by Liane Shaw
thinandbeautiful.com
thinandbeautiful.com
Liane Shaw
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Shaw, Liane
thinandbeauiful.com / by Liane Shaw.
ISBN 978-1-897187-62-3
CIP DATA TO COME
Copyright © 2009 by Liane Shaw
Cover and text design by Melissa Kaita
Cover photo by istockphoto
Printed and bound in Canada
Second Story Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.
Published by
SECOND STORY PRESS
20 Maud Street, Suite 401
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M5V 2M5
www.secondstorypress.ca
March 13
It’s morning again. I can tell because the sun came up. It keeps doing that, whether I want it to or not.
I used to like mornings … or so I’m told. I don’t really remember. My mother tells me that I used to be a morning person. I’m not a morning person now. I’m not a night person either. I don’t know what kind of person I am. Maybe I’m just a person without a time – or a place. Or maybe I’m not a person at all. I should go outside and see if I still have a shadow.
I won’t be going anywhere until I do what I’m told like a good little girl. Everyone here has to come up with some sort of lame personal goal they have to aim for before they can get out of here. Kind of like a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it isn’t really free because you have to work for it. I couldn’t think of anything remotely interesting so the obnoxiously cheerful redhead with the clipboard, who thinks she’s an expert on everything completely unimportant, told me I had to write down my memories and my feelings. How do you “write down” a feeling?
Anyway, I’m doing what she said because I figure they’ll let me out of this dump sooner if I look like I’m trying to do what they ask me to do. I look on it as kind of a game where no one knows the rules but me. That way, I’m sure I’ll win. I just haven’t totally figured out how yet. I do know what the big prize is, though. Freedom.
I still can’t believe I actually ended up here. My parents talked about it a couple of times when they thought I was out of earshot, but I never thought they would actually do it. I mean, it’s not like I’m some kind of criminal or something who needs to be locked away for the protection of society. I’m also not some kind of nutcase who pops pills or decorates her arms with slash marks. I know some kids like that. There was once this girl at my school who asked me if I wanted to see something cool. I said sure, why not? So she takes me into the auditorium, because she’s one of those audiovisual club geeks, and looks around to make sure no one is there. I look around, too, like we’re in some bizarre detective movie and we’re bank robbers checking for cops. I don’t know what I thought she was going to show me, but I’ve got to admit that I was pretty freaked when she rolled up her sleeves to show off a bunch of little round scars and big red lines all over her arms. I asked her what happened and she told me she had done it to herself with cigarettes and a utility knife. I thought I was going to puke, but I didn’t. I just shook my head and walked away. I didn’t know what to say to her. I couldn’t figure out why she showed it to me in the first place. I didn’t tell anyone about it. Maybe I should have told someone about it.
I wonder what happened to her. I don’t remember seeing her around much after that. Maybe she ended up in a place like this. Hey, maybe she’s here. I should look for her. It would be nice to see a familiar face.
I mean, I know she isn’t really here. It’s just that someone like her probably needs to be in a dump like this where she’s locked up so she can’t hurt herself. I’m not like her. I didn’t do anything to deserve being stuck in here. But they locked me up anyway and threw away the key. Actually, it’s even worse than that. They locked me up and took away my Internet. My whole lifeline to everyone and anyone who matters is floating away in cyberspace. The only Internet access in this social black hole is down in some office where we prisoners aren’t allowed to go. One of these nights, I’m going to find a way to get down there. This is a free country after all. I have a right to the Internet. I’m sure it’s in the Constitution.
It’s bizarre. I mean, really, why would anyone waste time making some fancy private treatment prison for people who just want to look good? I didn’t think that was a crime but I ended up here anyway. I didn’t even get my day in court. I was arrested and convicted by my parents and my mental-case doctor without any chance to tell my side at all.
chapter 1
Maybe this whole memory-writing thing isn’t such a bad idea after all. At least I’ll get to tell my story to someone – even if it’s only to myself. So, here it goes.
The story of my life, by Madison J. Nessfield.
OK, so I lied. I’m not going to write down the story of my life. First of all, I don’t have it all sitting in my head. I mean, I have lots of pieces of it, like an endless stream of thirty-second commercials running through my brain. I don’t even know if all of the pieces are actually real or if I pulled them from pictures and home movies. I don’t remember a lot of the details either. It’s more like I have black-and-white pictures in my brain and I have to fill in the colors with my imagination. It doesn’t matter much, I guess. I just need to figure out which memories I should be trying to remember so I can keep everyone happy and make it look like I’m trying to figure out my life. I don’t even know where to start. I guess at the beginning.
My earliest memory is from when I was three and I had just wet my pants outside in my driveway. Nice, eh? I had wanted to ride my bike so much that I just kind of lost track of time and all of a sudden there’s this yellow puddle on my seat. I was totally petrified that I was going to get yelled at because I was too stupid to run in to the bathroom. I got up and started bawling like a complete baby. All of a sudden I felt these arms around me and I was being picked up. My friend’s mom had me in this bear hug and was telling me that everything was all right. She probably got all wet and gross but she didn’t even care. She made me feel like everything was all right. No one yelled at me at all.
