Stolen

by Elizabeth Gilpin

  “Everybody sit the FUCK DOWN.”

  Oh shit. This is gonna be even worse than I thought.

  “We’ve got a serious problem,” Randall said. “All of you in here? You’re in deep shit. I don’t even know where to begin.”

  He did, though. He went right to Charlotte. In his mind she was some sort of ringleader. We were all bad apples, but she was utterly spoiled. He called her out for being entitled and selfish. A monster who looked down on other people and thought she was better than everyone else. None of it was true and the rest of us knew that, but Randall seemed intent on tearing her apart.

  “I know you think you’re a debutante, Charlotte, but you aren’t. You’re a dilettante.”

  He seemed proud of that one, like it was something he might have thought up in advance. There was something personal about the attack. It felt like Randall resented Charlotte simply because she came from wealth, like he wanted her to feel guilty for the life she was born into.

  “Kristen never made it home,” he said. “Did you know that?”

  Charlotte shook her head. Of course she didn’t know that. None of us knew anything at all.

  “She’s missing. Could be anywhere.”

  I felt sick to my stomach. Charlotte’s expression told me she did too.

  “When the cops find her dead body, left in a ditch on the side of the road,” he said, staring right at my friend, “that’s on you.”

  I was half expecting Randall to pull out an index card and write a new lie for Charlotte: Worthless Murderer. And honestly, maybe that was a label we all deserved. I was dizzy and nauseous, overwhelmed by guilt.

  I replayed Randall’s words in my head. He hadn’t actually said that Kristen was dead. It’s not like the cops had actually found her body in a ditch. In all likelihood, Randall had no idea what happened after Kristen left that day. She was hardly about to give Carlbrook a call to let them know she got home safely. Randall could have told us she was off sunbathing on a tropical island and it would have been just as much of a fiction, but that wasn’t the game he was playing. It wasn’t manipulative enough. In his version, Kristen was an inevitable tragedy. She was dead, or would be soon, and we all had blood on our hands.

  “You know what I think?” He turned to address the whole group. “I think you’re all ungrateful little shits.”

  His face was red.

  “You have no idea what kind of hellholes are out there,” he said. “Places for bratty fuckups like all of you.”

  Randall paced, looking for a target. He zeroed in on Brittany.

  “Don’t think I’m gonna take it easy on you just because you ratted everyone else out.”

  Fuck. What did she put on her honor list?

  Brittany looked ashamed, but that didn’t keep Randall from telling her she was a scumbag and a snake. That some people are just shitty and it was no wonder her family sent her away. I had no idea if Randall was reacting to something Brittany wrote on her honor list or just being mean for meanness’ sake. As her roommate, the only other person who shared space with Kristen, it made me really nervous.

  “Alan wanted to expel you and all your little friends,” he said, looking around the room. “Some of the other staff too. How’d you like to go back to the woods?”

  No one said a word, but I knew a lot of us were on the same page: Right now the woods seems pretty appealing.

  “I’m showing fucking mercy,” Randall said. “Believe me. If something like this happened at my school? There would be hell to pay that you brats can’t even imagine.”

  Randall was speaking about Cascade, the CEDU spin-off he’d gone to as a teen.

  “If they’d discovered a whole underground operation like you little shits are running? You’d all be in lockdown.”

  An underground operation? What the hell is he talking about?

  Randall kept talking about this underground. He was starting to sound paranoid. It was like he thought there’d been some big conspiracy to help Kristen run away. An operation to make sure every Carlbrook student had a Care Bear blanket and stash of granola bars.

  It wasn’t exactly a secret. Everyone suspected Kristen was planning to take off on her birthday. Even if she’d never said it out loud to the staff, there were several times when her intentions were questioned during groups.

  It felt like Randall was punishing us because he couldn’t punish Kristen. She was eighteen, free from his control, but the rest of us weren’t. So he screamed at us for six straight hours, spewing his venom and basically accusing us all of murder.

