BOOK THREE
DEPARTURE / ARRIVAL
We were going to see my Uncle Paul. He lived on Whidbey Island, in Puget Sound, where we had lived when I was a baby. Except he was staying in Northern California for the summer; his health was bad. A special facility, beautiful, all big sunsets and trees. The change of scenery would be good for me, my parents said. Besides, Uncle Paul was bipolar, creative, too smart for his own good—just like me. A transition between the hospital and real life. This is what they said.
That day I was just so sleepy. I fell asleep on the plane and then I fell asleep on the other plane and then I fell asleep in the rental car. It might have been the heat. It was July and so sunny that it wrapped around me like a blanket, dulling my brain and slowing my limbs.
It was like when you wake up from a nightmare, suddenly and breathing heavy. We were pulling into a parking lot that was gravel and empty. There was a fence, waist-high and wooden, bordering thick pines and next to it, what looked like a small house. There was a child sitting on the fence, small, maybe twelve years old, skinny. My face felt sleep-bloated and sweaty. The child was how I knew something was wrong.
“Where are we?” I asked.
My parents didn’t say anything. They just looked at each other.
“Where the fuck are we?” It was like they hadn’t even heard me. The silence that followed had a friction, and after a while of it building, they opened their doors and stepped out.
I just sat there. When they noticed, they told me to get out of the car. I refused. They exchanged a look and went into the little house alone.
I turned the volume up on my headphones, which I’d been listening to the whole way. My Discman was new, fancy, claimed it didn’t skip and you could get it wet. My parents had bought it for me when I was in the hospital, a “Sorry you tried to kill yourself again!” present. I closed my eyes, tried to sing along to the music. I pretended I was in my bedroom. I pretended I was in the canyon, sitting on one of the cliffs.
But it didn’t matter. There was no uncle. He wasn’t in the middle-of-nowhere, California. My uncle was in Whidbey Island, where we had lived when I was a baby. My parents had lied to me. I was trapped.
It was hot in that car. After a few minutes, I opened the door for air, but then I closed it. The door seemed like some sort of barrier; if I broke the seal I’d spin out into space. I reached up into the front seat, found the electric lock, and pulled it, clank. The heat closed in like a tomb.
My parents came out after a few minutes. By then, the child I’d seen on the fence had disappeared. My mom had a plastic cup of cold water in her hand, little beads of condensation on the walls. She went to open the door, presumably to give it to me, but, of course, it was locked. My dad unlocked it with a beep of the fob.
He opened the door, and I looked up at them. I saw their heads above me and the sun was behind them, blocking out their features until they were just two shadow people, a couple of menacing ghosts. If I ignored them, they would have no choice but to go away. I shut my eyes.
But my dad was shaking me. “Juliet,” he said. “Honey.” He took off my headphones, but gently, almost like he was stroking my hair.
“It’s so hot, honey,” my mom said. “Why don’t you get out of the car? Have some cold water.”
I opened my eyes. I felt like I didn’t know who they were at all. I took the cup and I looked in it, brown plastic, bumpy, the kind you drink from at summer camp. I still didn’t know what this fucking place was called.
I threw the water in my mother’s face without thinking. The action surprised me. Immediately I felt guilty. So then I threw the cup at my father. It bounced off his head comically: bonk. The looks on their faces. My mother’s wet hair. I started laughing. It was such a nasty-sounding laugh. I put my headphones back on and I pretended I wasn’t there. But the looks on their faces kept swinging back to me: shock, disgust, like I had betrayed them, but also like they deserved it. The exact same way I felt.
They went away. A small man came back in their place. I didn’t know he was there until I heard a voice saying my name. I hadn’t heard his feet on the gravel as he approached. He was wearing sandals and shorts and had thick beard, younger than my parents but not by much. I wanted to hate him but there was something kind in his face and I was annoyed to find that I liked him right away, and so when he motioned for me to take off my headphones, I took them off.
His name was Nathan. I was at a place called Redwood Trails School. It was a therapeutic boarding school, whatever the fuck that meant. My parents had sent me there because they were worried, they didn’t want to, they were scared for me, they hadn’t wanted to lie and only did so because they had to, blah blah blah. He asked me to get out of the car and I did. I wanted to be stubborn and stay in that car and fight some more but I didn’t fight. I gave in.
After I stood up, he put his hand on my shoulder and for some reason, it didn’t bother me. I didn’t see my parents anywhere. The sun was making me dizzy, the trees and sky blurring until everything was beige. He was only a few inches taller than me. “I want you to meet someone,” he said. He smiled. His teeth were white and straight.
HER NAME WAS ALYSON
Nathan told her to take me on a walk to the lake. She didn’t smile, or say hi, or shake my hand, or do anything else you’d expect a person to do when they first meet you. She just looked at me. It was that lack of a response, the lack of an action, that made me trust her.
