17: SQUARE ONE
I could barely keep my eyes open, and even though I had no idea what a migraine felt like, I was pretty sure I was having one right then. Larry’s office still had the view of the fence, and Avril and Burrito Eater were standing with flashlights at their feet, guarding the facility.
It was a completely new place. Larry was pacing in front of me, and the walkie in his back pocket was playing fuzzy, short conversations between counsellors around the property. They were all frantic and sharing information they thought was vital—where they were headed, what they were doing.
It was pouring rain.
“I’m sorry you had to find her like that.”
“It was just the body.” My nails were dirty. I picked at the crud beneath the nail and tried not to think about anything but the process of picking at a nail, and cleaning it out. “I’d like to go back to my cabin.”
“It wouldn’t be right to send you there.”
“And why is that?”
“This is an event that might change your stay here,” he said.
My stay here. That was something I didn’t want to think about in any kind of context. But I didn’t ask more questions because there was nothing to say. I put my head back and listened to the mess hall door open and close from the residents entering, and the noise of the chairs pulling across the floor. After a couple minutes, it was my turn to move too.
“What are you thinking?”
“What am I thinking?” I smiled. There was a lot to be thinking. I didn’t know what I really wanted to think about, but I knew what I didn’t want to think about. “I guess that could be anything,” I told him. And then I led him off course. “When I get out of here, what am I supposed to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Say I stay here, complete my course—what then? Am I cured? Cured of what? What will I know that I don’t know now? Will I have a different outlook on things? Am I going to be a better person, and know how to apply myself in the real world? I feel exactly as I did a couple weeks ago, when I first got here—isn’t that bad? I feel the same. What am I supposed to do when I’m home, when I feel like I do right now?”
“I guess I don’t have an answer—I don’t know what you’re supposed to do. I just hope that we gave you the tools to try harder, and do better.”
I laughed.
“What else do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. I just think there’s a huge script you’ve been reading across your eyelids when you close them at night, and you’re so well versed in it that you don’t even hear what I hear. The meaningless bullshit. I want a real answer, Larry. I want to know what I am supposed to do!”
“Do you really want specifics? Fine. I suggest that you grow up, get a job—any job. Fold clothes for living, bag groceries, I don’t care. Just get off your ass and make some money. Get your GED for fuck’s sake—you’re not a dumbass, you know that. And get the hell over yourself, and then maybe, just maybe, you’ll start to actually feel okay.”
The walls and the ceiling were painted two different colours. It was barely noticeable. The window behind Larry was opened a crack, and a breeze was making the curtains sway. I glanced down at his bare desk, and stayed completely still.
Larry leaned back in his seat. “You alive over there or what?”
I ignored him. “Are we done?”
“Follow me, Valerie,” he said. “And please, for the sake of others around you, please, please keep quiet about what is going on. I would like to explain things myself.”
It was funny that I was in a different position right then—that I was a god. Because I knew about life and the stark things that could happen if you weren’t careful. As soon as you become used to how things are going for you, life will tap you on your shoulder and remind you why it’s important to be grateful.
The mess hall had all thirty residents sprawled out in different areas. Some up on the stage, some lying on the tables. Thirty, because two girls had disappeared, and one was a deer-like girl who had hung herself from an outhouse ceiling. And when they pulled her down, her halo fell off her head and into the hole where people’s waste disappeared to. I wondered what knot she used to do the trick. I hadn’t paid enough attention to really learn them.
None of the residents knew what was going on. Nobody did. It was the middle of the night, when we were supposed to be dead asleep, and the counsellors were surrounding us, watching us like we would throw a sheet around the rafters and jump off a table.
Larry led me past my group to a table at the back, alone. I didn’t sit at it.
“Please, be good.”
“I am so sick of hearing that,” I said. “I’m not even doing anything.”
“Val.”
“It’s Valerie,” I said. “You can’t switch now.”
Larry left me alone and went to the front of the mess hall. My group watched me—maybe they thought that I knew something. Or maybe they thought I was being my typical self, and needed to be segregated as punishment. I kept my back to them, because one look at any of their faces, and I would explode.
I went along the back wall instead, and searched for the hand I had placed on the wall years ago. The one dipped in green. Green, because I couldn’t have the colour I wanted. That was the trend, apparently. I stopped when I found my splotched, little green print, and I placed my hand over it.
