by Rachel Cohn
“I said ‘No, no, no.’” Very actually sang it aloud to them.
“Oh yes, you will, young lady,” Aunt Esther said.
“But I can’t afford rehab!” Very tried to protest. The group had just come from their meeting and presented the idea to Very in her hospital room. She couldn’t afford college. Who the hell would pay the costs for a rehab facility? Aunt Esther didn’t have that kind of money to spare; she lived off a modest pension. And if Aunt Esther was going to spring for that kind of expense for Very, well, then, Very privately felt she would rather have the money go toward building a supercomputer station in her attic room in New Haven that she could one day use to teleport herself into outer space, thankyouverymuch.
“May we have a few moments alone?” Lavinia said to the group. The doctor left Very’s room along with Dean Dean, Aunt Esther, and Dreabbie (who’d been pissed to have missed her flight home for summer break in all the Very drama, yet seemed pleased to have been on call through the episode for the purposes of practical experience on her resident advisor résumé).
Alone with Lavinia, Very begged her, “You asked them to leave so you can tell me the better plan you’ve figured out for me, right? What is it?”
Lavinia tucked a strand of Very’s wild hair behind her ear, then tenderly patted her on the head. “You do have the money,” Lavinia said. “I counted the money in the envelope you left in our room from your Astronomy Club party. You have about exactly enough for a month’s stay at a residential treatment center. I found one for you. It’s near the summer camp where I’m working. I’ll be nearby. You won’t be alone. I promise.”
“No way,” Very said. Her hard-earned funds would most certainly not go toward a nonsense idea like …
“If you don’t use the money for rehab,” Lavinia said, “I’ll tell the dean how you made the money.”
“You wouldn’t.”
Lavinia smiled. “I would. And Bryan and Jean-Wayne back me up on this. So it’s your choice. We can lie and say you have some cash stashed away from various odd jobs you’ve been taking on all year, along with some contributions your friends kicked in, and you’ll have the possibility of at least coming back to Columbia next year. Or we can tell Dean Dean how you really earned that money, and you’ll never come back to the university.”
“You are evil incarnate,” Very said, shocked and offended that she’d had no idea about this sexy side of Lavinia’s personality.
“I’m worried about you,” Lavinia said. “Seriously worried. This is not a game anymore. You really scared me.”
And because she was a sucker for stupid ol’ Lavinia’s concerned but dear ol’ face, Very jumped on board with the ESCAPE plan. And because Lavinia blackmailed her. And because Aunt Esther said she had to.
They tried to make me go to rehab and I said … “Whatever. Who cares. So I’ll go.”
CHAPTER 19
Very needed to silence the quiet or she’d go mad.
If she could locate the secret stash of MP3 players on the premises, Very figured, she could last the four weeks in rehab. Simple tunage would ease her music-deprived soul and ease her transition into being so harshly, and completely, de-technologified.
ESCAPE was not kidding about forcing residents to escape from technology. ESCAPE could teach the TSA a few things about security procedures.
There was a metal detector that residents, and visitors, had to pass through at the entrance. A full-on body search was also part of the intake process for new residents, and it had caused Very to lose the first-generation iPod loaded with 2001’s Hottest Hits that she’d desperately bought off a long-term patient at the hospital following her psychiatric “incident” and then had slipped between her sock and shoe before check-in at ESCAPE. New arrivals were only allowed to bring a duffel bag of clothes and cosmetic supplies, which had to be thoroughly inspected by staff before residents could check in to their rooms. And so Very had also lost the Game Boy she’d acquired from that same hospital patient in exchange for a fully consensual but nonsexual back and shoulder massage (no oil or taking-off-of-shirt involved). Somewhere on the ESCAPE grounds, Very knew, there was a whole ESCAPE supply room filled with items confiscated from the arrival inspections: music players, phones, Game Boys, computers, probably naughty toys, too.
This was probably why Dr. Joyce Kuntz, aka “Dr. Joy,” was also also known as “Dr. Killjoy,” re-nicknamed by the original class of ESCAPE inmates, who’d passed the name down through successive cycles of rehabbers.
