There were boys in the west wings of the motel, but they wouldn’t ever be in the yard at the same time as the girls. Everyone ate together, but there was no talking while eating, so they wouldn’t be getting to know each other; anyway, they were all very bad boys. There was no reason to think about them at all, Mama Strong said.
She passed each of the Power girls a piece of paper and a pencil. She told them to write down five things about themselves that were true.
Norah thought about Enoch and Kayla, whether they knew where she had gone, what they might try to do about it. What she would do if it were them. She wrote: I am a good friend. I am fun to be with. Initially that was a single entry. Later when time ran out, she came back and made it two. She thought about her parents. I am a picky eater, she wrote on their behalf. She couldn’t afford to be angry with them, not until she was home again. A mistake had been made. When her parents realized the kind of place this was, they would come and get her.
I am honest. I am stubborn, she wrote, because her mother had always said so. How many times had Norah heard how her mother spent eighteen hours in labor and finally had a C-section just because Fetal Norah wouldn’t tuck her chin to clear the pubic bone. “If I’d known her then like I know her now,” Norah’s mother used to say, “I’d have gone straight to the C-section and spared myself the labor. ‘This child is never going to tuck her chin,’ I’d have said.”
And then Norah scratched out the part about being stubborn, because she had never been so angry at her parents and she didn’t want to give her mother the satisfaction. Instead she wrote, Nobody knows who I really am.
They were all to read their lists aloud. Norah was made to go first. Mama Strong sucked loudly through her teeth at number four. “Already this morning, Norah has lied to me two times,” she told the group. “ ‘I am honest’ is the third lie today.”
The girls were invited to comment. They did so immediately and with vigor. Norah seemed very stuck on herself, said a white girl with severe acne on her cheeks and chin. A red-haired girl with a freckled neck and freckled arms said that there was no evidence of Norah taking responsibility for anything. She agreed with the first girl. Norah was very stuck-up. The skinny girl with the cough said that no one honest ended up here. None of them were honest, but at least she was honest enough to admit it.
“I’m here by mistake,” said Norah.
“Lie number four.” Mama Strong reached over and took the paper, her eyes like stones. “I know who you really are,” she said. “I know how you think. You think, how do I get out of here?
“You never will. The only way out is to be different. Change. Grow.” She tore up Norah’s list. “Only way is to be someone else completely. As long as some tiny place inside is still you, you will never leave.”
The other girls took turns reading from their lists. “I am ungrateful,” one of them had written. “I am a liar,” read another. “I am still carrying around my bullshit,” read the girl with the cough. “I am a bad person.” “I am a bad daughter.”
It took Norah three months to earn enough points to spend an afternoon outside. She stood blinking in the sun, watching a line of birds thread the sky above her. She couldn’t see the ocean, but there was a breeze that brought the smell of salt.
Later she got to play kickball with the other Power girls in the old, drained motel pool. No talking, so they played with a silent ferocity, slamming each other into the pool walls until every girl was bleeding from the nose or the knee or somewhere.
After group there were classes. Norah would be given a lesson with a multiple-choice exercise. Some days it was math, some days history, geography, literature. At the end of an hour someone on staff would check her answers against a key. There was no instruction, and points were deducted for wrong answers. One day the lesson was the Frost poem “The Road Not Taken,” which was not a hard lesson, but Norah got almost everything wrong, because the staff member was using the wrong key. Norah said so, and she lost points for her poor score, but also for the talking.
It took eleven months for Norah to earn enough points to write her parents. She’d known Mama Strong or someone else on staff would read the letter so she wrote it carefully. “Please let me come home. I promise to do whatever you ask and I think you can’t know much about this place. I am sick a lot from the terrible food and have a rash on my legs from bug bites that keeps getting worse. I’ve lost weight. Please come and get me. I love you. Norah.”
“So manipulative,” Mama Strong had said. “So dishonest and manipulative.” But she put the letter into an envelope and stamped it.