“That’s cute.”
Lisa Hatcher was sitting at a table in the corner. She got up slowly and walked toward me. Each step made the boards under her feet moan. When she came up beside me, she put her hand on the print next to mine. Her hand completely covered it. When she removed her hand, the name popped out at me.
Tracy McPherson
For a second, I imagined that I wasn’t being crazy—that I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. But the name was printed in block letters, clear for a kid who had no idea what life was going to put her through. Tracy McPherson, with a red print, was a girl who was just as scared as I was back in my first time at camp, who cried like I did, who missed her mum. I hadn’t paid much attention to her after that first night at camp because we were different, and I hadn’t paid much attention again—because we were different. I didn’t know who Tracy McPherson was, and that was my fault.
I just knew Bambi.
Bambi had straight bangs, huge doe eyes, and liked reading books instead of existing in the real world. Bambi was timid in a terrifying way, and made herself a threat without having to open her mouth. The print beside my little green one was of a fellow camper who I didn’t get to know all that well, who had gotten the colour I wanted, who had given me green.
“What are you thinking?” Lisa Hatcher asked. She had no idea what she had just put her hand on.
“Nothing.”
“Sure you are—I know why we’re here. I know what’s going on.”
I looked at her.
“And you do too,” she said.
“Do I?”
“We know Jenny is out there, and they know they messed up—”
“You’re a fucking idiot.”
She stared at me with her wide eyes on either side of her head. Lisa Hatcher was disgusting to look at. And she had done it to herself. She was so bad looking that there wasn’t an easy way to imagine her to be pretty somewhere.
“Jenny never got out of here and you’re a dumb fuck for thinking that. You should never have started that rumour,” I told her.
“Rumour?” She laughed at that. “You’re the dumb one. That’s why we’re all here. She’s missing and they’re scared that they’re gonna lose us too.”
“I wish that was why we were here, but you’ve never been more wrong.”
“You’re just tired, Valerie Campbell. You’re not thinking clearly. You’re letting yourself get fixed.”
One last time, I looked at the handprint of Tracy McPherson. It was dipped in red. It was vivid and bright and scary. It looked like blood. Finally, I was glad to have a green
print. It didn’t seem so bad compared to how red looked when it dried.
“It’s crazy that things happen when you don’t think they can,” Lisa Hatcher said. “Jenny made things happen. Because she didn’t like being scared. Isn’t that weird?—that there are people in the world more scared than you. That they are out there, and you don’t think of them or really ever see them because you’re wrapped up in your own shit instead.” She smiled. “But everybody is scared of something, and you either let it scare you for a bit and get over it, or, be scared forever, and maybe even let it take your life.”
Take your life. That was amazing. The only way you could actually take your life anywhere was ending it. What a horrible way to say someone killed themself—that they took their life. Maybe it was brilliant though.
The counsellors were spread around the room, watching us like they were supposed to do. But they hadn’t yet listened. Because New Horizons wasn’t the place for people with problems. It didn’t have what we needed to get better. And a girl was dead because of that. Some of us had been more than troubled youth. Some of us needed more help than talking about ideas and building dream catchers and existing away from our real world.
“What are you going to do?” Lisa Hatcher asked. Her voice was a whisper and she cracked a smirk. “You helped Jenny escape and none of the residents really know what is going on—-”
I lunged for her.
That was what she wanted, maybe. A scene, and a moment, and a reason to have her hair pulled and to punch someone in the mouth. And I was all for being punched in the mouth, and having my own hair yanked at the roots. Because I was furious, and it felt good to be hurt that way.
Rick and Mary ripped us apart. But the moment I was back on my feet, with my arms held on either side of me, I screamed what I should have screamed an hour ago—
“TRACY KILLED HERSELF!”
There wasn’t really a huge reaction at first. Because most of the residents didn’t know who Tracy was. She was a face without a name. And since I couldn’t throw a picture up of her dead eyes, the only people who knew her were the only reactions that mattered.
“What’s going on?” Logan stood up. She looked at Sharon.
Sharon’s eyes were wide. Her hand was gripped around a walkie.
