by J. A. Rock
“If you can behave.” Denson coughed suddenly, and pulled out a handkerchief to dab at her mouth.
I nodded.
“No leaving the playing field.”
“Okay.” My voice sounded gruff and strained, like an old woman’s.
She sat on the end of the bed, far enough away that I relaxed a little. I’d had fun last night making furious mockery of every face I saw. But I couldn’t think of a nasty thing to say to or about Denson. Even her glasses had, over the past few minutes, become admirable.
“Can I ever leave?” I asked.
“When you find a home or you turn eighteen.”
I showed her my teeth—not a smile, and I hoped she knew it. “I don’t like this place.”
“You’ve only been here a few hours.”
“Well, it’s been a lousy few hours.”
“Try to eat some lunch.”
“I don’t want to.”
Denson got up. “Half. Just half of it by rec time. I’ll come get you in twenty minutes.”
“Fuck,” I muttered. Back at Auntie’s, I’d have been slapped for that. Denson only smiled.
Rec Time
Report By: Glenna Formas
Today is soccer. Girls line up to receive jerseys. One girl missing: #76510228. New intake, #11305094, demands to play barefoot. I permit this. Things going well, red team winning despite being a bunch of scrimshankers, and suddenly new intake bolts toward the west gate. I leave #44990033 in charge of game and pursue. I am not the fastest runner, but new intake seems not very strong, exhausted, etc. But adrenaline must be working overtime for her, because as soon as I get close, she finds another gear and tries to scale the gate. I catch her and pull her down. She fights better than I’m expecting, but she gets tired pretty quick. Then she acts like she can’t hear anything I say. I drag her to admin. When I get back to the field, I discover #38812096 has sprained her ankle, which I regret from a liability standpoint but personally I find her to be kind of a wiener and anyway it seemed more important to catch new intake than to babysit wieners.
And I mean serious wieners.
Admin Log
Date: 12 March
Event: Disciplinary Hearing
Report By: Christine Rollins
Present: Kennedy DuMorg, psychologist. Christine Rollins, co-owner/overseer.
Child: 11305094
T Ballard was brought before me following an escape attempt at rec time. I discussed the nature of her transgression with her, but she appeared uninterested. Her breathing was labored—I assumed from her flight attempt—and she had difficulty focusing. I asked if she understood that she is in Rock Point’s custody now and must follow our rules until she is placed in care, adopted out, or comes of age.
T said she needed to meet a friend off RP grounds. I told her this was the sort of privilege afforded to well-behaved children, and I pointed out she had caused nothing but trouble since arriving here. I placed a hand on her shoulder to indicate I understood how hard this adjustment period must be, and she grabbed my arm and twisted it. I required considerable assistance to fight her off. She did not respond to any of my statements or questions thereafter. I informed her she was banned from rec for the next three days.
Rollins’s Note: Darla Ling is no longer with Rock Point. The new weekday breakfast monitor will be Bessie Holmes. Please note it is never acceptable to strike a child in anger.
Psychological Evaluation: T Ballard
Report By: Dr. Kennedy DuMorg
T claims a history of physical and verbal abuse. However, she refuses to elaborate just yet. I thought it best not to push her at our first meeting. She also claims her mother murdered her father with an ax. Can anyone confirm this?
Rollins’s Note: Untrue. Her parents died in a car accident. T claims no memory of the tragedy, though she was present.
Medical Report: Dr. Brenda LiPordo
T Ballard is being treated for opioid withdrawal. Staff, please expect early symptoms—anxiety, muscle aches, sweating, runny nose, etc. Clonidine administered for treatment of symptoms. T is to report to the health room each day at 2 p.m. She has not eaten a full meal since arriving here three days ago.
