4: THIS IS HOW I DIE
In cabin 519, and everywhere else at 2:00 a.m. in New Horizons, you were supposed to be asleep. But it was our first night at the facility for troubled youth, and I was already imaging ways to escape through the fence surrounding the property. Maybe it was useless though. The worst part since my arrival weren’t the uniforms or that none of the residents were allowed to leave—the worst was listening to the girl’s whispering about their wild pasts. I just wanted to fall into a deep sleep and never wake up, but that was hard when everyone wanted to know who you were, where you came from, and more importantly, what happened the night you were taken.
They were all the same abducted stories, and then came the whole repeating of names when they forgot who they were talking to—was it Rachelle who tried to stab her cousin? Or Meghan? Surprisingly, there were no Meghans. But we looked like a bunch of Meghans. Meghans with an ’h’—the worst kind of Meghans. And to be honest, there was no point trying to remember exactly who was who. It was just a one month stint, and none of the girls mattered to me. I laid on my top bunk and listened to the girls and their ramblings about their hometowns, their families, and their cats, and I decided I was going to make it all up.
I started with their names.
The curvy, tall redhead with braces glued to her head was Green Gables. She liked asking personal questions about our families and schools and if we had ever had cheesecake before.
“Is that like an innuendo for something?” the girl with braids asked. She shared a bunk with Green Gables.
“No, I’m seriously just wondering. Homemade cheesecake is really good,” Green Gables said.
The two girls who weren’t responding to a lot of her questions I referred to as Twin and Twinner, or the twins for short. They had the same laugh and the same colour hair and shared the same bunk. That’s what was required to be a twin. But they had their differences too—Twinner had no tits, and Twin had really fuzzy hair and an addiction to kick. If I had to guess, Twin was a smoker back home. She kept her toothbrush between her fingers and her lips, taking a drag every now and then.
My bunkmate below wasn’t very talkative. She stayed in her cave and occasionally answered questions with one-worded answers. When I heard scratching from below, I looked down over the bed and saw her carving her name into the wood.
TRACY MCPHERSON
Something in my gut gave me that dejavu feeling, and I remembered that there were a lot of McPherson’s in my hometown. Tracy McPherson was making me miss home, and I didn’t like that. It was Bambi from that moment on.
“I just got fired from my job so it’s not that big of a deal being here,” the girl with the braids said.
“Where did you work?” Twinner asked.
“At a gas station.”
And that was when the big girl with braids became Karen—for no particular reason. She just seemed like an everyday Karen, except she was failing high school and having sex with her neighbour’s son who was five years older than her.
I stayed out of the conversation, but even though I wasn’t talking, I could still listen.
“How old is everyone?” Green Gables asked.
Each girl went around the room and said 17-years-old, and when it came to me, I decided to say my age at least since that was easy. The only girl who wasn’t seventeen in the cabin was my bunkmate under me.
“Sixteen,” Bambi said. Her voice was monotone until she sighed. Bambi had a great sigh. It was if you could hear the life slowly draining from her.
“That’s young,” Twin said from bottom bunk. She was looking at her split ends with her toothbrush still between her fingers. I wondered how she could even see them in the dark. Twinner didn’t have the same worry since she had chopped off all her hair.
“That’s not that young,” Bambi said.
“Have you gotten your first period yet?” Green Gables asked.
There was laughter in the cabin. It came from all sides, including my own, but Bambi stayed quiet. She didn’t care enough to have a response.
“I remember the first time I used a tampon. It wasn’t my first period, but there’s a story for you. Anyone want to hear it?” Green Gables asked.
“Absolutely not,” I said.
“I kind of do,” Karen said.
“Why?” I said. “Nobody cares.”
“I do,” Karen said.
“I’m going to tell it,” Green Gables said. “So, you know how there’s the applicator and you put that in you first, and then push the tampon in like a turkey baster?”
“That is quite the image,” I said.
