You Know I'm No Good

by Jessie Ann Foley

  They were all crying.

  My mouth was dry, and my head throbbed. I started to pound on the window—why was my family just standing there, letting me be kidnapped? Why weren’t they calling 911? And then I became aware of a person twisted around from the front passenger seat, watching me. She had close-set, intelligent eyes; an incongruously delicate nose; and the kind of short utilitarian haircut, threaded throughout with wiry gray strands, that is so unapologetically ugly it feels like a political statement. The words she was speaking with narcotic calmness began to fall into order like metal shots in a pinball machine—Red Oak Academy . . . I’m Dr. . . . but you can call me Mary Pat . . . help you need . . . a new chance . . . pain . . . therapeutic school . . . who you are and who you’re meant to be.

  I couldn’t process all of it, but I understood enough to know that the reason my family wasn’t doing anything to thwart my kidnappers was because they were the ones who had called them. The betrayal of it all doubled me over. I’d punched Alanna first, but as it turned out, she punched back much harder. I’d heard about these kinds of places but had always believed them to be just another myth in the toolbox of lies parents use to control their kids, in the vein of If you eat too much candy your teeth will fall out or Keep making that face and it will freeze like that forever.

  I thought back, as the car sped along, to the only other time in my life when I was locked away in a car like this. I was fifteen, at my cousin’s wedding. This was early on in my partying career, so I didn’t really know how to handle the rum and Cokes the cute bartender kept slipping to me all throughout cocktail hour. I shattered my glass on the dance floor during the Cupid Shuffle; I ripped my tights. In short, I was an embarrassing, sloppy mess. My dad said we had to go home, but Alanna refused. I’m not letting her ruin my good time, she said. So my dad dragged me out to the car, threw me in the back seat, and child-locked me in. I tried to kick out the window, but it was tempered glass, and all I managed to do was make a spiderwebbing crack. Later, when they came out to the car, they discovered me asleep in my own puke. The smell didn’t leave the car for weeks, not even after I cleaned it up as punishment, not even after I paid for a new window and a professional car shampoo with my own money. I still remember how Alanna, who was a little wine-buzzed herself, took it all in—the cracked window, the masticated chicken breast and scalloped potatoes sprayed all over the back seat, and me, makeup dripping, bra strap slipping down my shoulder. Maybe she thought I was still passed out, that I couldn’t hear what she said next to my dad: I’m sorry, Jim, but you know what? On days like this, I’m glad she’s not my real daughter.

  And now here I was again, a year and half later, locked away in a car for my bad behavior. And my physical response was the same. This Mary Pat person was at the ready, barf bag snapped open and passed back to me right in time. Let’s just say that, coming back up, the seventeen-year-aged Bordeaux was no longer incroyable. Once it had finished spewing out of me, she took the bag, tied it neatly shut, and placed it on the floor between her feet in what was surely the most expensive bag of vomit ever regurgitated. She handed me a tissue to wipe my streaming eyes and an Altoid to clear out the heinous taste in my mouth. Biting down on the mint, I thought to myself that if she tried to do something like reach back, squeeze my hand, and tell me it was all going to be okay, I would knock her the fuck out. But she was a pro. She understood that with new captures, it’s best to keep interaction at a minimum. I could kick and thrash as much as I wanted, but it would only be performative, an exercise in protest. She had all the power, and I had none: there was no escaping, and we both knew it.

  So after handing me another tissue, Mary Pat turned back to look straight ahead at the road, talked softly to the driver, and left me alone to cry and scream and carry on as if I weren’t there at all.

  When I’d finally worn myself out, I put my head against the cold window and watched Chicago, the city of my whole life, drain into the distance like a bloodletting. Whatever Xander’s mom took to regulate her feelings must have been some strong stuff, stronger even than fear, stronger than rage, because even though I didn’t mean to, I eventually passed out again.

  I didn’t wake up until many hours later. We were pulling into a round gravel driveway before a series of low-slung wooden buildings with thick wilderness pressing in on all sides. I was made to understand that this was where I lived now. The sun was up, and the sky was an obscene, cloudless blue. There was something snappy and crisp about the air; it had a freshness about it that felt hostile and vaguely foreign. I didn’t know what time it was, or how long we’d been driving, or even what state I was in. I reached for my phone in order to answer all these questions, but Mary Pat informed me, in an unctuous voice not unlike a funeral director’s, that it had been confiscated.

  “Once we get you settled in,” she said, handing me a cold bottle of water, “we can talk about ways for you to earn back some tech privileges.”

