Stolen

by Elizabeth Gilpin

  “But it hurts,” Allison said through gasps. “It really, really hurts.”

  “Are you gonna die?”

  “No.”

  “Do you need an EpiPen?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then there’s no reason we can’t keep on moving.”

  Slowly we got back up. We continued our hike, limping and grumbling. Eventually the pain became less immediate, turning into a dull soreness that would last the rest of the day. But nightfall was still several hours and even more miles away. The heat bore down. Our tears dried and sweat dripped into our wounds.

  “Civilians!”

  The staffer at the head of the line halted.

  “Civilians up ahead.”

  Each staff member repeated the warning so it traveled down the line. I’d been briefed on the rules for encountering so-called civilians in the wild. But this was my first time actually coming across people from the outside world. I’d forgotten that T-shirts could exist in colors other than orange.

  “Eyes down, Elizabeth.”

  I averted my eyes and got into position. The protocol for civilian encounters was to stop walking immediately, turn in a uniform direction, and look straight down. Eye contact was strictly forbidden, which meant there was no way to gauge the hikers’ reactions. Though I imagine they were probably strong ones, especially that afternoon. On any other day, we’d be a group of sullen, filthy teenage girls in matching outfits. But on this day, we were also covered in bee stings, clearly miserable and unable to hide it.

  Maybe they’ll stop for us. Maybe they’ll call the cops.

  I tried to look as pathetic as possible.

  Yes, Officer. Thirteen teenage girls. Filthy and covered in bee stings. One of them didn’t have any hair.

  But the footsteps didn’t let up. If the hikers were alarmed, they didn’t show it. I made a mental note to write a letter as soon as possible. Help. I’ve been taken hostage. I could hide it in my pocket and slip it to the next civilian I encountered. It was a solid plan, a perfect plan, just as long as the staff didn’t catch me first.

  There were many ways our counselors maintained control in the woods. Things like taking our shoes at night and making us recite numbers were the practical measures. Sometimes they’d threaten to call the police. But the thing that really terrorized us into submission was the threat of lockdown.

  There were facilities in and out of the United States that could hold a kid until she turned twenty-one. Basically, these were private detention centers with no federal regulations and nonexistent state oversight. All it would take to end up there was a staffer convincing our parents that more extensive measures were needed to handle our behavior. Would it work? Who knows. Most of us never imagined our parents would send us off to live in the woods.

  Nothing seemed impossible anymore. The idea that it could actually get worse, that we could lose even more freedom, was usually enough to deter us from any really terrible behavior.

  “In lockdown you can’t even brush your teeth without someone watching over your shoulder.”

  “Ever seen a straitjacket? That’s because you’ve never been in lockdown.”

  “You’re complaining about a hike? Try a week in solitary confinement.”

  “Or a dog cage.”

  “There are electric fences in lockdown.”

  Rick, my therapist, was the first person to threaten me with lockdown directly. I’d left our first meeting with the impression that he was a kind man, my only ally, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. He was a master game player, doling out kindness just so he could rip it away. Which he promptly did the following Sunday.

  “You’re lying, Elizabeth. You’re only hurting yourself.”

  Rick had been hounding me for my life story since our session began. I tried explaining that I’d been confused about the assignment, then I tried apologizing. But none of it mattered. He was determined to make me feel as terrible as possible—and it was working.

  “I don’t know how I didn’t see all that anger in you,” he said. “It’s like you wear a mask.”

  “I don’t. I’m just…me.”

  “It’s chilling. And I’m a professional.”

  “It’s not like I’m angry all the time.”

  “Sure sounds like your parents think you are.” Rick shook his head. “You’re a danger to every other person here. Really, I should send you straight to lockdown. I don’t think you understand the gravity of this situation, Elizabeth, what exactly it is we do here. We are observing you so we can decide what program we feel is the best fit for you. The good little girls and boys go to the good therapeutic programs, the bad little girls and boys go to the lockdowns. You don’t want to go there, trust me when I tell you that.”

