The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek

by Rhett McLaughlin

  Rex stood holding his scooter as he watched the taillights disappear around the bend.

  He wanted to throw up.

  Instead, he ran quickly across the road, scooped up the fire extinguisher, and disappeared into the pines.

  8

  “CANDIDATUS HAS NOT embraced her new name,” Alicia’s roommate said, all freckles and frowns as her index finger singled out Alicia.

  Each day after lunch at the Whitewood School, the entire student body—what looked to be about seventy-five kids—crammed into the meeting hall for Reports, a seemingly endless session devoted to classmates publicly reporting any questionable behavior they’d seen from their peers.

  “She has an A written on the wall above her bed,” Freckles said. “Her old initial.”

  “What?” the helper asked, a woman in her late thirties Alicia had seen getting her hair done at Loretta’s Beauty Salon. “You defaced school property?”

  Alicia offered a shrug.

  The helper turned red and snorted, like an angry bull in a cartoon. “How did you acquire a writing implement?”

  “I didn’t, Helper,” Alicia said.

  “What? Then how— What did you write with?”

  “Blood,” Alicia said, her heart pumping fast as she put on a face that said Oops, is that bad? She’d taken a staple from their only textbook—a Xeroxed stack of pages called The Whitewood School Learning Guide—to prick her finger, tracing her bleeding digit up, down, and across the wall to form an A. It was no Perfect Strangers poster, but it would have to do. She’d intended to write her whole name until she saw the blood was already getting thinner; she worried she’d only partially complete it, accidentally marking her territory with her least favorite nickname of all time. (Ali. She hated when people called her Ali.) Doing it this way was simple, powerful, and to the point. And, as she’d hoped, her roommate had noticed it right away.

  The helper covered her mouth in disgust, then puffed out her chest and gave what appeared to be the evil equivalent of the Care Bear Stare before stomping over to the wall intercom and pressing a button. “Send any available helper immediately,” she said. “We need transport to the Roll.”

  A few students gasped. Though Alicia had been expecting this, fear crept in now that it was actually happening.

  “We have been trying to guide you, Candidatus,” the helper continued through gritted teeth. “To help you. To warn you. But you don’t seem to understand. Headmaster has had his eye on you since you set foot in this school, and you’re treating it like some kind of joke.”

  “Well, it has been a real riot, Helper,” Alicia said, only making the exasperated woman angrier. The door opened and in walked another helper, a burly, clean-shaven man with a flattop whom Alicia remembered working at Thomble and Sons Hardware.

  “Sayonara, Candidati,” Alicia said solemnly as Flattop guided her by the shoulders into the hallway, then past the cafeteria and through the locked-from-the-outside exit. This was Alicia’s first time leaving the school since arriving a few days earlier, and she savored the late-summer air like she would a delicacy. It was a short walk to a row of small stand-alone buildings.

  “Welcome to Thinking Shed Number One,” Flattop said, nudging her through the door of the first building.

  “You guys have a cute name for everything?”

  “Watch your mouth, Candidatus.”

  The pleasant smell of the outdoors was replaced by the stench of rotten eggs, the same odor that would sometimes come from Bleak Creek plumbing after a big rain. The floor, walls, and ceiling of the Thinking Shed were covered in faded green tiles, making it not so much a shed as a giant walk-in shower. In the corner of the room sat a large tub filled with cloudy water, likely the source of the putrid bouquet.

  Next to it was a large roll of carpet that may have once been blue. Flattop began unrolling it across the room. Once unfurled, the carpet—soiled with unknown stains in a streak down the middle—carried its own fragrance that mingled with the egg smell, creating a perfume of unholy funk.

  “That’s the Roll?” Alicia asked. She was honestly a bit disappointed in the Whitewood faculty’s lack of imagination. After all the buildup, the steady stream of threatening references to “the Roll” from all the helpers, Alicia had almost started to look forward to being sent there, if only to see if reality matched the image in her head. She’d been picturing a human-sized hamster wheel, or at least something that moved.

