I didn’t know what to do with it. I knew it was a well-intentioned gift, but that bracelet was truly the last thing on earth I wanted. It showed me just how deeply the school had conned them. My parents had given me a reminder of my prison set in lovely, shiny gold. It made me feel like they would never understand the truth even if I was willing to talk about it. Carlbrook had worked its dark magic on them, and they still believed the beautiful facade was all there was.
Soon enough, I was “home.” We arrived at the big, unfamiliar house, where my brother and sister were waiting. It was decorated for Christmas, which only made the house look more perfect and only made me feel more alienated.
At least I knew I wouldn’t have to stay there very long. I would be with my family for the holidays and then I’d return to my old school to finish the year, but even that proved to be too much time. I felt like a stranger in my own home, distanced from the family that had cast me out. I wasn’t even sure what that word, family, meant anymore.
I returned from Carlbrook with even more anger than I had before. But I had even less sense of how to handle it. My tool kit was full of confrontational methods and strange sayings, and none of it was applicable to the real world at all. After a week of small fights and low, simmering anger, I finally exploded.
I was in the car with my parents and sister. My mother driving while I had the passenger seat. Emily shared the back with my dad. Since my sister was now twelve and no longer needed to be tiptoed around, my parents and I started fighting almost immediately—arguing about nothing and everything just as we’d done all week. When my voice raised to match my father’s, Emily had finally heard enough.
“Elizabeth, shut up,” she said. “I know you’re a drug addict and an alcoholic. That’s why Mom and Dad sent you away.”
Something inside me just snapped. I couldn’t believe that was the line my parents had fed her. I couldn’t believe that was still the way my family saw me. To have gone through all of that—from sleeping outside in the rain to the humiliation of disclosure circles and the isolation of programs—just to return to the same bullshit?
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” I said.
I looked at my sister. She was silent so I picked up a cup of milk from the middle console and hurled it right at her. Emily screamed. She was covered in milk, dripping across the whole backseat, but I wasn’t done.
“I’m not even a part of this family anymore, am I?” I said. “So why are we pretending? You hate me just as much as I hate you all.”
“Elizabeth, we don’t—” my mother started.
“Just take me to a hotel.” I turned to face my mom. “I SAID, TAKE ME TO A FUCKING HOTEL.”
If this had been a group, I would have been praised for screaming. The tears that accompanied my outburst would have been encouraged. At Carlbrook, being emotional meant being safe. In the car with my family, it just felt like confirmation of what I was convinced they truly believed: There’s something wrong with Elizabeth.
There was no way to get them to see just how badly that place had scarred me. I don’t think I even fully understood at the time. All I knew was anger and a deep, searing pain that knew no other form of expression than pure rage.
“I mean it,” I said. “Drop me off somewhere. That’s what you always do with me anyway.”
They did end up taking me to a hotel, but I had no money for a room and my parents weren’t about to get me one. I sat in the car crying for a while. Finally, I relented and told them to drive me home.
Somehow, I got through the next few days until it was time for my mom to drive me to Jenna’s. The fact that my parents were sending me right back to the same friends in the same town that had supposedly been such a bad influence on me was never mentioned. I think that deep down, they probably felt like they’d punished me enough.
When I got to Jenna’s, I was determined to make things seem as normal as possible—just as though I’d never left. It was the weekend and there was a party that night. I had my first drink in almost two years, which led to another. At some point I was handed a joint and didn’t turn it down. The pot and booze made it easier to pretend that everything was just as it had always been. I was the same person I’d always been and nothing had to feel any different than before.
Part of that meant rekindling my pseudorelationship with Nick. I spotted him lying on the couch and drinking a beer and headed straight over. I hadn’t told him I was coming to the party because I wanted it to be a surprise—and the look on his face made me light up.
He was happy to see me and I was happy to see him. I walked over and our eyes locked. Nick was in college now and he had his own house. He said that I seemed different, too, but he couldn’t quite figure out how.
“I’m just older, Nick. You haven’t seen me since I was fifteen. Remember?”
We flirted all night. When it was time to leave, I was drunk and smiling as I got into Jenna’s car. We stopped at an intersection and I looked down at my cell phone. I saw a voice mail from a number I didn’t recognize.
“Hi, Elizabeth. It’s Monica. I just wanted to check in and see how you’re doing. Are you settling in okay? Call me when you get this, please.”
Not a fucking chance.
“Okay. Talk soon.”
I hit Delete. Then I went ahead and blocked the number.
Monica no longer had any power over me. She couldn’t discipline me or make me talk when I didn’t want to. She couldn’t force me to rat someone else out or write a list of reasons why I was a terrible person. None of them could, not ever again.
My mistake was assuming that made me free.
Chapter 37
I DIDN’T LIVE at Carlbrook anymore, that was true; but I lived with it every day. It had become a part of my DNA. As glad as I was to be back home, things just weren’t the same. The town hadn’t changed, but I certainly had. I often had trouble relating to my old friends because I’d gotten used to being in conflict with my peers about everything and anything. It turns out regular people don’t resolve problems by writing “useless slut” on a name tag and sticking it on their friend’s shirt.