  “I dedicated my life to this,” he said. “And I’m not going to let a bunch of brats like you dismantle it. You have no idea how lucky you are.”

  He decided then that Brittany and Charlotte should be on out-of-school programs. He wanted them digging up old tree stumps with a pickax. It would take at least a month, but Randall made it clear he didn’t care if it took three.

  It was like he was in some sort of vengeful trance. He yelled out insults almost at random while picking out his next target. He landed on a boy named Charlie who probably shouldn’t even have been in this group. Charlie was shy and awkward, a wallflower who happened to be roommates with some of my friends. He was guilty by association at worst, but something about him set Randall off. I guess he just didn’t like the way the kid looked.

  “Hey you, what’s your name?”

  “Me?” He was stuttering. “Um, Charlie.”

  “Um Charlie. I have a question.” Randall sneered at the kid. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  The boy’s face turned bright red.

  “No, I’m really asking. Why are you such a loser?”

  “I don’t know,” Charlie said.

  “God. You’re not even a person. You’re a fucking wet blanket.”

  He turned to the nearest Securitas and asked the man to bring him a wet blanket. It took only a minute, but the wait was agonizing. I prayed that the blanket was actually just for Randall, to cool him down before he exploded. But when the Securitas returned with a dripping blanket Randall grabbed it and threw it over Charlie’s head.

  “There. Now you can’t pretend anymore. That’s what it feels like to be a wet blanket.”

  Randall wasn’t done yet. In his grand finale, he threw a water bottle at a boy and called a girl a cum dumpster. My stomach was in knots. I had been sitting frozen in place for hours. I kept expecting Randall to attack me next, and I knew that one wrong look, one accidental nervous smile, could spell disaster. I was terrified of inciting his rage and ending up on stump duty or in lockdown simply because of spite.

  He never got to me. I think he simply ran out of time. Dinner was long over by the time we were released. I knew more was coming, but I’d have to sit with that anxiety for a few more days. We made our way to the dorms, stumbling beneath the weak light of a crescent moon.

  You’re not a real moon. You’re a wet blanket.

  Pathetic.

  That night my room was the coldest, loneliest place in the world. Maggie had graduated, Kristen was gone, and Brittany wouldn’t even look at me. Suddenly it was like the whole world was her enemy and she hated me along with everyone else. Whatever she put on her honor list must have been pretty bad. I just wished I knew what she’d said about me.

  I wasn’t angry so much as I was frustrated and scared. I had that little-kid feeling of knowing I was in trouble, just not how much. At the same time, I understood that whatever Brittany said, any dirt she came up with, wasn’t done by choice. She was just trying to make it through.

  So was I and that was the problem. We were pitted against each other with the gaslight logic that it was for our own good. I felt so trapped and alone that I prayed for the first time in months.

  Dear God,

  I don’t even know why I’m praying to you right now. There’s no way you’re real. Honestly, if you are, I hate you. My friend is dead in a ditch. Or maybe she isn’t. Maybe she’s off somewhere having the time of her life while
I rot in this prison.

  I’m so scared. I know I wasn’t always great to my parents, but do I really deserve all this? I’ve never felt so hopeless and alone in my life. So why have you abandoned me just like everyone else?

  I thought you loved all of your children equally, God. Clearly that isn’t true because you don’t love me. I have nothing left to believe in at this point, not even you, so I guess this is good-bye.

  The next morning, I watched Brittany out in the freezing cold digging up a giant stump and almost wished I was there with her. At least then I’d know my punishment. I was living in a weird sort of purgatory, and there was nothing to do but wait.

  Charlotte had managed to get off pickax duty with a doctor’s note about her injured back, but her new assignment wasn’t much better. She had to clean the entire length of the fence using nothing but a bucket of soapy water and a toothbrush. She was on bans with everyone and wasn’t allowed to speak to me, but I made sure to catch her when I walked past her. In those moments, we communicated silently, both of us thinking the same thing.