  “Lie down,” Flattop instructed, ungraciously arranging her so that her head hung over the carpet’s edge. “Keep your arms at your sides.”

  Once she was lying on the carpet, the smell was unmistakable. Stale urine. Flattop proceeded to push her across the room, her entire body tightly entombed up to the neck as he rolled her to the opposite wall. She came to a rest with her face pointing toward the ceiling. Alicia wished she’d inhaled as deeply as possible before being rolled up, as she immediately found it difficult to take a satisfactory breath.

  “Snug as a bug in a rug,” Flattop said, smiling at the quip he’d obviously made before, then placing his knee on the Roll right at her chest. Breathing became almost impossible.

  “Good one,” she said in a strained but defiant voice.

  The helper grabbed a roll of duct tape from the corner and secured the carpet to itself, sealing her in place like the creme filling in some sadistic Swiss cake roll. “Didn’t I tell you to watch your mouth?” He placed the heel of his work boot on the Roll and pulled it away from the wall, Alicia completing two and a half disorienting revolutions before stopping in the middle of the room, her face now toward the floor.

  “Whee!” Alicia said, trying to push down her fear and the feeling that her chest was caving in.

  “Wrong answer,” Flattop said. He rested his foot on the Roll again, then thrust his leg forward aggressively, sending Alicia rocketing across the floor. After a few bewildering rotations, she slammed into the wall, what little breath she had squeezed out, her lunch of vegetable soup and creamed corn gurgling in her stomach.

  “You done?” Flattop asked.

  Alicia just looked at him, the room a spinning, jumbled mess.

  “Good. Now take some time to think about what you’ve done. Oh, and if you tell your parents about this during your monthly phone call, we’ll let them know you’ve developed a problem with lying. A problem that would definitely require more time here. I doubt you’re interested in an extra year.” When he closed the door, the room was still shifting.

  Alicia attempted to move her body, thinking maybe she could somehow wriggle her way out. It wasn’t happening. She was stuck here for as long as they wanted her to be.

  Alicia finally allowed herself to cry.

  As silently as possible.

  Eventually, she fell asleep. She dreamt that she was with Rex and Leif on their island in the Cape Fear River, sitting on a third rock that was bigger than both of theirs. “Look, we hate to do this,” Rex said, “but we have to recast you in PolterDog.”

  “You can’t do that,” she said.

  “No, we have to.” Leif spoke in the form of a statement even though he was on the smaller rock. “Candace Cameron wants to play Jessica. This could be huge for us.”

  “D.J.? From Full House?” Alicia asked with disgust.

  “Yup.” Leif nodded smugly. “D.J. From Full House. And we were nominated for an Oscar!”

  “Wait, how?” Alicia felt so confused. “We didn’t even finish making the movie yet.”

  “We didn’t have to,” Rex said. “We got nominated for most original idea for a movie. It’s a new category!” He high-fived Leif.

  Alicia awoke, forgetting where she was until her eyes focused on the dingy green tiles all around her. The sunlight coming through the small frosted window in the door had dimmed considerably.

  She desperately needed to pee.
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br />   Alicia began to wonder if she was going to join the ranks of Rollers before her who had given in and relieved themselves. Based on the stains and the smell, it had been quite a few.

  She decided she could hold it.

  As she lay there, unsure if she would be left overnight in this backwoods torture device, Alicia couldn’t help but feel a little proud of herself for being here in the first place. It meant she was brave. Or idiotic. But still, she definitely hadn’t seen any other students get sent to the Roll. She hadn’t seen any of the other students do much of anything but follow, really. Given the state of the carpet, she guessed some of them had been sent in the past, the impulse to disobey squeezed right out of them. She didn’t want that to happen to her. She didn’t want to become like them.