Morning Staff Report: Bessie Holmes
So aparenntly i get the duty of now giving this fucked-up new kid her meds every morning. Yippee. Tried this morning & she has slapped the pill cup out of my hands. i picked up the pills & pinched her nose shut, & she hit me in the throat. Dr. LiPordo says it will be a while before my voice fulheartedly returns, which is terrible news. As many of you know i sing in a divorced women’s choir & we are having our anual autumn concert in just 3 weeks. See me for tickets.
i couldn’t get ahold of T after that because I was been in to much pain, so i called Riley Denson in. T fought Riley too, & T was screaming so loud we couldn’t talk sense to her, so i drew my arm back, preparing to give her a good slap. Denson asked me to refrain from hitting.
i composed myself & left her to Denson.
Rollins’s Note: This log is not the place for solicitations, unless those solicitations are relevant to a child’s accomplishment. i.e. When little Rosie, #3592801, played the wise man in the town Christmas pageant.
I’ve chosen to tell this part of the story through what I’ve reassembled from Rock Point’s logbooks because, to be honest, I do not remember this period well enough to recount it properly. I was a wreck, sweaty day and night and behaving like a true beast. Paranoid, angry, and deeply, wildly alone.
I have a vague sense of Riley Denson as my savior. Growing up, I never had a high opinion of women who devoted their lives to caring for others. I considered them dull and feeble. To have any real fun in the world, you needed power. And to gain power, you had to wound others—not coo over the wounded. But Denson never cooed. Her scuffed, simple wisdom was comforting. “This is how things are, Thera. If you try to change them you may fail. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.”
Rock Point’s logbooks came into my possession when Rock Point was dismantled years ago. I like “was dismantled” better than “closed.” Forces acted upon it. Construction workers stripped the building for parts and then blasted its skeleton to dust. The town wants to build something new there, and I approve. I’m not one of those people who’s in love with what was.
I was vastly unpopular at Rock Point. The staff, the other girls, the teachers all loathed me. I preferred it that way. To draw lines and dare others to cross them was an enjoyable game, a villain-lounging-on-a-tower-of-cakes sort of feeling. I taunted my enemies, and when they charged, I whisked my cape away and stuck spears into their shoulders. There was one little girl who cried at the sight of me. She was my medal of honor.
The girls’ home was fairly large. There were four wards of eight rooms each—two wards upstairs for girls ages five and above, one downstairs for infants and staff, and another downstairs which consisted of a large parlor, two classrooms, a small library known as the reading room, a dining area, and a cramped kitchen. The décor was simple: wood paneling, faded pink and beige wallpaper, and framed paintings of flowers. The home sat on a cliffside acre; it was bordered on the front by a browning lawn, and on the back side by a scraggly wood.
When I wasn’t plotting my escape, I was tossing, sweaty and terrified in my narrow cot—pitched from the cart of my own nightmares into an empty road. Or else snapping pencils in class and spitting on the desk until I had a large clear pool in front of me through which to rub my chewed erasers. In my mind, over and over, I picked the lock on Auntie Bletch’s medicine cabinet. I found the things I needed, swallowed, and went hurtling somewhere no pain could touch me.
I suppose it was Miss Ridges who changed things.
One afternoon, Riley Denson came into my room. She had taken over my medication routines. She always spoke softly and had even, once, made me laugh. I wouldn’t say I trusted her, but that day I did not fight her when she led me, sweating and whimpering, down to the reading room. I’d eaten lunch, which felt like a dangerous accom
plishment. I was dressed, not in Rock Point grays, but in a sweater and jeans. The sweater was too big, old and ragged, and had cheap, glittery gold thread woven through it. I kept looking down, following the shining, broken strands with my gaze.
The reading room had a wooden floor covered by a thick oriental rug. There were three small tables along the back wall with a green lamp on each one. A painting on the wall showed a meadow on an overcast day, a single bare tree in its center.
I stopped in the doorway, Denson just behind me. At least ten girls were sitting on the floor. So far, I’d hardly paid attention to the other kids here, except to lash out at them in the cafeteria or during rec time. But now I was expected to sit with them, and they were all staring at me. Their faces were different shapes and ages, but they all held, it seemed, the same expression of sly disgust.
Miss Ridges sat on a stool beside a low table, her gray-streaked hair in a neat little bun, her brown skin soft looking and wrinkled. She smiled at me. “Welcome, Thera.”
Denson nudged me, which made me want to snap at her. “Go on,” she whispered.