If the letter was dishonest, it was only by omission. The food here was not only terrible, it was unhealthy, often rotting, and there was never enough of it. Meat was served infrequently, so the students, hungry enough to eat anything, were always sick after. No more than three minutes every three hours could be spent on the toilet; there were always students whose legs were streaked with diarrhea. There was no medical care. The bug bites came from her mattress.
Sometimes someone would vanish. This happened to two girls in the Power family. One of them was the girl with the acne; her name was Kelsey. One of them was Jetta, a relatively new arrival. There was no explanation; since no one was allowed to talk, there was no speculation. Mama Strong had said if they earned a hundred points they could leave. Norah tried to remember how many points she’d seen Kelsey get; was it possible she’d had a hundred? Not possible that Jetta did.
The night Jetta disappeared, there was a bloody towel in the corner of the shower. Not just stained with blood, soaked with it. It stayed in the corner for three days until someone finally took it away.
A few weeks before her birthday, Norah lost all her accumulated points, forty-five of them, for not going deep in group session. By then Norah had no deep left. She was all surface—skin rashes, eye infections, aching teeth, constant hunger, stomach cramps. The people in her life—the ones Mama Strong wanted to know everything about—had dimmed in her memory along with everything else—school, childhood, all the fights with her parents, all the Christmases, the winters, the summers, her fifteenth birthday. Her friends went first and then her family.
The only things she could remember clearly were those things she’d shared in group. Group session demanded ever more intimate, more humiliating, more secret stories. Soon it seemed as if nothing had ever happened to Norah that wasn’t shameful and painful. Worse, her most secret shit was still found wanting, not sufficiently revealing, dishonest.
Norah turned to vaguely remembered plots from after-school specials until one day the story she was telling was recognized by the freckled girl, Emilene was her name, who got twenty whole points for calling Norah on it.
There was a punishment called the TAP, the Think Again Position. Room 303 was the TAP room. It smelled of unwashed bodies and was crawling with ants. A student sent to the TAP was forced to lie face-down on the bare floor. Every three hours, a shift in position was allowed. A student who moved at any other time was put in restraint. Restraint meant that one staff member would set a knee on the student’s spine. Others would pull the student’s arms and legs back and up as far as they could go and then just a little bit farther. Many times a day, screaming could be heard in Room 303.
For lying in group session, Norah was sent to the TAP. She would be released, Mama Strong, said, when she was finally ready to admit that she was here as a result of her own decisions. Mama Strong was sick of Norah’s games. Norah lasted two weeks.
“You have something to say?” Mama Strong was smoking a small hand-rolled cigarette that smelled of cinnamon. Smoke curled from her nostrils, and her fingers were stained with tobacco or coffee or dirt or blood.
“I belong here,” Norah said.
“No mistake?”
“No.”
“Just what you deserve?”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“Just what I deserve.”
“Two weeks is n
othing,” Mama Strong said. “We had a girl three years ago, did eighteen.”
Although it was the most painful, the TAP was not, to Norah’s mind, the worst part. The worst part was the light that stayed on all night. Norah had not been in the dark for one single second since she arrived. The no dark was making Norah crazy. Her voice in group no longer sounded like her voice. It hurt to use it, hurt to hear it.
Her voice had betrayed her, telling Mama Strong everything until there was nothing left inside Norah that Mama Strong hadn’t pawed through, like a shopper at a flea market. Mama Strong knew exactly who Norah was, because Norah had told her. What Norah needed was a new secret.
For her sixteenth birthday, she got two postcards. “We came all this way only to learn you’re being disciplined and we can’t see you. We don’t want to be harsh on your birthday of all days, but honest to Pete, Norah, when are you going to have a change of attitude? Just imagine how disappointed we are.” The handwriting was her father’s, but the card had been signed by her mother and father both.