“Oh, trust me, you’re going to be thankful this has never happened to you—”
There was a knock on the door.
Everyone flipped over onto their stomachs at once because that’s what sleeping people were supposed to look like.
The door cracked open.
I held my breath.
“No talking, ladies,” Sharon whispered into the dark. She took the lantern out, and darkness greeted us. When the door closed, I flipped over onto my back. There was heavy breathing and I wondered who would be the first to talk. If I had to take a guess—
“Anyway, I pushed my tampon so far into me that it all disappeared into me.”
“What?” Twinner asked.
“Yeah, the string somehow went up too.”
“That’s a lie,” Karen said.
“I’m not lying.”
“Yes you are. Tampons can’t go up that far, and you can’t lose the string. It’s pretty long,” Karen said.
“Well it happened. And then I had to basically shove my whole fist up myself to get it out.”
“You’re sick,” Karen said.
Twin hiccuped.
“Bless you,” Green Gables said.
“You can’t say that,” I said.
“God bless you then.”
“No, it’s just not a thing for hiccups.”
“God can bless anything—hiccup or no hiccup.”
One month. One month of talking about age, tampons and who had the right to bless what. It was such a long time when you thought about who you’d be trapped with. People who weren’t like you. People who liked asking questions. People who knew exactly how to get in your head.
It felt like ten minutes went by before there was a knock on our door, waking me out of a dazed half-sleep. I didn’t fall asleep completely. All night I had a strange awareness of the bunk I was in and the people around me. At one point during the night there had been a blurry dream that played behind my eyelids, but it was too quick to remember.
“Ladies, time to wake up.”
I was awake. And aware. And I knew what was going on. I had been taken, and I was in the process of being transformed into a good individual. The other girls were making morning sounds. Weird moans, groans, and yawns—noises of people who had actually slept. They were very human sounds. I wasn’t tired. I wanted to get the day started so it could be ended. I had no reason to be there and I intended to show that.
Sharon held the lamp over her head since it was still dark out. Her grey hair went transparent and her skin looked blue. It looked like a ghost was standing outside our door. I wondered what I would look like with that much light around me—I probably wouldn’t look like myself.
I went outside to brush my teeth. There was a mirror hanging on the side wall, and I could see a little of myself with the sun rising through the trees. I brushed my teeth in slow circles. I wasn’t sure if that was the correct technique, but pushing hard and going in circles probably wasn’t the right way to do a lot of things. My teeth still felt filthy and I had many more days to go without toothpaste.
At breakfast, we sat at our table like we were told to. The mess hall was quiet, which I wasn’t used to. Camp Hedgewood was a place full of screaming and yelling because that’s what happy kids did. But if we screamed at New Horizons, we’d be sent to solitary confinement. Screaming meant you were fucking crazy.
We kept our mouths shut at our table, and the only sounds coming from us were of heavy breathing and chewing.
Karen was a loud eater. I watched her shovel food into her mouth. She concentrated on the bowl in front of her, and it took her five minutes before she noticed me examining her. That was a long time. I figured I would have noticed right away. When she looked at me, I looked back at my tray of food.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
“I just don’t know where to begin.” I looked down at my bowl of dry cheerios. Some of the girls had added their water to make it go down easier. But in my head, there was no pretending that water was milk. It just wasn’t.
“Eat this.” Karen threw an apple at my head. It smashed me on the side of my face and then knocked poor Bambi’s water jug all over her lap.
Bambi looked at Karen and then proceeded to pick up her jug that had fallen onto its side. Number 66. It was half empty. Bambi’s cargo shorts were soaked. She looked pathetic right then, like a child holding back a cry. I had to glance away from her because she seemed like someone familiar to me, and my heart began to ache with nostalgia. I didn’t like it doing that.
Karen took a mouthful of her watery cheerios, choosing to chew her food instead of explaining herself.
“Just so you know,” I said. “That really hurt my face.”
