Stolen

by Elizabeth Gilpin

  But I looked at him, standing there hunched and weeping, and I just couldn’t do it. Alan seemed so weak without the force of Carlbrook behind him. He was just a pathetic old man. It suddenly made no sense that he had been able to wield so much power. How could this red-faced, blubbering man have caused us all so much harm? How was that face the face of my worst nightmare?

  “You two really look great,” he said.

  Alan leaned toward me, pulling me in for that dreaded hug. My whole body went tense and I was flooded by a familiar feeling of disgust, but I wasn’t frozen in fear like I used to be. Outside Carlbrook, Alan’s hug was just a hug. I wasn’t his prisoner anymore. I pulled back from his embrace, knowing there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

  I hardly remember talking to anyone else that afternoon, or the things that were said about Trevor, stories and funny anecdotes. When the service was over, Luke and I walked out like we’d come in, holding hands and dazed.

  I felt a surge of rage the moment we drove away. It confused me. On the one hand, I was angry that Alan had been there at all. I’d put more than two thousand miles between myself and Carlbrook and still, Carlbrook found a way to reach me in California. I was also mad at myself, though. I felt like I’d let Trevor down by failing to confront Alan. It didn’t matter how pathetic he appeared, he was still the man who had hurt so many people, so many times.

  “I hate him,” I said.

  “I know.” Luke was shaking his head. “I hate them all.”

  For the rest of the drive, we talked about Carlbrook in a way we never had before. It had taken this long just to get past the subconscious fear of ending up on an honor list or being called out in group. It was the first time I opened up about how violated and unsafe the Carlbrook staff made me feel—both emotionally and physically. The words just poured out of me, long overdue. After keeping so much in, it was a hugely cathartic conversation.

  At the same time, I never wanted to do it again. Thinking about Carlbrook was too overwhelming. I no longer wanted to understand my life. I just wanted to forget it. So I continued to block out the world with booze and drugs. I ran away without any particular direction in mind. I stumbled and blacked out, then I got back up and started running again.

  As months passed, my relationship with Luke became about drugs more and more. I told myself we were just having fun. We were young and in love and making up for lost time, but most dates don’t end in 5:00 a.m. comedowns or hangovers that last until the next bender starts. Plus, I don’t think a romantic getaway is the right term for the night I snorted a line of crushed-up pills and woke up two days later.

  A lot of the time, I was either too high or too sick to eat—but that was a good thing. In my mind I couldn’t possibly be skinny enough. I was anorexic and bulimic, always googling new ways to lose even more weight. When I looked in the mirror, all I saw was a girl who wasn’t good enough. A worthless abuser and a mistake.

  When Luke and I broke up, things only got worse. I’d lock myself in my apartment for days, playing sad songs on repeat. Just like Carlbrook taught me. When I emerged from isolation, my only plan was to find the next party. I’d stay out all night long, fueled by alcohol and coke. When the sun was up and my friends were long gone, when the drugs had run out and there was nowhere else to go, I’d make my way home.

  To the extent that you feel joy, that’s how much you will feel sorrow.

  I really understood the pendulum swing then. A great night inevitably meant a horrible morning. Some of those comedowns were so bad I would google the numbers of rehabs and call them up crying.

  “I think I need to check myself in.”

  “Okay. Tell me what’s going on.”

  I’d explain my problem and say I needed to check myself in. But instead I’d end up falling asleep for the rest of the day and when I woke up I always felt better.

  I don’t need rehab, I just need more drugs.

  So I kept on running. I met a guy and ran away to New York to be with him. My new boyfriend helped me get an internship at Vogue that turned into a full-time job. I entered a world where there was always another party, then another afterparty, and the drugs didn’t run out. At first I still kept in contact with my Carlbrook friends. I’d talk to Maya and Bobby on the phone every now and then, and I saw Charlotte whenever she came to New York. Eventually, I found myself wanting more and more distance. I wanted to forget about Carlbrook completely.

