8: SQUARE KNOTS AND BOWLINES
Sharon woke us up in the dead of morning. She threw the door open and I flinched when she blew a whistle. It wasn’t something you wanted to hear when the sun wasn’t up. It felt like my ears were never going to stop ringing.
Brooke rolled over and fell out of her bunk. She landed on the hard floor and cursed. Twin and Twinner laughed in their own mocking tones, and I smiled at that. It was something we needed to see happen to Brooke, the compulsive liar. I wished I hadn’t known who she really was. But I had unfortunately grown up and realized the truth. Wasn’t that what growing up was? Realizing things? If I could have it my way, I would never realize anything, ever. It was sometimes nicer to imagine how people might be, instead of how they actually are.
“Rise and be bright, ladies,” Sharon said.
“That isn’t the saying,” Twinner said. Her short hair was sticking up, and you could see her dark roots. I wanted to scream across the room that she wasn’t all one colour, but there was no point. Everyone had dark roots, but not everyone had huge, droopy earlobes like she did.
“Oh stop that, I can say whatever I want as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody,” Sharon said. “Everyone get out of your bunks. Because we are going on an overnight adventure.”
I couldn’t look at her because she still had on that wrap for her sprained wrist. It was from the night I had chucked her into the woods, and each day that passed that I didn’t say sorry to her, her wrist seemed to be screaming louder and louder at me, accusing me of assault. I had chucked an old woman into the woods like she was compost, and each day she continued to stand in front of me, like nothing happened. It was like a young, dumb idiot hadn’t tried to kill her, and she was smiling because maybe she believed I wouldn’t try it again. I felt sick that I had done something so obviously wrong. Yet in the moment, when it was happening and things were blowing up, I couldn’t not do it.
But I had to stop thinking about it if I wanted to move on. I got down from my bunk, and when I got my shirt, socks and boots on, we all followed Sharon outside. On the dirt path in front of our cabin were six backpacks attached to sleeping bags. We each picked one up and dropped our toiletry bags into the sack. I held 49 in my arms as I followed the frail woman down to the fence in front of the lake.
The gate in front of the stairs was open.
My heartbeat quickened. There were counsellors all around the area, but I still had the urge to run down the stairs and disappear down the shore—just to see if I could get away. One moment of freedom was all I wanted.
“We’re going down to the shoreline. Go single file down the stairs. They are steep, and we don’t want anyone tripping. Once you are on the shoreline, head to the dock, where the canoes are waiting. No funny stuff, there are counsellors everywhere.”
I took a breath and headed to the stairs. They were sandy from the wind blowing off the water. We walked in single file like Sharon had instructed, and I kept my grip on the railing, in case I passed out from the excitement of being outside of the fence.
"Girls, get into groups of two and find a canoe down at the dock," Sharon said. "And leave the hiking bags in the middle of the canoe so the weight is balanced out."
"Sharon are you coming?" Karen asked.
"No, I'm afraid I’m not in the condition I’d like to be in for hiking.”
I couldn’t look at her. I knew she was looking at the side of my face. I really wanted to apologize but I didn’t know how to do it without looking like I was just trying to do the right thing. I wanted her to know I really was sorry, and not doing it just to look good.
"Larry, Guy, Rick and Mary will be joining you on the trip," Sharon said. "Now, go get into a canoe and wait for instructions."
Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, it did. Larry was going to try to tick me off the whole time, and angry me was going to fall for it. Maybe I would chuck him into the lake and drown him and end up in juvie just like Guy had warned me. And then there was Mary—her stomach, big nose, and little eyes finally had a name.
I paired off with Karen because Karen grabbed my wrist. I guess she wanted nothing to do with Brooke, and she didn’t have many good options in our group to pair up with. We walked toward the dock and our boots sunk into the wet sand. Behind us, our footprints revealed where we had been. If I were to run, I’d have to be careful about leaving a mark.
I decided I was going to take the back of the canoe since Karen probably wasn't a very strong paddler. When we got down to the dock to get into our canoes, the boys were already in theirs and out in the water.
Murray waved at me. He seemed happy to see me and that was kind of exhausting. I hadn’t seen him in a while since the girls had been separated from the boys in a lot of our daily activities. But there he was, waving, excited just by the sight of me. Like a puppy. Murray had no idea who I was, and had become happy just by the idea of what he had created in his head.
“You two are in love,” Karen said.
“Yep. We’re going to get married. And when I have kids, they’re going to come out with caterpillar eyebrows and tattoos. I’m pretty excited about it.”
“Caterpiller eyebrows?”
“Yeah. Don’t you see them on his forehead?”
Karen didn’t answer me. She was looking down at the canoe, waiting to see how shaky it could be as she put in her bag. I dropped mine on top of hers, and took a step back to watch. It was quite the thing to see. She had no idea how to get into a canoe.
