by Cyndy Etler
With that barrette pulling her bangs back, the girl’s got a lot of forehead. That’s what I notice as she stares at me. That and her tiny, stumpy eyelashes.
“How do you know you don’t like it if you’ve never smoked it?”
And that’s when I lose it. “Man, fuck this. I’m going out for a cigarette.”
They’re on their feet so quick, their chairs screech on the tiles.
“No, you’re not.”
Both girls are posed like Wonder Woman, legs spread, hands on hips.
“Fuck you, I’m not. Lemme by.”
Barrette Chick gets the Hulk power. I see it in her eyes. She’s gonna kick the shit outta me.
“You’re not leaving, Cyndy. You have been signed into Straight by your parents.”
“Fuck that!”
I’m shouldering between them when the door is thrown open. Before I know what’s happening, two guys, the door losers from the front office, surround me. One’s behind me and one’s in front, way the fuck too close. My-nose-on-his-shirt close. I’m lifting my arms to push him away when something’s jammed down the back of my jeans. That’s when I start screaming.
“FUCK Y—” I get out. Then I’m ripped in half as my jeans are wrenched up my crack. I’m jerked backward so fast that my legs can’t keep up. It’s my Levi’s, slinging into my ass and z-z, that catch me from falling.
I yank around to get out of whatever I’m caught on, and I see two things at once: the hairy hand of a door loser grabbing the back of my jeans, and my mother. Standing here, in this room, seeing this. And not stopping it.
A caramel voice says, “Cyndy, your parents are here to say good-bye.”
I’m screaming as The Wall’s laughter kicks up in my head. Now I know what they were laughing at: my boarding school visions and my stupid, little-kid trust.
“YOU CAN’T! DON’T LEAVE ME HERE! MOM! MOMMY! DON’T! WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS? DON’T LEAVE ME, MOMMY!”
But it’s like she doesn’t hear me. She doesn’t even blink. I’m twisting around, trying to get my Hulk back, and I’m almost there, but I—I can’t—rip—off—this hand dug into my jeans.
Twisting as I scream, I see the door loser’s face. It’s calm. And so is Barrette Chick’s. And her silent friend’s, Mrs. Harper’s, and my mother’s. And Jacque—he’s fucking smiling. They’re all calm and happy as they watch me, the crying, screaming cyclone on a leash.
“MOMMY!”
I lunge at her, and get sliced up the ass again as I’m jerked back. My tears fling forward and land at my mother’s feet.
“Good-bye, Cyndy,” she says. Then she walks out of the room.
“Bye, Cinny,” Jacque mouths.
Or maybe he says it out loud. I can’t hear him through my screams.
12
NO GETTING OUT OF SEAT WITHOUT PERMISSION
The beige room gets even smaller as more people cram in. The door guys alone take up half the space, and two new kids, one guy and one girl, are in here now too. Barrette Chick calls them “staff” when they walk in.
The “staff” guy says they’re gonna see if I’m carrying. Then he says, “Drop your pants and underwear. Bend over.” So I bend. Do I have a choice?
They’re all behind me now, and I can feel them looking at me. My fingers are on my toes and my face, red and slimy, is the size of a beach ball. I’ve shed tears today that have been in storage for fourteen years.
I don’t know if it’s the guy or the girl “staff,” but I hear the snap of a rubber glove. Two hands peel my butt apart, harder and farther than it wants to get peeled. It hurts, but I won’t say ow. Some choice words cut through the swirl in my head.
“Clean?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘clean,’ but drug free.”
There’s laughter, and another rubber snap.
“Cyndy, your intake’s over. Bring her to the group.”
Then comes Barrette Chick’s voice, but with an edge to it. “Pull up your pants, Cyndy.”
I pull my stuff up without a word, like I’ve been following orders all my life. I’m still buttoning my jeans when a hand scrapes down my back again, and a fist clenches onto my waistband. I throw my arms out to steady myself as I’m dragged toward the door. My top button stays undone.
