We stayed up until four in the morning, railing on person after person. Each of us walked away with a new word or phrase on an index card. Charlotte’s read Stone-Cold Bitch. Maya was a Pathetic Slut, Brittany a Manipulative Liar. Levi was a Wannabe. Even so, no one got it worse than Benjamin. He had to walk back to the sleeping mods with Molester written across his shirt.
We could hardly look at one another that night. We were each other’s destroyers. And we were all destroyed. We had only a few hours to rest, and I spent most of them thinking about the worthless abuser I had become. The slut, the bitch. If I could have gotten my hands on salt and ice, I would have burned myself until I went numb. I wanted to kill pain with pain. Instead, I folded myself into my tiny bed and cried silently into my pillow.
I must have fallen asleep because all of a sudden, I was inside my nightmare. The faceless man is there as well; he has come for me just like on a thousand other nights, but something’s different this time. He’s outside the workshop room, lurking in the woods. When he sees me he starts moving toward me. His hands reach up and pull down his hood. For the first time, I can see his face.
It’s a face I recognize.
It’s Alan’s face.
Whatever I had been scared of had been subsumed by a bigger fear, a real-life villain who tormented me day in and day out. His identity wasn’t blurry in the least. In fact, I knew far too many sordid details about Alan’s life.
The morning air had a chill running through it. We trekked back across campus, reversing course, though we’d only just left. I felt the slap of wind on my cheeks. I hadn’t gotten more than another hour of sleep, and I was so emotionally drained I felt delirious.
“We did important work yesterday.” Alan began talking as soon as we entered the trailer. “Hard work. We tapped into the part of us we hide from the world. And that isn’t always pretty.”
As he spoke, Alan handed out silver marbles. One for each of us, shiny and new.
“These marbles were just born,” he said. “They’re perfect, beautiful. Completely untouched. But the more you use a marble, the more scratched up it gets. Maybe you drop it on the concrete. Maybe you throw it in your toy box without any care.”
He went to his easel and drew a circle. His own marble.
“Maybe you forgot about your marbles completely, left them on the floor for weeks.”
Alan drew a scratch on his paper marble.
“Maybe you took your anger out on your marble. Threw it against the wall.”
Another scratch.
“Maybe your marble was adopted. Maybe its parents got a divorce.”
Scratch, scratch.
“Its brother calls it ugly. Dad yells at it for singing too loud. Maybe your marble has sex with a boy and the boy isn’t very nice.”
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
“Sometimes the scratches are on the surface and sometimes they go deep. Those disclosures we opened up about yesterday are the deepest kind of scratches.”
Alan put down his pen ceremoniously.
“But today,” he said, “today we get to scratch back. If we don’t confront our wounds, they’ll never heal. But if we face them head-on, we have the chance to wash those scratches away. We can be those shiny, new marbles again.”
The student supports entered the room carrying armloads of pillows. There were stacks and stacks of them, as though they’d just robbed a Bed Bath & Beyond and needed to stash the merchandise.
“Is it naptime?” Alan said. “No. It’s time to fight our demons.”
So we’re marbles. And the pillows are demons. Got it. Totally.
“Everyone partner up and find a space to work. Think of the pillow as your deepest scratches. The things that hurt you the most.”
Catherine demonstrated the pillow-demon-fighting technique. We were to sit on our knees and interlock our fingers. Raise our hands above our heads and bring them down to attack the pillow again and again.
Orchestra music came on, so loud I could barely hear myself think. But maybe that was for the best. Maya and I teamed up and found a corner. We got down on our knees and placed our pillows on the floor. Alan suddenly thrust his hands into the air and brought them down sharply.
“Begin!”
No one moved. None of us wanted to be the first to start beating up a pillow. But that wasn’t about to stop the likes of Alan and David. They walked around the room taunting us with our disclosures.
“Come on, Elizabeth,” David said. “Don’t be so weak. Is this how you act around all those boys?”
I wanted him to get the fuck away from me, so my only choice was to attack the bedding. I pounded down, once, twice, and then I couldn’t stop. All around me I heard screams as feathers went flying. Some of my classmates really seemed to be fighting their demons. While some of us had realized that the louder you screamed, the more the staff stayed away. Each punch kept them at a distance. Suddenly I realized I was fighting the staff. They were my demons.
Fuck you, Alan! Fuck you, David! Go to hell, Lynn Anne Moore! I fucking hate you all and I hope you can feel every single punch.
Like everything else, this exercise wasn’t going to end until there were tears. But I didn’t have to fake it. I was so exhausted. I was sick of this workshop, of this place—the fucking marbles and pendulums. I looked around and everything was feathers and tears and…smooshing.
Oh no, not smooshing.
We were battle-weary and broken, totally spent from two days of hurling insults like weapons, forced to go in for the kill. Now we had to lie around on top of one another. In workshops, boys and girls could smoosh together, and of course Alan and David joined in.
Surely there’s something against this in the Geneva Convention.
I got through it, somehow. I had made it through to the other side. There was a term for a group reappearing after a workshop, looking older if not wiser, or at least that much closer to death. It was “the return.” Our Integritas return was set to “Superman” by Five for Fighting. We walked down the stairs and sat down with our arms around each other, waiting for the song to end.