  For a while, I actually did. There were several years where it was like that part of my life was erased from my consciousness. I had unraveled so much that even Charlotte and I stopped talking for a while. Most of my new friends had no idea I’d even gone to a therapeutic boarding school. Or that I lived in the woods for three months when I was fifteen. Every time a memory threatened to intrude, I’d push it away or drown it out.

  I forced Carlbrook out of my own life story. It was there and it wasn’t; everything that happened turned into nothing at all. I had split myself into two parts, and each half stayed alive by lying to the other. It was an exhausting way to live and I was dizzy from the effort of trying to keep up with myself.

  Regardless, I knew it was worth it. Because this time—this time—I was actually free.

  Chapter 39

  THE KIDNAPPERS HAD come in the middle of the night and the call came in the middle of the day. A decade was spooled out between two moments that changed my life forever.

  It was the summer of 2015 and I was back in Los Angeles. I had reached my breaking point with drugs and late-night drinking and was in the process of piecing my life back together. I finally found something to anchor me when I took my first acting class and fell in love. It felt like a safe way to express myself, almost like therapy for the darkness inside. Carlbrook was still buried in some distant corner of my psyche, and I wasn’t quite ready to look at it head-on.

  Then there was the phone call. When my cell started ringing with Bobby’s name on the screen, it took me by surprise. I had just pulled up to my acting coach’s house. I stared at my vibrating phone as I walked toward her front door. My first instinct was to ignore the call. I didn’t want to be late or seem rude. I also knew in my gut that Bobby was bearing bad news.

  “Hello?” I picked up. “Bobby?”

  “Hey. Elizabeth. How are you?”

  “I’m good,” I said. “Back in LA. What’s going on with you?”

  “Oh fuck,” he said. “You really haven’t heard yet, have you?”

  I heard the sadness in his voice and my heart froze. “Heard what?”

  “Oh man,” he said. “I guess I’m the first to call you. You two were so close at school and, well…This is gonna be a shock, okay?”

  “Okay…,” I said. “What?”

  He hesitated.

  “Bobby, just tell me.”

  “Maya’s dead.”

  “What? No.” I could hear the panic in my own voice. “That’s impossible.”

  “I felt the same way when I heard.”

  “What happened? Was there a car accident or something?”

  “No,” Bobby said. “Not an accident.”

  “What are you trying to say, Bobby?”

  “It was suicide, Elizabeth.” He took a deep breath. “Maya jumped off a bridge on Saturday.”

  Chapter 40

  IT’S BEEN FIVE years since Maya died and about fifteen since I graduated from Carlbrook. That’s half a lifetime that I spent running away from myself. Half a lifetime spent feeling broken and lost, confused about who I was or even if I was at all. But I’m not running anymore. In fact, I’m sitting.

  I’m on a bench in Los Angeles, overlooking a lake. It’s a place that reminds me a little bit of the one at Carlbrook. Where I’d sit with Maya and Bobby and talk about the future. I don’t think any of us got the lives we’d planned. But I’m getting there. Little by little, day by day. It isn’t always easy, but I’m rebuilding my life.

  Although I’m alone, a workshop of one, I think I’m ready fo
r my first truly honest disclosure circle.

  Disclosure: I’m not free from Carlbrook. I never was and I’m not sure I’ll ever fully get there. But I know now that avoiding it was never going to be the solution. I needed to run toward it, not away from it, and now that I have, I feel better for it.

  Maya’s death brought back my Carlbrook nightmares. I have dreams about the staff and others where I’m trapped in an endless workshop, but I recognize that this is a good thing. It’s a sign I’ve stopped burying the painful parts of my life. I can look at Alan’s face directly and know, even in my dream state, that I will wake up okay.

  Disclosure: I suffer from depression. I’m not a drug addict, and my anger doesn’t come from some unexplainable place. I just have trouble regulating my mood sometimes, just like so many other people I know. I didn’t need to be sent away. I didn’t need a full-time “therapeutic community.” All I ever needed was for someone to take the time to really hear me. To interpret the cry for help that was at the center of every explosive fight or drunken night.