Karen shrugged. “Oh sorry. It slipped out of my hand.”
“I believe you. It would probably take an army to get your hand to grip an apple and bring it to your mouth.”
She ignored me and continued eating her breakfast. Karen had a lot of cheerios in her bowl, and I watched her bring every bite of food to her mouth. Eventually, my staring finally got to her.
"Quit cutting your eyes at my food. Not all of us are anorexic.”
"You’re definitely not.”
The scene exploded.
Karen pushed out of her chair and was across the table on top of me in one motion—it was like there had never been a table between us. We both landed on the floor, with all two hundred pounds of her crushing me.
“THIS IS HOW I DIE! I JUST KNOW IT!” I screamed.
Her body pushed all the air out of my lungs and the blades of my back dug into the floor. I managed to laugh when she tried throwing punches at me, but eventually a few of her fists smashed me in the mouth, and then I wasn’t laughing.
The mess hall seemed to go up in flames after that. It only took one person to do something wrong, and then things could fall apart. Residents were out of their seats and throwing their breakfast bowls across the room. Everyone was screaming, but I was too occupied with blocking Karen’s fists from hitting my face to pay more attention to anyone else.
By the time the counsellors pulled her off me I had a bloody lip and what felt like a black eye. I stayed on the ground in starfish formation with blood pouring from my bottom lip. When a counsellor began to drag me out of the mess hall, I finally came back to life.
"Why the hell are you dragging me off?!" I screamed. “I did nothing!”
There was no answer. I was dragged out of the mess hall and down the stairs. My body slammed against each step.
“Is this legal? I thought you guys weren’t about physical abuse here.”
The counsellor looked down at me with his dark eyes, like he was thinking about it, and then kicked me in the side to get me to move. That answered that.
I curled up into a ball from the pain. It was a sharp, quick jab that got worse as I laid there. I was about to get up, like he wanted me to, but out of nowhere someone else joined the scene.
The counsellor dropped down beside me on the ground. He groaned louder than I had.
“What the hell?” I looked up.
And there was that buzz cut kid. His eyebrows looked like two fuzzy caterpillars on his forehead the way he had them scrunched up.
“What did you do that for?” I covered my mouth with my hand. It was shocking that he had hit someone hard enough to put them on the ground. It wasn’t right.
“I punched him in the back of the head.”
“Why?!”
“It’s not right forcing us around like that. It’s unnecessary.”
“That’s his job. You’re the unnecessary part of all of this.”
Larry came out of the mess hall. I knew I was in trouble when he saw me.
“What’s going on?” Larry came down the stairs. He helped the counsellor who had been assaulted up off the ground. He didn’t offer his hand to me, so I stayed how I was.
“He assaulted a counsellor.” I pointed at the buzz cut guy with caterpillar eyebrows.
Caterpillar eyebrows glared at me.
“Did she cause this?” Larry asked. He pointed at me.
“Hell no. I’m on the ground.”
The injured counsellor nodded.
“Take her to the stake.”
“What?” I said. “Why me?!”
“Take the boy too.”
That was when I bolted. I sprinted toward the woods because it just seemed like the right place to head. Whistles blew all around me, and two counsellors from another direction grabbed me within a hundred meters and tackled me to the ground. They carried me off down a path until I was out of sight from the mess hall. My stay at New Horizons felt like it was about to get much harder.
I was attached by the ankle to a rope, and that rope was staked in the ground. The punishment was that the stake was behind the mess hall, nowhere near any shade, and it was the hottest place to be. But the worst torture was the lake taunting me in the background, where the fence cut right in front of the cliffs, barring us from taking the wooden stairs down to the shoreline.
There was no escape.
At least I wasn’t alone. Several other residents who decided to act out were spread out around me. Caterpillar eyebrows and Karen were among them—the two pests I couldn’t seem to shake off.
