by M. F. Lorson
“Hold up! Do I even want to hear why you’re here? You're starting to gross me out.”
“Just let me finish.”
“Okay, but..”
“Seriously, shush. I’m not saying I’m a child molester, though I appreciate your jumping to that conclusion so readily. I’m saying people’s reaction to why I’m here would be the same, disgust. I should know because it disgusts me.” For once Wanda looked vulnerable, her hands clasped to keep from shaking, never looking up from the table as she spoke. I was overcome with the strongest urge to reach across the table, cover her hand with mine and say, everything was gonna be fine, kind of a conflicting emotion considering how unpleasant the first half of the semester had been largely thanks to her. Instead I just nodded, prompting her to continue. “Back home I was a mean girl, and I had a little troupe of mean girl followers.”
“Old habits die hard I guess”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean Liz and Ariel. You three kind of have that dynamic.” Wanda nodded coolly.
“That’s what happens when you make people afraid of you. The ones who are the most afraid cling to you. They feel safer I guess. The difference is back home I didn’t set out to scare people. Here it’s a necessity, there I didn’t even realize I was doing it. I thought those girls were my friends because they wanted to be, because we liked the same stuff, we thought all the same things were funny. I kinda learned the hard way that the people you hang out with aren’t your friends though. Because, you'll notice I’m in here and they aren’t, yet we all did it. We were all a part of it. I’m just the only one who admitted it.”
“The “it” being….”
“I’m getting to that. This group of girls and I used to torture other girls, like girls who were cuter than us, or like if one of us had a crush on someone and he liked another girl, we might make things hard for that girl until she went away. It was usually that sort of thing and we always felt entitled to do it because we could always come up with a good reason that person deserved it.
“It sounds like you were a super fair bully.” Wanda glared.
“If I were proud of this stuff you’d already know about it.”
“Continue.”
“ I liked this senior. He was really nice, like to everyone, including me, which made me like him so much because as I’m sure you’ve gathered I had a reputation for being a horrible bitch. The kind of guys that liked me weren’t nice. They were hot, they had money, they could be charming when they wanted something, but they weren’t ever genuinely nice. He acted like he didn’t know what people said about me. He just took me at face value all the time. I had convinced myself that I liked him so much that it had to be mutual. I thought he was gonna ask me to prom.” Wanda’s voice began to waiver. “ But he didn’t he asked this girl Mariah. She was super mousy, but just really cool. I was so jealous Kate,” there was desperation in her eyes “ and the girls, they just kept feeding me all this hate, talking about how she knew I liked him and was probably just going with him to humiliate me. Didn’t I want to get revenge? That sort of stuff. If it was just any guy we would have done the same thing we always did, start a rumor, pick on her clothes, squeeze a fat joke in here and there. He wasn’t just any guy though. I didn’t want him to see firsthand that all those things people said about me were true. So we started thinking of other ways. Ways to hurt her without being blamed. After awhile my “friend” Angela got this idea, that we could do it online. You see Ryan was from a really wholesome family. He wasn’t allowed to use the internet for anything outside of homework. I knew that because we had done a project together and we had to meet at the library the whole time. So we knew that if it was online he wouldn’t see it and we knew if we did it right she wouldn’t talk about it either.”
“This is starting to sound like a Lifetime movie.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where Angie got the idea.”
“Continue.”
“So we set up a facebook account in Ryan’s name and we sent her a friend request. It was after school got out for the summer so we didn’t have to worry about the two of them interacting face to face. They weren’t dating. As far as we knew Prom was their only get together but that didn’t mean he didn’t like her. Ryan just wasn’t allowed to date. If he coulda been dating it would have been her and that was enough for me to get crazy stupid. We started out slow. Just emailing back and forth as Ryan. Saying what a great time we had at prom and how he wanted to see her over the summer but of course that was impossible. We got her to trust “him” and then we started digging into her personal life for ammunition. We asked her question after question, looking for something we could use to humiliate her. For every answer she gave us “Ryan” revealed something about himself. For a month we got nothing useful. Just a bunch of embarrassing stories, walking around with your skirt tucked into your underwear types of stories nothing we could really use and then we hit the motherload. We asked about her first kiss. She responded, Nick.” Wanda was silent, the tremble in her hands growing more noticeable by the moment.
“Who was Nick?” I prompted.
“He was her brother. Her Step-brother technically but they’d grown up in the same house since Mariah was born.”
“That’s kind of gross.”
