Get out of here,” Sharon said. She pointed over my shoulder at the stairs where Guy was waiting for me.
I walked up to the stairs and headed to the mess hall. Guy was ahead of me, and I thought I was alone behind him until a little voice hollered at me.
“Wait up,” Tracy said.
I turned around and she was jogging up to me. She had her shirt over her head, and when she put her shirt on, New Horizons was across her chest instead of her back. There were a few counsellors walking around with walkies, watching our interaction, and I turned to keep walking to the mess hall. I wondered where Jenny Shoulders was—if she was on the other side of the fence or not. If she had climbed it or found that hole that Lisa Hatcher was preaching about. Maybe she was still inside with us. In the pretend facility.
“Is that all true?”
“Yeah.”
“Where is she then?”
“Out there—Murray says there’s cottages all around here. I imagine there are more roads all around. If she gets to a road, she’s gone.”
“We should do it too.”
“Do what?”
“Get out.”
I laughed.
“What?”
“Why?”
“Because, I don’t want to be go back to my aunts.”
“That doesn’t s
olve anything leaving like that. It just shows that something is wrong. You’ll get home and see it’s not a big deal. In the meantime, you can survive here.”
“No I won’t. I want to get out of here.”
“Okay, crazy.”
She stared at me.
“What?”
“She probably didn’t even get out.”
“I saw it.”
“Anyone else see it?”
“Yeah.”
“Who?”
“Another girl. And I bet I could ask Guy. He’d tell me.”
“Yeah?”
“I think so.”
Tracy and I sat down at our group table. We weren’t allowed to get up and get food until everyone was present. So we waited. I stared at the stage that was in front of the mess hall, and the walls all around the place, covered in prints. There were colourful hands of the campers from the past. Most of them were tiny because they were prints from children enjoying their summers. But there were all different sizes of small, weird shapes, all sorts of colours, and no matter where I looked, there was one in every spot around the mess hall.
“It’s surprising that someone hasn’t painted over those prints by now,” Tracy said.
“Yeah, they’re kind of childish in a place like this.” I got up and walked toward the back wall to get a closer look at the handprints there. I went along the wall and dragged my finger against the paint and felt the difference between leaving an imprint and not. My stomach felt weird because I knew where mine was. The approximate area, at least. My print was in green, and it jumped out at me after a few seconds.
It made me miss everything I was missing out on, and I could have crumbled to the floor. I remembered wanting a red one though. But there had already been red ones around the area I was told to place my print, and my camp counsellor at the time said there couldn’t be two red ones next to each other on the wall.
“It won’t look right,” she had said.
I dunked my hand in green and barely left it on there long enough to make a print. I was mad. My fingertips stayed, and some of the heel of my hand did as well, but it wasn’t a full print. There were spaces—holes that didn’t make it onto the wall. I signed below in loopy handwriting only because they told me too.
Val Campbell
I placed my hand over the print. The camp counsellors said when we’d come back some day we would be able to find our hand and compare the change. Every year I came back and it still fit. It was funny how change could come quick and all at once. How my hand completely hid its old print. I wouldn’t know it was mine if it didn’t say so in messy writing below it.
My group was looking over at me when they entered the mess hall. Logan glared at me from across the room. I tried not to look at them and headed over to get in line to fill my plate with food.
Lisa Hatcher was two people down from me in the line. She seemed to stick out now that I knew her. I never would’ve picked her out before because she didn’t matter to me. Now she did. Lisa Hatcher noticed me in line and slowly slithered her way so she was right in front of me.
“Tell your little group about Jenny?”
“What about her?”
“Her dedication.” Her eyes found mine.
“Dedication to what?”
“Getting out.”
“She really didn’t get out, did she? She had to have broken her leg. She probably got shipped home, just like she wanted.”
Lisa Hatcher laughed.
“It’s true.”
“No, why would someone like her want to go home?”
“I don’t really care. I just know that there’s no way out of here. You’d have to be pretty desperate to try and find a way through the fence.”