  I didn’t need tough love. I just needed a little extra help.

  Disclosure: I’ve always been ruled by my emotions. As a kid it sometimes felt like my feelings were too big for me. As though I’d been given the wrong size by some accident of God or fate; and Carlbrook, that place of bullshit “emotional growth,” made this problem so much worse.

  After I left, I often had trouble figuring out what I really felt to the degree that I’d either explode completely or just shut down. I’d gotten so used to isolation that I unconsciously re-created it in my new life. Like that first year in Los Angeles, when I’d lock myself in my apartment for days on end.

  My first boyfriend in New York had a storage room down the hall from his loft. It was filled with stacks of books and a single picture of Marilyn Monroe. Sometimes after we fought, I’d lie and say I was going for a walk. Instead, I’d lock myself inside the little room and stare at the picture of Marilyn, wondering what was wrong with me. Her eyes looked so sad and lost—but they were also completely familiar. Her eyes said the same thing that mine did every time I glanced in a mirror.

  Someone hurt me once. And then everyone did.

  My boyfriend was sympathetic to the bits and pieces he knew about my life. He really tried to help me, but I didn’t know how to let him in. I was still hiding from myself, after all. I was more comfortable with drugs and parties—and that’s what I returned to after we broke up.

  Disclosure: I have a habit of getting in over my head when it comes to relationships. There was a night back in New York when I fell in love in a single instant. Whatever the reason, he made me feel safe and utterly content in ways I’d never experienced before.

  He took me to Paris. Inside our hotel room, looking out at the city, he wrapped his arms around me and told me he loved me. He said he wanted to have kids with me—not one day, but soon. It didn’t matter that I was so young, and so obviously traumatized, because I wanted it too. I had felt alone and lost for so long that once I finally had love, I didn’t want to give it up, I wanted to double down.

  I didn’t expect to get pregnant so quickly, but I did. It felt just as sudden when I had a miscarriage. There were complications, and after days of constant pain and bleeding I finally went to the hospital.

  I needed my boyfriend, but our relationship had started falling apart. Instead, I got Percocet. My first prescription was for thirty pills, and when that ran out, I got more. I couldn’t handle the trauma of losing the baby, and everything fell apart in dramatic fashion. It was the last straw for my fragile psyche, which was already overloaded by the compounding trauma of everything I’d been through. I was a mess of crazed emotion, trying to soothe myself with whatever drugs I could find. Getting high and eating nothing but coconut popsicles for months. One day I even found myself crying in a church because I had nowhere else to go.

  If there was ever a time in my life when I truly should have died, this was it. I wasn’t saved by a cat life, though. I was saved by a friend. I barely knew Evan, but he took me in and pieced me back together. He helped me get off the opiates I’d become addicted to and forced me to eat real food. He was there for me at a time when it felt like everyone else in my life had written me off as a lost cause.

  Disclosure: I still have a hard time with trust. I tend to keep people at arm’s length, afraid of what might happen if I let those I love get too close. It’s a work in progress, both in my relationships and with my family.

  A few weeks after my miscarriage, I called my mom and asked her to fly out to be with me. I wanted her comfort; I craved family and connection, but I didn’t know how to receive it. Instead, I took my pain out on her. This most recent trauma triggered all the old wounds and we got into it at a restaurant on the Upper East Side. I told her I hated her, that she’d ruined my life—that old refrain. I stormed out of the restaurant, unable to get past the betrayal I felt for even a moment.

  I now understand they were victims too. When I finally began to unravel the tangled web of Carlbrook, I was able to see that things were more complicated than the simple narrative I fixated on at fifteen. My parents were scared for me. They didn’t understand my moodiness and anger. When they were offered a magic fix, they took it.