“Tell them, Larry.” I pulled my hand out of a counsellor’s grip and pointed at him. “Tell them.”
The two counsellors began to drag me toward the door. And it wasn’t something I wanted to happen. I wanted to stay where I was. I wanted to stay with the other residents. Because for once, I finally wanted to speak up about something that absolutely mattered to me.
“Tracy killed herself because that’s what people do when they want to die!” I yelled.
Murray stood up from his table. I didn’t even have to scream for him. He headed right for me because he liked getting involved in things that could blow up.
“Take a seat or you will be out of here too, Murray,” Rick said.
“Murray, they’re hurting me,” I said.
They weren’t hurting me. They were doing their job and trying to diffuse a situation. But I knew exactly what I was doing. And exactly what he would do if he heard that.
“Let her go.” Murray tried to get the counsellors off of me. He grabbed my arm and tried to pull me away. But they wouldn’t let me go. “Come on, let her go. She’s not even doing anything,” he said.
That was my problem. I had stopped doing something in life, stopped doing well, because something had hit me. And it was a dark shadow that I couldn’t shake off. What was scary was that nobody else could see it, and I couldn’t do anything with it around me. I knew that maybe I was sick, but nobody saw it like that. And then I ended up in New Horizons, and Murray punched the counsellor holding me back—
Two counsellors grabbed Murray by each arm. One of them was Guy. They began to drag him out the door just like they were doing to me. The residents around us were paralysed, and I looked back to get one last glimpse of my group.
Brooke was laughing. Her braces were a sharp contrast against her wide, open face. Her teeth were in the midst of being fixed, though, and maybe someday they would be absolutely perfect. Twin had her hand over her mouth, some how shocked by my display. It was something to do though. Maybe she was hiding a smirk because it had to be good to see someone else getting into trouble. Kenzie was just watching me, waiting for the scene to play out in different ways. The whites of her eyes were so big and excited.
Last was Logan. And with a wide smirk on her face, she waved at me as I went out the door. It was a fluttering, weak, lazy wave because she didn’t know she was never, ever, going to see me again. She would have waved better, surely.
And I grinned. Because I had no idea either.
Right then, staring at my bunk mates who knew nothing about me because I hadn’t shared, I realized that crazy was simply a perspective. That you had no idea about other people if you didn’t take the time to get in their head, or put yourself beside them. That context mattered, and if you kept doing similar things over and over, they added up and defined who you were.
With two outbursts in a row, I was officially off the hinges and crying wolf. Nobody was taking me seriously, and they had no reason to. I was simply a wild card, and something entertaining to watch.
To them, I must have looked nuts.
I was taken away, outside, away from people that we could scream at and influence. The rain slapped me in the face and stung my eyes. I was soaked immediately, we all were, and I tried running when the men dropped me. I was pushed into the ground, and then I was dragged to the buildings I had thought were outhouses on my first day.
Murray was put in one first. Guy shut the door, and slid the wooden bar across the door, the only thing trapping him in there. It was simple and easy and effective. Guy came over and helped the men wrestle me into the building. I wasn’t letting it be an easy job.
“Val, you have to calm down. You’re acting out.”
“Acting out is that Jenny girl who jumped out the window for no reason.”
“Stop it, you’re not thinking.”
“No. She was smart. She knew what she was doing. If you jump out a window, you’re going to break your leg. If you hang yourself, you’re going to die. Those are rules of life. And both scenarios, you get to go home.”
“You’re not like them, Valerie. You’re fine.” He shut the door.
I went limp. A few random tears went down my face, into my ears, and then into my hair. That was what exhausted tears did. And I was lying on my back, and it was the only place they could go. I wished I could see the stars. I had the ceiling to look at instead, and I listened to counsellors talk back and forth on their walkie-talkies far, far away from me.
“They’re on their way.”
It was out. Bambi was dead. She had killed herself. I was trapped. And Murray was beside me and there was a storm outside that was ready to destroy what was left of us. Murray pounded on the wall of his solitary confinement building. He was that neighbour I didn’t exactly know that closely, but knew enough about to not want anything to do with. We could still be friendly though.
“Murray?”
“I’m here Val.”