“Come on Karen, it’s going to be tomorrow by the time you get in.”
“How the hell am I supposed to get in without tipping it?”
“Just jump in.” I put one foot in and then the other and then I was in the canoe. I looked at her. “Holy shit!”
“What?” Her eyes were wide with fear.
“That was hard.” I smiled.
She was scared. Anyone could see that, and I had no idea why she was afraid. Her eyes were green. Not in between blue or any other greyish colour—just green. She wasn’t paying attention to the other girls getting off the dock around her. She just cared about herself right then. Karen looked good. Everyone seemed to look their best with a little fear smeared across their face. Worry had a way of painting things more sharply.
"Okay residents, the goal is the islands. We will be exploring several of them and even camping out on the largest one in the middle. Are you all ready?" Larry asked.
Nobody responded.
I watched as he got into his canoe. Guy sat behind him and didn't look very pleased to have to share a canoe with him. Mary and Rick got in another one and paddled toward where the other residents were already paddling away. They screamed after them to keep together.
“Come on Karen.”
She looked down at me.
I held out my hand.
She sat down on the side of the dock. I thought maybe she was just going to sit there for a bit, but she put one foot in the boat, and then the other followed. She took my hand and used it to carefully enter the canoe, which swayed a little bit. Before the canoe could do anything crazy, she dropped down into her seat quickly.
“Oh my god,” she gasped.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Shut up.”
“This is going to be the longest day of my entire life.”
At least we were in the canoe, and somehow managed to get it moving and out of the cove. Larry and Guy made it to the front of the line of canoes. Murray was up there too, and everyone else was spread out. Karen and I were at the back and we couldn’t figure out how to paddle straight.
“We are going to die in a canoe,” I said.
“Stop it, Val. For real.”
I smiled. Karen was afraid. But I wasn’t interested in that. The cliff side was behind her, and the stairs were right there, leading up to the fence. There were counsellors all along the shore, and other groups being led to more canoes. Everyone was watching and aware of the situation, and I realized I would have
to disappear another time.
“Paddle, Val.”
I looked at Karen. She was paddling, and doing a horrible job at it. I joined in, but it was just as terrible. We weren’t in unison, but we got it together eventually. We didn’t have a calm and peaceful paddle technique. It was sloppy, and water got into the canoe. At least the canoe was moving, and we didn’t talk at all. We just paddled.
There was something different between us since Karen had revealed herself, and I was still a mystery. That was her problem though. You didn’t see me pouring my guts just because someone else had. She should never have told the world what she was about. I didn’t want to think of her as someone with issues. I just wanted her to remain an everyday Karen.
Fifteen minutes later we made it to the islands. They were clustered together, and the largest one was where everyone was headed.
"Karen, is that a float with a high diving board?" I pointed at the strange contraption floating near the island. It was a wooden float, but what held my interest was the ladder about ten feet high with a small ledge to dive from.
"Who cares, lets just get to the dock. They’re waiting for us."
"Let’s go for a little swim." I pulled my paddle from the water.
"Stop, Valerie.”
"Come on."
"No. I'm not going in, and we can't get our hiking bags wet. They have our sleeping stuff in them."
She had a point. I stood up and stretched anyway.
"What are you doing?"
I looked up at the sun high in the sky. Then I looked over at Larry, who was now at the dock. He was calling my name and telling me to sit down. Everyone else was behind him in their canoes, either tying up to the dock or just pulling in. They were watching me too, waiting to see what I was going to do.
“Don’t do anything we’re not supposed to do,” Karen said. “Let’s be good.”
I looked down into the water. It was so dark. Blue Lake was nearly black. It didn’t make any sense to be called Blue Lake and I loved that about it. It was hard to be in a canoe on a hot summer day, and not jump in.
“Valerie, don’t you dare!” Larry yelled.
I dove into the water.
The cool water was a shock to my skin, but it was exactly what I needed. I didn’t go deep because I didn’t know how shallow the water was. I burst through the surface and grinned at Karen. She shook her head at me and pointed at the dock on the island. Larry and Guy were back in their canoe, and headed toward me. They were quick paddlers, and about sixty meters away from me. I swam toward the float because I wasn’t done.
"You have three seconds to get back in your canoe!” Larry yelled.
I climbed the ladder instead. When I got to the top I stood on the small piece of wood and tried to keep my balance.
"Hey Karen, have you ever seen the Olympic diving team on TV?" I stretched out my hands in front of me.
“No, I haven’t.”
"You’re about to get a live experience.” I crept to the ledge of the board and turned. My heels were no longer on the board, and my toes were the only things holding me up. I jumped back and did one full back flip. It was something my neighbour had taught me the year we had gotten our trampoline in the backyard. He had been in gymnastics for a couple years until he figured out drugs were even better than doing back flips.