“It’s super gross. But not for the reasons you think. Nick was five years older than Mariah. He’s been in college for the last four years. When they started being romantic, or whatever you want to call it, she was in the seventh grade. He was a high school junior. It was wrong of HIM and she was too young to really understand. He told her they didn’t share blood so it was okay. He didn’t tell her the myriad of other reasons their relationship was inappropriate. By the time he left for college she was old enough to be ashamed but she didn’t know how to stop it either. Everytime he came home for a holiday it started up again. When she protested he would threaten to tell people. He told her people in our town would be disgusted and she still had years left to live among them. She poured out her heart about all of this. Even though her greatest fear was that if people knew they would reject her. She did it because she trusted Ryan, because Ryan was a good guy and we had spent all summer making her believe they were sharing each other's secrets. After she dropped the bomb about Nick we knew what to do. We knew that to shatter her all we had to do was play in to her fears. We made her believe that Nick was right all along. She finally had the courage to tell someone, a first step toward coming out about the incest and we shoved her back into the closet as hard as was humanly possible.”
“I don’t understand what did you do?”
“We wrote her back as Ryan. We told her she was disgusting, that she obviously liked it for it to go on this long and that Nick could have her because we wanted nothing to do with her.”
“Ouch.”
“Only that wasn’t all. We also told her we would tell everyone. That everyone deserved to know.” At this point Wanda was unsuccessful at holding back tears.
“Did you?”
“We didn’t have to. Mariah hung herself three days after our last message from Ryan.”
“Wanda…” Wanda sniffed wiping the tears off her cheeks with the sleeves of her Huntley and Drake issued sweater. She stood to go, hastily shoving her work back into the velvet cases .
“So you can see why I would appreciate it if you kept this between the two of us.”
“I..” I didn’t know what to say. Of course I wouldn’t tell but she already knew that. What I wanted to say was that it wasn’t her fault. That Nick was to blame, or that Mariah had clearly been on the brink for a long time, but none of that came out. It didn’t matter anyway. Wanda left the room without so much as a goodbye.
Chapter 19
Wanda may not have been my favorite person but the girl kept her word. By lights out Tuesday, Robyn’s necklace had mysteriously reappeared at her bedside and Ariel was looking particularly sheepish. I thought that Robyn would be happy to have it back but a
ll it seemed to do was make her hell bent on finding out who took it and how to punish them. Maybe it was easier to channel her feelings about the assault into anger about her necklace whatever the case Robyn had all but given up on school entirely. If it weren’t for Sydney she would have been cut weeks ago. Sydney, was the one who went to bat for Robyn. Sydney was the one who begged Ms. Lewis to give her more time to adjust. I did the best I could to help Robyn. I let her copy my homework I stood up for her when the other girls complained that she got special privileges. I’d even made sure to put my math test as close to the edge of my desk as possible so that she could copy down the answers when I knew she hadn’t studied. These days all she did was lay on her cot, drag herself to a minimal number of classes and walk briskly around the campus muttering under her breath and plotting God knows what. Half the time she didn’t even show up for meals.
I was not giving up on her but I didn’t have much faith that things would turn around. Cuts were less than a month away and once the upperclassmen returned space would be limited. They couldn’t keep dead weight around just because they felt sorry for her. The spots at this school were meant to rehabilitate kids. Robyn wasn’t gaining anything from being here and it wouldn’t be long before Dean Humphries and Ms. Lewis found someone that needed that cot more than she did.
I knew I had to worry about myself but it was impossible to focus when I knew I was about to lose my only real girlfriend. I thought I was hiding my concern well but apparently not. Even Jordan picked up on my mood and we only saw each other for forty five minute blocks of time, time that was usually spent running and not talking. “Are you freaking out because you’re worried about cuts or are you freaking out because you're having a girl thing I don’t want to know about.”
“I have no idea how to answer that question.”
“I’m asking if you want to talk. If something's bothering you? I could be helpful, probably not, but possibly.”
“Wow, you really know how to get a girl to open up.” Jordan scoffed.
“I’m giving it my all here.”
“I gathered that. It’s nothing. I’m distracted. It’s dumb.”
“Please don’t tell me you're jeopardizing your spot here because you think a boy is like really cute and stuff’.” I socked him in the shoulder just hard enough to illicit a howl.
“I am absolutely not upset over a boy.”
“Really? You don’t mind that your study buddy is all hot and heavy with Wanda?”
“One, how do you know that he is hot and heavy with Wanda? And two, even if he was I would only care because he can do better.”
“You think that douche bag deserves someone better?”
“As a matter of fact I do. And what's it to you. You barely know him.”
“I don’t have to know him. I know guys like him.”
“I would have thought being here for the last three years would teach you not to judge someone based on what type of person they appear to be.”
“Three years here also taught me that there are some types of people that can’t change and I would bet money that he is one of them.”
“I think you're wrong.”
“Really? What do you really know about him huh? Why’s he in here? What did he do? If he could go back and change one time in his life what would it be?”
“I...I don’t know...we haven’t gotten that far.”
“Exactly, you need to trust me Kate. He’s not good. You don’t want to be hanging out with him.” I couldn’t tell if he was jealous or sad, the tone in his voice was indeterminable. I knew I was pushing it but I opened my big mouth anyway.
“What’s it to you anyway?”
“What’s it to me? What’s it to me Kate? I care about you. Can’t you tell that?” My face turned ten shades of red.