  How the fuck do we make it through this? Kristen was right to run away.

  A few days later, another Randall group went up on the list and my name was at the top. It included mostly the same people from the first one, every one of Kristen’s friends he hadn’t gotten to yet. This one was held in the dining mod, which at least meant it couldn’t go past dinner. Any hope I had that Randall might have cooled off with time was dashed immediately. If anything, he seemed even more worked up, red in the face and out for blood. He didn’t waste any time getting started and he began with me.

  “Elizabeth,” he said, “you know I’ve been waiting to talk to you for a while now.”

  My blood froze. There was something about Randall that terrified me to my core. Alan and David were creepy, but Randall was a loose cannon. He had a charming aspect, a sort of venomous sparkle, and that made his anger so much more frightening.

  “Me?” I said. “Why?”

  “My mother gave me a heads-up about you before you even got here. She said you were a mean, angry bitch. You know, she wanted to call the police on you when you pushed your mom.”

  Fucking Lynn Anne Moore. I bet she loved that I pushed my mom. It was just what she needed to convince my family to send me to her son’s school.

  “Brittany,” Randall said, “let’s hear it. Stop being so spineless and tell Elizabeth what you really think about her. To her face this time.”

  “I think you’re weak,” Brittany said. “And you deserved to be ratted out because you think you’re better than everyone else, but you’re not. You deserve to be on a program just like me.”

  “No one cares, Brittany,” Randall said. “I just wanted her to know what a bad friend you are.”

  He continued on this way, asking people to say shitty things about me and attacking them as they did. But I barely heard any of it. I was inside the riptide where the roar was deafening. I knew this was the moment I’d been dreading since I saw Kyle running anger that first week.

  “Charlotte. Tell Elizabeth what it feels like to have blood on your hands.”

  Whatever she said drowned alongside me. I wasn’t even looking for a way out. I just let the tide take me under and it was better that way. I didn’t have to feel the tears that ran down my face or hear my own voice come out strangled by sobs. I let my body do the work of producing mucus and tears and screamed incomprehensible nothing words at the floor.

  To my surprise, running anger was almost a relief. I didn’t have to do any of the hard work. I didn’t have to keep track of my lies or get into any specifics at all. I just had to perform, to scream and sob. Language disappeared, dulling the jagged contours of my pain, and my head filled up with white noise.

  I must have given a pretty good performance. It was clear that Randall was satisfied, that he thought I’d done real emotional work, because my punishment wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared. He put me on a program but it was in-school, which meant no stumps. I was about to go into Amicitia, the friendship workshop, so I figured there would be a lot of overlap in my assignments.

  The only person sentenced to stump duty was Lina. I hardly ever saw her interact with Kristen, so it seemed like a move out of left field. But Lina was in our friend group, and I still didn’t know what kind of dirt was on Brittany’s honor list. It didn’t help that she froze when Randall attacked her. When it came time to run anger, she didn’t go all in like I had. She didn’t perform, so Randall made an example out of her too.

  To this day, I still wonder if Randall actually believed he created a better kind of school. He certainly built an expensive one. Was that the point all along? Maybe he was another Mel Wasserman. Just a guy who saw an opportunity to monetize the pain of adolescence. His mother was right there next to him, helping things along.

  Wasserman, though, was just a businessman. He was an outsider, a square. But Randall was a part of the thing, trapped inside the cycle of trauma and abuse.

  I don’t know what the teenage Randall did to end up at Cascade. Or what kind of adult he would have turned into if he hadn’t. One look into his bloodshot eyes and it was clear that place had a real effect on him. Maybe Carlbrook was his attempt to control the uncontrollable. To square the cycle.

  Maybe, like all of us, Randall was just doing what he needed to survive.

  Chapter 23

  I HAD A very different nightmare the night before Amicitia. I was on an empty street in a rural town, somewhere close by that could have been anywhere. There was a body on the side of the road. A dead girl in a ditch. I knew exactly who it was before I saw her face.