I wasn’t a nail biter. But my hands were in my mouth, and there was I was, ripping the nails off my fingers with my teeth and spitting them away.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I covered my face. It was so dark and I was soaked. There were drips of water coming through the ceiling. It felt nice on my skin. There was a crack of light in the corner. A lighter version of black that caught my eye. I stared at, as if in a trance, until I realized what it meant.
I was back to square one.
On my first day, I had been put in the very same confinement building. The one with the weak walls, the one with the bent boards, and the one I had nearly broken out of—-
My feet smashed into the wall. I imagined it to be people’s faces, I imagined there to be
a fire inside, I imagined that there was someone else in the room that I needed to get away from—
“Just calm down, Val,” Murray yelled.
I couldn’t stop. I kicked and banged my feet against the wall. And it was breaking because I kept kicking and kicking and kicking—-
“Stop it. You’re going to hurt yourself.”
I kicked and kicked and kicked, and then my foot went through the crack, and the crack turned into a hole. I pulled my foot out, and I stared out into the dark, mad world of New Horizons. The sky was sobbing in between screams of thunder, and I felt like the only person in the whole world who was mad and angry and depressed about so much. Without even testing a small part of me, I pushed my arms, head, and shoulders first into the hole, and dragged the rest of myself through it. My hips got stuck for a second, but I wiggled them until I burst through to the outside.
“Murray—Murray I’m free!” I yelled to him. There couldn’t be a good reason for why I was smiling. My heart was pounding and I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t expected to break free. There was nothing keeping me trapped, but I was hesitating.
“Open my door!” Murray yelled.
I ran over to his shed and stopped in front of the door. I peered through the crack. I couldn’t see Murray, but I could hear him right behind the door, waiting for me to slide the bar across and let him out.
“Hurry,” he said. “If we get out, we can run to the woods. And maybe jump the fence or something. And then we can figure it out from there.”
I had never really thought about it before, but right then I realized what I’d been missing about Murray. He was a distraction from what was actually gong on. He was someone fun to listen to, someone who did bold and bad things, and therefore, someone who was lower in life than me. Deep down, I knew I was better than Murray, and that was why it was better for me to have him close by. Bad people were nice to be around because then I could say “at least I’m not that”. But I had that with Jordan. And I didn’t want that anymore with anyone, because eventually, I’d be the bad person everyone knew they were better than.
“Val, hurry up. Get me out of here.”
“You’re exhausting,” I whispered.
And I left him.
There was no reason to let him out. I never wanted to see Murray again, and that was the nice thing about meeting new people from other places—you never had to see them again if you didn’t want to. Right then, I had forgiven Murray, wiped my hands clean of him, and started to make a nice, distant memory of him of my own design, that way I’d never have to know for sure if he makes it or not.
I had no idea where I was going or what I was doing, but I ran as hard as I could, and I disappeared into the woods before anyone could see that I was missing.
When I was on the track team in junior high, Coach Allen told me that the key to sprinting was to know you were faster than the person next to you. That was important. If your head believed it, your legs would pump whatever your mind saw.
I came last that year.
Running through the woods was just like that year I came last. I had no enthusiasm to keep going. When the exhaustion finally caught up with me from running through the dark forest, I stopped and leaned on tree to catch my breath. I had a stitch in my side and I squeezed it to make it go away. It didn’t occur to me that I wasn’t a sprinter until then.
I collapsed to the ground. Just to hide. It was lightly raining all around me, and I made a snow angel in the mud. The rain smashed my face, and I closed my eyes and felt every rain drop on its own.
There were a lot of things to be worried about. Like when I was going to be caught. I was aware that I wasn’t going to be free forever. I was aware of the situation, of the woods, of myself. That I was going to be in trouble, and maybe put into a new program—a military one that the really bad kids went to. But I didn’t care. Things suddenly felt different for me.
A girl had decided not to be alive anymore.
Bambi wasn’t supposed to die. It was supposed to be someone like Lisa Hatcher. Or Twin. Someone who was bad and would greet death with open arms. Why didn’t Bambi have options? Why didn’t she see them? She was so far gone in herself, I guess. She didn’t know we were around to talk her out of it if she asked. We were in our own little worlds, and didn’t think to help.
I knew I was trying not to cry. It was difficult, and I wiped my muddy hands across my face. The sky was completely dark, and through the trees, high above me, were shiny, little stars.