The fist in my spine pushes me into the hall, where my stupid heart trips itself up again. My little girl fantasy tells me my mother will be standing out here. Arms open, face stained with tears, unable to leave me. Like jackrabbits, my eyes flick to the right, to the left—and nothing. Just a row of closed doors. That crushed dream kills something in me. Something important—something like hope. But the fist in my back doesn’t pause. It steers me away from the front office.
So I’m walking down this hallway with a hand in my pants. This ugly chick has her fist gripping my waistband, right above my butt. She’s pulling my pants up into my butt. And I—I can’t do anything about it. We saw what happened when I tried to fight. A door opens, and that kid with the badge comes walking toward us. The Runner. I don’t even care that he’s dweeby, he’s still a guy. God, if you’re there, don’t let Runner see the hand in my pants.
At the end of the hall, the silent girl leans on an industrial door, then shoves me into a massive room. And what’s happening in that room makes no sense. No sense at all. In front of me is this heaving…beast made of hundreds of human bodies. There are rows and rows of blue plastic chairs, each chair connected to the one next to it. There’s a kid in every chair, and all the kids’ bodies are whipping around—back and forth, up and down—like an epileptic mega-seizure.
Listen to me. This beast? It’s…it’s fighting itself. The top half of it is all arms, waving and bending, snapping toward the ceiling. Hundreds of heads shake and nod, but they’re not saying yes or no. They’re jerking in every direction, and nodding hard like the devil told ’em, “NOD.” The bottom half of the beast—the bodies below the armpits—are pogo-stick straight, butts glued to their plastic chairs. The only sound is a thrushy breathing and this weird, fleshy clicking. It’s a vision of hell.
I’m pushed across the empty half of the room, toward the rattling mass of people and chairs. All I can see are hundreds of backs, but then a few faces twist around to look. Their piston arms keep pumping over their heads, but their eyes are deep and blank. Their eyes are black holes. These kids—these kids are dead inside.
Barrette Chick jerks me to a stop, two feet behind the last row of chairs. The beast’s energy pings all over me like Pop Rocks dumped on a tongue. It’s bad, but no kind of bad I’ve felt before. It’s—it’s fucking terrifying.
With the fist in my Levi’s trapping me in place, I know how the damsel in distress felt, chained to the tracks with a train screaming toward her. Only this isn’t a game. And I have no hero coming.
Down the middle of the chairs is an aisle. It’s the spine of the beast. At the tip of the spine is the beast’s head: two teenagers sitting side by side on barstools. From the right stool, a blond girl smiles at me. It’s a hungry smile. From the left, a guy spots me over the bashing sea of heads.
“Stop!” he goes, and the beast falls. Every hand, every arm, every head—they all collapse at once. “Incoming!” he shouts.
The million-headed beast turns its black-hole eyes on me. On the left side are boys; on the right are girls that look like boys. No one’s wearing makeup, no one’s wearing jewelry. And many—way too many—have those third-eyebrow barrettes.
The barstool kid gives a tiny, frowning nod, and the silent girl is suddenly roaring.
“This is Cyndy! She went to Masuk High School in Connecticut! She says she’s done pot and alcohol!”
My jeans are yanked farther up my ass, and the beast makes its voice heard.
“Hi, Cyndy! Love ya, Cyndy!”
The faces turn to the front again, and the arms go back up. And all together, with no
prompt that I can see, the beast starts convulsing again.
Barrette Chick’s hand steers me around the girl side. At the very front row, she pushes my head down so I’m duck-walking. I’m held from behind, getting whacked by flapping arms.
I watch a girl sitting in a chair at the end of the row. At least, a piece of her is in that chair, the edge of her butt. The rest of her is leaning forward, her arms waving at the girl on the barstool.
Barrette Chick leans in toward the girl. She shoves four fingers down the waist of the girl’s jeans, nails sliding against the skin of the girl’s back. She pushes her thumb through the middle belt loop, makes a fist around the waistband, and pulls the jeans up in a super-wedgie. And the girl just keeps flinging herself around, eyes locked on the barstool blond. What? She doesn’t feel this? This is no problem?