  At her first breakfast, Alicia had recognized Cindy Fisher, who had been sent to Whitewood at the end of the previous school year after her parents found a condom in her bedroom. It didn’t matter that it was unused—even knowing that she was considering having sex—safe or not—was enough for her parents to call up Mr. Whitewood. Though Alicia had never been close with Cindy, she’d known her well enough to consider her kind, outgoing, and even funny. But Alicia saw none of that in Cindy’s eyes when she’d sat next to her in the cafeteria, where they were forbidden to speak as they ate. When Cindy had looked at her, Alicia had raised her eyebrows to signal her recognition; Cindy had quickly looked back down at her Cream of Wheat.

  There were a couple dozen other Bleak Creek kids that Alicia knew, the youngest seeming around ten years old, the oldest a high school senior named Todd something. But the others—maybe forty students, as well as her roommate—were complete strangers. Alicia had never really stopped to consider whether there were students from out of town at Whitewood, but that was clearly the case. However, none of them—whether Bleak Creekians or outsiders—had made any effort to connect with her at all. She figured this was just the way things were at Whitewood, but she also knew that her particular offense—injuring the headmaster himself—had made her a special brand of untouchable. She was the blackest sheep in a herd of black sheep.

  Maybe this stand she was taking was incredibly foolish. Maybe she should just follow, or at least pretend to. But she felt like it was more important to not lose her grip on who she was, even if it would ensure her a longer stay in this hell. And she was still holding out a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, bucking the system this way would allow her to find the school’s Achilles’ heel, which could be her ticket out of there. It was unlikely. But she had to keep believing.

  The sunlight was gone now.

  After another thirty minutes of resisting, Alicia finally let herself relax, warm urine spilling into her jumpsuit.

  9

  JANINE STROLLED DOWN Walnut Street, the sidewalk still wet from the previous night’s thunderstorm. She passed an elderly lady sitting on her front porch, the old woman’s head swiveling to track her as she crossed the width of her yard. Janine had always seemed to attract these kinds of stares in Bleak Creek, a town with a knack for identifying outsiders. Of course, she was making that a particularly easy task with her camera bag, black leggings, cutoff jorts, combat boots, and off-the-shoulder gray T-shirt that gave all Bleak Creekians a pristine view of her left collarbone. She offered a friendly wave to the woman, who reflexively waved back, never losing her quizzical expression.

  After Janine had learned that Donna was a former Whitewood student, she’d made the decision to stick around town. She had to learn more about this strange institution, about what had happened there to transform her cousin into a shell of her former self. Naturally, she’d first tried to talk to Donna, striding to the back of Li’l Dino’s even before her lightheadedness had gone away (and before offering to help Big Gary clean up his stones), where Donna made it clear that yes, she went to that school, and no, she didn’t want to talk about it.

  Janine refused to be discouraged. Screw a movie about old people’s kidney stones. This was the film she needed to make, whether or not her cousin was down to participate. She’d asked Tommy, the pimply-faced server, if she could interview him, but Big Gary—still furious over his spilled treasures—had ordered her to get out of his restaurant before he called the cops, which had only confirmed Janine’s suspicions that she was onto something. She’d slipped Tommy her number (well, GamGam’s number) on a scrap of placemat, and, to her surprise, he’d called that night. Which is how Janine now found herself walking the quarter mile from her grandmother’s house to the home of Tommy Dowd.

  Janine pressed the doorbell and listened as it triggered a rising and falling sequence of chimes. Before the doorbell stopped ringing, Tommy answered the door.

  “Uh, hi,” the boy said, seeming surprised that she’d actually shown up.

  “Hey, Tommy. Where should I set up?”

  “Um…”

  “My camera,” Janine said, gesturing to her bag.

  “Oh, uh…let’s go to the backyard.”

  Janine followed Tommy around the side of the house, passing a large German shepherd chained to a pole, the dog growling but unwilling to deliver a proper bark. They finally arrived at two mildewed lawn chairs Tommy thought would be perfect for their talk.

  “So, how long were you at the Whitewood School?” Janine asked once the camera was rolling.