Instead of thinking about Bambi, I thought of Jenny Shoulders.
I knew what had actually happened to Jenny Shoulders—in her head, at least. I knew why she had chucked a chair through the window, I knew why she had jumped out of a two-story building, and I knew why she had tried to escape. My simple interpretation of Jenny Shoulders was that she just didn’t have a real good reason not to do any of it. And she broke her leg trying to do something she just really felt like doing—
It had been exciting picturing the possibility of getting out—of a crazy girl taking a chance, and it paying off. And when it wasn’t the case, that nobody had gotten anywhere, it destroyed a lot of things we had been daydreaming about. Just feeling some excitement over an idea, and losing it, was brutal on the brain. And when you were already at a low, something as silly as disappointment—not so silly, after all—could kill a person.
Jenny Shoulders didn’t care about anything. And when you didn’t care about consequences, and outcomes that could happen when you did other things, you weren’t thinking clearly. There was a simple kind of self-awareness that being terrified could knock into a person, and when you were blank—dead inside—that was when you didn’t know what you were really doing. That was why the system was designed the way it was. New Horizons. Basinview. Life. It was horrible being scared, and any sane person would do anything not to feel it. We weren’t actually crazy. We were just constantly on the fence, waiting to fall either way. And none of us seemed to know which side was better.
It took just a quick second to get to my feet again, and I was sprinting. Moving in the dark forest was hard. Branches kept pulling at my clothes, and it was hard seeing in the dark. The blisters on my feet were screaming at me but I pretended not to feel them. What I really hoped for was that the counsellors didn’t know I was gone.
“There is no better motivation to run than getting away from something else,” Coach Allen had said. “Just pretend someone is trying to get you.”
I wasn’t ever allowed look back when the baton was being passed up to me in the 4x1 race. I was supposed to put my hand back and the runner behind me would place it in my hand—a teamwork kind of thing. But I always had that urge to look behind me.
I looked behind me, in case there was someone chasing after me. But there was only fast moving trees, and then I smashed into something—
My back hit the ground, and I laid there like I wasn’t shocked by the fence coming out of nowhere. The scary part was that my breath was taken from me. I leaned forward to try and catch its rhythm again, but it was a case of hysterical cries. It felt like maybe I wouldn’t be able to find the track that routine breathing was always on. Like my lungs were never going to remember how to breathe again.
But I found it, somehow, and the panic slowly subsided into relief. My head ached from slamming down into the ground, and the trees still didn’t have their edges above me. After five seconds of blurriness, everything slowly began to clear. I took a couple deep breaths, and I let my eyes wander up and up, where the fence and barbed wire kissed the sky. It was amazing how tall it could go, how it went all the way around—
There was a hole.
It wasn’t really much of a hole. Just a crawl space. Where the fence had been cut at the bottom, and some desperate soul had dug beneath the area. It looked like a dog had made it. A wild animal. A human, probably.
My heart knocked on my ribcage, asking to come out and see what was going on. It was the secret knock when ide
as came super close to exploding out of your body.
If I climbed through, Blue Lake was right on the other end of the property. And right in front of it was a line of chained, useless canoes.
I peeled myself off the ground and immediately pushed myself beneath the fence. The cut metal scraped across my back, and I pushed my chest across the ground until I had to drag myself with my arms. The back of my shirt got stuck on a piece of metal, and I pulled until I heard a rip. When I got to the other side, I reached back and felt the hole between the letters of NEW HORIZONS.
I was really free.
And instead of running right away, I took a breath, looked around, and sat down. What an escape. Just out in the woods, sitting around, doing what I wanted. Where was I going? What was I doing? I covered my face with my hands and thought about the area around me, and I traced it in my head. Where I would walk—just right along the fence—all the way down to the shore, and to the dock. And then what? Paddle away?!
I got up off the ground and looked through the fence where I had been before. It didn’t look any different than where I was. It was a fence in the woods. But I knew where I was. In my head, I knew I was finally on the right side.
I ran.
There were flashlights everywhere on the inside of the fence. When they got close to the edge, I stopped running and lied back down in the mud again until they went away. The skin on my stomach felt raw by the time I saw the lake shimmering through the trees. I had no idea how I was going to get across the wide, open space of the fence across the cliffs without being seen. But when I got there, instead of stopping and thinking, I did what my body told me to—
I bolted.
