Very Lefreak

by Rachel Cohn

  “I don’t know, actually. I’ve never much liked the Internet myself. Don’t own a TV. Never played on a Nontendo.”

  “Nintendo.”

  “Sure.”

  Very asked, “Are you one of those Luddite people who don’t deal with technology at all?”

  “Of course I deal with it. Can’t live life in this day and age without it. I just don’t let it rule my life.”

  “Technology doesn’t rule my life!” Very proclaimed. “I can do without it just fine.”

  “Obviously.”

  More rocking, more pipe smoking. Still no cigarette or information.

  Finally, Jones answered her real question. “There is no stash of confiscated equipment here. If you’d actually read the liability waiver you signed before checking in, you’d have noticed the clause which very clearly states that any prohibited equipment you’re found with upon arrival is donated directly to charity, and not maintained on the premises to be returned when you leave, since the condition of entry to begin with was to not bring the equipment at all.”

  “Harsh,” Very stated.

  “It’s not so harsh,” Jones said. “It just takes a desire to change.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I’ve seen people come and go from this program. Watched as some people made it through and flourished afterward, and watched as other people completely fell off the wagon and vanished in the night to find the closest gaming casino, or Internet terminal, or cell phone store. I’ve watched as many return time and again after leaving prematurely, relapsing and getting into bigger and more dangerous trouble again on the outside, all because they’ve refused to seriously attempt the timeout to try taming their inner beasts while they’re here. From what I’ve noticed—and mind you, I’m a caretaker and not a professional therapist, but I like to think I have a keen enough sense for how things work in the world—what separates the ones who flourish from those who fail is the simple desire to seek change in their lives. To try this path and give it their best, honest effort.” He shrugged. “It’s not so complicated, really.”

  “Oh,” Very said. She could try to try living without an iPod for a while, she supposed. Think about it as an experiment, rather than a death sentence.

  Jones reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of smokes. He leaned over toward her chair to extend a cigarette to her. “You wanted one of these, my new friend Very?”

  Very looked at the cigarette pack. They were American Spirits, but probably still not as good as those hand-rolled cigs that Hector made. She didn’t really smoke that much, anyway. Maybe she should not smoke even casually anymore. Make ESCAPE sort of a one-stop-shopping place for healthy living, at least in terms of giving up nicotine, and eating a vegetable or two, and she supposed she could try one of those yoga classes or something. Since her party money was going toward the nonparty manifesto anyway.

  “Never mind on the cigarette,” Very said. “But thanks. Where’d you say that atlas was?”

  Jones returned the cigarette pack to his pocket and set his pipe down on a nearby table. He reached for a baseball cap there, placed it on his head, and tipped the cap down to cover his eyes for a nap. “You’ll find the kids in the den inside. Tell ‘em Jones said to play nice with the new girl.”

  He shooed her inside with his hand and stopped his chair rocking to settle into his quiet shut-eye time.

  CHAPTER 21

  Very was wary of making new friends or even going on her typical hunt for crush prospects at ESCAPE. She was starting to worry she might be a toxic personality. She didn’t want to cause undue harm to unwitting rehabbers. They had enough going on without worrying about whether Very needed someone to take care of her, or if she might cause them to be unfaithful to their significant other, or if she might suddenly have the desire to kill them.

  She was bad news. Very understood that much. She still didn’t think she was such a problem as to have warranted being sent to ESCAPE, but she also knew enough to know she didn’t want to be the person who created new problems for other people. For as long as she was stuck at ESCAPE, Very vowed, she would do her best not to form attachments, in either the friends or the friends-with-benefits category. She would be as celibate as … a stick of celery—a pleasant enough filler, especially with peanut butter or cream cheese slathered inside, but not a dangerous tool of emotional fortification or caloric fornication, either.

  Yet still, Very had one very important question she couldn’t help but reach out and ask: “What the fuck am I supposed to do with my hands?”