For the next few years I found myself wanting to be in the company of my Carlbrook friends. Maybe we were trauma-bonded, or maybe it was just nice to have people around who understood. I saw them as often as I could, especially Charlotte. We were finally able to have a normal friendship without standards and request groups and bans.
Exactly a year after I got out, I took a trip to New York. Charlotte came, too, and we stayed at an apartment belonging to a member of her family. Some cousin or an aunt, I don’t think I ever knew, but it was ours for the week. It was New Year’s Eve, and we decided to have a little party with Carlbrook kids.
Brittany lived in the city and Levi was in town for the holidays. A few other kids came too. We had been drinking for hours when Brittany called her dealer. The next thing I knew I was leaning over a tray of white powder like an Animus statue.
It took all of a year for me to prove Carlbrook right. Because that first line of coke hit me like a revelation. I felt more awake, more alive, than I had in years. It was the feeling I used to get when I scored a goal. When I ran through graveyards late at night. Suddenly, it was like I still had a future. Like I could be everything I ever wanted to be, after all.
I’m a fighter pilot. I’m Mia Hamm. And I’m going to win a gold medal.
Hang on a second.
I smiled and did another line. I felt like me again for the first time since I’d left Carlbrook. It was an even better version of me and I knew I could stay that way forever. Just as long as I did another line, and one more after that.
When everyone else left, Charlotte and I met up with her friends from her old boarding school. And they had twice as much coke. The two of us went all night, talking about everything and nothing. We didn’t make any sense and yet everything was profound.
When we finally made it back to the apartment, it wasn’t becau
se we were ready to stop. It was because the drugs were gone. All we had was a bottle of red wine that we immediately spilled all over the white couch.
“Fuck it,” Charlotte said. “We’ll clean it later.”
“Yeah, I’m too tired to do anything right now,” I said. “Except throw up.”
I was starting to get sick and pretty soon, I felt about as bad as I’d ever felt in my life. I sat up on the bathroom floor for hours, feeling like I was going to throw up and wishing I were dead.
“Hey, Charlotte,” I said, my voice rough and raspy. “Do you think we need to go to rehab? Am I a drug addict?”
“You’ve done coke once. You’re not a drug addict.”
“I want to kill myself. What do I do?”
“I want to kill myself too,” Charlotte said.
“I think I need to go back to Carlbrook.”
“You don’t need to go back to Carlbrook, Elizabeth.”
“I think I do, though,” I said. “I think they were right about me the whole time.”
I really meant it too. I was so confused. I was sick and shaking, trying to remember the clarity I’d had just a little while ago. That sense of being me again.
“You hate that place,” Charlotte said. “You know it’s a fucking prison.”
“Yeah. You’re right.”
It was true, of course. It was a prison and I didn’t really want to be back there. I did want something else in that moment, though. I wanted to know who I was.
Did Carlbrook turn me into someone I was never meant to be? A person who tried cocaine and then didn’t stop for two days? Who was sick and depleted but already thinking about how to get drugs again? Or could Alan and Monica always see me better than I was able to see myself?
I was so disoriented, I had no idea if I was fulfilling a prophecy or acting out. Or if I was just being a teenager. I kept feeling the pull of Carlbrook even though I wanted to be free of it. I felt angry and confused, but I didn’t know how to talk about any of it. Not even with Charlotte.
So I did the only thing I could think of to really try to break free. I put as much physical distance as I could between myself and Halifax, Virginia.
Chapter 38
Few Details in Bloody Miami Murder: Student Trevor Malone Found Dead in a Pool of Blood in His Own Home
Mother Grieves as Police Seek Clues in University of Miami Slaying
Twenty-One-Year-Old UM Student Brutally Murdered: No Updates on Murder Case
Stabbed UM Student’s Killer on the Run Ten Years Later
When I was a kid, I promised myself that one day I’d move back to California. I wanted to live in Los Angeles, by the beach and the silver screen. It was one of those things I’d talk about at soccer practice, almost as if it were a done deal.
“I’m going back the first chance I get.”
It wasn’t a childhood dream like flying planes or playing in the Olympics, exactly. It was more like something I said when I realized the truth about those childhood fantasies. That they were, in fact, just fantasies. Maybe I wasn’t Mia Hamm or fighter pilot material, but no one could stop me from moving to Los Angeles.
I did it too. In the summer of 2007, I drove with a friend from Carlbrook out to LA. We road-tripped from Charleston to Orange County, where she had family. The GPS stopped working in Mississippi, and the car broke down the minute we parked on the West Coast. But that hardly mattered because we’d made it (almost) all the way to LA.
I heard through the grapevine that Luke and Bryan had moved to California the previous year. I had barely spoken to Luke at all since the fateful day when he left for his home visit and never came back, but I still thought about him sometimes. I called him from the side of the road, and he met us at the broken-down car.
From that moment on, we were a team. The other girl stayed only for the summer, but I was committed to sticking it out for the long haul. It wasn’t like I had anywhere else to be. I was completely lost then and had only vague ideas of what I might want to do.
