For those of us left behind? Cold grits for breakfast and threadbare mattresses on which to sleep. Clothes that had been handed down so many times that when families ran out of kids or neighbors to share them with, they donated them to us. Occasionally, we’d get something that didn’t have a tear in the seam or a stain that couldn’t be scrubbed out.
In such conditions, you’d think we might bond over our shared misery; form a sisterhood of sorts, provide comfort for those who needed it. And I suppose some of us did.
A twelve-year-old named Gina became a friend. She was a scrawny girl with stringy hair from Moncks Corner whose parents died in a car accident when she was six and staying with a babysitter so her folks could go to a movie; a date from which they never returned. Gina went to live briefly with her grandfather, but when he fell ill, there was nobody else to take her in. She was sweet and we tried our best to watch out for one another.
A fourteen-year-old boy named Gabriel completed our little trio of misfits. He’d only been at the group home for a little under a year when I arrived, and to me he had the saddest story of all.
He came from a prominent family in Spartanburg, where his dad was a famous football coach and his mom was active in the community and church. He had a big brother (a football star, naturally) and a little sister.
On his fourteenth birthday, he summoned up the courage to come out to his parents. It was a tear-filled confession, filled with apologies to his folks, but he was certain of it— of who he was— and he hoped they’d understand.
His father laughed at him, as if his son had told them an uproariously funny joke. When Gabriel insisted that he was serious, his father told him that he must be confused, that he was too young to know what he wanted anyway. He’d made some remark that once his boy got to high school and saw all those pretty cheerleaders, Gabriel wouldn’t “feel gay” anymore.
When Gabriel corrected his father, and said he was who he was and he was proud of it, his father backhanded him off his chair and to the floor, splitting his lip. Gabriel looked to his mother for support and understanding, but he found only cool indifference.
“Well, this just won’t do,” she said.
Gabriel relayed this story to Gina and me one night while we sat on the back porch after dinner, seeking some sort of breeze to relieve of us from the stifling heat inside the house, where the air conditioning rarely worked properly.
After a tumultuous week during which Gabriel was treated more and more like an inconvenience rather than a loved member of the family, his father had told him to pack a suitcase. One suitcase from fourteen years’ worth of Christmases, birthdays, new school clothes every August, and all the decorations with which he’d appointed his bedroom.
It wasn’t until the car, driven by his father, passed Columbia and continued on I-26 toward Charleston that Gabriel got an answer to his persistent question:
“Where are we going?”
His mother hadn’t bothered to say goodbye, and his brother wasn’t home, but his little sister clutched Gabriel’s leg and wept when he tried to get in the car. She seemed to sense something was amiss.
“You’re going to your new home. I’m not raising a queer. There’s no room in our family for that.”
“What do you… I don’t understand,” Gabriel stammered.
“Everybody thinks you’re going away to boarding school. It’s all arranged. You can’t throw or catch or run very fast, so nobody back home is going to miss you anyway.”
Of course. If he wasn’t going to be a football star, what good was he?
“If you ever decide you like girls, maybe things can be different. You just about killed your momma, you know. What would the ladies at church say? You’re so incredibly selfish,” his father said, not having the courage to look at his son.
Gabriel was dropped off at our group home without a goodbye from his father, who walked in, signed some paperwork, got back in his car, and drove home. Gabriel wept for three days and couldn’t keep down a bite of food for the entire first week, although you didn’t need a traumatic event to struggle with the food we ate.
Dropping your no-longer-wanted gay teenage son off at a group home was apparently as easy as taking your barking dog to the pound. At least if you helmed a high school football powerhouse that regularly supplied talent to Clemson and the University of South Carolina and had money and connections to take care of things.
And yet I’d never met a sweeter soul than Gabriel Joiner.
Gabriel, Gina, and I hung out together as much as we could, and while most of the other kids were at least agreeable, there was a group, led by Marla Muchow, who seemed determined to make life exponentially more miserable for everyone.
Marla was fourteen, but she had the bulk and muscle of a burly adult. She led through intimidation and fear, rather than charisma, which she lacked completely.
Her story, so she claimed, was that her father was in prison for robbing banks, and that he’d stashed away a fortune in an old barn up near Dillon, South Carolina, near the North Carolina border. According to her, she was only a “guest” with us until her daddy got out, and then she was moving “to the islands” with her dad, and that the rest of us “losers” would be stuck there at the group home forever. I wasn’t sure I hoped she was lying or that she was telling the truth and that Old Man Muchow would be paroled tomorrow and come to take his repugnant daughter away.
She was mean to the core, scrubbing toilets with other kids’ toothbrushes, spitting on peoples’ food, and verbally torturing Gina and Gabriel. She delighted in saying things like “Hey, Gina, let’s go to the movies!” and “Gabriel, if you have sex with me, maybe your parents would take you back. Oops, you’re not my type. I like men, not fairies. Sorry.”
And when she discovered that I suffered from claustrophobia, she acted on it in typical fashion.
In the backyard, on the edge of the property near the woods, sat a shed where the lawnmower and various other implements were kept. It was locked, but one of Marla’s minions, a boy named Charlie, had a background in the juvenile detention system and found locks no obstacle.