  I started to cry.

  Can he do that? Just snap his fingers and send me to an institution?

  “Luckily for you, I believe in second chances.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I wasn’t above groveling.

  “You’re gonna write a letter of accountability. Owning up to every single thing you’ve ever done. Every sin, every indiscretion. Every little secret you thought you could keep hidden. None of this faux-innocent crap. If you hide anything else from us or sugarcoat the truth, it’s not going to be pretty. You got it?”

  I nodded, but I could see trouble up ahead. Maybe I hadn’t quite owned up to my anger, but the rest of it was true. I had admitted all my indiscretions. Clearly, they weren’t good—or bad—enough.

  “Thank you for the second chance,” I said. “I won’t let you down.”

  The threat of lockdown loomed over me like a black cloud. I had no idea how I was going to write an accountability letter that would meet whatever impossible standards Rick had set. To make things worse, I was separated from the group once again so I could work on my letter without distraction.

  I sat down in the shade and took out my journal. There were a few disclosures I could offer, things I hadn’t wanted to share before. Like how the first blow job I gave fell into a gray area of consent. There had been no kissing, no buildup. We were sitting on my bed, my pink bed in my pink room, and he unzipped his pants. I knew what I was supposed to do and he guided me. He pushed my head up and down, hard, until my eyes watered. Half from the force of it, half because I wanted him to love me. Even though I hated every second of it, and even though he knew that, this was as close to love as I was going to get.

  There was one good thing about Rick’s Sunday visits. On his way out to whatever cluster of trees we were stationed by that week, he stopped at the intake trailer to pick up a new round of provisions. Along with the usual rations we were each given a sausage link and a block of American cheese. This was our Sunday dinner. It felt like a treat, but it wasn’t meant to be. We ate cheese and sausage on Sundays simply because they were the most perishable items. If we didn’t get to them right away, they’d spoil in the heat.

  After subsisting on congealed beans and soggy oatmeal all week, meat and cheese was practically fine dining. It was the first meal I didn’t have to force myself to swallow, and I daresay I even enjoyed it. Unfortunately, my digestive system had grown used to the beans and oatmeal. I felt the effects of these new rich foods immediately. Just as soon as they arrived the cheese and sausage were ready to exit my body.

  I grabbed a few squares of toilet paper and asked to use the bathroom.

  “I’ll be listening for your number.”

  We’d been at the campsite for a few days and the latrine was especially disgusting. The smell was unbearable, like a rancid version of the food I’d just eaten. I started gagging when I was still ten yards away. By the time I reached the latrine, I was fighting back vomit, my body ready to expel its contents by any means.

  “Fuck you,” I yelled into the hole.

  I retched, spitting out half-digested sausage.

  “Thirteen,” I yelled back toward camp.

  I can’t do it. I won’t do it.

  “I fucking hate
you.”

  I meant the hole. I meant Rick. My parents. Lynn Anne Moore. Even the bees were getting a piece of my wrath. Fuck this. I turned away from the smell and ventured a little deeper into the woods. There, I found a bush and turned it into my own personal latrine.

  “Thirteen!”

  I walked back to camp with newfound confidence. Like a dog marking his territory, I’d just laid my first surface turd. It was a tiny act of rebellion, but it felt a lot bigger. I was letting the world know it hadn’t beaten me yet.

  The feeling lasted until bedtime. That was all I got, an hour’s reprieve from dread and sadness. Zipped into my sleeping bag in the all-consuming darkness, a familiar terror crept back in. There was an eerie sound track that played in the woods each night. In the background, owls hooted and wind swept through the trees. Up close, leaves rustled and twigs snapped under the foot of some creature. It was probably a squirrel or a raccoon. But in my mind, it could have been anyone or anything.

  I shivered. I craved my baby blanket more than ever. It was unfair, even cruel, that I couldn’t have this one tiny comfort. I wanted to disappear into the pink-and-white knitting and stay safely inside forever.