Should I model? Act? What about fashion school?
Before long, Luke and I were dating. When we were together trouble was never far away, and we were always together. We drank most nights and smoked a ton of pot. We took pills and more pills, whatever it took to get us numb.
Luke and I should have died several times over, but we never suffered any real consequences at all. The biggest incident was an accident on the 405. I had been out drinking with friends in LA, and at one in the morning I called him to come pick me up. I sat on the curb in my gold sequined dress and waited for him to arrive. I was so tired by the time he pulled up, or maybe just too drunk, that I didn’t even bother with my seat belt. I curled up and went right to sleep.
When I woke up, Luke’s car was facing the wrong direction on the freeway. Apparently another vehicle had flipped after hitting the median a few moments before. It had no lights and by the time Luke realized, it was too late. He hit the other car, another car hit us, and so on until there was an eight-car pileup.
They say if you’ve been drinking and your body is loose, you’re actually more likely to survive a crash. Maybe that’s what happened to me that night. Or maybe, once again, I had just gotten lucky.
I think I knew it this time. Because standing on the side of the road, still drunk, waiting for the tow truck, I felt compelled to call my mom.
“Hello?”
“Mom?”
“Elizabeth? Are you okay? It’s five in the morning.”
“We had an accident. Luke’s car was totaled. But it wasn’t his fault.”
“I knew it,” my mom said. “I felt it tonight, that something was wrong. I even had a nightmare that you’d been hurt.”
It seemed for a moment that some strange force was pulling us together, but maybe my mom had nightmares about me all the time.
“What happened?” My mom’s voice sounded pinched. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine.”
I heard her exhale. “Why do you keep doing this to yourself?”
“I said it wasn’t our fault!”
“Oh, Elizabeth. I just wish you could see what a dangerous path you’re on.”
I could tell my mom was crying and trying to hide it. I knew I should feel bad, but what I really felt was nothing. I was getting to be a skilled dissociation artist. I could turn off reality just like that. Blackouts and near-death experiences were becoming a habit, or maybe a hobby.
Somehow I still had all those cat lives and if I could have, I would have given them away. Especially when my friends started dying. Instead of engagement announcements and job updates, the Carlbrook network passed along obituaries.
I was out with Luke and Bryan one night not long after the accident, getting obliterated per usual, when all of our phones started going off at once.
“What the fuck?” Luke said. “Guys, you have to read this.”
I forced my eyes to focus. Trevor, our easygoing, grinning friend, was dead.
“This can’t be real,” I said.
It wasn’t just that he was dead. Trevor had been murdered—fucking murdered. Instead of an obituary, we were reading headline news.
“Jesus,” Bryan said. “Stabbed seven times? In the neck?”
“Found dead in a pool of his own blood.”
It was surreal, almost impossible to believe. Trevor had been such a bright presence at Carlbrook. He was the guy who got along with everyone, always looking for a way to be helpful. Like the day of my very first group, when he read the terror in my eyes and countered it with a giant grin. After that, he always made time to check in with me—and not in a bullshit, tell me your life story way.
He’d been there for Kyle as well—on that day and many others. He could tolerate his friend’s pain without letting it consume him. The worse it got for Kyle, the more Trevor leaned in—but his smile was still there in case someone needed it. Despite being close, they always seemed so different. It made no sense that now both of them were dead.
> Trevor was killed in Miami, not far from the college where he’d been finishing his senior year. But Los Angeles was his hometown. So the memorial was held not an hour from where Luke and I were living.
Luke and I arrived together and we walked into the church hand in hand. We were both so numb from shock that it felt like we were simply at a Carlbrook reunion. I saw kids I never thought I’d cross paths with again in my life—some welcome, some not. I saw a Pony and instinctively tensed up—until I realized there was nothing she could do to hurt me anymore. Even if other kids were still playing the game, I had opted out. For a moment, I actually felt okay.
Then I saw Alan and froze in place. My tormentor was standing twenty feet away, weeping in front of a dead boy’s casket.
“Oh no,” I said to Luke. “He’s here.”
“I know,” he said. “We can leave whenever you want, okay?”
“Maybe we can just avoid him,” I said.
But of course that was impossible. Alan spotted us before the words even left my mouth.
“Elizabeth! Luke!”
Alan walked over to us. The collar of his shirt was soaked with tears, and I could smell his hot, stale breath. It was the scent of déjà vu.
“Look at you two. How are you? I’ve missed you both, you know,” he said. “Especially you, Luke. We never got to say good-bye.”
Luke shuffled his feet. “Um, sorry about that.”
I expected Alan to lay into him, but he just smiled. He looked around the room, sniffling. “Trevor was so beautiful.”
“He was,” I said.
“I’m going to miss him so much.”
“Me too.”
I wanted to tell Alan to shut the fuck up.
Stop crying, it’s all your fault. You ruined every one of us. Even Trevor.
It was my one chance to say everything I really thought.
You’re a pig. And I fucking hate you.
You ruined my life, you fucking creep. You made me feel dirty and disgusting. Like there was something wrong with me. But there’s something wrong with you, Alan.
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