  As I chugged the water, I thought of Xander throwing a tantrum about being kicked off his phone plan. I wondered what he would do if his father took away his actual phone. And his home. And his life.

  “I don’t even know where I am,” I croaked, my voice hoarse from screaming. “You can’t do this. I don’t even know where I am.”

  “You’re in east-central Minnesota, Mia. And you’re safe. If there’s anything else you want to know, all you need to do is ask.”

  But as she led me up the path toward the main building, with the two transport meatheads hulking behind me, the only person I had a question for was my dad. Don’t you remember what you said to me at Mom’s funeral? I mean, I was three, and I still remembered. In fact, it was the only thing I remembered from that day at all. Rain drumming the roof of the hired car as it crawled to the cemetery behind the yellow taillights of the hearse that carried her body. Him turning to me with his dark suit and puffy eyes and squeaky black shoes. Holding both of my hands in his. Saying: Mia. It’s just you and me now. And I will never, ever let you go.

  7

  MARY PAT SHOWS ME to a seat in her office while she goes to get my paperwork. When she leaves, she takes along her letter opener and her marble paperweight—“Just out of an abundance of caution,” she says with a mild smile—and locks the door from the outside. As I wait for her to come back, too shell-shocked to feel the full extent of my hangover, I pick up a glossy brochure from a pile on her desk. On the cover is a picture of three girls with their arms thrown around each other: one black, one white, one Asian, all gorgeous. They are sitting together on a giant log while a picturesque sunset lights up the pine trees behind them. They are each smiling these ridiculous big-toothed grins that are obviously meant to assuage the fears of prospective parents who are having doubts about sending their daughters away to a prison camp in the middle of nowhere. Not only have we been thoroughly brainwashed into compliance, the girls on the log seem to be saying, but we’ve had fun doing it!

  I open the pamphlet and begin to read.

  Parenting isn’t easy.

  But it should never be this hard.

  Let us help.

  Welcome to Red Oak Academy, a therapeutic boarding school for troubled teenage girls. We are a fully accredited high school located on ten beautiful wooded acres in east-central Minnesota, just outside the Rum River State Forest—a one-of-a-kind facility that combines the latest in therapeutic pedagogy with the ancient healing qualities of Mother Nature. Our program is designed to help your daughter find her way back to the life she was meant to lead and the person she was meant to be. Our pledge is that when we return your daughter to you after her program has reached maturation, she will be like the red oak for which our school is named, and by which our school is surrounded, growing straight and tall and proud in the forest of her life.

  Our treatment approach is distinctly holistic and tailored to each individual student’s needs. Unlike some more traditional therapeutic schools, we do not engage in practices that are rooted in patriarchal, mili
taristic systems—e.g., uniforms, honor codes, “levels,” traditional academic grades, etc. We believe this holistic, individualized approach is what distinguishes us from other therapeutic boarding programs. In this spirit, please be aware of what we are NOT:

  A wilderness program

  A drug rehabilitation facility

  A mental health facility

  A boot camp

  A lockdown facility

  This last bullet point is sort of a comfort. If it’s not a lockdown facility, does that mean I can leave whenever I want? But when I look at the locked door before me, or out the window behind me, with its thick wall of forest on every side, filled with trees growing straight and tall and proud,5 I wonder where it would be that I could even go.

  Who Is a Red Oak Girl?

  She is your daughter: a smart, loving young woman, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, who has simply lost her way. She may be:

  Making poor and dangerous choices

  Acting entitled, selfish, or detached

  Manipulative

  Lying

  Sneaking out

  Rebellious

  Depressed

  Withdrawn

  Self-destructive

  Narcissistic

  Histrionic

  Eating-disordered

  Violent

  Promiscuous

  Academically unmotivated

  Using/abusing drugs and/or alcohol beyond the experimental stage

  Experiencing grief and/or trauma

  Experiencing attachment struggles

  Engaging in school refusal

  Unable to adhere to rules or limits

  Unable to regulate her moods

  Expressing suicidal ideation

  Self-harming

  Easily influenced by others; lacking a solid sense of self

  Oppositional

  Fire-starting

  Huh.

  Like, okay.

  I admit: some of these apply to me. I make poor and dangerous choices. I manipulate, I rebel, I’m promiscuous, I’m defiant, I use/abuse drugs and/or alcohol beyond the experimental stage, I’m academically unmotivated, and while technically speaking I am able to adhere to rules and limits, I usually choose not to. But honestly, that also probably describes a good chunk of the people I hang out with. I mean, look at Xander! He’s a burnout, a thief of rare aged wines, a man whore, and a drug dealer. So why am I the one who got sent away?