One by one we stood up and said our truths. It seemed insane that after all of that, we were somehow expected to think of ourselves as honest and kind again? I sure as hell didn’t feel like I had any strength or power inside me whatsoever.
But no one had to know that. After all, I was a Southern girl. Even though I was the furthest from okay I’d ever been, I knew how to pretend.
“I’m powerful,” I said.
A few days later I was walking across campus when I saw the black SUV pull up to the carriage house. Two men dressed in black stepped out. Escorts. It meant one of two things: Either someone was arriving or someone else was being taken away.
The escorts were there for Benjamin. I watched him get into the car, his head hanging low, and I never saw him again.
In that evening’s Last Light speech, all Alan said was that Benjamin would no longer be attending Carlbrook. He was being sent somewhere “better suited to his particular needs.”
What does that mean? A different kind of school? Back to the woods?
But I feared the worst: that Benjamin was being sent to lockdown for the things he’d said in the disclosure circle, and that was something else entirely. Obedience, cooperation, those were things we could control. But how could any of us navigate this new situation?
We were being mined for deeper and darker disclosures all the time, and we had to deliver or we’d be accused of lying. But say the wrong thing and it’s off to one of those dreaded lockdowns to stay a prisoner until you turn twenty-one.
Great. One more thing to be afraid of.
Chapter 20
AFTER INTEGRITAS, I was finally off bans with my peer group. It was a relief to actually be able to make some friends, and almost immediately Maya and I became attached at the hip. We were both from small Southern towns and there was a familiarity and ease that made me feel like I’d known her forever. She was in
my sleeping mod, and we walked to breakfast together every morning. At the student store, we each picked out a different candy bar and split them in half so it felt like getting two.
Before long I was part of an unofficial clique. It included me, Brittany, Kristen, Charlotte, Maya, and a girl named Valerie who I was just starting to become close with. Valerie was the president of the Cake Committee. She asked me if I wanted to join, and saying yes was one of the best decisions I made at Carlbrook. Nelly actually let us listen to music and dance around the kitchen. She never said anything when we stole a spoonful of frosting.
Eventually, the clique would come to include a few more girls from the peer class just below mine. There was Shelby, from Texas, who reminded me more of home than anyone else I met at Carlbrook. She always wore large pearl earrings and seemed to thrive in those J.Crew sweater sets. She was the only girl I knew who brought a Bible with her to school, and besides God, her primary interest seemed to be landing a wealthy husband.
Lina was the polar opposite of Shelby. She was the one person who could actually make the dress code seem cool. She wore beaded moccasins and headbands and combined colors in ways that shouldn’t have worked but always did. She was tough but had a good heart and would end up being one of my best friends.
Then there were the boys, a group of nonconformists. This crew included Luke, who I was developing a real crush on; Bryan, a brilliant kid with an anarchist streak; and Levi, the would-be mobster from Detroit.
Luke’s roommate was a kid named Owen, who was so quiet and unassuming I often forgot he was there. Though if Owen was trying to blend in, to stay beneath the staff’s radar, you could hardly blame him. By the time I met him he’d already become a cautionary tale.
I got the story from Brittany, who seemed to know everything about everyone—an impressive feat when you considered that her arrival preceded mine by only about a month. The way she explained it, the whole thing was a total accident. When Owen’s parents shipped his belongings to Carlbrook they included a backpack along with clothes and bedding. Unbeknownst to them, the backpack happened to contain a bottle of pills hidden in an interior pocket. The contraband slipped past the staff and sat untouched in the backpack for weeks.
Of course, as soon as Owen realized he had drugs there was only one thing he could do. He shared them with Luke and another roommate, they told a couple of friends, and from there it was only a matter of time until Owen got caught. When he did, the whole “It was an accident” thing didn’t exactly land. They made good on their threat and sent Owen back to the woods while figuring out what to do with him next.
At Carlbrook there were levels of punishments. Mild infractions meant running crews, our peer-on-peer punishment. That meant scurrying around in front of the entire school scrubbing toilets and carrying water jugs pointlessly around the lake. Next was a program, which meant a month or two in isolation. Do something really bad and Carlbrook would send you back to the woods for observation. It was a sort of test, where passing meant going back to Carlbrook and failing got you sent to lockdown.
He must have had either a guardian angel or parents with especially deep pockets because Owen was back at Carlbrook the following month. It easily could have been lockdown instead, and Owen knew that if anything ever happened again, it most certainly would be.
The backpack incident gave the group of boys quite a reputation. They were known around school as the troublemakers and it wasn’t exactly untrue, but weren’t we at Carlbrook? Wasn’t everyone here one kind of trouble or another?
Well, not exactly. This place had its overachieving kiss-ups just like every other school in the world. I don’t know where the word came from, but we called them Ponies. Beatrice was a Pony, of course. As was a girl named Molly, along with Rose from my peer class. There were male members of the species, too, and these boy Ponies tended to be the most overachieving of them all. Paul was our student body president, and he walked around like a hall monitor. Seeing Paul always made me freeze in place.