The other was written by her mother. “Your father said as long as we’re here we might as well play tourist. So now we’re at a restaurant in the middle of the ocean. Well, maybe not the exact middle, but a long ways out! The restaurant is up on stilts on a sandbar and you can only get here by boat! We’re eating a fish right off the line! All the food is so good, we envy you living here! Happy birthday, darling! Maybe next year we can celebrate your birthday here together. I will pray for that!” Both postcards had a picture of the ocean restaurant. It was called the Pelican Bar.
Her parents had spent five days only a few miles away. They’d swum in the ocean, drunk mai tais and mojitos under the stars, fed bits of bread to the gulls. They’d gone up the river to see the crocodiles and shopped for presents to take home. They were genuinely sorry about Norah; her mother had cried the whole first day and often after. But this sadness was heightened by guilt. There was no denying that they were happier at home without her. Norah had been a constant drain, a constant source of tension and despair. Norah left and peace arrived. The twins had never been difficult, but Norah’s instructive disappearance had improved even their good behavior.
Norah is on her mattress in Room 217 under the overhead light, but she is also at a restaurant on stilts off the coast. She is drinking something made with rum. The sun is shining. The water is blue and rocking like a cradle. There is a breeze on her face.
Around the restaurant, nets and posts have been sunk into the sandbar. Pelicans sit on these or fly or sometimes drop into the water with their wings closed, heavy as stones. Norah wonders if she could swim all the way back in to shore. She’s a good swimmer, or used to be, but this is merely hypothetical. She came by motor-boat, trailing her hand in the water, and will leave the same way. Norah wipes her mouth with her hand, and her fingers taste of salt.
She buys a postcard. Dear Norah, she writes. You could do the TAP better now. Maybe not for eighteen weeks, but probably more than two. Don’t ever tell Mama Strong about the Pelican Bar, no matter what.
For her sixteenth birthday what Norah got was the Pelican Bar.
Norah’s seventeenth birthday passed without her noticing. She’d lost track of the date; there was just a morning when she suddenly thought that she must be seventeen by now. There’d been no card from her parents, which might have meant they hadn’t sent one, but probably didn’t. Their letters were frequent, if peculiar. They seemed to think there was water in the pool, fresh fruit at lunchtime. They seemed to think she had counselors and teachers and friends. They’d even made reference to college prep. Norah knew that someone on staff was writing and signing her name. It didn’t matter. She could hardly remember her parents, didn’t expect to ever see them again. Since “come and get me” hadn’t worked, she had nothing further to say to them. Fine with her if someone else did.
One of the night women, one of the women who sat in the corner and watched while they slept, was younger than the others, with her hair in many braids. She took a sudden dislike to Norah. Norah had no idea why; there’d been no incident, no exchange, just an evening when the woman’s eyes locked onto Norah’s face and filled with poison. The next day she followed Norah through the halls and lobby, mewing at her like a cat. This went on until everyone on staff was mewing at Norah. Norah lost twenty points for it. Worse, she found it impossible to get to the Pelican Bar while everyone was mewing at her.
But even without Norah going there, Mama Strong could tell that she had a secret. Mama Strong paid less attention to the other girls and more to Norah, pushing and prodding in group, allowing the mewing even from the other girls, and sending Norah to the TAP again and again. Norah dipped back into minus points. Her hairbrush and her toothbrush were taken away. Her time in the shower was cut from five minutes to three. She had bruises on her thighs and a painful spot on her back where the knee went during restraint.
After several months without, she menstruated. The blood came in clots, gushes that soaked into her sweatpants. She was allowed to get up long enough to wash her clothes, but the blood didn’t come completely out and the sweatpants weren’t replaced. A man came and mopped the floor where Norah had to lie. It smelled strongly of piss when he was done.
More girls disappeared, until Norah noticed that she’d been there longer than almost anyone in the Power family. A new girl arrived and took the mattress and blanket Kimberly had occupied. The new girl’s name was Chloe. The night she arrived, she spoke to Norah. “How long have you been here?” she asked. Her eyes were red and swollen, and she had a squashed kind of nose. She wasn’t able to hold still; she jabbered about her meds which she hadn’t taken and needed to; she rocked on the mattress from side to side.