She was short, thin, had shoulder-length blond hair, a pretty face. Wide green eyes framed by thick black eyeliner. In these ways, she looked a lot like me. But her thighs were thinner and her boobs were bigger, straining the stripes of her tank top. A nose that was a tiny bit crooked, forehead just a tad too big. I think the combination made us the same level of attractive.
A LIST OF THINGS ALYSON TOLD ME ON OUR WALK
She was from Vacaville, a shitty city near the bay.
Her parents were divorced.
Her mother was very sick.
She hated her father.
He had paid two men to abduct her from her bedroom at 4:30 a.m., literally kicking and screaming, and they’d put her in handcuffs and then taken her on a plane and dropped her off here in a rented SUV.
This was three weeks ago.
The boarding school sucked.
They had to have group therapy twice a day.
Group therapy sucked.
There were four phases at the school.
Each phase included a higher level of privileges.
Alyson was on Phase One.
I was also on Phase One.
This was because we were new.
Phase One sucked.
Right now, there were twelve students in the school.
Most of them were girls.
The lack of boys sucked.
It meant everyone got their periods at the same time.
Everyone had to do a lot of chores, all the time, regardless of our phases.
The chores sucked.
There were a bunch of animals: some pigs, a few goats, some chickens, cats.
Sometimes the counselors took them fishing on the lake.
A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE LAKE
There was a little path behind the little house. It weaved through tall brush that was mostly brown and dry. I had thought Northern California was green. There were a lot of briars in the brush and even though we walked on the path they got stuck in my socks. The path went by a barn. I could smell their animal smell, but we didn’t go in there. The path grew muddy as it went down closer to the lake, my shoes sucking in the muck. The brush turned into cattails and tall plants with green leaves like spears. The lake was small and muddy and had a lot of flies and mosquitoes buzzing around. Dragonflies too—bodies big and bright turquoise, their veined wings winking thin rainbows. The sky was so bright it wasn’t even blue anymore, just white. There was a rowboat next to the lake, so people could go fishing. The mosquitoes started biting me right away.
Mosquitos have always loved me. I felt their bites swelling quickly into lumps.
A LIST OF THINGS THAT HAPPENED AFTER THE WALK
They put me in this little office in the little house with this woman Rosie.
Rosie had dyed red hair and was wearing pink lipstick and a big smile.
She took my blood pressure.
She took my temperature.
She made me pee in a cup.
She went in the bathroom with me while I peed.
It was embarrassing.
I put my hand over the crotch of my underwear so she couldn’t see if there was discharge.
I got some pee on my hands.
My luggage was in the tiny office.
A suitcase my mother had brought was in the room too.
That suitcase was filled with my clothes.
It made me feel stupid for not realizing what was going on sooner.
The suitcase was big, and I had been told we would be gone for just three days, and my father always made us pack light.
I had a pack of cigarettes and a couple lighters in my suitcase.
She took those away.
She let me keep everything else.
She printed my name and date of birth on a label using a little label-making machine.
She put the label on a black binder.
She handed me the binder and told me to take it over to the big house.
I hadn’t seen a big house.
She told me to say goodbye to my parents first.
My parents were sitting in the big office space of the little house.
They were crying.
I refused to say goodbye, or say anything, or even look at them.
They hugged me anyway.
I kept my arms by my side.
I finally said something.
I told them I hated them.
My parents continued to cry.
I wanted to cry too.
But I didn’t.
Nathan said he’d walk me over to the big house.
The big house was right across the parking lot.
I felt stupid for not seeing it before.
He wouldn’t let me carry my bags.
Instead he put them all on his arm and smiled at me, as though he was trying to make me less nervous.
It didn’t work.
The rest of the students were in group.
Group was in the “great room.”
The great room was a big room with a lot of couches, all facing each other, except at the end of the room where they were turned toward a TV.
All the couches matched.
They were all an ugly plaid.
The same plaid was used over the windows as drapes.
I didn’t want to look at the students.
I could feel them looking at me.
Nathan told them my name.
They each said their names but the only one that stuck was Alyson’s.
I felt like I had felt at every new school I’d ever been to, when I had no identity but The New Kid.
I sat down on a couch next to Alyson.
They continued with their group.
I didn’t hear what they said.
Somebody put my bags in what was now my room, which was also Alyson’s room, without me noticing.
A LETTER FROM THE FUTURE #3
It is December 14, 2015. I am thirty-two years old. I am writing from the basement of the house where I live in Piney View, West Virginia. My desk is right next to the back door, which overlooks three oak trees and a small patch of forest, and all their leaves have fallen. These sections, I have written them twice before, over the course of five years. Both times, I tried to tell them straight. So this time, I am trying to tell them a different way. I don’t know if I will get it right. The problem that always happens is information overload. So many things that make the boarding school different from the rest of the world.
My husband, he always laughs whenever I say I went to boarding school. “Boarding school is for rich kids,” he says. “You were institutionalized.” And he is right.
I’d searched for Alyson before, at least once or twice a year since social media has existed. I’d never been able to find her before. I thought maybe something bad had happened to her. I thought maybe she’d died.