My eyes kept opening and closing as the day progressed. The sun was directly over us for a while and the pain from being attacked by Karen, who actually had a good punch, took the life out of me. It felt like my skin was burning and my lip was fat. I wanted to go back to Basinview, hide in my bedroom, and sleep forever.
I flipped over onto my stomach. I could feel the dry dirt sticking to my skin. It would’ve been nice to jump in the lake, or have a little shade. When I opened my eyes to see if anyone else was in as severe pain as I was, Caterpillar was looking at me. He looked completely soaked from the amount of sweat coming off his body.
"You sure threw me under the bus back there,” he said.
I turned onto my side so that my back was facing him. He was a weird guy and had the kind of face everyone had a version of. A police sketch. Sharp jaw, five o-clock shadow, no hair. He looked like he could rob a bank.
We were in the field. It wasn’t a real field or anything, just a patch of rectangular grass, nowhere near the regular size of any professional sports field. But it was the field we used to play soccer on, and the old chalk lines were somewhat still there, just a tad washed out. The soccer posts were on either end, and the nets were ripped and blowing in the wind. The grass was yellow, dry, and rough. It scraped my arms and poked my skin.
Several years ago, the field had been green and taken care of. It was funny how quick things could die. And when things died, they shrivelled up and turned a different colour. Yellow was a dead colour.
“Why did you call me exhausting that first time you saw me—it didn’t make sense, I had no idea why you were even talking to me?”
“I don’t know,” he answered from behind me. He laughed. “Someone called me that once and I hated it. So I saw you and thought I’d say it to get a reaction. I wanted to bother you, I guess.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I decided to ignore him. My view was still of Karen. She was having just as difficult a time as I was. That was something anyone in pain could ask for—a struggling neighbour. I was glad to see her scrunched up face and sweat on her forehead. It felt
like we had been out there for hours. I wondered if ten minutes had even gone by.
“Karen.”
Karen groaned. She wouldn’t move her hands from her face.
"Karen.”
She finally opened her eyes and looked at me. She was drenched in sweat. It was beading and falling to the ground.
“Are you alive?” I asked.
"My name is not Karen."
I sat up into a cross-legged position, and leaned back on my hands. "Oh, I thought you don’t care about names.”
Karen sat up too. Instead of answering me, she tried to pull out her stake in the ground.
“You can’t get it out.”
“Says who?” She tried yanking again. Like if she tried harder, it would budge. But there was no such thing as a good work ethic having positive results on everything. Some things weren’t meant to go your way.
Karen didn’t stop pulling. She even changed her stance, in case that was the issue why the stake wasn’t coming out of the ground. She stood up and pulled on the rope and I swear it moved an inch before I heard screaming from behind us. When I looked back, a few counsellors were headed out from under the shade of the woods. They were coming toward us to investigate.
“Oh look what you did now,” I said.
She continued trying to rip out the stake. Even when the counsellors were two feet behind her she was madly ripping at the ground. One of the counsellors was Guy. I waved at him. He ignored me.
“You still have many long hours out here,” a counsellor said. She had a huge nose, little eyes, and a stomach.
“I’m doing fine out here,” I told her. “It’s just hot.”
Guy looked down at me. He was standing next to two other counsellors. He glared at me until I looked away. They didn’t say anything about Karen trying to get her stake out—maybe it was an impossible thing to do. Eventually, they backed off and sat in the shade, one hundred meters away. They had water jugs and I missed 49.
It had to be one of the hottest days of the summer. I sat cross-legged and leaned back on my hands. There was no shelter from the sun. Our jugs of water were nowhere to be seen, and I would have given up a leg for water. I was dripping in sweat and my hair was in a knot on the top of my head with strands falling loose at the back.
“Hey you,” I said.
Caterpillar looked over his shoulder at me.
“Stop smiling,” I told him.
He wasn’t smiling at all. He was sweating so much and his hands were shaking.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked him.
“Nothing.”
“Sure looks like it.”