Very didn’t think asking for one bloody iPod, or just a battery-operated AM/FM radio, was that big a deal.
Dr. Killjoy apparently thought differently.
“Veronica, you’re missing the point,” she’d said when Very presented the idea to her during their initial orientation session together. “The goal here is to check out from external stimulation and material communication. It’s not meant as a punishment. It’s a means for you to cleanse, and check in to, your own soul.”
Soul cleansing at ESCAPE would include mandatory attendance at group therapy with Dr. Joy, art therapy, talk therapy, and kitchen-duty “therapy,” but, frankly, Very thought her hygiene habits weren’t all that bad, so she didn’t understand what she needed to be cleansed of.
“Cleanse my soul of what, exactly?” Very demanded. “The devil?” Trapping Dr. Joy into defending the supposedly secular curriculum could be an entertaining diversion.
Conceiving devil-themed playlists would be more entertaining, though. Off the top of her head and without benefit of a search engine, Very would include “Devils Haircut” by Beck, “I’m Your Boogie Man” by KC and the Sunshine Band, “Shout at the Devil” by Mötley Crüe, “Christmas with the Devil” by Spinal Tap, “Satan Is My Motor” by Cake, “Devil Inside” by INXS, and, most obviously, “Satan Rejected My Soul” by Morrissey, which Very considered her personal anthem, in a song-title kind of way.
Better yet, Very could pass her ESCAPE time developing a Satan-inspired video game. It could be something like Grand Theft Auto … in HELL, brimstone and hellfire in really fast cars, and a seedy underbelly lined with John 3:15 placard holders, and death and tyranny and awesome motor raceway sounds.
Very had to find that secret stash of confiscated equipment soon. Who was she fooling? An iPod alone wouldn’t do her. She needed access to programming software, which would require computer hardware.
Dr. Joy said, “Of course I’m not talking about ‘the devil.’ This program is not intended to engage in that kind of polemic debate. The goal here at ESCAPE is to achieve a simple spiritual purification from within, without artificial stimulation.”
“‘Simple,’” Very said. “That makes no sense. I’d simply like to be able to listen to my music. Getting through the day without that is like asking me not to breathe.”
Very had to figure out the sound track for her video game before she could develop the actual game. She’d like to get started right away.
“No one’s asking you not to breathe. If it’s simple music you think you are missing, you could learn to play an acoustic instrument here! We have classes available for that! You could learn to play the banjo, the recorder, the lute! We have so many exciting options.”
Very laughed. Dr. Joy did not. Sarcasm did not seem to be included in the doctor’s therapeutic repertoire.
What Very found fascinating about Dr. Joy was that she seemed to genuinely want the pathetic offerings at ESCAPE to sound fun and enjoyable, yet the expression on her face as she offered them was often strangely grim. It was like Dr. Joy’s voice inflection was filled with exclamation points, but her facial tics indicated a dreary and indifferent same-old period mark. Unnaturally tall, slim, and pasty-faced, Dr. Joy looked to Very like the beleaguered Mother Superior who was always chasing after that rapscallion Madeline girl in the children’s books. BTW, Dr. Joy’s attire could use an infusion of cool nun’s habit. At present, her clothing appeared to operate strictly out of the Lands’ End bargain basement.
“‘Outlet’ implies electricity, hence—no, absolutely not. And there will be no need for wailing or clashing here, Veronica! I assure you of that. We’ve already gone over some of the physical activities offered here—”
Did this woman even hear her?
“I’m not interested in churning butter like in the brochure,” Very interrupted, imagining herself decked out in a peasant’s costume and singing “Ol’ Man River” along with the other indentured servants. The appealing costume aside, the mental picture appalled her. Also, her arms would get really sore from the physical labor, and just when her carpal tunnel syndrome was getting so much better. Fuhgeddaboutit.
“Are you vegan?”
