Stolen

by Elizabeth Gilpin

  I was partnered up with Brittany. I looked her over and tried to decide her fate. Given her history, I decided it should involve cocaine, so I had her bend over at the waist with her hand pressed to her nose to hover midbinge. For her part, she placed me on my knees and told me to keep my mouth open.

  Is this a trailer? Or are we in the Carlbrook Museum of Contemporary Art?

  I glanced around the room as much as I could from my frozen position. Charlotte was slack and crumpled, dead from a heroin overdose. Levi had been shot to death; and then there was the pièce de résistance—Rose, perched on all fours to accommodate two guys at once. Unlike me, she didn’t only have to keep her mouth open, she had to spread her legs apart as well.

  Alan moved through the room, appraising the statues like they were works of fine art. I felt his hot breath on the back of my neck again.

  “Does that make you feel good, Elizabeth?”

  I cringed when he touched me but tried to stay still. Monica came over next. She lingered for a moment, observing.

  “This isn’t how you want to die, is it?”

  No, you bitch. You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?

  He kept us frozen in place for what felt like an eternity. When Alan finally announced that we could move I felt all the muscles in my body twitch. I needed a break, or at least some fresh air, but the staff had already moved on to the next exercise.

  Alan cleared his throat and scanned the group for a victim.

  “Lindy. Tell me something. What are you afraid of?”

  Lindy seemed at a loss.

  “Come on, what’s your biggest fear? What keeps you up at night?”

  “Um,” she said. “I mean, I’m really scared of Animus.”

  “Oh, Lindy,” Alan said. “No, no, no. Your nightmare is that no one is ever gonna love you.”

  Lindy looked down and shrugged.

  “Am I wrong? Is there some other reason you’ll sleep with anyone who shows you the slightest bit of attention?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. You know you’re a slut. What about you, Conrad?”

  Conrad looked defeated. “I’m afraid my adopted family is going to give me up too. Well, I guess they already did.”

  “Good.” He tossed Conrad a box of markers. “Draw it.”

  Alan turned to face the rest of the room. “Maybe your nightmare is an overdose. Maybe it’s ending up a violent alcoholic like your mother. Maybe it’s that boy you couldn’t fight off. Whatever hell looks like to you, I want to see it pictured on that piece of paper.”

  Music came blaring through the speakers. It was “Meant to Live” by the Christian hard rock band Switchfoot. As I uncapped the marker, my first impulse was to sketch the Carlbrook grounds, with its deceptively picturesque lake and mansion surrounded by trailers. Being trapped in the snow globe forever truly was the worst thing I could imagine. It was my actual nightmare, I realized, so strong it took over the recurring dream that had haunted me for years. My real life had become worse than anything I could imagine, and that was why I’d stopped dreaming completely.

  I pictured the last nightmare I could remember having. The image of Kristen’s body lying in a ditch was still vivid enough that I could draw it as if from a photo. I sketched out an empty road and the body of a dead girl. It could have been Kristen, but just as easily it could have been me.

  Alan collected the drawings and taped them to the wall. There were sketches of heroin needles and razor blades, a skull with a bullet hole through the middle. Charlotte had drawn the girl from The Ring. To me, it seemed like a self-portrait. Randall’s abuse and weeks of isolation made her feel monstrous and alone.

  Half of the wall was full of nightmares and the other half was left blank. Alan emerged from a corner, holding a thick, coarse rope. I winced instinctively, hoping we wouldn’t have to put it in our mouths.

  “Over here is Death.” Alan pointed to the cluster of nightmares. “And on this side, we have Life. How many of you want to live?”

  Most of the hands in the room went up, but I couldn’t bring myself to raise my own.

  “Answer me. Who wants to live?”

  “I do!” the group of us called out in unison.

  “Prove it,” Alan said, laying the rope on the floor. “Get up and fight for your fucking lives.”

