by Sean Black
“Good. You’re getting it, Price. Fast learners always do much better here than students who try to fight the system.”
She heard the beep as he punched in the digits. She listened hard. Maybe different digits made a different sound. If they did, she couldn’t tell.
She heard the bolt open. She turned around, half expecting another penalty because she hadn’t waited to be told she was allowed to. The staff member pushed the blue door open.
“This, Price, is going to be your new home while you’re here.”
He walked into the room. She held back, hovering in the doorway.
“You can come in. The three-step doesn’t apply in here.” He turned to face her and smiled. “Not enough space to keep three steps from each other at all times.”
He wasn’t kidding. The room itself was tiny. At least for the number of occupants.
There were three windows spaced equally alongside the far wall. They looked out onto a paved central courtyard. Within the room, there were three rows of thin mattresses laid out on the floor. Each row was made up of six mattresses. Each mattress had a single, equally thin foam pillow, two sheets and a rough wool blanket. Along one wall was a series of open lockers. The contents of each locker looked to be identical. Toothbrush, toothpaste, a hairbrush, clothes, a wash cloth, and a towel.
The walls were white. No arrows, but the same range of motivational posters. On the wall opposite the lockers there was a chart. Ruth couldn’t read it from where she was standing, and she didn’t want to walk over to it without permission. She stood where she was and tried not to break down in tears. That was what she wanted to do.
Apart from when she found out that her parents were divorcing, she couldn’t remember ever feeling so low before. This was her new home? Maybe for years. A week here would be bad enough.
Her mind flitted back to her room at home. To her posters, her clothes, all the things that made it home. She thought of the cat that her mom had bought her (no doubt to make up for the divorce). How she always came back from school to find Merlin curled up in the middle of her bed. He wasn’t a replacement for her dad being there, but he had been a comfort, something that made home feel a little less empty. She thought about all of that, looked around the bare room she had to share with strangers—a room that offered no privacy—and now she really had to fight back the tears.
There was a knock at the door. An older girl was standing there. She was dressed in staff uniform, although Ruth didn’t think she could have been old enough to be an actual staff member. She looked like one of the girls Ruth had seen earlier, walking in line.
“Rachel, this is Ruth Price. She just arrived. I was showing her the dorm,” said the male staff member, who still hadn’t told Ruth his name.
Rachel swept a hand through a mane of long, glossy chestnut hair. She was tan, with a perfect smile and long legs. She might have stepped out of a swimsuit advertisement in a teen girl magazine. “I can take care of that for you,” she said.
She might have been smiling but the look in her eyes was far from friendly. Ruth recognized it from the popular girls in her classes at high school back home.
“That’d be great if you would. I’m supposed to have a meeting in a few minutes.”
“Leave it with me, Father,” said Rachel.
Father? The guy didn’t look old enough to have a daughter Rachel’s age. Not just that, they didn’t look related. Then there was the way she had said it. It had come off creepy.
Rachel glanced back at Ruth. “Mr Fontaine is our house father. We call him Father. Staff may address us by our family name or our first name.”
“We’re like one big family. Isn’t that right, Rachel?”
“It is. One big happy family,” said Rachel.
Fontaine left them. Ruth could hear him whistling to himself as he walked back down the corridor. She stood awkwardly in the middle of the room. Rachel walked over to her, circling her slowly, looking her up and down.
“What are you here for?” she asked Ruth. “Dope? Booze? Whoring around?”
Ruth shook her head. She hadn’t done any of that. She wasn’t sure a few puffs of a single joint made you a doper. “I don’t know,” she said.
“No reason?” Rachel sounded incredulous.
“No,” said Ruth.
“There has to be a reason.”
“I guess there does,” said Ruth. “But I don’t know what it is.”
“Oh, wow, that’s really sad.” Rachel tilted her head back and laughed. It was a real mean-girl laugh. “Hey, maybe your parents just don’t like you.”
13
Donald Price paced up and down outside the entrance to the Four Seasons Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. In one hand, he held his cell phone, pressed hard to his ear. In his other he had a lit cigarette. Along with weight gain, and a stomach ulcer, smoking had been another unforeseen consequence of separation. He’d gone from being a former smoker of fifteen years’ standing (he’d stopped when Ruth was born) to a pack-a-day habit in a little under six months.
He brushed a stray cone of ash from the lapel of his sports coat and took a breath. “I’d like to speak to Ruth. I haven’t spoken to her since the weekend, and I don’t want her thinking I’ve disappeared off the radar.”
On the other end of the line his soon-to-be ex-wife, Sandra, offered to take a message.
“She’s not there?” he asked.
“Not right now, no. Or haven’t you been listening?”
“You just said she couldn’t come to the phone. I thought that maybe she was doing homework or something.”
“I’ll tell her you called—”
“No,” he said, cutting her off. “Not good enough. I want to speak to her.”