I smashed the water hard. It kind of hurt, and I stayed under for a couple seconds before bursting through the surface. The moment my head came out of the water, Larry was there. He tried to grab my shoulder.
I ducked back under the water and swam under his canoe. I didn’t think I could hold my breath for that long, and it was scary to see a rope holding the float to something dark at the bottom of the lake. It made me kick harder, and swim faster, until I got to the other side of the float. I climbed back up onto it, and leaned on the ladder to catch my breath.
"Get back in your canoe," Guy said. “Don’t be stupid.”
Karen brought the canoe around. I carefully climbed back into it, and she gasped when it swayed.
“What is your deal? Are you seriously afraid to get a little wet?” I said.
We paddled back to the dock. When our canoe tapped the wood, Mary leaned down and immediately grabbed the side of our canoe like we were about to paddle off again.
“You’re never going to progress to anything, Valerie,” Mary said.
“Thank you.” I put my shirt back on. It stuck to me, and I could feel the thicker part of the letters across my back. NEW HORIZONS. It was stamped across me for everyone but myself to see.
Larry and Guy tied up their boat behind us. When I got on shore, Larry came up to me and put his hand on my shoulder.
"You can’t act out like that, Valerie,” he said. “Something bad could happen out here and we wouldn’t be able to get help for you fast enough.”
“There’s no difference between this island and back at the other property. It’s all the middle of nowhere out here,” I told him. It was fun to me. Finally, after months of being asleep, I was having fun. I liked the reactions it got. What else was there to do? I liked that everyone looked at me and wondered what I was going to do next. I wasn’t actually like that in real life, and I felt like my real life was far, far away from me.
It was called Lonely Island. I had slept on it before, but back then we were young kids with tents to hide under. This time all we had to sleep with was a thin sleeping bag rolled out onto a tarp.
The first thing we set out to do was find firewood. I broke a branch in half off a pine tree and brought it back to the pile. Larry took mine out and chucked it back into the woods.
“Jesus, Valerie.”
“Wood is wood.”
“There’s better wood.”
The island was cleared out in the middle, with trees surrounding the empty spot. It had a fire pit, and logs to sit on from previous campers inventions. The whole island was a cute little oasis that we were there to experience for a change of scenery.
Mary showed us a few new knots that were good to know in life or death situations. We practised them in pairs. I was paired up with some girl from another group who liked talking under her breath about how much she hated herself. It seemed like an appropriate topic for a program designed to teach you about yourself.
“I’m such an idiot,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say to her. She couldn’t get a knot right, and she hated herself for it, like it was the worst thing in the world. Maybe it was, right then, because it was what we were doing.
We did a square knot first, and that one was useful for tying the rope around an object. Mary told us it was for tying things securely, when you didn’t want the knot to slip out. I liked that one. It seemed useful if you were into knots and stuff. Karen was all about the bowline until she managed to turn it into a noose. Maybe the bowline was also a good knot to kill yourself with.
“Karen, you got some experience with the bowline I see. Good for you.”
“It’s no noose, but it could work.”
For lunch, we had granola bars and an apple. I was starving after inhaling my two items. Mary told me we would be having a good supper, and that it was something to look forward to.
“Oh that makes me so much less hungry.”
Murray sat next to me on a log and he chewed his granola bar with his mouth open. He was so much bigger than me and I knew he had to be starving for real food. I was sick of dry, bland food. He had to be dying from it too.
“You’re seventeen,” he said.
“Says who?”
“I asked someone.”
“Who’d you ask?”
He pointed at Brooke. “That one.”
“Oh, well that one is a pathological liar. Good choice.”
“I also asked her.” He pointed at Karen. “She said you were seventeen but acted like you were twelve.”
“That is…fairly accurate.”
“I like you, Val,” he said. “I like you a lot. You’re different than
everyone else here.”
“Well, that’s pretty easy. It would be harder to be like someone in a place like this. There’s a lot of different personalities to choose from. We’re all a great mix of weirdos here.”
“No, you’re different in a good way. It sucks we met here though. I wish I had of known you before everything.”
“Before your rapist days?”
He shook his head and took another bite of his granola bar. I knew if I asked for a piece that he would give it to me. That if I asked for his shirt, he would hand it over. That he would give me anything off his back. But if I asked for information, something from his past, he would never give it up. He didn’t want me knowing him, and I didn’t want him knowing me, and we both wondered about each other even though it would make things hard.
“I think we get along because we know absolutely nothing about each other,” I told him.
“It still bugs me that you think I’m this terrible person. Because that’s not why I’m here, I promise. I didn’t do anything sexual against anyone.”