Next thing you know, the girl’s pulled out of her chair by the wedgie. The girl crouches next to me; then I’m swung around and plunk. I’m in her seat. The hand pulls out of my pants, and God, for a second, I feel free. Then I remember where I am: in the very first seat of this psycho beast, three short steps from the hungry blond smiler. I’m trapped in the bull’s-eye of this beast.
What the fuck?! I want to jump up, screaming, and run. None of these khaki-wearing pansies could catch me. But those big guys? The ones blocking every door? They could stop me, easy.
Craning my neck around, I see that this room goes on forever. I’m in the middle of a tile-floor Sahara. Running is not in the plan.
A voice cracks out like punishment.
“Jamie C.!”
The beast falls still and the girl next to me stands. Every eyeball in the room turns to look at her. And me. I slump into my seat to get back at them, wrapping my arms across my chest. I look so comfy, I could be in a La-Z-Boy. Fuck you, beast. You don’t scare me.
Except, my butt is scared. It hurts like hell. I can’t be sitting on hard plastic right now. But I won’t let that “staff” know it hurts. Trying to look as tough as I can, I move my arms and slide my hands under my butt. By raising my thumbs I can lever myself up, get a pocket of air back there.
The standing girl starts talking. “I remember the first time I smoked pot, I was with a bunch of popular kids. I only got to be there because my cousin was visiting from California, and—”
The guy on the barstool cuts her off. “Your druggie cousin?” he says. He looks sixteen, but his voice sounds way older.
“Yeah. My druggie cousin. They thought she was a movie star or something, because she’s totally pretty. And I really wanted to be cool, so I tried to smoke pot. I didn’t like it. I coughed ’til I puked, and then I kept coughing and puking. Little bits of my puke got on the popular kids.”
Nobody laughs at that. Nobody. That choice line, that could make the whole basement crack up, wasted. The girl stands there a second, like she’s waiting for the laugh, and then she sits down.
“Love ya, Jamie!” the beast screams in one massive voice.
You know in cartoons, when somebody gets trapped in a giant bell, his eyeballs spin and his eardrums pop out when it gets gonged? That’s exactly how I feel, sitting in front of that voice. Who are these freaks? Where am I?
The flapping arms and heads start back up. I take another look around, but I don’t like what I find. Up high on the walls, there’s a massive row of signs. They’re full of, like, God gibberish. Here’s what they say.
THE SEVEN STEPS
1. Admit I am powerless over _____________ and come to believe that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity.
2. Make a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God as I understand Him.
3. Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself, daily.
4. Admit to God, myself, and another human being the exact nature of my wrongs, immediately.
5. Make direct amends to such people whenever possible except when to do so would injure them, myself, or others.
6. Seek through prayer and meditation to improve my conscious contact with God as I understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for me and the power to carry that out.
7. Having received the gift of awareness, I will practice these principles in all my daily affairs and carry the message to others.
I have no idea what this means, but it has shit to do with me, or the God I know. How the fuck am I gonna deal with this ’til Saturday?
Saturday will make three days. Back in that torture room, before the “staff” guy walked out, he said I was here for a three-day evaluation. He said, “If we determine you have a chemical dependency and need the help Straight offers, your program will last a minimum of six months.”
So. They’re gonna “evaluate” me for three days, and then they’ll realize how fucking stupid they are. I obviously don’t belong here with these drug zombies. They’ll see. I’ll just sit here and be invisible for three days, watching the freak show. Then I’ll go back to Bridgeport with awesome stories to tell.
13
HANG ON TIGHT TO NEWCOMERS BY THE BELT LOOP
There’s been this smell, like a big hot fart, for the last hour. There’s also been sounds that aren’t the beast—a pang, then some voices. They’re coming from behind a boarded-up window in the wall; there’s light in the crack underneath it. But I can’t quite hear what’s happening back there over the sound of thrashing arms.
Then the barstool guy goes, “Dinner rap!” and people start to move.