From other friends of his, guys who were either separated or divorced, he knew he had to make a concerted effort to maintain a relationship with his daughter. If he didn’t, it would slip away. Leaving messages, which would suit Sandra down to the ground, was the start of it.
He’d already had to spend tens of thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees just to be able to see Ruth one weekend a month and have two weeks with her over the summer vacation and a week at Christmas. It was money he’d hoped to use toward her college education, but the system was so hopelessly weighted against fathers that he’d had no choice but to use it to pay his attorney’s kids’ college tuition.
It could have all been avoided if his ex had been reasonable. But she hadn’t been, and it didn’t look like she was about to start now. If anything, over the past few months, she’d gotten worse.
Their relationship was now one of mutual contempt that was no longer even thinly disguised. Thinly disguised contempt had been about three months back. Now “openly hostile” would have been the more accurate description. And, despite Donald’s best efforts, maybe Sandra’s too, their daughter was in the middle. The one thing his ex knew she could use to hurt him, like he had hurt her. It was messed up, but hardly new when it came to couples splitting up. Children as the battleground for their parents’ failed relationship.
“She’s not here,” Sandra said finally.
“Where is she?” Donald demanded. Wouldn’t it have been easier for her to tell him where she was? Rather than making every single thing an uphill battle.
“Don’t speak to me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like that.”
It was as if they were reading from a script they’d run through so often that the pages must have been dog-eared from use and covered with coffee stains. “I tried her cell but it was switched off, or out of service,” said Donald.
“She’s at a friend’s. She probably turned off her phone and forgot to turn it back on again. You know how forgetful she can be sometimes.”
“Do you have a number for this friend?”
Sandra hesitated.
Something was off. He sensed it. You lived with someone as long as he and Sandra had been together, and you knew when they
were lying. Or holding something back, not telling you the whole truth.
“No.”
“You let her go to a friend’s but you don’t have a number for them?”
“I do but, listen, I’m really busy right now, okay? I wasn’t expecting you to call.”
“Sandra, stop. What are you not telling me here?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do.”
“This is harassment, Donald. Am I going to have to go talk to my attorney again, see if he can ask the judge to take another look at your visitation rights?”
Donald looked up. He had stopped in front of the hotel’s valet parking stand. A well dressed D.C. couple were staring at him. He didn’t blame them. He must have looked like a maniac, standing there, almost screaming into a cell phone while in his other hand the Marlboro burned down to the filter.
He hit the end-call button. He’d only say something that would make an already bad conversation even worse. He could call back later, speak to his daughter then.
He looked across at the couple, and shrugged an apology. “Sorry. Soon to be ex-wife,” Donald Price said to them, with a nod to his phone.
The man shot him an understanding smile. His female companion caught it and glared. The smile evaporated.
Donald walked past them and back into the hotel’s lobby. He had a meeting in five minutes about a deployment of security personnel to the Turkish-Syrian border and he still hadn’t finished writing the brief.
14
So, Chris already told you about the levels?” Rachel asked Ruth.
So that was his name. Chris Fontaine. Although he expected to be called “Dad” or “Father”. There was no way Ruth was going to call him that. She already had a dad. She didn’t need some creepy replacement.
“Yeah. You start at one and go up to six. When you hit level six Ms Applewhite will start preparing your exit plan.”
“You mean that’s when you get to go home?”
“If you want to, once the exit plan has been agreed, then yeah.”
If you wanted to? This girl was cracked.
“So you’ll be leaving soon?”
Rachel shrugged. “I guess so. I turned eighteen a few months ago, so I could have gone then if I’d really wanted to.”
The conversation was getting more and more bizarre. Who in their right mind would choose to stay here? A place out in the middle of nowhere, where you had to sleep in a room full of other kids, on a mattress.
Rachel seemed to sense Ruth’s incredulity. “If you leave without an exit plan, you get a one-way ticket and fifty bucks in your pocket. If your parents don’t want to take you back then you’re better off staying here.”
That made a little more sense. Even a mattress on a floor probably beat living on the streets.
Rachel twirled a finger through her hair. “Anyway, you’re like a million miles away from all that. It usually takes kids at least a year or two to move up to level six.”
Ruth’s heart, not for the first time in the past twenty-four hours, sank again. She wasn’t sure how she’d handle a month here. Never mind a year. She reminded herself that she wouldn’t have to. Not when her dad found out what had happened. What her mom had done.
But, right now, it would be better if she just played the game, went along with the program. No matter how crazy it seemed.
“The best thing you can do is to take one day at a time,” Rachel continued. “Do what you’re told, when you’re told to do it, and everything will be fine.”
Those were almost the exact same words Chris had come out with. Rachel had delivered them in exactly the same robotic way he had.
“That’s what you’ve done?” Ruth asked.
“Yeah, I guess,” said Rachel.
Ruth tried not to stare at her. She already had the idea that if Rachel wanted to, she could make her life even more miserable than it was now. Who in their right mind could like a place like this?