“You care about me?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I care about you and I don’t want you tagging along with that piece of shit Hayden instead of focusing on cuts.”
“So when you said you care about me you meant you care whether or not I make cuts.”
“Yes!”
“And that's all you meant?” Now it was his turn to blush.
“I don’t know what all I meant. Look Kate, this conversation is going exactly where I don’t want it to go. Could you just do me a favor and be careful when it comes to him? There’s things you don’t know and I don’t want you getting hurt.”
“If there's things I need to know then you need to tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t? You can’t tell me why I should stay away from Hayden? How about you. Why don’t you tell me why you’re in here?” Jordan sighed,
“I can’t tell you that either Kate.” Part of me wanted to tell him that was okay. We could talk later. He could take his time. But a louder part of me opened my God damn mouth and called him a hypocrite.
“When you can come clean about yourself. That is when you can start telling me who everyone else is. Until then, I’ll trust my own judgement thank you very much.” It was obvious that we both wanted to say more but the nine pm bell was already chiming. He had rounds to do and I had to work on my sociology presentation. He sounded off one more warning before trotting off to his first watch. I didn’t want to admit it but when he said he cared about me. For just a minute there I hoped he meant cared about me. You know, romantically. It was crushing when he recanted. I knew his intentions for warning me about Hayden were good but I also trusted Hayden. I had never asked Hayden to tell me about his past. I had asked Jordan and he didn’t trust me enough to answer. Maybe it was time to ask Hayden and see where we really stood.
Chapter 20
Back at the barracks all of the girls were knee deep in finals preparation. There was a quiet yet frantic buzz amongst us all as everyday closer to cuts made us more and more aware that whether we stayed or left was reliant upon who stayed or left in our place. The only class I had any real confidence in was sociology. Bill’s bread crumbs had led me down an interesting path. Reading about deviance didn’t feel like homework. I was beginning to understand what Bill meant when he said that no one could understand deviance the way the students at Huntley and Drake would.
In sociology deviance is defined as an action or behavior that violates social norms. Having committed any crime was generally considered an act of deviance. So, everyone at Huntley and Drake had been labeled a deviant at one time. The trick would be to make them understand what led them there in the first place. There were a lot of theories out there. Some people believed that people became deviant because they didn’t feel a connection with society in the first place, and therefore had no motivation to follow its rules. Others felt that it was being labeled a deviant in the first place that made a person participate in deviant behavior. I didn’t really know where I stood. As a child no one had ever labeled me anything. I was your average white girl, trouble at home but well behaved out in the world. Yet, I had committed a crime. What did that say about me? Did I do it because I couldn’t relate to society? Because I didn’t feel I had anything to lose? It didn’t seem that simple. What the sociologists didn’t seem to address was motivation. Sure, they talked about how a person with no close connections might not feel guilt breaking rules that don’t matter to them, but they didn’t say what would motivate a regular person to stop caring what people thought. At some point each and every one of us at this school had decided that the crime we wanted to commit was more important than what other people thought of us. And now we lived in a society in which everyone had committed a crime. If committing a crime was normal here than did we stop being deviants the moment we enrolled?
I had a thousand questions and no one to ask them to. When I thought of my peers here and the things they had done to get here, I didn’t really know whether or not their sins made them bad people. I didn’t think I was a bad person or that Hayden, Jordan, Robyn or even Wanda were. We had all made mistakes but weren’t we all here because we wanted to be better? Because
we wanted to be accepted back into society? Wasn’t a return to normalcy what everyone here was seeking? We wanted to go to college. We wanted clean slates. We wanted to conform. The question was, now that we were all labeled deviants, would society want us back? I didn’t know the answer to that, and it ate at me.
Chapter 21
It was assembly day, which at my old school would have been cause for celebration. Assemblies typically take up class time and the less time I spent in class the better. Here at Huntley and Drake however, assembly day meant one thing, cuts. Cuts were just around the corner and if I was being really honest with myself I wasn’t so sure I had what it takes to secure a spot in the dorms. Today would be the last assembly in which the upper classmen still lived off campus. By this time next week some of us would be going home and hoards of them would be moving in. I was just getting used to the newbies, throwing upperclassmen in the mix was overwhelming to think about. What if there were already upperclassmen on the track team? Would they even need me? Whenever this kind of self doubt crept in I tried to remember that Jordan and I had done everything in our power to prepare for cuts. If I didn’t make it, then I wasn’t good enough and no amount of preparation could change that.
If only my grades were better, than my skill wouldn’t matter so much but quite frankly my academic performance thus far could best be described as towing the line. The old me would have felt pretty damn good about this. Towing the line was the best I had done in school in years. Not failing was to me what being named valedictorian was for other people, a big friggin deal! But, that didn’t matter here. It wasn’t me against me at Huntley and Drake. It had been clear since that first meeting at the San Jose Correctional Institution that I had to do more than beat myself to earn a permanent spot on this campus.