“Well, you didn’t give me a reason not to think that. So I can think about all kinds of reasons why you are here. Because you didn’t tell me much.”
“Yes I did.”
My teeth had something stuck in the front. I picked at it and kept my eyes on him. It was unattractive, and I didn’t care.
He looked at his feet.
“You didn’t tell the truth.”
“Neither did you, really.” He flattened out his eyebrows, and the sweat on them kept the hairs down.
“Yeah I did. I just didn’t tell all of it, though, because there isn’t really a good reason why I’m here.”
“Sure,” he said. “I just think you don’t trust me.”
“Correct.”
“If I told you something that you might want to know, I think you would trust me.”
“And what would that be?”
He stood up and moved toward the shore. There were trees in front of us, but he pointed through them, toward the other side of the lake. There were just more trees over there. “There’s a town over there.”
“Obviously.”
“No, it’s closer than you think. There are new cottages over there. And tonight, you will see the lights. We aren’t far away like you think. They’ve built properties over there in the last couple years. It’s not the middle of nowhere like it used to be. The land has been developed.”
I had never seen the lights before. I had slept over on the island plenty of times. He didn’t know what he was talking about.
“You’ll see,” he said.
“I sure will.”
After lunch, when I was feeling the most lethargic and just wanted to roll my sleeping bag out, we were asked to get into a large circle. Our circle was more of a long oval with holes in it from where people didn’t want to stand next to each other. Rick was in the middle of it.
“I’m about to hand you a paint chip card. Nobody look at what colour you have until I say so.”
Rick handed me mine. I held it close to my body. Everyone did the same thing and when he came to the middle of the circle again, he smiled. Beside me, Murray said he hoped he got purple.
“Purple?”
“It’s my favourite colour.”
“There is every single colour possible in nature,” Rick said. “Every single one. And this activity, with your detective eye, is to show that. Each of you have a paint chip card. Your job is to find your colour. Now please take a look at your card and go find it.”
Murray had a greyish blue, and beside me, Karen had a brown that was so dark that it looked black. I flipped mine over, expecting something similar, and Murray immediately laughed at me.
“Pink,” I said. I held it out for everyone to see. “Is this for real?”
“That’s a tricky one you got there, Valerie,” Twinner said. She had a yellowish colour paint chip. That was everywhere.
“It’s not even a dull pink,” I said. I looked down at it. “It’s bright pink. What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”
“Every single colour is in nature,” Rick said. He held up his own paint chip, and his arms were so long that I could barely see what kind of colour it was. It looked like beige. That wasn’t fair. “It’s your job to find your colour in nature. If you don’t find it, you’re not trying, and then you can’t move forward in the levels of this program.”
“We’re in the woods, where ninety-percent of it is some version of green. Where the fuck am I going to find pink?”
“Watch your mouth, Valerie. Do you not want to progress to become a Dandelion? Or a Firefly?” Larry asked.
“A Firefly?” I said. That made me laugh. “You know that’s my dream in life. To be a Firefly.”
“You may never be anything at this point.”
“I don’t want to be. I’m fine being how I am.”
Twin was the first to find her colour. She pulled a pine needle off of a branch right next to her. She put it on her paint chip and held it together with two fingers, way up in the air for all of us to see. Her fuzzy hair blew in the wind, and her boobs bounced when she took a step.
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “Green? That was hard.”
She smiled and took a seat at the fire pit. Her job was done, and she picked a small stick up off the ground and put it in her mouth. She puffed on her pretend cigarette, and got to sit back and watch us search.
Everyone found their colour. Because they all had dull, nature colours that you could find when you flipped over a rock or pulled a root out of the ground. Brooke found hers on a leaf, and Tracy had a light purple colour that she found on a stone near the shore. And I had a paint chip that didn’t exist anywhere. I wanted to throw it in the fire, but Rick shook his head when he saw me crumbing it up.
“Giving up already? That’s a shame. You never know what can pop up.”
I doubted that, and I chucked it near the fire pit.
“Don’t litter,” Mary yelled. “Put it in your bag for later.”
I picked it up and did as she said, and my guts were boiling. Murray was over by the shore, still searching for his colour. Larry was beside him, pointing out little areas to search. I went over there and sat down on a rock and watched them point at different versions of grey.
“You didn’t find your pink yet?” he asked.
“Obviously.” I looked down at his feet. He had a few rocks lined up, and he was comparing his paint chip to each one. He held up his card, looked at it, and then looked at me. “What do you think, Val? Which colour does it match the best?”
I took it and looked at him. His eyes were the exact greyish blue on his card, a weird, sad colour. I wondered if he knew that. But I didn’t bother telling him. His colour wasn’t supposed to be found in himself—it had to be in nature.