  “Weed. Pot. Mary Jane. Reefer. Every generation calls it something different.” A staffer named Taylor had begun the following day’s group session with a lecture. “But they all say the same thing. It doesn’t count. It’s not a real drug.”

  She looked around the circle. Because of my unofficial demotion back to Earth Phase, I sat outside the circle once again.

  “You’re thinking exactly that right now, aren’t you?”

  A few of the girls stifled nervous laughter.

  “Thinking that I don’t get it,” Taylor said. “Because it’s natural. It’s medicinal. It isn’t a big deal. But your brains? They’re still developing. And you’d better believe weed gets in the way of that. And it leads to other things, doesn’t it?”

  Not for me. Nothing bad happened to me because of weed.

  “Carolina,” Taylor said, “what was the first drug you tried?”

  “Reefer,” Carolina said.

  “And how old were you when you switched to hard drugs, Isabelle?”

  “Fifteen,” Isabelle said.

  “Wow, I bet there’s a story there,” Taylor said. “What happened that made you start so young?”

  “Nothing. It was just…around.”

  Taylor raised her eyebrows. Around?

  “Not my parents or anything,” Isabelle said. “I have an older brother.”

  Taylor flashed a look at the staffer sitting across from her.

  “And he did drugs?” the staffer said.

  “Him and his friends, yeah. They were always just in the house. Getting high.”

  “And they offered it to you?” Taylor leaned forward. “Or did you ask for it?”

  Isabelle shrugged, like she didn’t remember.

  “You asked for it, didn’t you?”

  “I guess.”

  “And they let you do it with them, didn’t they?”

  Isabelle nodded.

  “But not without getting something in return.”

  She looked confused.

  “Oh, come on,” Taylor said. “Don’t act all naive.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Isabelle, this game with you is getting really old, and if you don’t start getting honest with yourself, we are just going to keep you here longer.”

  Isabelle looked as scared as I felt, stuck with no way out.

  “Was it a hand job? Blow job? Both?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t know.” The tears started slowly, leaking from Isabelle’s lashless eyes.

  “This is a safe space, Isabelle.”

  She continued to cry. Her eyes were wide, terrified.

  “Was it…more?”

  Isabelle was sobbing now. She buried her face in her hands.

  “Oh no,” Taylor said. “You poor thing. So young. And such a violation.” She looked proud. Like she’d cracked the case. A major breakthrough. “Well, it really explains a lot, don’t you think?”

  Taylor called an end to the meeting. As the rest of us walked away, she took Isabelle aside.

  “I’m proud of you,” she said. “We really broke through today. This is going to be great for your progress.”

  As the rest of the group split off to journal, Marissa came up to me. “I bet they make her write a letter,” she whispered.

  “To the guys?”

  “Maybe. Or her parents. They do stuff like that all the time.”

  I thought about it all night. Isabelle hadn’t actually admitted to anything. In fact, she tried to tell Taylor that she was wrong about her brother’s friends. Taylor kept pushing, though, unwilling to accept anything but the darkest version of the story. The trauma that would explain everything and prove that the brutal tactics of the woods were saving us, after all.

  I realized this was exactly what Greta had been trying to do to me when she accused me of lying about being a virgin. After seeing the way Isabelle was basically forced to admit to a false story, I wondered if I’d have to do the same. Taylor seemed to think Isabelle’s tears proved something—a dark secret, finally exposed. I don’t think they were about that at all. Isabelle was frustrated and scared. She was worried she’d never get out of the woods. Or worse, that lockdown was in her future.

  Something else crossed my mind then. What if I did write about the blow job I didn’t actually want to give? Would that information make its way home? I imagined my father pounding on the door of my classmates’ houses. And my brother, vindicated in his rage. How could I ever go back to school after something like that got out? I’d be an outcast, a pariah. That is, if people actually believed me. It was equally possible I’d be accused of lying. The crazy girl with the crazy stories. It was a lose-lose situation any way I looked at it.