“She never came back that night. You know it and I know it. We would’ve seen her right back in the ward with us, and we didn’t. Facts are facts.” Lisa Hatcher raised her eyebrows. “Who’s your friend?”
“Excuse me?” I turned around.
Tracy was right behind me. I had no idea how much she’d heard, and if it even mattered. It was all a bunch of crap.
“Where would she go if she got out?” Tracy asked.
Lisa Hatcher shrugged. “Maybe ask your cabin mate.”
Tracy, for once, had a smirk on her face. She looked relieved to hear the news.
I got out of line with my plate and sat down at the table. Breakfast was pancakes. There was nothing to put on top. No condiments. No sauce to dip into. And that was the definition of New Horizons. I took a huge bite of dry pancake and pretended there was butter and syrup to make it moist, and when I swallowed, it felt like I was chewing sand.
When the girls got back to the table with their own plates, I put so much food in my mouth so I wouldn’t have to talk to them. I chewed and shovelled the food and pretended to be busy with eating while they watched me from their own sides of the table.
"You’re acting different," Brooke said. She was looking at me.
“So what?” I said. It wasn’t something new. I tried to chew my food as much as I could so I wouldn’t have to talk.
“You’re so mean.”
“Guess I’m not acting any different then. There goes that theory.”
“I think she’s homesick,” Twin said.
“I’m sorry—who are you to talk?” I swallowed everything in my mouth. “You’re nobody, so shut your teeth.”
Lisa Hatcher had her eyes on her plate and was picking at a pancake. Her group members were ignoring her and talking among themselves. She was sitting at the edge of her table and seemed like she wasn’t part of things. When she looked over at me, she picked at her front teeth and then wiped it on her shirt.
“Which one of you pulled me out of the water yesterday?”
“Kenzie did.” Brooke pointed across the table. At Twinner and the holes in her face.
I raised my eyebrows. “Kenzie?”
“Not really. I just pulled you out. I didn’t give you mouth-to-mouth or anything. I just dropped you on your back, and you started spitting up water.” Kenzie played with her pancake on the plate in front of her. She cut it into very small pieces. And then smooshed it. It was nearly a paste.
I didn’t remember any of it—that she had saved me. I just remember waking up and spitting up water and Larry taking me to the ward, where Nurse Janice patched me up. It was weird how much you could miss when you blacked out. That people could do crazy, good things in the matter of seconds. In tiny, split seconds. Even people you didn’t think twice about. Like Kenzie.
My reflection was looking different. Maybe that was because I was gaining the tools on how I judged myself and the world. Or maybe it was because I was just looking like shit since arriving at New Horizons.
My face was thinner, and my nose looked huge on my face. Why couldn’t my nose lose weight like the rest of my body? My bones were sticking out of my skin and my eyes were carrying dark bags beneath them. Hopefully they were designer.
“You still look the same.”
I glared at Twin.
“What, you do.” She peered at herself in the glass. She was two inches from it. “I saw you the first day you arrived before you got your hair changed. It was just as messy and gross. And you’ve always been underweight too.”
It was true. I probably did look like shit all the time. I was just finally seeing it. My weight always seemed to get low when I was stressed or nervous or scared. It had been hard to keep my weight up. And it was showing. It didn’t help that we weren’t exactly getting fed the most appetizing meals either.
“But if anyone looks like shit, it’s Logan.” She pointed at Logan through the glass. She was sitting just inside, talking with Sharon. Logan was someone who nodded a lot when someone was talking to her. She was so full of crap and I admired that about her. That she knew how to play pretend.
I knocked on the glass. Both Logan and Sharon looked over at Twin and I. Logan gave me the finger while Sharon waved for me to get away from the glas
s. I waved the most enthusiastic wave of my life, like I was excited to see them.
Logan smiled. Sharon shook her head at me.
“You’re like a pro at being charmingly annoying,” Twin said.
I finally moved away from the glass and looked out onto the property. I was next to go and talk to Sharon about life and things, and everyone else in my group was down on the grass, doing yoga positions. Kenzie was doing the downward dog, and Brooke was on her back. She seemed like she was used to that position.