“The new girl talked to me last night,” Norah told Mama Strong in the morning. Chloe was a born victim, gave off the victim vibe. She was so weak, it was like a superpower. The kids at her school had bullied her, she said in group session, like this would be news to anyone.
“Maybe you ask for it,” Emilene suggested.
“Why don’t you take responsibility?” Norah said. “Instead of blaming everyone else.”
“You will learn to hold still,” Mama Strong told her and had the girls put her in restraint themselves. Norah’s was the knee in her back.
Then Mama Strong told them all to make a list of five reasons they’d been sent here. “I am a bad daughter,” Norah wrote. “I am still carrying around my bullshit. I am ungrateful.” And then her brain snapped shut like a clamshell so she couldn’t continue.
“There is something else you want to say.” Mama Strong stood in front of her, holding the incriminating paper, two reasons short of the assignment, in her hand.
She was asking for Norah’s secret. She was asking about the Pelican Bar. “No,” said Norah. “It’s just that I can’t think.”
“Tell me.” The black beads of Mama Strong’s eyes became pinpricks. “Tell me. Tell me.” She stepped around Norah’s shoulder so that Norah could smell onion and feel a cold breath on her neck, but couldn’t see her face.
“I don’t belong here,” Norah said. She was trying to keep the Pelican Bar. To do that, she had to give Mama Strong something else. There was probably a smarter plan, but Norah couldn’t think of anything. “Nobody belongs here,” she said. “This isn’t a place where humans belong.”
“You are human, but not me?” Mama Strong said. Mama Strong had never touched Norah. But her voice coiled like a spring; she made Norah flinch. Norah felt her own piss on her thighs.
“Maybe so,” Mama Strong said. “Maybe I’ll send you somewhere else then. Say you want that. Ask me for it. Say it and I’ll do it.”
Norah held her breath. In that instant, her brain produced the two missing reasons. “I am a liar,” she said. She heard her own desperation. “I am a bad person.”
There was a silence, and then Norah heard Chloe saying she wanted to go home. Chloe clapped her hands over her mouth. Her talking continued, only
now no one could make out the words. Her head nodded like a bobblehead dog on a dashboard.
Mama Strong turned to Chloe. Norah got sent to the TAP, but not to Mama Strong’s someplace else.
After that, Mama Strong never again seemed as interested in Norah. Chloe hadn’t learned yet to hold still, but Mama Strong was up to the challenge. When Norah was seventeen, the gift she got was Chloe.
One day, Mama Strong stopped Norah on her way to breakfast. “Follow me,” she said, and led Norah to the chain-link fence. She unlocked the gate and swung it open. “You can go now.” She counted out fifty dollars. “You can take this and go. Or you can stay until your mother and father come for you. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week. You go now, you get only as far as you get with fifty dollars.”
Norah began to shake. This, she thought, was the worst thing done to her yet. She took a step toward the gate, took another. She didn’t look at Mama Strong. She saw that the open gate was a trick, which made her shaking stop. She was not fooled. Norah would never be allowed to walk out. She took a third step and a fourth. “You don’t belong here,” Mama Strong said with contempt, as if there’d been a test and Norah had flunked it. Norah didn’t know if this was because she’d been too compliant or not compliant enough.
And then Norah was outside and Mama Strong was closing and locking the gate behind her.
Norah walked in the sunlight down a paved road dotted with potholes and the smashed skins of frogs. The road curved between weeds taller than Norah’s head, bushes with bright orange flowers. Occasionally a car went by, driven very fast.
Norah kept going. She passed stucco homes, some small stores. She saw cigarettes and muumuus for sale, large avocados, bunches of small bananas, liquor bottles filled with dish soap, posters for British ale. She thought about buying something to eat, but it seemed too hard, would require her to talk. She was afraid to stop walking. It was very hot on the road in the sun. A pack of small dogs followed her briefly and then ran back to wherever they’d come from.