  We scrambled toward the rope, pushing one another out of the way. The fastest of us made it to the Life side, while the rest of the group ended up on Team Death. We grabbed on to the knots and started to pull, swaying back and forth as dominance was traded. Every time Team Life threatened to win, the counselors came over to taunt us with our disclosures.

  “Pull harder. Is this what you did when your boyfriend fucked with you, just let him do it?”

  “You’re fucking weak. This is why your brother hit you.”

  “You’re a disgrace. Your family never wanted you.”

  It seemed like they were talking to me, but I wasn’t certain. It didn’t really matter. We were basically all the same to them, interchangeable problem kids they could scream at without recourse.

  “Come on!” Alan was right at the center of the action. “Show me you want to live!”

  My hands burned and sweat poured down my back. The lights were off, and it felt as though I was playing tug-of-war in that graveyard. Those buried were trying to pull me to the dark side, to join them in the ground. We were all supposed to be fighting for life, but I wasn’t sure that life was what I wanted.

  We wrestled back and forth, playing tug-of-war for our souls. Finally, the rope gave out and the other side fell down. I let go of the rope and collapsed, trying to catch my breath. All around, my classmates were panting and rubbing their blistered hands.

  Collectively, we were exhausted, drained of adrenaline and emotional bandwidth. The humane response to seeing a group of teenagers in such a state would be to call for a break, but Alan wasn’t done with us.

  “Get up,” he said. “On your goddamn feet.”

  Team Life winning hadn’t been part of his plan. It was too generous and optimistic. He wanted us on the other side, in the nightmare zone where our drawings hung.

  “This is now a Lifeline. Living’s on one end and dying’s on the other,” Alan said. “I want you to stand in a line, wherever you think you should be. Closer to Life or closer to Death.”

  When we’d all chosen our spots, there were three or four people firmly on the side of Life and an equal number hovering in the vicinity of Death. The rest of us stood somewhere in the middle, halfway down the line, which just seemed like the safest bet.

  “Really, Elizabeth,” Monica said, “you think you belong this close to Life? I’ve been watching you all day. Get over on the Death side.”

  She wasn’t wrong. I was in an awful place. There was no denying that my mood had been darkening for a while now. So why not embrace it? I stepped away from the middle of the Lifeline and walked the plank all the way to its unhesitant end.

  It wasn’t my first time traveling in the direction of death. That trail was littered with migraine pills and shrugged-off cat lives, signposts I had always ignored after turning back around. From where I stood, pressed up against the trailer wall, all I could see was the chaos of my current existence.

  Alan and Monica were both screaming, berating the kids who still stood in the middle until they were chastened enough to pick another spot. It got harder to move as more and more of my classmates were sentenced to death, a wet-faced herd sent to join me at the edge of the Lifeline. Alan kept yelling for everyone to move closer to the wall, corralling ten or twelve bodies so tightly I could hardly breathe.

  It was four in the morning when Alan finally set us free. I could still feel the tightness in my lungs even as I stepped outside. I felt like I had truly pushed right up against death, closer than I’d ever been before, and for the first time I felt like there might not be a path back.

  We were zombies the following morning: sleep-deprived, hungry, and e
motionally depleted. I was over it and I didn’t know how to hide that anymore. Not Alan; he seemed to have boundless energy when it came to this bullshit.

  “Mayday, Mayday!” he started yelling as soon as we entered the trailer. “The ship’s going down!”

  Monica ushered us to the center of the room and we sat down in a circle.

  “We’re in the middle of the ocean,” Alan said. “Hundreds of miles from land. We struck a reef and we’re going down fast.”

  I took a seat between Levi and Brittany and rubbed my eyes. Alan paced, unable to contain his enthusiasm. I imagined him practicing his captain voice in front of the mirror, with Titanic playing in the background for reference.

  “The good news is, we have a lifeboat,” he said. “The bad news? It can only hold four people. And there are fifteen of you.”