When I looked back over my shoulder, Logan had her face pressed up against the glass. There was a lot of skin spread out, and when her tongue touched the glass, I shook my head at her.
Sharon got up and grabbed Logan by the sleeve and pulled her back.
“You two are soulmates,” Twin said.
“Yeah, that or we’re going to kill each other some day. I think we’re the kind of people that should go our separate ways. Not keep in touch. And then just tell stories about each other to our grandkids—make it really nostalgic, like we missed each other or something. That’s a better kind of friend. Someone far away, who you don’t actually have to get together with, or ever really know.”
“That’s called a stranger.”
I went inside the mess hall just as Logan was coming out. Twin didn’t follow me. She stayed outside because it wasn’t her turn. Logan smashed her shoulder against mine when I walked past her, and I pretended not to notice the blow while I kept moving toward Sharon. When I got to her sitting at our table, she told me not to bother taking a seat.
“Am I just going to stand?”
“No, you’re going to be having your solo session with Larry.”
I chuckled. She was hilarious.
“Get going Valerie, Larry is in his office. Just sit outside it until he’s done with the resident he’s talking to.”
“I’m gonna die in this place,” I whispered.
“No you’re not. Get going.”
I dragged my feet to his office and sat in the chair just outside the door. His door was open a crack and I listened to one of Larry’s epic speeches that I’m sure he told all of his screw-ups.
“I don’t want you to get caught up in the bad things you’ve done, but I don’t want you to forget about them either. You can’t deny that they happened—you did some terrible things. But the physical violence you displayed against your girlfriend was a sign of your internal struggles. Normal people don’t hold a knife up to someone’s throat. Normal people not only have control, but don’t have the urge to do what you’ve done. Now, this doesn’t make you a bad person as long as you understand that you have problems that you’re seeking help for.”
I tried to get ready to catch my eyeballs when they popped out of my head. I didn’t want them rolling around on the floor. My ears were little caves, deep and listening to the room that some crazy kid was in. His issues seemed so much worse than my own. Mine seemed like nothing.
It was nice to know that there were people worse off than you—really messed up souls that couldn’t figure out anything. At least I didn’t go around wanting to stab people. I didn’t even think about it. Maybe I was just boring.
“If you ever want to be part of society, and get a chance at avoiding jail someday, you have to accept that there are areas of your life that you need to fix, and that to do this, you need to accept other people’s help.”
Someone had held a knife up to someone else’s throat. There was nothing worse. You were too far gone if you were ever in that kind of situation. There was no point trying to change. Like Larry said—normal people didn’t do that. Larry was talking to a lunatic, and I wondered why he was even wasting his breath—
“Murray, you can be as good as you want to be. It’s all up to you.”
It wasn’t my eyes that popped out of their sockets. It was my stomach that moved first, and turned over from shock. It rolled and rolled, and I didn’t think it was going to ever stop.
“I know that, I just don’t feel like I have control over myself sometimes.” His voice was low. He didn’t sound like that cocky boy from before. “I have issues.”
“At least you recognize that and you show remorse,” Larry said. “Some people never get better because they don’t have the self-awareness to recognize that they need to change. Remember what I said? That change is life forgiving you.”
I remembered that. I also remembered Murray telling me different things about his past. That he was at the program for a DUI. He hadn’t said shit about nearly stabbing someone—no, not just anyone. His girlfriend.
There was shuffling in the room. A chair moving. And I stayed where I was when Murray walked out. He didn’t see me sitting there when he walked straight toward the mess hall door with his head down, but I couldn’t let him go into the world in an ignorant bliss like that.
“Hey Murray.”
His head snapped up.
“Great story.” I gave him a thumbs up. “My favourite part was everything.”
Murray turned and left. He made sure to slam the screen door of the mess hall as hard as he could. To show how manly he was. Maybe he would take it out on his girlfriend later when he got out of the program. I bet he made her stay with him too.