Dammit, Very could feel the potential for tears forming in her eyes. She had been so determined not to even talk about anything meaningful with this stranger, yet here she was, ten minutes into their session, giving it all away.
“How did you know Kristy?” Keisha asked.
“She played on the field hockey team at my high school in New Haven. She was really blond and beautiful, but in that no-makeup, casual, athletic kind of way. She looked like she should be on the cover of, like, rich people’s equestrian magazines.”
“Was Kristy in your classes?”
“Oh, no. She wasn’t that smart. At least academically. She was really into sports. She did okay at school, but she didn’t put in much effort. I was in all Honors classes, got mostly A’s back then; the work was so easy in high school. I met Kristy because I was assigned as her peer tutor.”
“So what happened between you and Kristy?”
“Well, she used to come over to my house to study. I live at my aunt’s house because my mom died. New Haven’s kind of a nothing place, but I have a really nice attic room there, so I didn’t mind it that much. And my aunt is old and doesn’t like to climb stairs, so I had a lot of privacy. Kristy had a big family and her house was always in chaos. So we always studied at my aunt’s place, in my room.”
“How did your mother die, may I ask?”
“Drug overdose,” Very said. She could only get through Kristy today; she couldn’t fathom opening up that other bottle of disaster.
“I’m sorry to hear that. Your father?” Keisha asked, jotting away on a notepad.
“Never knew him.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“Robbed,” Very said.
Keisha placed her notepad on her lap. Very couldn’t read the words, but she could see that whatever Keisha was writing about Very had already taken up a whole page. “This is a lot we’re stepping into, Very. Do you need a break?”
“I’m okay.” Very wasn’t lying. She hadn’t realized how much she needed just to talk. Like, talk-talk, to a live person, not online-OMG-talk. “Let’s finish what we started.”
“Okay. Tell me more about Kristy.”
“I was totally into her. Maybe even thought I loved her. But when we were together, you know, she’d only go so far. Kissing, and cuddling, and sometimes my hand was allowed to wander, but she was so embarrassed by it after. She barely acknowledged me at school. Then one time after school when my aunt was gone, Kristy and I were alone for real for the first time. And she let me go farther.”
“Do you want to tell me how so?”
“My hand in her panties.”
“Did she do that to you also?”
“Never progressed that far. It took so much whispered sweet-talking just for her to let me touch her there. I don’t know how teenage boys put up with all that yes/no, stop/start stuff from teenage girls, let me tell you. Drove me crazy! But then finally one day, like I said, we were truly alone for the first time ever, and she was really into it, and she let me take it farther than just kissing. She let me slip my hand there. Inside.”
“I notice you talk very openly about sex.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Frankly, no. Especially at your age. Was your mother very open with you about it?”
“Totally. She walked around naked at home whenever she could; she hated clothes. She had boyfriends over all the time. She took me to the doctor to talk about birth control as soon as she knew I was sexually active.”
“How old were you then?”
“Sixteen,” Very lied.
Jot jot jot, wrote Keisha. She looked up from her notepad again.
“So. Kristy. What happened when she let you become that intimate with her?”
Very paused.
Jot jot jot.
“Could you stop writing while I tell you this?” she asked Keisha.
“Of course.” Keisha set the notepad over on her desk and returned to her comfy chair. “Does the notebook bother you?”
“No. But if I’m going to tell someone about this, I’d like to know they’re really paying attention to me. If I see you writing, in my mind, you’re also IM-ing your friends, or returning e-mails to coworkers, or …”
“… technological multitasking? Five screens open at once?”
“Yes, something like that,” Very said.
Keisha said, “The notepad’s gone. You have my full attention. I’d like to hear what you have to say.”
Very hesitated one more time, then let it out. “Kristy let me put my fingers in there. And she seemed like she was really into it. But then she came so fast, I was almost frightened. It was amazing, too, though, to give so much pleasure to someone I cared about so much. Beautiful, even. She smiled at me for a second and then kissed me; it was like this one perfect moment of happiness. But then, just as fast, she turned on me. She shoved me away and started crying, then hitting me, saying she wanted to go home. She completely freaked out.”