  My classmates and I looked at one another, suddenly alert. It was definitely too early for what was about to happen.

  “It’s up to the group to decide who lives and who dies,” Alan said. “So think hard. Who deserves to be saved? Is it the junkie? The self-harmer who wants attention? Is it the whore or the tease?”

  One by one, we were forced to go around the circle, look each person in the eye, and say either “You live” or “You die.” A student support made tally marks on the whiteboard, counting up our votes. It was a cruel task, a lose-lose game from every angle. It was smarter to choose Ponies over friends, a move more likely to fly under the radar, but that meant killing your friends. Some kids chose to keep a seat for themselves, but I gave all four of mine away. Saving myself would have been disingenuous when drowning just seemed so much easier.

  I heard “You live” from only three people. Brittany, Levi, and Dash all gave me spots on their lifeboats, though I’m not entirely sure why. How could they want to save me when I didn’t even choose to save myself? Maybe it was strategic in some way, or maybe they were just being nice. Either way, when both Charlotte and Maya looked me in the eye and said the words “You die,” I knew I couldn’t take it personally.

  According to the final tally, I was one of the lives least worth saving. I tried to be okay with that fact, but Monica wasn’t making it any easier.

  “How does it feel,” she said, hovering over me, “to realize you’re expendable?”

  “We all die eventually, right?”

  “The words of a girl who doesn’t value her own life.” Monica’s tone let me know my sarcasm wasn’t appreciated. “Do you even matter, Elizabeth?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, maybe that’s why eleven of your peers just left you to drown.”

  “I’m a pretty good swimmer, though,” I said. “Ranked and everything.”

  “And you just threw it all away.” Monica shook her head. “What a waste. Your parents must be so disappointed, and your so-called friends don’t care if you die.”

  I looked down at the ground, feeling the anger and shame Monica was trying to rouse.

  “You need to figure out what makes you worth saving. Because I’m starting to think everyone else might be right.”

  Tears stung my eyes. Alan walked from the circle to a row of chairs at the front of the room, set up by the student supports. There were four of them, meant to represent the lifeboat.

  “This is it. The raft’s about to set sail.” He looked us over. “If you want a spot on board, I want you to fight for it.”

  No one moved. Monica fiddled with the stereo and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” began playing at an alarming volume.

  “Get up and go!” Alan said. “When the music stops, I want you to fight for your lives.”

  Quit telling us to fight for our lives. You just want us to fucking fight. Like we’re animals. But this isn’t real. It’s just a fucked-up version of musical chairs.

  We walked the perimeter of the lifeboat as a group, making tighter and tighter circles around the seats. The music stopped abruptly, and everyone just froze. Finally, Conrad made a break for one of the chairs. Levi was on him in a second, pushing him from behind. Dash fell to the ground and cowered.

  “Dash,” Alan said, “are you gonna let people push you around your whole life? I thought you had a breakthrough yesterday.”

  His face went red and he got back up. He lunged at Levi, who had just secured a seat. The chair crashed down with the two of them on it and they began to wrestle. The floodgates had been flung open and the rest of us all ran forward at once, shoving and clawing our way toward the chairs. Levi managed to capture one, but he was on the ground a moment later. I saw Charlotte in flashes, forcing her way through the crowd like an Amazonian warrior.

  Every time someone managed to secure a chair, they were ousted moments later. There were no rules, just chaos, as much as each of us could take. One by one, my classmates gave up and sat down on the ground. I fought halfheartedly for a while, to keep Monica off my back, but I didn’t actually want a spot on the lifeboat. As soon as I could, I took a seat on the floor along with the rest of the drowned.

  When the game ended, Alan’s voice took on a somber tone.

  “A terrible crash off the coast of Virginia claimed the lives of eleven teenagers tonight,” he said. “There were only four survivors. They say their lost peers showed great bravery in the face of the disaster.”