There was no other way to do it. There were no flashlights pointing in my direction, and I grabbed onto the fence and shimmied across the ledge of the cliff like I was some brave, Jenny Shoulders type. But I was nervous, and my hands didn’t move off the fence as I shuffled along, ass out, legs apart, with my chest grazing the metal. When I got to the stairs, I climbed over the railings and ran as fast as I could down to the dock.
There were my canoes. The one on the end, the dark green one, wasn’t tied up like the rest. It had been missed, and it was free.
I ducked behind the row of canoes to keep cover from both the counsellors and the rain. The green canoe was right beside me, and I found the chain that wasn’t looped through it.
I felt like a kid, and I remembered how exciting it was to be one. To be little Valerie Campbell, excited to be on the lake.
Tiffany was our canoe instructor one year. She had braces, which was weird for a 30-something-year-old. It was all you saw on someone like her. But she was passionate about canoeing, and a good instructor because she dumbed the process down.
“Treat a canoe like another human being,” she had said. “And if you do that, there is no way you could ever knowingly hurt it.”
I pushed the canoe off the stand and it fell into the sand. The wind blew the loose strands of my hair into my face, and thunder suddenly cracked around me. There was nothing delicate about the situation, and I treated the canoe how humans usually treated each other because I knew if humans could take it, that a canoe certainly could. I grabbed the rope tied to the bow and pulled it over my shoulder to the water. I could hear Tiffany clearly yelling behind me.
“Val Campbell! It takes two people to lift that—you must ask for help!”
But I couldn’t ask for help. I was completely alone, there was nobody around, and I knew I could pull it through the sand on my own.
There was no paddle, which I realized just as the water touched the bow of the canoe. I dropped the rope and ran up to the wooden crate near the end of the dock, where life jackets and paddles were chucked in a pile. I grabbed the first paddle my hand wrapped around, and when I got back down to the canoe, I pushed it into the water.
I jumped in. The canoe rocked, but it never tipped.
“Fuck you Tiffany,” I said before I began to paddle. Dip after dip, that paddle went hard into the water. My shoulders felt the pressure, and I had no idea what I was doing. All I remembered was Tiffany, and how her tips had prepared me for my escape.
“Dip your paddle right in and push off. Pretend like your paddle is thirsty and needs water. Give it what it wants.”
I pretended my paddle had never been more thirsty, and I dipped it so low that I knew I had to be doing something wrong. But I didn’t stop—any technique that was consistent and moved the canoe quickly was good enough for me. I didn’t want to stop, and even though I was tired, I was too motivated to stop paddling. I kept going.
Lonely Island was straight ahead of me, and I saw the dark spots and small shadows a distance away that were neighbouring islands. Most importantly, I saw the one thing I had seen that night we’d camped out, the thing Murray had showed me.
The light.
From the middle of the lake, the light looked like a little star. But it wasn’t a star because it wasn’t in the sky. It was on land. It was the light of civilization, and I was going to get to it.
I paddled toward that spot, and when I got close enough to see what it was, I took my paddle out of the water.
Even in the rain, and the black of night, Blue Lake was pretty. It was the only time Blue Lake could maybe be blue since we couldn’t see that it wasn’t. During the day, Blue Lake was the brownest lake around.
There was a cottage straight in front of me at the shoreline. It had a boathouse with a sliding door to pull boats into, and a dock to tie up to.
I pulled up to the dock and jumped onto it without tying up my canoe. It didn’t hurt to leave the green canoe there, all alone, because I knew I had given it a last, real adventure without schedule or rules. The waves swept the canoe quickly to the shore of the property, and I ran down the dock in the pouring rain. There was a crack of thunder, and a bolt of lightning lit the sky behind the cottage. It was pretty, and I was scared of trespassing on someone else’s land, but mostly afraid of being seen.
Sensor lights came on when I ran up the side of the cottage, and I ran down the driveway without looking at the front of it.
The road was at the end of their long gravel driveway, and I was relieved to see random streetlights scattering the dirt, one way road. It was lit just enough for me to see where I was going, wherever that was.