“Yes,” Very lied. She was as vegan as that Jimmy Dean sausages guy on the TV commercials was, such a good salesman that the mere sight of him made Very also crave the glories of scrambled eggs slathered in butter, crispy bacon, bagels with cream cheese, and coffee with half ‘n’ half.
Dr. Joy said, “Then you are excused from butter churning and cheese making. What types of exercise do you enjoy?”
Very laughed. “I’m sorry, did you just say ‘exercise’ and ‘enjoy’ in the same sentence?”
“I did.” Dr. Joy’s stern face acknowledged no humor in the statement.
“Okay, I’ll play this game. I love Wii bowling, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour SimGolf is cute, too, but figuring out the golfing outfit to wear while playing it is cooler. I like the haberdasher/plaid kind of look, like sort of Caddyshack meets a Wii version of Gossip Girl—”
“Let’s discuss realistic options.” Dr. Joy’s eyes didn’t offer even the possibility of a twinkle. Caddyshack meets Wii Gossip Girl?!?!? Totally hilarious! And what an awesome fashion statement that would be. But, realistically, Dr. Joy continued, “Each night an activity schedule showing the offerings for the following day is posted in the dining hall, so you may schedule your time accordingly. You’ll have group therapy or individual counseling, but also time for exercise and other purifying activities. We have canoeing, tai chi, tetherball, meditation sessions, yoga—we’ve even just added hot yoga!”
“What’s that?” Very said, imagining a roomful of Playboy Playmates doing naked yoga, which could potentially be highly entertaining.
“Yoga! In heated rooms! The sweat you generate in that style of yoga is an excellent way to relieve your body of toxins!” Dr. Joy’s face indicated the prospect might be as fun to experience as getting a Pap smear.
“Sizzle me not,” Very sighed.
Very’s first order of business after escaping the ESCAPE headmistress would be to find out where the confiscated loot was and, at the very least, get some music back into her life. The Internet she could maybe live without for a few hours—er, days—no, a whole week, even. Head-banging and thrash-dancing and music-electrifying she absolutely, positively had to have.
Like, right now.
CHAPTER 20
The quickest way to discover where the cache of confiscated machines was stored would be to hit up any institution’s designated group of all-knowing information sources: the smokers. Very might only have been nineteen years old, but she had seen enough movies and TV shows about the subject to know that no [Insert Name of Any Bad Vice Here]s Anonymous meeting would be complete without the toxic air of cigarette smoke suffocating all those otherwise good feelings and affirmations going on. And where the smokers could be found, important information could usually be tapped.
The main lodge at the center of the property, perched on a hill and offering a breathtaking view of Lake Champlain, was ESCAPE’s equivalent to a campus student union. The dining hall was there, along with many various spaces for group activities, socializing, counseling sessions, and administrative offices. The cabins for residents were located a few hundred yards away.
The cabins were simple one-room shacks that mercifully included private bathrooms. Each cabin was furnished with a bed, desk, chair, and wind-up clock, and oil lamps for light. Empty carcasses of plaster hung around the room’s walls where outlets had once been, traces of wiring hanging loose, as if to tease the newly wireless into submission. Beyond the rows of cabins were gardens and paths and trees, then a tennis court, then the pool, then … finally, after all that useless nature walking, Very found the holy grail: the smokers’ lair.
Despite nicotine’s international fame as the last refuge for addicts, Dr. Killjoy’s first order of business upon taking the reins at ESCAPE had been to banish the smokers to the farthest outpost on the grounds: the caretaker’s house. In fact, Dr. Joy had banished smoking entirely at ESCAPE, but through exhaustive legal maneuvering by a former renegade group of ESCAPEes who’d taken the cause up with the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Dr. Joy had conceded a small part of the property to be designated a smoking zone, pending a court-case decision.