  Gesturing jazz hands, Very directed this question to the boy and girl sitting on a couch in Jones’s den, who looked up at her from the atlas they were poring over. The boy wore green eyeliner, so Very already knew how he’d gotten to ESCAPE. The girl Very immediately recognized from an unfortunate high school prom night after-party video that a mean prom king had recorded on his phone, then posted on YouTube, where it had gone viral. The drunk prom queen from the clip was known to the world as “Big Gulp.”

  The boy said, “You’re new?”

  Very nodded.

  The girl said, “That’s the toughest part the first few days. Trying to figure out what to do with your hands if you’re not texting or holding a joystick or typing. Right?”

  “Exactly!” Very said.

  “Do you smoke?” the boy asked. “That’s the first line of defense.”

  “No,” Very said, feeling like it wasn’t a lie. She didn’t. Anymore.

  “Needlepoint?” the girl asked.

  “Ew,” Very said.

  “Try it!” the boy and girl said, in unison.

  The boy’s name was Erick; the girl was Kate. Erick had lost it after a Dreams game at Harvard. He jumped into the Charles River, thinking he could go after underwater prey there. Problem was, he didn’t know how to swim in actual water. Pretty blond Kate from Atlanta … Well, everyone knew Kate’s story. There was even a Yahoo! group created by 7-Eleven employees who wanted to marry her. She obviously never joined that group. She had to drop out of her freshman year at the University of Georgia because she was too famous. No sorority house would have her, not even the really slutty ones.

  They were nice, this Erick and Kate, and helpful, too. They located a spare needlepoint kit for Very to help her get started. For their art therapy projects, Erick was working on a needlepoint cat that somehow looked more like a dolphin, and Kate was working on a hydrangea bloom that somehow had evolved into a picture of a cell phone that was also a gun.

  “Freedom of expression,” Kate said.

  Erick said, “Needlepoint is a really awesome and safe way to keep your hands occupied, but go deep down, like, in the sea of your soul to see what’s really in there.”

  “Cool,” Very said.

  Over coffee, vegan cookies, and stitching, Erick and Kate filled Very in on how to survive her ESCAPE tenure.

  “The first week is the hardest,” Erick said. “Figuring out how to stay occupied. Trying to figure out how to breathe when there’s no wireless energy source you can practically feel pulsing through your body.”

  These kids really got it!

  “Yes!” Very said, excited for the first time in a long time. Jean-Wayne had been the only one of her outside friends to really understand this—the hunger that felt like it burned through and pillaged your body, the infinite lust to connect, to game, to be online all the time.

  Kate agreed. “Yeah, when I first got here, just learning what to, like, think about, if you’re not hitting Refresh on your friends’ pages every two minutes, or IM-ing, or texting, or video chatting, was way hard.”

  “Or meme-ing!” Very said.

  “Or listening to music!” Kate said.

  “Dreaming!” Erick sighed.

  Kate said, “You know what’s been the weird part about making friends here? Getting to know people in the first-person present instead of through their third-person updates. It’s a bit disconcerting at first. But then yo
u get used to it.”

  Erick said, “Yeah. After a while, you get used to not checking e-mail, or browsing your friend lists, or needing to be in an online game round-the-clock. It seems to just happen. It gets to be pretty mellow to hang out in the real world, and do needlepoint, and play tennis and stuff. I’m not saying it’s better like this. It’s just … different. But okay. Like, totally survivable.”

  “Really?” Very said.

  “Really!” Erick and Kate answered.

  But they warned her: Beware the ones who weren’t serious. You could tell the ones who were going to fall off the wagon. They tried to flag down passing boats from the dock to ask to borrow sailors’ cell phones. They stood at the road to wait for SUVs to go by, hoping to get a glimpse of a GPS system or the backseat video screens playing Wall-E for the kiddies on a long road trip. They gnawed at the empty electrical outlets in their cabins, pining to be re-electrified. They stood on the roofs of their cabins, framing their hands as if they were holding a phone to try to find a good connection out in the boonies, then gestured wildly like they were having an actual conversation, when their hands were actually empty and they were alone up there.