But today I found her. She is a mother now, two kids, a husband in the military. She looks both exactly like she does in my memory and also totally different. She is a grown-up now, short hair and neat lipstick. And without warning, or me expecting to, I am crying.
I remember the time I talked to my boyfriend from boarding school, the one you will soon read about. That was three years ago. My first love. Like Alyson, I hadn’t been able to find him for years, and then I did. He called me one night shortly after I’d found him, late. Neither of us was doing well at the time. His voice, it sounded the same. I didn’t know I remembered his voice but I did. I was talking to that seventeen-year-old boy in my memory even though the sixteen-year-old girl who’d fallen in love with him was long gone now. Or my sixteen-year-old self had reawakened, just for a moment, and it was she who was doing the talking. I felt the part of me that was our shared past, such a small strand of our existence, reaching out across what was now half our lives, emerging from the dark and reweaving itself into the same braid. Even from what was once the future, that link glowed, the memories of that intertwining vivid in a way that memories rarely are, the vividness that only occurs when a person is going through intense pain and intense change (which are the same thing). I remembered the look in his seventeen-year-old pupils, empty and black and doomed. It was the same look I had had in mine. The pupil is a hole in the iris that lets the light in. The pupil of a doomed person is just a hole.
Now, on December 14, 2015, my pupils no longer broadcast doomedness or blackness or even emptiness. There is something sad in them instead, even though I am mostly happy now. The sadness is something you can’t get rid of. In one photo, Alyson is with her two children and her husband, who is dressed in army fatigues. Her smile is so big and she looks so pretty. She looks so happy, genuinely, the smile obviously not just a pose. But even in this photo—the pupils show something else.
WAKE-UP CALL
I woke up the next day, early. There were no blinds on the window and the sun beat hot on my face. I waited for my eyes to adjust, and the gray lumps slid into objects. Our window overlooked the porch that wrapped around the house, and past it, trees and then the lake. It might have been pretty if everything wasn’t so brown.
Alyson was still asleep, snoring softly out of her mouth, hair messy on her pillow. I felt so far away from everyone and everything I knew and loved—a sucking kind of loneliness that made me want to crawl inside myself until I disappeared.
I started to cry.
I was horrified to realize I missed my parents.
Ever since I was a baby, any time I cried my mother would scoop me on her lap and tell me to just get it all out, even after I was way too old for that kind of thing. She’d rub my back while I cried, and whisper Shhhhhh, shhhhh. But they weren’t the kind of shhhhh’s meant to convey that I was supposed to stop crying. It was the kind of noise meant to wordlessly tell me that everything was going to be OK. I wished she were here; I wished she cared enough to do that now.
ORIENTATION
I didn’t have to think all day. We had breakfast and then chores and then group therapy and then school and then group therapy and then more chores and then dinner. Everything was “orientation,” which meant they either gave me instructions or I was just supposed to watch. I pulled out weeds. I ate a turkey sandwich. I paged through a textbook. Nathan led the group therapy, a new language, phrases like “emotional regulation” and “conflict resolution.” During the meals, the other students asked me questions. What was my name. How old was I. Where was I from. What was my diagnosis. Too personal and accusatory. The day didn’t feel like a day but a series of flash cards, crash studied, too much too quick so nothing could stick.
By the end of the day, I said as little as possible because I didn’t want them to think I was stupid. Everyone else knew exactly what to do, knew their role and what would happen next, but I was in a foreign new world, with no map.
We had free time after dinner. Alyson and some of the other kids went down to the barn, but I didn’t because I felt like I’d been following her. I figured I’d just go read. It was a nice day so I decided to sit on the porch.
The rails had just enough space between them that you could put your feet through and let them dangle. It was still hot and bright out and the low sun skimmed off the lake in a shimmer. It was very quiet—just the thrum of insects and an occasional shout from the barn.
I only had two books in my bag—a stupid teen horror novel, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I hadn’t started yet. Strangely, it had been a gift from my father. He had said it was one of my uncle’s favorites. Guilt. My thoughts were pinging around in my head, all the stuff I’d been told that day, in a way that made it hard to concentrate. I didn’t want to think. I picked the horror novel.
I read for five minutes before I heard someone behind me. I turned around. It was this guy I’d met earlier, although I didn’t remember his name. He had curly hair, brown eyes, sharp cheekbones, and even though I didn’t like guys with curly hair, he was easily the cutest person in the school. I think his girlfriend was this rockabilly girl because I’d seen them holding hands at lunch. The rockabilly girl was chubby but her face was pretty.
“Hey,” he said to me. He smiled. His teeth looked sharp.
“Hey,” I said.
“Can I sit next to you?”
“Sure.”
He didn’t say anything for a minute and I felt confused about what he was doing there. Then he asked me what I was reading and I regretted not having picked Fear and Loathing. I showed him the cover.
Juliet the Maniac Page 11