One Saturday afternoon, while Gabriel was reading and Gina was doing chores, I was lured into the backyard by Walter, a younger boy who I normally avoided, since he hung around with Charlie, one of Marla’s most trusted sycophants. Walter wasn’t all bad, however, and he told me he’d found a baby bunny out by the shed. The prospect of something cute and fuzzy was irresistible, so I followed him out to the corner of the yard.
Once we arrived, and I asked him where the bunny was, he shrugged and said “Sorry.”
Marla, Charlie, and two of the ugliest girls I’d ever known, Taryn and Kimber, sprung out from behind the shed and tackled me to the ground before I could run. I tried to scream, but they covered my mouth with their grubby hands before Marla stuffed an old rag inside my mouth and Kimber wrapped duct tape around my head to keep it in place. She then moved to my wrists, which Marla held behind my back, and she bound those with tape as well. They pulled me to my feet, and to my horror Charlie was standing by the unlocked and open shed door, triumphantly.
“Do you know what lives in there?” Marla spat, her face an inch from mine. “Snakes and spiders and all sorts of awful shit. Have fun!”
With that, she shoved me inside, and I heard the click of the lock after the door was slammed shut behind me.
Panic consumed me. The small space was completely black inside, and the walls seemed to all close in at once. I couldn’t breathe, and my heart jackhammered almost right through my chest. Worst of all, I could swear I heard hissing, although in retrospect it was probably my imagination.
I gathered my strength and flung my shoulder against the door, but it was no use. My head spun and I suddenly felt like my temperature was two hundred degrees. I was having a full-blown panic attack, and the peals of laughter outside weren’t helping a bit.
My desperate voice was stifled by my makeshift gag, and I eventually crouched down
into as close to a fetal position as I could get, more terrified than I’d ever been.
Gasping for air through my runny nose did little to help my situation. I needed Gina or Gabriel. Or a miracle.
“Is that long enough, do you think?” I heard Taryn ask, but Marla was unmoved.
“Hell, no. Let that little bitch suffer. Let’s go up to the house and find something to eat.”
My terror switched to rage, and I exploded out of my crouch and slammed myself against the door again, only to fall back to the floor as pain shot through my shoulder.
Hearing the thump, Marla returned to the shed door.
“They’re bound to miss you at bed check tonight. Not sure anybody will think to look here, though. I think the guys come to cut the grass on Tuesday. If you do get out, you know better than to not mention my name, or you’ll get ten times worse next time. Get comfortable! Let’s go, y’all.”
Anger made me shake. I wouldn’t tell on Marla.
I’d kill her.
She was an evil, nasty person, and I wasn’t planning to wait another minute for her felonious father to appear to take her away. How I’d get away with it, I had no idea, but at that moment, all I could think of was getting my hands around her throat. Marla “Muchow” indeed. It was low-hanging fruit, but she was “Moo-cow” through and through. I hated her.
And then suddenly things changed.
“Ow! What the fu- Ahhhhhhhhh!” It was Marla’s voice. She sounded like she was in complete agony. “Make it stop! Oh God make it stop! NO!” She wailed and cried out, clearly in the worst kind of pain.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was being mauled by a lion. Her screams were primal and animalistic. The wails of the dying.
Taryn, Kimber, Walter, and Charlie added a cacophony of voices to Marla’s screams.
“What’s wrong?”
“Marla! Tell us what happened!”
“Somebody get help! Get Mrs. Purifoy!”
Their voices betrayed fear and confusion. Marla continued to scream, until her throat was raw and she was suddenly making sounds I could barely hear through the shed door, low moans and whimpers. It sounded like somebody, one of the boys, was throwing up outside.
All at once, the backyard was filled with voices, adults and more kids. They expressed shock, horror, and concern. I kicked at the shed door, hoping somebody would hear me.
In the distance, I heard sirens.
“She’s in shock, get blankets!”
“What happened?”
I was finally heard over the hellish symphony outside, and I felt the door and lock being manipulated outside. Within moments, the door flew open and I collapsed out into the daylight, a mess of sweat and snot. I rolled onto my side to see Marla being covered with towels and sheets. There was blood all over the grass where she lay, and what looked like bone sticking out of her arm. And face. And everywhere else that I could see before she was covered.
How had it happened?
Everyone who could stand to stare at her did so with perverse perplexity. It was as if random bones throughout her body had decided they no longer liked being inside Marla’s hefty frame, and all at once they’d made a break for it, no pun intended.
Her face was a twisted mask of agony, although she seemed to have passed out from the pain. Shortly, paramedics arrived, running down the backyard hill carrying their bags of equipment.
When they reached Marla, and the first man knelt down by her and pulled back the sheets with which she’d been covered, he fell backwards with his eyes wide. His training and well-practiced professional stoicism abandoned him.
A second man gave himself the Sign of the Cross before gathering his wits enough to cut the gag from my head and remove the makeshift cuffs from my wrists. Chunks of hair came out with the tape.