“Why do you think that was?”
“Her family was really religious. The conservative Catholic kind or something, not the chilled-out types. I guess she wasn’t ready to accept that she wasn’t straight.”
“So what happened after?”
“Kristy left. And never talked to me again.”
“That must have felt bad.”
“It did. It felt awful.” Very felt the sadness and rejection revisiting her body, squeezing the breath from her lungs and making her heart want to collapse as a spray of tears rushed down her face. But the tears felt okay: safe. And when she got her breath back, Very found it was deeper, and better. It seemed weird that letting out something so sad could actually make her feel kind of glad, but she couldn’t deny the sense of relief flooding through her.
Keisha passed a tissue to Very.
“Thanks,” Very said. She sniffled into it.
“Do you think there’s anything you would have done differently then, knowing what you know now?” Keisha asked.
“Yeah. Don’t fall for a girl who won’t admit she likes girls. Pretty simple, if you ask me.”
“Do you prefer girls?” Keisha asked.
“I prefer a pulse,” Very said. “I know it’s lame to say this, but I’m probably one of those It’s the Person, Not the Gender people on the sexual orientation spectrum. I’m pretty equal opportunity. Well … maybe I trust women less than men.”
“Why do you think that is? Because of Kristy?”
Very paused a moment, to give the question fair consideration. “I don’t know, really. I didn’t realize I even felt that way until I just said it. I mean, I feel like I am a feminist, and I was raised by women, and Go, Girl Power! and all that. But yeah … I think I do trust women less than men. Partly because of Kristy. But also, with men, I just don’t expect anything of them, anyway. So they can’t let me down.”
“Sounds to me like you’re saying you don’t trust men or women, then? Do you think the feeling of being let down and not able to trust ties in to your feelings about the loss of your mother?”
Very’s head was officially ready to explode, and not with a need to connect to a machine, but from connecting to too much personal feeling.
“Keisha, may I be honest with you?”
“I sure hope so.”
“I really just want a nap all of a sudden.”
Keisha stood up. “You’re not the first to sit on that couch and tell me that before our session is over. It’s good to listen to what your mind and your body are telling you. So go back to your room and rest. We’ll pick up where we left off next time. Deal?”
“The M&M’s will be here?”
“They will. Perhaps, contrary to Dr. Joy’s notes to me, you might not really be a vegan if you’ll eat milk chocolate candies?”
“I was trying to get out of butter churning.”
“Good move.” Keisha smiled and patted Very’s shoulder. “And great work here today.”
CHAPTER 23
Y
ou could take the song out of her ears by taking away her headset, but the song remained the same: always in her heart.
The best way for Very to make it through kitchen duty was to make a song game out of it.
Kitchen duty was a mandated ESCAPE chore. With no automated food-processing machines or dishwashers allowed, Dr. Joy cleverly managed to cut ESCAPE’s labor costs by forcing the residents—who were paying to be there—to help with food preparation and cleanup. Dr. Joy should be featured on the cover of Forbes magazine rather than Psychology Today, Very figured. “Shrink Shrinks Costs by Squeezing Joy from the Hands That Feed Her,” the headline would read. The inside pictorial spread would show ESCAPE residents in kitchen-duty servitude—preparing vats of glutinous oatmeal for breakfast, cutting cucumbers to put into elegant-looking lunch sandwiches, peeling and chopping vegetables for dinner—and post-meal cleanup glamour poses featuring residents washing plates with Joy brand dishwashing liquid (whose manufacturer would gladly compensate for the product placement, as would that of Glad, for displaying its plastic wrap and storage containers) and cheerfully mopping floors with the maniacal gleam of Mr. Clean on their faces.
Very survived kitchen duty by thinking of the experience as an experiment in socialism. Everyone did his or her part to contribute to the collective whole, and if she signed up for duty alongside Kate and Erick, her comrades-but-not-friends (for their own safety), the time passed more quickly.