Am I doing anything out of standard? Did I finish everything on my breakfast plate? Can you see my ass through my jeans?
I was constantly on guard, especially on group days. One morning, I saw my name right below Rose’s and just had an instinct she had requested me. It was an Alan group, which meant he would be crying along with everyone else. Halfway through, Rose switched chairs to sit right across from me and I knew my instinct had been correct.
“Elizabeth, I requested you for group today,” she said. “I’ve noticed you’ve been spending a lot of time with negative people like Luke.”
Are you fucking kidding me?
“I really care about you. And I think you flirt with negative people to avoid dealing with your emotions.”
I was stunned. I had no idea how to respond. But I didn’t have to because apparently half the group had an issue with my supposed flirting.
Shelby jumped in. “I agree. I’ve also noticed you spend a lot of time with Luke.”
“Other boys too.”
“You’re always laughing and smiling at them.”
“Flirting really triggers feelings from back home,” Shelby said. “I don’t feel safe when you do it.”
This is fucking bullshit.
I locked eyes with Maya. I was on the verge of tears and I think she could tell I was genuinely upset.
“I know you’ve struggled with feeling like a disappointment,” Rose said. “Especially since your parents sent you away. You know I deal with the same thing. I just don’t want to see you bring another toxic relationship into your life.”
Alan could see I was close to a breakdown. He knew it was time to dig in.
“Do you have anything to say? How does it feel to hear you’re making people feel unsafe? Are you a flirt, Elizabeth?”
“No,” I said. “They’re overreacting.”
“Elizabeth, don’t be defensive.”
“But it’s not even true. It’s not like I’m some slut all over everyone at school.”
“Your behavior is slutty,” Rose said.
I started to cry. But I honestly couldn’t tell if I was genuinely hurt by what was being said or if I was just doing what I needed to do to make everyone stop. Maya moved across the room and sat down next to me. She wrapped her arm around my shoulder and hugged me while I cried. After a moment I realized Maya was crying too.
“Maya,” Alan said, “what are you feeling right now?”
“Sad,” she said. “Sad for Elizabeth. And for myself.”
“What’s making you feel that?”
“I know what it’s like to want to feel loved,” Maya said.
She was crying. Alan brought over a box of tissues.
“My whole life, I’ve just wanted to be good enough. Good enough to be loved.”
Maya put her head down and started sobbing uncontrollably. I placed my hand on her back like she’d done for me.
“You are,” I said, whispering in her ear.
I don’t know if she heard me. She was fully in it now, engaged with her demon. Her tiny body was slouched over, and tears ran onto the floor.
“I just want to be me. But better.”
Hearing her say those words made me want to cry more than any of those accusations had. Maya was so earnest and raw, something I could never be. So I continued to keep my tears at bay. Crying for real would have been too honest.
“I deserve love. I know I do.”
Maya was crying for real. She didn’t do what I did, what so many of us did, lying and exaggerating to protect ourselves. She really believed in Carlbrook. She trusted the place and the people much more than I could ever have imagined doing. She wanted to heal, to do the work, no matter the toll it might take.
If anyone here deserved to be loved, it was Maya. I wanted to tell her that she was strong and beautiful, worthy of all the love she’d been missing in her life. Instead, all I could do was rub her back while she ran anger, hoping she knew how special I thought she was.
> An Alan group always ended with hugging. I tried to leave, but he stopped me and wrapped his arms around my shoulders.
“You got cut off there,” he said.
“That’s okay.”
“I think there’s more work to do. Why don’t we meet tonight at appointment time?”
I went through the rest of the day with a knot in my stomach. That evening, I met Alan on the couches outside the med bay. I was shaking as soon as I got there and I hardly heard anything he said. I could feel myself begin to check out of my body.
He patted his thigh, a signal for me to sit on his lap.
“It’s all going to be okay,” he said, stroking my hair.
I nodded. I felt sick. Nothing seemed okay in the least.
“You’re so beautiful, Elizabeth.” Alan had tears in his eyes. “You’re beautiful and everything’s going to be okay.”
I realized I was crying too. It was out of fear, the feeling that I was trapped. I wanted to scream and run away, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to end up in lockdown or wherever Benjamin had gone. I sat there frozen like a little girl while Alan whispered in my ear and rubbed my shoulders.
“Let it out. You’ll be okay. You just have to do the work.”
After the appointment was over, I didn’t want to see anyone. I wasn’t sure if Alan had actually done anything wrong, but I did know that I didn’t want to feel that way ever again.
I would, though, many more times during my time at Carlbrook. Alan’s questionable behavior wasn’t talked about back then, but it came up a lot in the years after I graduated. It would turn out that most of my friends had a story about a time a staff member’s physical affection made them feel uncomfortable.
I walked to the sleeping mods as quickly as I could. At lights-out, I buried my head in my baby blanket and silently sobbed for most of the night. When I woke up my eyes were rimmed with red. I was so tired that eating breakfast felt like too much effort. I pushed my food around on my plate and rubbed my eyes.
“Hey you.”
Nelly was standing over me, peering at my plate. “Why aren’t you eating? What’s going on?”
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