  I scanned the survivors. When I saw that Charlotte was among them I cracked a smile for the first time all day. Even with her hair in knots and scratches up and down her arms, she looked better than she had in months. The Charlotte sitting proudly in a hard-won seat wasn’t the ghostlike girl who’d kept her head down and followed orders. She was her old self again, fierce and unbroken. Randall had tried so hard to snuff out her spirit by spewing accusations and treating her like a pariah. But Charlotte made it through the freezing cold days and the interminable isolation. Randall’s campaign failed to break her down, after all. In fact, it seemed that all he did was make her even stronger.

  “How do you feel, Charlotte?” Alan asked.

  She smiled. “I feel pretty fucking good.”

  A word of advice: If you’re ever offered the opportunity to attend your own funeral, decline. As we ate a dinner of cold cuts, the staff transformed the trailer into a funeral parlor. They dimmed the lights and lit candles. There was no more Rocky theme song, only the somber music of death.

  Before we broke for dinner we’d written obituaries for ourselves, and now Alan was going to read them as if our funerals were real. One by one, we took turns lying on the floor inside invisible coffins. It was truly eerie. At the same time, at least we didn’t have to do anything but listen. And when my time came, I was more than happy to close my eyes and pretend to be dead.

  “When Elizabeth was a child, she was full of light and energy. Nicknamed ‘Hotshot’ because of her love for sports, she had dreams of playing soccer in the Olympics. After that, she wanted to be one of the first female fighter pilots. Her heroes were Mia Hamm, Tara Lipinski, and Dominique Moceanu. Hotshot died tragically at the age of sixteen.”

  It was the opposite of an exorcism. Alan wasn’t trying to cast out our demons, he was burying us along with them.

  “Sadly, she’ll never accomplish any of those things now that she’s dead,” Alan said. He was reading the last words of my obituary. “Regardless, we’ll always remember Hotshot for the powerful person she once was.”

  The lights were still off when the door opened and the older students came back in. It was a candlelight vigil, and Alan actually started to cry.

  “Get together,” he said. “I want you all to hold your brothers and sisters.”

  We moved together. We had no other choice. “You’ve Got a Friend” by Carole King started playing.

  “This is a celebration of life. It’s your chance for a new beginning. That’s right, Charlotte, let it out.”

  I noticed she was sobbing.

  “We know you never meant to hurt Kristen, and you’re doing such a great job now.”

  He look
ed at the rest of us.

  “I know that all of you have what it takes to fight for your life. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. So let’s make today the day that you choose to live! There’s a saying I want to leave you with as the workshop comes to an end.”

  Alan took a deep breath for maximum effect.

  “If you build castles in the air, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

  With that grand statement, Animus was over. I had physically survived all three days, but mentally I was not okay at all. I hardly had the energy for our dramatic reentry into regular Carlbrook life. I knew from previous Animus returns that the commons would be decorated like a castle, full of paper flowers made by younger students. The thought of it alone made me want to run and hide. I wasn’t Don Quixote, and Halifax was hardly La Mancha.

  But that didn’t matter to Alan. We were still expected to perform. Each of us had to stand in front of the whole school, pretending to draw our swords as we shouted some fresh Animus-approved lesson.

  “I stand for having a purpose,” I said. It was unconvincing at best.

  I didn’t have a purpose. Not even close. A pretend sword and a fake flower was about all I had in the world. I was exhausted and depressed, exactly the wrong emotions for what happened next. As the ceremony ended, upbeat music began to play.

  It was dance party time. An opportunity to celebrate life. My friends all looked like they were having a good time, but I could hardly bother to pretend. I danced because I had to, but I wasn’t really there.

  In my mind I’d never left that invisible coffin. I was waiting to be buried because I felt about as good as dead.

  Chapter 27

  AFTER ANIMUS I had all but given up. I fantasized about dying in a shipwreck for real, or suffocating as my classmates pressed me up against the wall. But the Lifeline wasn’t real—and that was the whole problem.