Flash ahead. Now I’m like six and I’ve graduated to a twowheeler. I had those dinky little training wheel deals on the bike for almost the whole summer and then I decided I was ready to go it alone. My mom said she’d hold the seat so I could balance. So there I was, sitting all proud on my pink seat on my even pinker bike, and my mom started running and pushing me down the sidewalk while I pumped my legs like a maniac trying to move on my own. She’s all panting and puffing and I’m yelling at her to let go. So she did, and I fell flat on my butt with my pretty pink bike on top of me. My mom tried to help me up and I slapped at her hand and did it myself. My dad joined the party and tried to hold the seat so I could try it again, but I slapped him too. Nice kid. Anyway, I kept climbing on and falling down and getting ticked at the people trying to help me up until I finally managed to wobble my way down the sidewalk. I just had to do it my own way. Your own way is always the best way. It’s hard to do something wrong if you made it up in the first place.
Next clip, kindergarten. My buddy Annie and I used to walk to kindergarten every day by ourselves. Well, that’s not really true. In my mind we were alone, but my mom reminded me a few years ago that we were always being followed by a couple of grade eight kids who lived on our street and made a few bucks a week watching us hike to school. I guess it wasn’t too far from our house, but it seemed like miles and miles to us, with our short little kid legs
. The day in question was a rainy one. Annie and I had on these little yellow raincoats that we thought were wonderful, but probably made us look like mutated ducks. We had rubber boots on, too, which gave us instant permission to jump in all of the puddles. The boots always got full of water but we didn’t care. It was kind of fun to dump them out and make new puddles inside the house.
Annie decided that we needed to do something different than puddle jumping on the way to school that day. She got the brilliant idea that worm collecting was a much better use of our time. At least, in my memory it was her idea. I don’t remember any of this being my fault. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to pick the squiggly little guys up or not, but Annie persuaded me that her mother was in desperate need of worms for her garden. I had loved Annie’s mother madly ever since the whole pants-peeing incident, so I reluctantly, but bravely, agreed. It was more fun than I had thought it would be, and we managed to pretty much fill the big square pockets on our fancy yellow coats with piles of squirming, stinking, desperate worms.
It didn’t occur to either of us to wonder what the worms were going to do all morning while we learned our ABCs from the tall and terrifying MRS. FINDLAY. I put her name in capitals because when I remember her she is always larger than life. She looked about ten feet tall to us. She always made me think of a scary dragon that terrorized the townspeople in a book my brother read to me once when my mom wasn’t listening. Man, that book scared me for weeks! The dragon was huge and ferocious and ate little children for breakfast. MRS. FINDLAY looked at us in the exact same way that the dragon in the book looked at the children it wanted to have as appetizers. In my memory, she even looks like a dragon, with greenish-gray skin and big teeth. I seem to remember long, red fingernails that could have been claws covered in fresh blood from some poor, unsuspecting cow that she had eaten for dessert. She was very strict and always wanted the classroom kept really neat and tidy, just like the dragon, who picked the bones of his victims sparkling clean so that his cave wouldn’t get messed up. We learned quickly that we had better always clean up after ourselves at school and carefully hang our coats up in the cloakroom on the proper hook, making sure that our boots were lined up underneath the little bench.
So that’s exactly what Annie and I did on that rainy day. We carefully hung our coats on the proper hook. It was a little hard to do because they were heavier than usual, but we managed it. Then we took off our boots and put on our shoes, careful not to make puddles on MRS. FINDLAY’S floor – floor puddles were saved for home where our mothers just shook their heads and mopped them up. Satisfied that we had met the required standards of kindergarten cleanliness, we went to our seats to become brilliant.
We were, understandably, completely shocked about an hour later when MRS. FINDLAY threw a complete and total hissy fit.
“Who put these … these things here!” she yelled, standing in the cloakroom. I’m not really sure if that’s what she actually yelled, but it was something like that. We all froze in our seats, shaking in our shoes and wondering what the heck she was talking about. She came out of the cloakroom, with her face all red and kind of shiny looking. Her eyes were bugging out of her head like some kind of maniac insect and she seemed to be having trouble breathing. Her dragon teeth were glistening with saliva, which was threatening to drip down onto the floor. We cowered in fear, certain that she was going to start breathing fire at any moment.
“What is this?” she asked, holding up a worm that was desperately trying to escape her evil clutches.
“It’s a worm,” Bobby Smith said helpfully. I made up his name. It’s close enough.
“I know it’s a worm! I want to know how it got in my cloakroom!” She looked around at our terrified faces, her eyes boring into our tiny brains. We couldn’t run, we couldn’t hide! We also couldn’t talk, so we just sat there with our tongues glued to the insides of our mouths.
“Did you do this?” she glared at me with eyes like lasers. I shook my head. Annie shook her head too, even though MRS. FINDLAY wasn’t even looking at her. I think that’s what gave us away. That, and the fact that the worms were busily crawling out of the pockets of two little yellow coats with Annie and Madison labels stitched carefully into the collars.