  I was going to have to make something up.

  As soon as I had the thought I knew I was stuck with it. I was scared for my life and didn’t know if my limited traumas would even suffice. I figured saying what they wanted to hear was my best shot at surviving. One road led to lockdown and the other to a social catastrophe in my hometown. This was a middle way. I would compromise the truth to keep myself safe. It didn’t feel great, but it was the only solution I could think of. I opened my journal and started writing, and I felt sick to my stomach the moment I did.

  I knew this was the worst possible thing I could have lied about, but it was the only way. Lying was a lot better than lockdown until I was twenty-one years old.

  It’s the first week of summer. I’ve just finished my freshman year and my whole class is at the beach. We’ll be there for five days, staying in rental houses, two or three to a room. I’m with Jenna and her mom is our house’s chaperone. Jenna’s mom is cool. She lets us stay out late and throw parties in the backyard.

  There’s a group of guys in the house next door. They’re older, probably sixteen or seventeen. Maybe even college aged. The night I meet them I’m drunk on Jägermeister. Jenna’s mom had gone to bed and we’re trying to be quiet. But I get so drunk I step on a broken bottle in my bare feet. My foot starts gushing blood. One of the guys is a lifeguard. He gets his first-aid kit and bandages my wound. Jenna’s mom never has to know.

  We have a big party on our last night. The guys from next door come over and they bring vodka. I mix it with orange juice and take big sips. I drink a lot of vodka and orange juice. Then the lifeguard is there and he’s asking me about my foot. He’s asking to check my wound. He says he has a Porsche and do I want to see it?

  I say yes. I’m so drunk I can barely walk straight. He shows me the car. And suddenly I’m in it and we’re kissing. There’s nothing I can do. I have no control over my body so I leave it. My vodka-soaked mind is miles away and my body belongs to someone else. The lifeguard assaults me and when it’s over, I pretend I’m asleep. That way I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to adm
it that I let it happen, not to myself or anyone else.

  I don’t know what I would have done if my lie got any pushback. The staff could have questioned my story or probed me for more details. Maybe I would have taken it all back, but the more likely scenario was that I would have doubled down on my lie—leaving me feeling twice as guilty and sick to my stomach. But no one questioned me. The staff seemed pleased to have another example of success with one of their campers. My parents now had an explanation for the dark moods that overtook me, a justification for why I was this way. Never mind that I had been angry for years before that summer at the beach. At least for that moment I was no longer a candidate for lockdown, I had finally done real work. I could go to one of the therapeutic schools where they can only keep you until you are eighteen.

  The craziest part was, I never really had to talk about the incident again. I was let back into the group like nothing had happened. Even Rick didn’t get into specifics. At our next meeting, he simply asked if I felt better after letting people in. I was grateful I didn’t have to wallow in my lie, but it did seem questionable from a therapeutic standpoint. What kind of counselor doesn’t work through the emotions surrounding a confession like that?

  I wondered how many other girls had made things up. I asked myself that question many times.

  All of them, probably.

  The longer I stayed in the woods, the more affirmed I felt in my decision. Manipulating the truth was just survival. It was a tool, a psychological bow drill we could use to keep ourselves safe. Unspoken but not uncommon. But it still felt like I was entering dangerous territory.

  What happens now? Am I going to be defined by this one night, a horrific incident that didn’t even happen? Will I have to go over my story again and again, rehashing the details so many times I actually start to believe them?

  It felt like the lie was stuck to my soul, had become a part of my identity. I wanted to scrub it off. If I could have, I would have taken the hottest, longest shower of my whole life. Of course that wasn’t an option. So I took a sponge bath, the cold creek water and bandanna a poor substitute for the total scouring I craved. I wanted new skin, untouched by cruelty and manipulation. Without the residue left by all the Ricks and the Kendras and the Lynn Annes of the world. But the best I’d get was a fresh pair of underwear and a T-shirt I hadn’t been wearing for three days straight.