The decided-upon smoking zone, not coincidentally, also housed the institution’s one true legacy, a caretaker who was the last surviving resident from the family who’d owned the original resort, and was himself a smoker. He had been born and raised on the property, and was known as “Jones,” both because that was his last name and because his part of the property was where residents gravitated when they jonesed for something: a cigarette break; casual hanging-out time with other residents outside the auspices of Dr. Killjoy’s purification aura; wicked good vegan chocolate chip cookies that Jones made fresh daily and sold at fair market price; fresh fruit from the berry patches behind Jones’s house (free); and caffeine, which Dr. Killjoy had also forbidden in the dining hall, but, after the threat of more legal wrangling, had been forced to agree to allow—by means of nonelectrical French press coffeemakers in Jones’s kitchen, so long as Jones was amenable, which he was, though again at fair market price.
The ground floor of Jones’s house, which had a wraparound porch furnished with outdoor chaise and rocking chairs, was known to have an open-door policy for residents. Jones kept private quarters upstairs, but the downstairs area was left unlocked, and residents were free to go there to socialize, play card and board games, make coffee, nosh, smoke, etc. Very had found out about Jones the same way most residents did—not because the jonesing location was mentioned in the ESCAPE brochure, which it most certainly was not, but through word of mouth in the dining hall, along with the map to Jones’s house crayoned by previous residents into the bottoms of the desk drawers in many cabins.
When Very found the house, she approached the only person she saw there, an old guy probably as ancient as someone’s dad, like late forties or early fifties. He looked Yankee-hippie relic—long and scruffy hair and beard, but wearing new and neat jeans and flannel shirt, with man sandals on his feet. He smoked a gentleman’s pipe as he rocked on a rocking chair that looked out onto a gorgeous lake view.
“Greetings,” he said to Very. “Got a name, newbie?”
Very said, “Veronica. Friends call me ‘Very.’”
“Nice,” he said, nodding approvingly. He took a puff on his pipe, then let out a sweet-smelling exhale of smoke. “Have a seat. Tell me about yourself. I’m Jones.”
“So you’re the famous Jones. Nice to meet you! Are you the lone smoker out here? I heard people hung out on this porch all the time.”
“There’s a few of them inside the house. They discovered a road atlas on my bookshelf while they were making coffee. Young ones like you, hipsters who never used anything besides Google Maps. They’re hunkered down over the atlas inside, if you want to join in with the new discovery.”
“I know what a real atlas looks like,” Very said, defensive.
“Do you also know that paper
road atlases can’t be zoomed and scaled, have no live satellite imagery, and require that driving directions be figured out manually?”
“Of course I know that,” Very said. (Shut the fuck up! That was how you used nonvirtual atlases? What a waste!) She took a seat next to Jones. “Do you have a cigarette I could possibly bum?”
“I do,” he said. He took another toke on his pipe. He rocked contemplatively in his chair, making no effort to retrieve and hand over a cigarette, as if he had all the time in the world.
“So,” Very said. “Cigarette now? Later? Or were you teasing me?”
He stopped rocking and turned to face her. “What got you here?”
“You mean, how I found your house, or how I ended up at ESCAPE?”
“Whatever you want to tell me.”
The finding-his-house story wasn’t that interesting, so Very went with the latter option. “I landed here after a bad acid trip inspired me to hack into the CIA’s Mongolian surveillance operation.”
Jones smiled. And waited.
Very tried again. “I freaked out and thought I was a living Pokémon. I went on a hunger strike at City Hall, demanding the mayor put me up on a giant electronic billboard in the middle of Times Square displaying me as, like, the master Pokémon deity who was going to take over the world.”
Jones chuckled. And resumed his chair rocking. Still said nothing.
Very gave in. “I was a freshman at Columbia this past school year. Went a little overboard with, like, being online and whatever. But it really wasn’t that big a deal. Sending me here was a bit of an extreme solution, in my opinion, to a very minor problem.”
He spoke. “Is that so?”
“Totally.” Jones still did not extend a cigarette. But since he seemed to be a cool guy, Very figured she could straight-up ask for what she really wanted. “Where’s the stash of confiscated equipment? ‘Cause if I could get some music, and the tiniest amount of programming time, I think my whole ‘recovery’ would go better, and just be more efficient. You know?”