  Those were the ones who’d fall and wouldn’t make it through the program. Watch out for them.

  This one guy, he’d been to ESCAPE three times already. He escaped, but kept getting sent back by his rich, angry parents, who didn’t know what else to do with the guy. He was the most fun guy in the world, until the hunger bit him so hard that he turned crazy, and he broke into the church charity store in town in the middle of the night to loot the confiscated equipment supply that ESCAPE donated every week after its new recruits checked in. Stealing from the Congregationalists! What kind of desperate jerk took it that far?

  Erick pointed to the collection of framed needlepoint pieces on the wall, which looked like it could be a picture-book window into the minds of past ESCAPEes. “Check out the clown one,” Kate told Very. “It was made by him.”

  It was hard not to find the clown-face needlepoint. It was the most disturbing image on the wall, scarier than Kate’s phone/gun-in-progress. The clown face had searing black eyes with pointed red eyebrows, a Star of David for a nose, big purple lips opened to reveal one blue tooth, and bright red cheek rouge like a transvestite. The clown also wore a turban, but like the kindly Auntie Mame kind, not the Indian kind, which was particularly upsetting. The clown looked like the meanest mofo from Mental Clowntopia since, like, ever.

  Very shivered. “Yikes!” she said.

  On the less serial-killer-potential side of the ESCAPE gossip, Erick and Kate updated Very on ESCAPE’s most winning long-running soap opera: the war between Dr. Killjoy and Jones. He thought she was a New Age quack; she wished the old-school Yankee crank would just move off the property already. They tried to avoid each other, but if you were lucky enough to glimpse Jones walking down to the main lodge, be sure to follow, and listen outside Dr. Joy’s door to the ensuing conversation. The drama was better than any reality TV show, and the dialogue was totally real.

  “Outstanding!” Very said. Sign her up to tune the fuck in.

  CHAPTER 22

  Today’s Talk Time was brought to Very by the letter K and the number 7.

  Her therapist’s name was Keisha, and Keisha met with residents in studio number 7 in the main lodge.

  Very wasn’t too keen on having to go to regular talk therapy. But if she was going to try to try … she’d try. Although she really didn’t see how a stranger who had no emotional investment or personal connection to her could actually give a care about what Very had to say.

  It helped that Keisha appeared totally casual. Very couldn’t imagine truly confiding in someone who dressed in Birkenstocks and chinos and sweater sets, like Dr. Joy. But Keisha wore faded, vintage jeans, and she was barefoot with sparkly blue-painted toenails, and she wore a shirt that Very recognized from Threadless.com, a baby blue tee that said, “Let’s ESC together,” but the “ESC” was a picture of a computer Escape key. Her dreadlocked hair was tied back with a piece of twine.

  “Is the shirt meant to be ironic?” Very asked as she sat down with Keisha for their first session together.

  “What do you think it’s meant to be?” Keisha asked. She wasn’t really old like the rest of the staff at ESCAPE—she looked at least young enough to have come of age after e-mail was created.

  “How old are you?” Very asked, sitting down on a sofa opposite Keisha, who’d settled cozily into a cross-legged position on a comfy chair.

  “Does it matter?” Keisha asked.

  Very thought about it. Did it matter? She shrugged. “Guess not.”

  “I’m thirty-two,” Keisha said. She pointed toward her diplomas posted on the wall behind her desk. “Undergraduate degree in history from Mount Holyoke, master’s degree in clinical psych from the University of Vermont. Will this package work for you?” She didn’t say that last sentence in a mean way. She had a relaxed, kind manner that Very appreciated.

  “Do you have candy?” Very asked.

  Keisha reached over to open a drawer from the coffee table that was placed between them. “M&M’s do ya?”