We didn’t get eaten and no one got burned. But we did have our first detention that day. We didn’t even know what the word meant, but we knew it was pretty bad. It came with a note that we had to take home to our parents. We couldn’t read yet, so we didn’t know what horrors the mishmash of ABCs contained. I was kind of surprised when I showed my mom the note and she laughed about it. I didn’t think that having a dragon for a teacher was very funny. I never did find out what the note said.
Annie and I were best friends from that day forward, bonded for life by a mutual fear of dragons. When we got a little older, we stopped being afraid of them and developed a kind of obsession with them. We bought each other dragon stuff for years on every birthday and Christmas and any other occasion we could come up with. I have practically every size, shape, and color of dragon you could imagine.
Annie and I aren’t friends anymore, though. I think she’s part of the reason I’m in this place. I guess the bond wasn’t for life after all.
I wonder if she kept all her dragons.
March 16
One of the nameless horde of prison guards just came in to give me my protein shake. That’s what they call it. Isn’t that a joke? They tell me it isn’t fattening or anything, that it’s just full of vitamins, nutrients, and vegetable juice. Yum. I know they’re lying. It’s thick and gross and disgusting and I can tell it has more calories in it than a McD’s triple thick shake. I have to drink it, though. If I don’t, I’ll get solitary confinement. That means I would have to sit in this little room where they’d have someone watching my every move. They’ll take me away from everything I have that makes me feel a little bit like me.
Not that I have much in this place – a few books, my CD player, a pillow that I brought from home that has a dragon embroidered on it. I think Annie gave it to me, so I guess I shouldn’t have brought it. Anyway, it’s comfortable, but I bet I wouldn’t be allowed to have it with me because they’d likely think I was going to put it over my face and suffocate myself. I bet they wouldn’t even let me take my writing stuff in case I write myself to death. All I’d be left with is thinking. I don’t really like to think for extended periods of time. It makes my brain hurt. Not hurt as in physical pain, like a headache. It’s just that there seems to be too much to think about. My body, my parents, my friends, my weight, my school, what to eat, when to exercise, how to get out of here, why my life sucks…. It’s like my thoughts start moving too fast and filling up all of the empty spaces so that I can’t separate them from each other. I literally can’t think straight because I don’t have room to keep them organized. The pressure builds until I feel like I might explode if one more thought tries to squeeze in there, so I try to make them all go away. The problem is that the more I try not to think, the more I think about thinking, which starts to make me feel basically nuts. So, thinking is not really my favorite sport.
So, I take the proteins and suck them back like a model prisoner, which I am. But they’re not as smart as they think they are. I have unsupervised bathroom privileges because I’ve been such a good girl, so the protein shake can always visit Mr. Toilet when no one is around. I can do it with no sound at all, so even if Big Red and her squad of bathroom police are listening outside the door, they figure I’m just doing what people do in the can. It’s my game. Madison, one–Redheaded Demon, zero.
chapter 2
I can’t believe it took me a whole chapter to get up to kindergarten. The good news is that the rest of my childhood, up until I hit the whole teen thing, is mostly one boring run-on sentence, with blurred images here and there. I don’t even bother with thirty-second commercial memories – more like five-second sound bites. I do remember being a nerd-baby in school. I wanted to be the smartest and never quite m
anaged it. I would always wait when the tests or report cards were handed out, sure that this time I would be the number one geek. But there was always someone with one mark higher. Come to think of it, it was always the same someone. I hated her for years and now I can’t even remember her name. Weird.
Annie was always so much cooler than me about everything. She was super smart but didn’t feel the need to show it off. Annie was actually named by her grandmother, who was a big fan of the book Anne of Green Gables. Annie has her grandma’s Japanese copy of the book and she brought it to school and tried to read a bit to us, but she didn’t really know all that much Japanese so it was kind of funny. Annie even reminds me of Anne, all strong willed and creative and full of answers. Except that Annie’s hair is black instead of red. She did try to dye it once just to see what she would look like, but it turned out kind of mud-colored. If it had been me, I would have dyed it back to black before anyone saw me, but she left it that way. She never seemed to really care what people thought about her. There’s this expression I’ve heard about marching to your own drummer. That’s what Annie has always been able to do. She has her own music playing in her head and the sounds from the people outside never manage to drown it out. The music in my head always has the volume turned down so low that I can’t hear my own music over everyone else’s.
Music. Now, that’s something I do remember. I played the piano from the time I could read. My first piano lessons were in the lunchroom in my elementary school and we all sat at the lunch tables with cardboard cutouts of the keyboard. There was only one piano and maybe twelve kids or so, so we all had to wait for our two-minute turn on the real deal. I loved it from day one. We had an old player piano at home that you could pedal with your feet and make amazing songs come out. I used to sit on my dad’s knee and try to hit the pedals when I was little. I remember being so excited the first time I managed it on my own. It was easy to get excited back then, I guess.