  Kristen. She had been raped and murdered. Discarded like a piece of roadside litter. I heard someone yelling and I turned around. It was Randall, taunting me.

  Look what you did. Do you see? She was your friend. Now she’s your dead friend.

  I started running, but there was nowhere to go. Randall’s voice followed me no matter where I turned.

  This should be you.

  I woke up in a cold sweat. I was almost glad to be heading into a workshop with Alan and David. At least they weren’t Randall. I shivered all morning, trying to shake off the dream. I knew this workshop would be especially brutal for me and Charlotte and Brittany. Everyone knew the reason we were on programs: what happened with Kristen, our supposed roles in the nonexistent underground. I was marching across campus with a giant target on my back and a cracked egg in my hand.

  About that: In the days leading up to Amicitia, we were given a warmup assignment to test our ideas of friendship. It was one of those classic egg-baby exercises, where students are supposed to keep a hollowed-out egg “alive” as a stand-in for a real human baby. Of course, there was a Carlbrook twist. Instead of carrying around our own egg baby, we had to trade eggs with someone else. So I was tasked with keeping Maya’s egg baby alive and she was responsible for mine.

  I didn’t know how my child was faring, but Maya’s was a little worse for wear. I hadn’t shattered Lily or anything (of course Maya named her egg), but there were a few cracks I was hoping to keep hidden.

  As we got closer I heard music coming from the trailer. “Lean on Me” was playing on a loop. We all filed inside and sat down in a circle.

  “Welcome to Amicitia,” Alan said. “This workshop is about friendship. Last time we learned about integrity. Unfortunately, some of you really struggled to honor that.”

  I locked eyes with Charlotte. We both looked down immediately.

  “Amicitia will teach you what it means to be a friend,” Alan said. “To others and to yourself. I know a few of you in here who could really benefit from that lesson. But first, let’s check in on those eggs.”

  Fuck.

  My face went hot. Sheepishly, I held out Maya’s egg baby, with all its cracks.

  Thankfully, my egg was hardly the worst one. Several of them were totally shattered. Not Maya’s, though. The egg baby she took care of for me was thriving
.

  “Interesting,” Alan said, looking around. “Those of you with cracked eggs really need to think about how you treat your friendships.”

  Alan paced the room as he spoke. “Because friendship means being both a giver and a taker. And taking? That’s easy. A lot of you are in this room right now because you got very good at taking. But I want you all to become givers.”

  “Let’s start out by telling each person all the ways they’re a giver. Walk right up to each of your peers and tell them what you admire about their giving.”

  I heard some nice statements. That I was a leader. Someone who could accomplish big things. A good listener when I wanted to be. But none of it mattered one bit when we got to the next part. The taker part. My peer group had a lot more to say about all the ways I was bad.

  “You take because you can. That’s selfish.”

  “You aren’t even capable of being a true friend.”

  “You care more about being liked than doing the right thing.”

  “Yeah. You’re a follower who just wants everyone to like you.”

  “That’s why you didn’t try to stop Kristen.”

  “You were never a friend to her, not really.”

  I tried not to let it get to me. In a way, knowing what was coming actually helped. I couldn’t even blame my classmates. After all, I was eventually forced to do the same to them. Anything to keep the sharks circling in another part of the sea, tasting someone else’s blood.

  After the exercise, we broke for lunch and the Les Misérables sound track made a reappearance. There truly is no satisfactory way to explain Carlbrook’s obsession with that musical. Were we meant to see Jean Valjean as a role model? I bet our parents would have gotten a real kick out of that one, especially when it came time to pay the tuition bill.

  I finished my cold cuts and took a seat on the ground for the dreaded disclosure circle. I thought about Benjamin, whose confession now served as a cautionary tale. It was a helpful reminder that this wasn’t a simple game we were playing. The rules for making it through Carlbrook were complex, and it felt like they could change at any time.