The third paramedic to reach Marla was an Asian woman who looked equally upset at the condition of her patient; but who took action, barking directions to her useless male counterparts and trying to decide how best to treat a girl whose body had basically exploded.
Mrs. Clara Purifoy, the house mother, gathered us inside, away from the carnage, and she sent everyone to their rooms, with orders not to look outside. Charlie, Taryn, Walter, Kimber, and myself were sent to the dining room, where she, understandably, had questions for us.
“What were you doing in that shed, Briar? And what did you do to Marla? Everyone knows you two don’t get along. These are her friends. They’ll tell the truth even if you won’t.”
Wait. How was I being blamed for this? I hadn’t even been present when Marla was attacked or afflicted. I was as befuddled as anyone else.
“They jumped me and locked me in the shed!” I pleaded. “I didn’t do anything at all. I was trapped inside.”
“Humph,” Mrs. Purifoy replied. “I’ll get to the bottom of this. Things will go better for you if you just fess up now. That sweet child will be a week in the hospital if she’s a day.”
Sweet child? Give me a break.
That had to be the first time in her life that anybody had referred to Marla Muchow as a “sweet child,” although I did feel uncharacteristically terrible for her. I’d never heard screams like hers before. As badly as I wanted to hurt her for what she and her friends had done to me, I wouldn’t have wished that on her.
Whatever that was.
The next few days were a whirlwind of activity at the group home. Police and state investigators came and interviewed everyone even peripherally involved in “The Marla Incident.” Doctors who worked on Marla at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston said that the injuries she suffered were unlike anything they’d ever seen before; bones throughout her body were broken at odd angles, including several compound fractures, despite no obvious cause of trauma. Some of the breaks could have come from a high-impact collision such as with a train, or falling from a great height. But Marla had, by all accounts, simply been walking across the backyard.
Mrs. Purifoy’s prediction that Marla would spend a week in the hospital was overly optimistic. She was in intensive care that long, and she convalesced another two weeks past that before returning to our home.
The local news caught wind of the case and ran a series of stories on abuse and neglect in the group home and foster parent system, but as minors none of us were named or interviewed.
Until Marla returned, her minions didn’t know what to do or how to approach me, so they gave Gabriel, Gina, and I a wide berth. My friends and I discussed the subject at length, but nobody had any sort of plausible theory as to what could have caused the injuries, short of some sort of very brief, extremely localized, category six hurricane.
It wasn’t until a few days after Marla’s return that things began to become clear.
Gina and I were talking about a boy she liked at school, and how much it sucked that eventually she’d have to make a choice between telling him that she was a resident of Mrs. Purifoy’s Little House of Horrors, or just giving up the notion of pursuing him altogether. We weren’t the type of kids who were ever going to do “normal” things like go to prom or homecoming or have the sort of fairytale romance we watched on television or read about in YA novels.
Gabriel snuck up on us from behind the ratty sofa and jumped up with a “Boo!” that surprised us, causing Gina to fall off the front of the couch. A harmless prank, but when Gina hit the floor, her pinky finger bent back and we all heard a snap like the breaking of a tree branch. She clutched her hand and winced.
“I’m sorry, G!” Gabriel pleaded. “I’m so sorry!”
I knelt next to Gina and wrapped my arms around her. “Let me see. Is it…”
“I can’t bend it. It hurts!” Gina yelped. Her large eyes filled with tears.
It tore my heart in two to see my friend dealing with that kind of suffering.
For reasons I couldn’t explain, I gently pulled her injured hand into my own and tried to soothe her with a “Shhhh.”
Her right pinky was bent out fr
om the rest of her hand at a painful, extreme angle, and tears rolled down her face as I wrapped my own hands around her trembling palm. Something drew me to touch Gina’s broken pinky, despite her whispered, “No, no, no, Briar, no.”
With the tip of my index finger, I caressed her injured digit, from the tip back to the damaged knuckle, and something wondrous occurred.
Gina shrieked and then gasped as her finger, under no pressure at all save my feather-light touch, seemed to correct itself. It wiggled and slipped back into place, and Gina tentatively balled her fist to find that the injury, and the pain, were gone. The finger was mended as if it had never been broken.
Gabriel and I made shocked eye contact, and then we both looked at Gina, who had a look of genuine bemusement on her face.
The room suddenly filled with people, drawn by the noise Gina had made when she fell, but we assured them that everything was fine. Gina continued to clench and relax her hand.
“How did you do that?” Gina whispered to me once the three of us were alone again in the den.
“Do what?”
“You fixed her finger, Briar,” Gabriel interjected. “It was mangled. Broken for sure. And then you touched it, and…”
“She was hurt, I just wanted to help her; I mean I didn’t do anything,” I insisted.
“Oh my God,” Gabriel said, his eyes wide. In a cartoon, a light bulb would have appeared and illuminated above his head. “You did it. To Marla. And now to Gina. Briar, don’t you get it?”
I didn’t get it. Or at least I didn’t want to get it.
Gina looked at Gabriel as if he were a math problem she hadn’t a clue how to solve.
“It’s totally fine. It’s so weird,” Gina muttered, her gaze returning to her hand. “It hurt so bad. But now it’s fine.”
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