  “Plain or peanut?” Very said.

  Keisha pulled out a crystal candy dish, so fancy it had a top to it. She placed the candy dish on the table, lifted the top off, and said, “Almond.”

  “Almond,” Very said, impressed. “You’re one classy broad.”

  “I try,” Keisha said.

  Very dipped in for a handful, which went right into her mouth. Crunched, chewed, swallowed: delicious.

  Therapy maybe wasn’t so bad.

  “So what would you like to talk about, Veronica?”

  “Friends call me ‘Very.’”

  “So we’re friends?”

  “Yeah. I think so. Are we?”

  Keisha took a handful of M&M’s for herself. “I hope so, Very.”

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to talk about,” Very said.

  “Talk about whatever’s on your mind. How you got here. Which color M&M’s you like best. How you’re managing this first week here at ESCAPE. Your family. Your friends.”

  “I’d like to know the name of that nail polish color you’re wearing on your toes.”

  “It’s called ‘Am I Blue.’”

  “That’s a good one. I hate it when they call the colors something that has nothing to do with an actual color. Like, a really whore-red color gets called ‘Night on the Town.’ And stuff like that.”

  “A whore-red color? Describe it.”

  Very said, “You don’t need to do that with me.”

  “Do what?”

  “Use what I say to lead me into something you think I’m supposed to be talking about.”

  “Like what?”

  “If you want to know if I’m a whore, it’s okay to ask me straight out. I don’t mind.”

  “Well, that’s maybe not the word choice I’d go with, but tell me, Very … what do you think you are?”

  “I’m a bit whore-y,” Very allowed, laughing.

  “How so?”

  “I like to fool around. Get together. Hook up. You know.”

  “Do you have unprotected sex?”

  “Fuck no!” Very said, offended.

  “Good. So when you ‘fool around,’ tell me about that. Have you been in a long-term relationship, or are you more casual?”

  “Casual. Haven’t been lucky in the long-term department.”

  “How so? Are there relationships that you’ve had so far in your life that you might have wished to be more than casual?”

  Very couldn’t believe she was going to say what she was going to say—she’d never even talked with Lavinia about this stuff, not seriously, at least. “Well, even though I am the first person to make out at a party, I’ve only been with, you know, really been with, six people.” Very counted on her hand. “Or wait, seven, if we’re being technical.”

  “What’s the distinction?”

>   Very spoke down low. “Penetration with a guy totally counts. But when it’s with a girl, it’s more … vague.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s six people I’ve been with. Well, more like six and a half. Okay, seven. Five guys I’ve slept with. And two girls. But the first girl, she was just practicing, although it went as far as it could go.”

  “Which is how far?”

  Very started to feel exasperated. She was about to tell Keisha something important that she’d never shared, but Keisha was leading her to the wrong story. Very didn’t answer Keisha, but took another handful of M&M’s instead.

  Keisha said, “If you don’t feel comfortable talking about it, that’s okay. Our time together is to explore what you feel comfortable discussing.”

  Very had always been a girl who put out too soon. Why should therapy be any different? Very let out, “I’m totally comfortable talking about my sexuality. It’s that you’re asking about the wrong girl. It’s the second girl who doesn’t quite count that really got to me. That first girl, she was nothing, just experimentation. She was someone I met at a party when I was in high school. We went upstairs to watch a movie in someone’s bedroom. But there was one of those Skinemax movies on TV when we turned it on—”

  “Skinemax?”

  “Late-night soft-core movies on the Cinemax channel.”

  “Oh. Thank you for clarifying. Please continue.”

  “That first girl and me, we were just imitating what was happening on the TV. We were drunk, the usual. I don’t even remember her name. Strictly experimentation.”

  “So who was the second girl, who doesn’t quite count as your seventh person, if I’m following you?”

  “That’s right. The second girl was Kristy. She would only go so far with me, so that’s why I don’t count her all the way.”