  “Uh, I…Well, I…” Tommy began, clearly uneasy. “I think it was about four months.”

  “Tell me about your time there. How are students…reformed?”

  “It was, um, really good for me,” Tommy said. “I learned how to, um, respect my, uh…elders.” Janine noticed that Tommy’s eyes were darting between the ground and somewhere on her clothes. Just like Donna, she thought. Unable to make eye contact. Then it hit her. He’s looking at my shoulder. Janine had failed to consider how something as innocuous as the collarbone of a mysterious older woman could derail a teen boy’s thoughts. That’s why he agreed to this meeting.

  “But what happens specifically at the school? How do they…change you?” Janine pressed.

  “Um, I’m sorry,” Tommy began muttering, having now developed the courage to lock in directly on her shoulder. “I’d rather not talk about that. But like I said, it was, um, really really good for me.”

  Janine pulled her T-shirt up over her shoulder. Tommy’s face reddened.

  “Is that part of the deal? You’re not supposed to talk about what happens at Whitewood?” Janine pushed further.

  Tommy was squirming even more, and not just because his wandering eyes had been exposed. “I think I should go back inside. Thank you, um, Ms. Blitstein.” He stood up abruptly and stiffly jogged back to the screened back door.

  * * *

  —

  JANINE PULLED TO the side of the road, awkwardly reaching across the passenger seat of her GamGam’s Grand Marquis to roll down the window. “Excuse me,” she said to an older couple walking out of the post office. “Would you happen to know how to get to the Whitewood School?”

  They stared at her. “You know parents ain’t allowed to visit, right?” the man asked, adjusting his John Deere hat.

  “Of course,” Janine said, not missing a beat. “I’m just taking a look to see if I, uh, want to send my daughter there. She’s being a real terror.” Imagining herself as a mom freaked her out, but she tried to seem as normal as possible.

  “It’s a very good school,” the woman said, eyeing the length of the car, then staring at Janine with more than a hint of skepticism about her ability to operate such a massive vehicle.

  “I don’t know what seein’ it is gonna do,” the man said. “You either want to send her or you don’t. And you can’t even really see it from the road anyhow.”

  “Well, a mother likes to know her child is gonna be okay. You know, get some peace of mind,” Janine said, hearing how unbelievable she sounded.

  “W
hat kind of trouble is she in?” the woman asked.

  “Gangsta rap,” Janine said without thinking.

  “Gang-ster rap?” the man asked.

  “Yep. She listens to it nonstop. Ice-T, Ice Cube…all the Ices. She hates cops.” Janine was almost cringing at this point.

  “Oh my word,” the woman said. “And you look mighty young, so she can’t be that ol—”

  “She’s six,” Janine said.

  The couple was shocked. The man grabbed the bill of his hat and adjusted it right back to where it was.

  “Yes, it’s horrible,” Janine added, laying it on thick.

  “All right,” the puzzled man said, ready for this conversation to end. “Just follow Main Street until it hits Creek Road. Take a right, and after a while you’ll see the gate. They won’t let you drive onto the premises, though.”

  “Great, thanks,” Janine said. “I won’t even try.”

  The man nodded without smiling. Janine rolled the window up and pulled the mammoth brown-and-beige automobile back onto the street. In the rearview mirror, she could see the couple still standing there, their furrowed brows watching her drive away.

  Janine passed by the Bleak Creek landmarks she’d seen hundreds of times during her visits over the years: the redbrick First Baptist Church with its towering steeple, less than fifty yards from the light brown brick Second Baptist Church with its slightly taller steeple; Blanchard’s Bait ’n’ Tackle, which she’d literally never passed without seeing the WE’LL BE RIGHT BACK sign in the window; the THOMAS & THOMAS LAW OFFICE in an imposing plantation-style house, making it a rather ironic bastion of justice. She’d always considered these places the staples of a polite southern small town, but with her looming questions about the Whitewood School, they seemed almost like a façade, carefully constructed exteriors hiding decidedly impolite truths.