What was timeless to the experience, Very would discover, was disco music.
Kitchen duty was as segregated as eating in the dining hall. It wasn’t a scene like the high school cafeteria with the popular people in one corner and the rejects in the other; the social breakdown was more like a case of Olds versus Youngs.
The Olds at ESCAPE were the forty-plus crew, who were not as technologically adept as their younger comrades but perhaps had more to lose because of their addictions, having had more time on earth investing in material accumulation. They were people at kitchen duty like Bob from Phoenix, a fifty-five-year-old architect, who had lost his once-thriving business to online gambling. Or Irma from Atlanta, a mother of eight, grandmother to eighteen, and great-grandmother to four, who had her house foreclosed on when she went into credit card debt from online shopping. (Luckily, one grandchild in there was solvent and could afford rehab.) Minnesota Suzanne had lost tens of thousands of dollars—and her powerful status as president of her local Leisure World Tenants Association—when too many too-trusting residents at her retirement community entrusted her with their online stock-trading choices.
The Youngs were people like Very and Kate and Erick, and like Enrique from Miami, a twentysomething music promoter who, when so many people showed up for the electronica club night he conceived, thought it meant people wanted to be electronically Tasered during their music reverie. Or people like young mom Raelene from Alabama, thirty-one, whose live Internet sexcapades during her kids’ school hours went awry when her oblivious husband came home early with a sick child in tow, and the ensuing fight was streamcast for all the pervy online world to watch. So deeply Inside, Raelene hadn’t thought to power off the webcam.
The Olds versus Youngs tended to segregate themselves, whether consciously or not, in the dining hall and at other group activities, and even, Very discovered to her horror, in kitchen duty. The Olds were some bossy bitches.
It was the second night of kitchen duty toward the end of her first week at ESCAPE, and Very was assigned to dinner preparation.
Bob took charge first, announcing, “I’ll fold the napkins tonight.” Which meant Raelene would be stuck setting the napkins out at each table, while Enrique had to set the cutlery out.
Irma seconded with, “I’ll measure the flour.” Which meant Very would be stuck kneading the bread dough.
Suzanne topped it off with, “I’ll make sure the refrigerator is stocked with the necessary ingredients.” Which meant Kate and Erick would be peeling and chopping the carrots and potatoes.
The Olds then “supervised,” in the form of sitting at a corner kitchen table playing gin rummy after their meager tasks were completed, while the Youngs had no choice but to pick up the slack. Raelene and Enrique took on setting up the tables in the dining hall, while Very, Erick, and Kate set out to their food-preparation tasks in the kitchen.
Erick arranged carrot sticks on a platter to resemble fishies.
Kate spewed invective at the Potato Men she sculpted with the potato peeler. “You! Potato Man! Can’t-be-trusted, lying, no-good, mean jerk! How I hate you! I bid you be chopped into french fries and devoured by gluttons!”
Regrettably, Very had to admit that there was something to Dr. Joy’s assertion that kitchen duty had therapeutic value. For Very, it came as she was kneading bread dough while singing aloud to the KC and the Sunshine Band song in her heart, if not on her iPod, at that moment: “I’m your boogie man …”
To her surprise, from the corner of the room, a man’s voice—Bob’s!—answered with: “That’s what I am.”
Very had thought it a fluke, but then Suzanne and Irma chimed in with: “I’m here to do …”
And then the voices united to include Kate’s and Erick’s: “Whatever I can.”
The Youngs and Olds all looked up from their respective tasks, wondering if what they thought had just happened had indeed happened.
To test it, Very tried a new song—her signature song, as it were. Again she sang aloud: “Young and old are doing it, I’m told.”
The Youngs and Olds collectively answered with: “Le freak, c’est chic.”
So it was true, then. Disco music was the great equalizer.
And even if the Youngs and Olds bridged only this one gap, the irrefutable evidence was now clear: At this moment in time, Very was in the exact place where she belonged, with the people, whether friends or not, whom she was meant to share it with, and vice versa.