I stepped into the room. One foot in front of the other. Took a seat next to a girl who looked about my age, and who wore a black blouse and spangled jeans. I picked at my sweater as I felt her turn to study me.
Miss Ridges picked up a book. I was too far away to see the title. But as soon as she began to read, I stopped caring what the title was or who was around me. The only storytellers I’d known before were grade-school teachers, with their sick-sweet voices and their big faces telling me how I should feel about what I was hearing. Miss Ridges didn’t make faces. Her voice was low, and it slipped even lower when she started to feel the words she was reading. She read like she was singing in a jazz bar, closing her eyes, shaking her head slowly, getting lost in the music. I listened to every word of the trite tale, and when she was finished I hugged my knees, reluctant to move. It had been a foolish story, but Miss Ridges seemed anything but foolish.
The girl next to me shifted. Her knee bumped mine. I saw she had painted nails. “I thought the ending was stupid,” she said aloud. “Just . . . stupid.”
The girl’s name was Bitsy, and she had long blond hair tied in a messy ponytail, ragged bumps along her scalp. She talked constantly about other people’s shortcomings in a husky voice that sounded like she was suppressing a laugh—the sort of strained, defensive laugh you’d give someone who has just hurt your feelings, deeply and publicly. A What’s your problem? laugh.
She had little interest in tales of woe. When I explained I’d come to Rock Point addicted to drugs, she only laughed and told a story about the time her cocaine addict mother had tried to strangle the milkman. She recounted to me just about every story Miss Ridges had read aloud over the last year. She had an opinion on why each one was silly, and yet she remembered them in such detail it was hard to believe she felt only disdain for them. Most were fairy tales—secret princesses rescued from slavery by true love, children lost in the woods, a beanstalk leading to a kingdom in the sky.
I told her Bitsy was a dumb name, and she glared at me. “My mother’s idea.”
“Is your name Elizabeth?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“So why not go by that?”
“Because you’re a gummed-up box.”
“Box” was one of Bitsy’s favorite words, and I was embarrassed when I finally had to ask her what she meant by it, since she didn’t seem to be referring to cartons. She rolled her eyes and slapped my shoulder affectionately. “You’ve got one between your legs, waddy brain.”
Bitsy, I decided, was wonderfully disgusting.
The weeks went by, and I sweated less. I stopped waking at night with cravings so deep I had to kick the wall and dig my nails into my hips to find some release. I attended classes, and while I was generally disruptive and a poor student, I learned tricks for controlling myself. If I stared out a window, I felt less combative. Some teachers were okay with this, and I got along well with them. Others said things like, “Eyes up here,” or, “Pay attention, Thera,” and I wanted to spit at them, but I spat on my desk instead.
It also helped to go around the room and imagine how each girl had come to Rock Point. There was a very thin girl with a distant gaze whose parents could only have died tragically in some bloodless accident—like a joint drowning or mutual consumption of sleeping pills. Another girl was the sort who’d been given up, I reckoned. She was a terrier with a pant leg—grabbing an idea and shaking it and not letting go until she was kicked. I didn’t see how the teachers could stand her. She tried to make meat of the history of some long-ago revolution, all because she believed cannons hadn’t been around at the time.
“I assure you”—Miss Tophitt, the history tutor, looked as though important blood vessels might be close to bursting—“that cannons existed and were used.”
“But no,” the terrier insisted. “That’s a tale we’re told. In fact there were only swords and catapults.”
After lessons I often found myself in Bitsy’s room, half listening to her tirades, which generally focused on her roommate Liz, the dining hall food, or Riley Denson, whom Bitsy hated. One day, we were sitting on her floor. I had a pack of cigarettes Bitsy had snagged from Bessie Holmes’s dress pocket. In the absence of a lighter, I was breaking them in half and rolling the tobacco between my fingers. Bitsy was painting her nails with oil paints she’d nicked during craft time.
“So then—” Bitsy held out her hand and carefully painted a green stripe on her middle nail “—Lizzie says, ‘Well, it’d be nice if your side of the room wasn’t always a pigsty.’ And I say, ‘Okay.’ I mean, isn’t it my business what I do with my side of the room? I don’t tell her to trash that awful pink unicorn.”