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
He smiled but his eyes were clenched so tightly together that it wasn’t much of a smile. Maybe he wasn’t used to sunbathing like I was. Lying out in the sun wasn’t for everyone.
The sun eventually began to set. At least it was cooler out when it ducked below the treeline. The sky was pink. And bright. A colour you forgot existed in nature. But it was there. You just had to look up.
"I think they’ll be taking us back to our bunks soon," Caterpillar said. He looked a lot better since it had cooled down. But he still had some weird twitches occasionally, like he couldn’t stay still. Maybe he had ADHD or was just restless.
I exhaled and sat up. "Damn, I was hoping we'd get to sleep outside. It's such a nice night out.”
“Yeah, it wouldn’t be my first night doing that.”
“Me too.” I looked at him. “What’s your name?”
“Murray.”
“Murray?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Val.”
“Like Valerie?”
“Yeah, but Val.”
“I see.” He looked at the sky. “You’re kinda pretty.”
I touched my fat lip. “I sure feel kinda pretty.”
“You are. Even with a fat lip.”
It wasn’t the first time I was called pretty. And that wasn’t why I was jaded over it. Because I knew everyone had an angle to their face that was kind of pretty. And I imagined right then, with the sun how it was, that maybe he had seen it. But up close, in really good lighting, straight on, I was weird looking.
“You like how I look?” he asked. He was a big guy. He had huge shoulders and his shirt was tight on him. He had a lot of facial hair for a teenager, and he looked so much older than anyone I had seen so far at the program.
“You have a lot of tattoos,” I told him.
“Do you like tattoos?”
“No, I don’t.”
He smiled. “I bet you like them on me.”
“Actually, for real, I don’t care for them.”
“How old are you?” he asked.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Wow.” I raised my eyebrows.
“Let me guess, you’re like, sixteen?”
“I’m fifteen,” I lied.
“No you’re not.”
“Yeah I am.”
He looked at me.
“What?” I said
“There’s no way.”
“Why are you here?” I said, switching the subject.
“Reasons.”
I stared at him.
“I’ll tell you if you tell me how old you are.”
“I’m fifteen,” I lied again.
“Okay, fine. That’s a no then.”
“That’s fine with me,” I said. It wasn’t that pressing of an issue. There were weeks to figure each other out.
“Where are you from?”
“Basinview. You know where that is?”
“Yeah, I have an idea. I’m not near that area, but I’m not crazy far away from it either. Like a few hour drive, maybe, if you don’t make any stops.”
“Where do you live?”
“Sacton.”
I laughed. “Seriously.”
“What?”
“You’re from around here. That’s weird. You probably know what’s through the woods, and where the dirt roads go.”
“Yeah, mostly. I grew up here. It’s a really nice place.”
“I actually used to come up here every summer. It used to be a camp.”
“Camp Hedgewood, I know.”
“Did you ever go to it?”
He laughed. “No. My parents didn’t have enough sense to have me doing things like that.”
“Oh.” I looked up at the sky. Maybe it was more red than pink. It was hard to say. Maybe it was just changing. “It was a good camp. I liked it a lot.”
“I’ve never been to a camp.”
“No? Well, this program is kind of like camp. You have cabin mates, and eat your meals in groups, and there are outhouses—that’s camp.”
“Yeah, but I’m here because of a judge.”
I went quiet because I wanted him to keep going. I liked the sound of his voice. It was a nice change from hearing girls all day. His was deep, and if he was talking, that meant I didn’t have to.
“It’s bad,” he whispered.
“What’d you do?”
“I’d honestly rather not say.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll think poorly of me.”
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll assume it’s something really bad.”
“Maybe that’s better.”
That was true. The first thing that came to me was him getting into a fight with someone, and maybe he really injured them. That was what I hoped. But I didn’t know him. Maybe he had sexually assaulted someone. I didn’t want it to be that. Somehow, that was scarier than physical assault. Whatever he did, though, Murray was suddenly interesting to me.