Some kids stand, then walk down their aisle of chairs. Others scooch forward in their seats and stay there. There’s an ugly girl walking toward me, and the chick in the next chair, “Jamie C.,” goes to the edge of her seat. She spins her knees toward the barstools and leans her face forward, offering her ass to the ugly girl, like a dog in heat. It’s twisted. The ugly girl does that butt-grab thing. She pulls Jamie up with a thumb through her belt loop and four fingers curled into her waistband. Since Jamie’s zipper is now level with my face, I can see her jeans cut into her coochie like a string hammock. A fucking front wedgie. And she doesn’t say a word!
Man, I am not having some big monster slice my jeans into my z-z again. Wherever everyone’s going, I’ll get there on my own. So I stand. I stand and set off a bomb.
“Sit down!” a voice blasts.
To somebody, this is an emergency. I look left to see who it is, and there’s Barrette Chick, all bulging eyes and dropped jaw. With her hands on my shoulders, she pushes me down hard, like I didn’t just have a finger crammed up my butt, in that torture room. Like a blast of fire didn’t just shoot up through my middle. Then she’s reaching around and grabbing the back of my jeans. She shows me how pissed she is as she hauls me to my feet. I feel her fury, right between my legs. I want to fucking punch her, but something stops me, makes me look up…and I see the blond girl on the barstool, staring at me again. This time she’s not smiling.
The words from earlier come back to me: “Cyndy’s violent tendencies are a clear indicator of drug abuse… You’re here for a three-day evaluation.”
When I was still in Stamford, this family of bad boys lived down the street. They would hold a magnifying glass over a trapped ant to make it catch on fire. I tried to save the ant by fighting them, but they would knock me down, laughing. Today, I’m the ant. I have three days to make sure I don’t catch fire. I drop my eyes and wiggle a little, trying to loosen the z-z-knife. Barrette Chick wrenches it in deeper.
She directs me with a push of her hand, but otherwise, she’s silent. Everybody is. In the silence, there’s movement, a complicated arranging of bodies. There’s a ton of boys, each with another boy’s hand holding the back of their pants, in a line at the now-open window. There’s this raggedy flock of girls standing twenty feet behind them.
Three days, man. Three days, I tell myself.
When I get to the window, I see where the fart sme
ll was coming from. It’s one of those big, lonely church kitchens with the shelves full of pots, each big enough to boil a kid. Under the window, there’s a counter lined with Styrofoam trays. Each tray holds a Dixie cup of water, a white bread bologna sandwich, and this gunk, which must be the fart-smell stuff. I want to study it for a second, figure out what it is, but the fist in my spine tells me otherwise. Barrette Chick is digging her knuckles into me, forcing me forward, and it hurts. What does she do, lift weights with those knuckles?
When she drops me back off at my seat, I snatch a look around. These kids are sitting up, ramrod straight, eating this shit with one hand and waving their other at the new kids sitting on the barstools. Fucking freaks!
Well it’s been a lot of hours since breakfast at Shirley’s. So I eat the bread, but not the gunk. I’ll show them. I don’t eat farts.
14
NO HANGING OUT IN PARKING LOT
It feels like ten years have passed since my mother left me here, but somehow, it’s still the same day. The beast is lining up again. A new hand is in my pants, and it belongs to some girl named Sandy. I got matched with her when the staff guy, the one who looked in my asshole, stood up with a clipboard.
“Okay, listen up! Host home changes!”
He starts reeling off names, and people get moving. Then I hear my name.
“Cyndy E. with Sandy G.!”
And this girl comes up and grabs me by the butt.
That’s about all I know. I’m going somewhere with someone named Sandy, wearing a coat that’s not mine. There’s a volcano of jackets on the floor behind the beast. Sandy steers me up to it and pulls a ski jacket from the pile. It’s purple and orange and cream, and she holds it in front of my nose.
“Nah, that’s—”
That’s all I get out, before there’s a “Shhhh!” in my ear and another upward yank on my jeans.
Still holding it in my face, she gives the jacket a shake, like, “Shut up and take it.” So I slide my arms into its sleeves. I just hope there’s no lice in it.