  I still wish they hadn’t. I’d be lying if I said the thought of being sent away doesn’t continue to break my heart. I’ll probably always struggle with trust. But I don’t blame them for trying to help me. Not anymore.

  Disclosure: I didn’t go to Maya’s funeral. I had every intention of being there. As the date got closer, I just couldn’t do it. I was too angry—not just at Carlbrook but at myself for letting our different views about our school get in the way of our friendship. I really loved Maya and I know she loved me too; but she never stopped defending the school, insistent that it had helped her heal.

  Maybe that was her defense mechanism. Mine was to shut out any mention of the place, especially when it was positive. After all those years of repressing any thought of Carlbrook, Bobby’s call opened the floodgates. I was back in the snow globe, and it had been turned completely upside down.

  I’d already had friends die—suicides, overdoses, a murder—and was still able to go on ignoring the root issue, but this time it was different. It was Maya. Always smiling, always willing to see the best in everyone and everything.

  It was such a strength, but I can’t help but wonder if ultimately her generous spirit was the thing that harmed her the most. I will never know why Maya jumped off that bridge, but I can’t shake my conviction that Carlbrook had something to do with it. There were just so many deaths. As we learned in Integritas, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

  Losing Maya cracked me apart and all the pain I’d tried so hard to bury rose up at once. Suddenly I wanted answers. I wanted to know why and how. I wanted to know exactly what that place was, exactly the nature of what we’d been through. I wanted to understand why I’d survived it when so many others hadn’t.

  So no, I didn’t go to Maya’s funeral. I wasn’t ready to face the past just yet. But her death was the catalyst for everything that came next. It’s the reason this book exists. She deserved so much more from life than what the Troubled Teen Industry gave her.

  We all do, every one of us. Maggie and Kyle, Charlotte and Brittany. Even Randall was a product of the cycle.

  To those who didn’t survive: You deserved a different ending.

  To those who are still surviving: You deserve to be understood.

  This book is for you. It’s for us. It’s for anyone who was touched by the long, cold arm of that terrible industry. It’s for everyone who just wants the cycle to stop.

  Afterword

  Carlbrook has been permanently closed since December 2015. After fourteen years of operation, the school cited declined enrollment as the reason for its shutting. In 2010, a student named Forest Ferguson walked off the Carlbrook campus and was never hear
d from again. To this day, he remains a missing person.

  As for Kristen, she did not end up dead in a ditch like Randall described. After we graduated, a postcard made its way to Charlotte’s address. It was a Christmas greeting from Kristen, who was very much alive and well.

  In memory of:

  Adam, Alyssa, Arturo, Beau, Blake B., Blake J., Brendan, Brian, Cage, Carl, Cody, Cody C., Coleman, Connor F., Connor G., Daniel, Eddie, Elizabeth, Ford, Henry, James, Jennifer, Joe, Jonathan, Kate, Kelly, Laura, Lisa, Matt, Michael, Mike A., Miles, Molly, Neil, Rich, Rob, Sean, Sean W., Trevor, Walker, and Zack

  Acknowledgments

  To my family, who supported me in telling such a hard story. For reliving this time in our lives in order to make this possible. They were not only understanding of my desire to share it, but are also proud of me for doing so. These institutions prey not only on the children, but also scared parents and families. I am grateful to my brother, Thomas, for our trip to Montana. I was nervous about how everyone would react to my doing a book; he stood by me and walked me through the process. This journey has shown me that forgiveness is always possible.

  Annabel Fay, who has become my family and whom I am forever indebted to. We survived this experience together and without her I don’t know where I would be in life. Thank you for trusting me when it came to reliving your experience; I know how deeply personal and painful it is. To my other classmates who have kept in touch with me over the years, you did more for me than you know.

  My deepest gratitude to Liana Maeby, my great friend and someone I deeply respect and admire. Thank you for the countless hours spent meticulously reading and reviewing the text and for offering invaluable notes, ideas, and suggestions. Your generous and thoughtful contributions helped me find the story I was meant to tell.