This rehab was straight-up for real.
CHAPTER 24
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Erick and Kate had been right.
Very was getting used to ESCAPE. She wouldn’t describe herself as fully assimilated, but her resistance had worn down, and she was, after a week in, fully acclimated.
The withdrawal pains had subsided. Very no longer sprang out of bed in the middle of the night to search for messages from El Virus. She wasn’t mentally calculating all the unread e-mails she was unable to answer, nor was she visualizing emoticon responses to substitute for human interaction. When she walked, she saw white clouds and blue sky and green trees, and not artificial yellow smiley faces and jumbled-together black punctuation marks. :/phew. Without the constant stimulation of video games, Very felt her blood pressure going down, as if her body was acknowledging gratitude for not rushing a constant adrenaline surge through it. Certainly, Very’s mind felt clearer, and her balance much improved from not regularly swerving and jumping to match the fast and furious goings-on of an on-screen virtual world.
The hardest bite of all? Her body had acclimated to not being on constant alert for a buzz against her flesh that indicated new messages vibrating through her iPhone.
Oh, her iPhone.
She could give up all the other crap, but that one, it was so exquisitely beautiful, such a perfect little piece of technology, so smooth and compact and powerful and … well, she missed that one a hell of a lot, but she didn’t need it. She was doing fine without it; she wasn’t going into withdrawal-pain shock spasms or anything anymore. iPhone. Whatever. Totally casual. She’d get back to it whenever. Not a big deal.
The bummer part was just as she was getting used to ESCAPE, the place changed. Erick and Kate were graduating. They’d made it through their twenty-eight days and were headed back into the world, to their real lives. Once back on the outside, Kate planned to start a support group for teen girls who were the victims of cruel Internet games. Erick planned to learn how to swim, for real. Very would have to find new people to needlepoint with. O
r maybe not. The Christmas-stocking elves Very had been working on in their company had turned out complete disasters and looked positively satanic. The needlepoint elves frightened Very, and not in a beguiling goth-metal way, but in an ickily creeped-out way. Maybe Very would have to find a new form of art therapy once she lost the companionship of Erick and Kate.
“Are you scared to leave?” Very asked them.
Per tradition, the almost graduates were being thrown a campfire get-together on their last night before legitimately escaping from ESCAPE. A small group of fellow ESCAPE convicts (Youngs) sat around the fire at the designated fire pit behind Jones’s house, celebrating Erick’s and Kate’s imminent reintegration into the world. The group drank herbal tea and munched on trail mix. Someone strummed an acoustic guitar, but no one was singing. The sounds of fire sparks and cicadas were enough backup.
Very’s last campfire had pretty much put the death seal on her relationship with Bryan. She was like her mother with fires. Dangerous.
Kate said, “I’m scared to go back out there. Absolutely.”
Erick said, “Mostly I’m scared to talk to people again in a real setting. You know, in an environment that’s not artificially maintained for nonartificial living. I don’t know what I’m supposed to talk about if I’m not all the time talking about my addiction problem.”
Addiction. That was the basic component of the ESCAPE program Very just could not get on board with. That one simple word. It implied so much desperation and lack of control. Addiction meant alcoholics, and people who abused narcotics, and bulimics who couldn’t keep their Twinkie habits in check. The a-word didn’t really apply to the people at ESCAPE. It was a word Dr. Joy bandied about to sound smart, Very assumed. It wasn’t possible to be addicted to technology, because even Dr. Joy acknowledged that when ESCAPEes went back out into the real world, they could never escape technology. An alcoholic needed to stay sober to survive, but a “technology addict” couldn’t maintain a job or a relationship or any kind of life in the modern age without reconnecting in some way, shape, or fashion. Dr. Joy said it was all about “finding the inner tools” so that “balance in the outer realm” could be achieved. Very suspected it was more about getting over the hump of one problem in life before moving on to the next one.