15
An hour later the other girls who lived in the room began to filter back. Although filter might not have been the right word. They appeared in a marching column that only broke up when they stepped into the room. As best as Ruth could tell, they ranged in age from about thirteen to seventeen. They all wore the same uniform that Ruth had been ordered to change into.
The uniform was white and consisted of a long skirt and the hideous, puffy blouse she’d noticed earlier. Instead of shoes or sneakers, each girl wore red or yellow flip-flops. That seemed to be the only color variation that Ruth had seen. No one wore make-up and, apart from girls with short hair, they all had their hair tied back in a ponytail.
A couple began to chat as they came into the room. A few nodded at Ruth or said hello. When Rachel appeared behind them, they clammed up. They all seemed wary around her. She wanted to ask what was up with the red and yellow flip-flops, but didn’t dare.
In the corner, Ruth noticed a girl who seemed to be around her age sneaking glances at her. The girl had red hair cut into a short bob, and was overweight. She also looked, thought Ruth, completely miserable—even by teen girls’ standards. Her shoulders slumped and, other than darting glances at Ruth, she stared at the floor, not making eye contact with anyone else in the room.
If no one else was going to introduce themselves, Ruth figured that she would have to make the first move. Even if she didn’t plan on sticking around, it might be useful to make a few friends while she was here. If nothing else, she might be able to get some information that would help her escape.
Ruth walked across to the girl with red hair. “Hey,” she said.
The girl glanced up at her. She looked like she might be about to burst into tears. It seemed a strange reaction to someone saying hey.
“I’m Ruth.”
“Mary,” said the girl, her eyes returning to the bare concrete floor as she spoke.
Ruth glanced around the room. Rachel had disappeared. Some of the girls had gone back to chatting, although they kept their voices down to a low whisper, speaking just loudly enough so the person they were talking to could hear them.
“So what you in for?” Ruth asked.
Mary blinked her eyes. “In for?” she asked.
Now that Ruth was closer to her, she could see that the desert sun had brought out a mass of freckles on Mary’s face. “Yeah, why did you get sent here? What’d you do?”
Still no answer. It was as if Ruth was speaking French or something.
“I’m here because my mom’s a crazy bitch who thinks she can punish my dad by sending me here. At least, that’s all I can figure.”
Mary stopped blinking. Her eyes widened. She stared at Ruth.
“So? What about you?”
Mary cleared her throat. “I’m here because I lack self-discipline. Especially when it comes to looking after my body. Broken Ridge is helping me. A lot!”
Ruth was suddenly aware of someone standing behind her. She turned to see Rachel. Her arms were folded across her chest, and her right foot was tapping out a beat on the floor.
“I was just telling Ruth how good this place has been for me, Rachel,” Mary blurted, her words coming in one big rush.
It didn’t take a genius to work out that all the other girls were intimidated by Rachel’s presence. Ruth didn’t blame them.
“Right,” said Rachel, who was staring at Ruth. “You two had better get changed. Phys Ed starts in five minutes, and you don’t want to be late again, do you, Mary?”
“No,” said Mary, her eyes cast down to the floor.
Rachel turned toward Ruth. “Mary really needs to get as much exercise as she can. Chris says that being fat is the outward manifestation of being weak.”
God, what a judgmental bitch.
Rachel looked Ruth up and down. “You could probably do with losing a few pounds yourself.”
All the girls in the room had started getting changed into T-shirts and shorts. Without answering Rachel, Ruth went over to her open
locker, grabbed what she needed, went back to her bed area and started to get changed.
The clothes that she’d had with her had already been taken away. She doubted she’d see them again. She was left with what she’d been given shortly after she’d arrived. She guessed that everyone wearing the same clothing was another way of making people conform, of converting them from individuals to little robots who didn’t challenge anything and always gave the right answers.
A few minutes later she followed the others out of the room. They spaced themselves out and, led by Rachel, walked down the corridor and outside.
It was late afternoon but the air still bubbled and shimmered with heat. Rachel led them to an area of open ground away from the residential blocks. They stood in a single line and waited. No one looked at anyone else. No one spoke. They just waited, silently, in the baking heat.
A few minutes later, just as Ruth was starting to think she might pass out, Chris Fontaine appeared. He stood directly in front of them. “Good afternoon, ladies.”
“Good afternoon, Father,” they all said in unison. Only Ruth didn’t join in.
Chris looked at her. “I said, good afternoon, Price.”
Ruth hesitated. She knew she had to say it. There would be a problem if she didn’t. But calling this guy who was a complete stranger her dad, when she already had a dad, creeped her out. Maybe she could compromise.
“Good afternoon,” she said, remembering to keep her voice as neutral as possible.
She could almost hear the collective intake of breath from the other girls.
Chris Fontaine glared at her. “Good afternoon what?”
She wasn’t going to call him Father. No way. He could deduct a hundred points if he wanted. They could create a whole new level just for her. It wouldn’t matter. She wasn’t staying around here. Even if she couldn’t run away, as soon as her real dad found out where she was he would get her out.