I glanced over at the stuffed pink unicorn on Liz’s bed. It had purple eyes and a dopey smile and a horn made of yellow pipe cleaners.
I shrugged, a cigarette dangling from my lips. “She’s just being an ass.” I didn’t tell Bitsy that her side of the room really was disgusting. I liked the messiness of it. At Auntie Bletch’s I’d been made to keep my room clean. I’d gotten very used to having almost nothing, and to keeping what I did have out of sight. But Bitsy let everything she’d collected—clothes, toys, books, hairbrushes, stolen markers and paints—mountain up beside her bed.
Bitsy rubbed at some paint she’d gotten on the skin beside her thumbnail. “I end up feeling like I’m the crazy one for expecting people to behave like adults.”
Everyone in the world had done Bitsy an injustice, and I was the one she confided in. I never had to say much. I could go on chewing the ends of cigarettes, staring at the scuffs on the wall, as long as I nodded every now and then and said, “Uh-huh,” or “That’s a shame,” or “You should tell her how you feel.”
“And then that lousy bitch, Denson,” Bitsy was saying. “God, I’d like to putt a nut into that box.”
I’d long since grown used to Bitsy saying she wanted to putt a nut into people’s boxes or assholes or mouths or ears. She liked golf and the prospect of damaged orifices. “What’s so bad about Denson?”
“The way she looks at me.”
“Looks at you?”
Bitsy was also more than a bit paranoid. She shook her head. “She hates me. I don’t know what I ever did to her.” She leaned back and studied the sloppily painted nails of her left foot. “She loves you and hates me.”
I had come to be on decent terms with Denson. I couldn’t think of a time in my life where any adult had preferred me to another child, and I felt a small, guilty satisfaction, a hope that Bitsy was right.
Bitsy held out her hand. Her nails were painted alternating red and green. “What do you think?”
I leaned over and put my fingertip on the middle nail of her left hand. The wet paint came off on my skin.
“You ass!” Bitsy jerked away. “It’s not dry.”
“Miss Alpern said during crafts yesterday that oil paint takes years to dry.” Som
etimes it was little things like that—stupid facts that drew my attention and fascinated me for unknown reasons—that made life here bearable.
“To be honest . . .” Bitsy blew on her nails and glanced at me. “I think Denson likes you more than is entirely proper.”
I’d been playing with Liz’s unicorn, making it ram its horn into the edge of the bed. I stopped. “What are you talking about?”
“You have to know she’s a BD.”
“What’s that?”
Bitsy rolled her eyes and shook her head. “You’re really hopeless. I can’t say it out loud. She’s just . . . She likes you. You know.”
I thought about how Denson often put a hand on my shoulder, or combed my hair with her fingers. The way she looked at me for long moments before speaking, as though I was something quite fascinating. “You’re mentally ill.”
Bitsy laughed.
“I’m serious. Just quit talking about it, okay?”
Bitsy shrugged and pulled herself to her feet using the edge of the bed. She left oil paint stains all over the gray sheet. “Just watch your box, is all I’m saying.”
The town of Rock Hill sits on an isolated stretch of knobby land. I didn’t think the solitude strange growing up, but now that I’ve seen more of the world I wonder how Rock Hill survived, forgotten and miserly as it was. Perhaps it would have been a mercy had the beast, the Minotaur, destroyed it.
The sea surrounds the area on three sides, and the air is always gray. A feeble mist clings to the cliffs, and the clouds are low and swollen, moving gracelessly. In winter, the leafless trees look like black prongs thrust into the sky. The sea collects a layer of frost, and as spring nears the waves seem to hatch as though from an egg, spilling across the shore. In summer, the sun is like a pathetic rag hung out to dry, badly stained and dripping weak light.
To the south of Rock Hill is a headland called Rock Point. For years there was nothing on it but the girls’ home and the prison. On another cliff north of the town—one obscured by fog and simply known as the promontory—was the labyrinth.