  And what about this other stuff?

  Suicidal ideation?

  Self-harming?

  Fire-starting???

  I mean, even if I admit that I’m bad, I’m not, like, arsonist bad. I’m not hurting-myself-and-others bad (Alanna’s nose doesn’t count; that was one time, and if you’d heard what she said to me, you would agree that she completely deserved it).

  I look around Mary Pat’s office with its wood-paneled walls, its folksy tchotchkes lining the bookcases, its cozy braided rug, its framed oil paintings of ducks. The place looks like some kind of sinister, alt-universe Cracker Barrel. And my dad thinks this is the kind of place I belong, with these kinds of people? As I wait for Mary Pat to come back, an awful image forms in my head: of him and Alanna sitting late at night at the kitchen table, heads pressed together, pens in hand. I picture them going through this list and ticking off box after box, each checkmark an affirmation that the only solution they have left is to farm me out to a band of psychology-degree-wielding, non-militaristic, non-patriarchal strangers. And with each checked box, even though they won’t admit it—even to each other—both of them feel a growing sense of excitement. With me no longer in the picture, they can finally be who they’re meant to be, the Dempseys: just a mom, a dad, and their two adorable and fully biological children. Without me around, they can finally be a normal family. A nuclear family, as they say, but with its nuclear piece, which has threatened for years to blow them all to pieces, finally defused for good.

  8

  AFTER MARY PAT HAS handed me a clear plastic backpack filled with a couple notebooks,6 a Red Oak student handbook, and my small purple duffel bag from home, filled with clothes Alanna must have packed and shipped in advance of my ambush, she leads me to a windowless cinder-block room down the hall from her office. The floor is concrete, the track lighting is harsh yellow, and there’s nothing in the rectangular space except for two chairs and a long table with a plastic bin on it, the kind you see at airport security where you have to put your keys and jacket. There are two women sitting in the chairs. The one with long flat-ironed hair is tall and mom-like, in her Dansko clogs, craft fair earrings, and blue scrubs. The other is short and shapeless, young enough to still have acne, with unevenly applied eyeliner, a messy bun tied at the top of her head, and a wavy blood-colored line at her hairline where her drugstore dye has bled into her scalp. She’s wearing a T-shirt that reads RED OAK STAFF across the front.

  “Mia,” says Mary Pat, “let me introduce you to Melanie, our school nurse practitioner, and Dee, our assistant team leader.”

  Both women stand to greet me; I look past them like they aren’t even there.

  “Nurse Melanie is going to weigh you and take your vitals, and then I’m going to do a quick search of your person.”

  My person? I don’t actually hate her weirdly formal choice of words. It dissociates me from my body—my body is my person, and I’m me. Two separate things: and these bitches can only search one of them.

  When I go to step onto the scale, Nurse Melanie stops me.

  “If you don’t mind, Mia,” she says, “I’d ask that you turn around and step up backward.”

  “Why?”

  “Some of our girls have body dysmorphia and problematic eating patterns, so we have a policy of keeping students’ weight confidential.”

  “Well, I don’t have an eating disorder.”

  “Standard intake procedure, honey.”

  Now I’m more annoyed that she just called me honey. I sigh, turn around, step backward onto the scale, and wait for her to record my weight. Then she takes my blood pressure and listens to my heartbeat, recording all my results in her laptop.

  “I’ll ask you to remove your clothes now,” Mary Pat says, as she pulls two blue rubber gloves from a disposable packet on the table.

  “Wait. You’re going to strip-search me?”

  “Again, this is standard intake procedure.”

  “Fuck that. I opt out of standard intake procedure.”

  Mary Pat smiles at me with the unruffled American-heartland efficiency that I’ve already come to loathe. “Mia, if you refuse to cooperate, then we’ll have to hold you down and remove your clothes forcibly. But I’d really like to avoid that, if at all possible. That kind of physical interaction can be very triggering for some of our girls.”

  I stand in the middle of the well-lit room, looking back and forth between these three women. I know I haven’t exactly led a life of dignity these last few years, but still, this feels egregious. At least when I’m taking off my clothes for somebody, they’re taking off their clothes, too. Plus, the room is usually dark.

  “Now go on ahead and remove your clothes, please, and place them in the bin. This won’t take more than a minute.”

  Nurse Melanie smiles at me and nods gently. Dee waits, watching me. I notice the thickness of her arms, the sturdiness of her short, bowed legs. Her face is impassive, but there is a certain mean energy in her eyes, a challenge. She wants me to fight this. She wants to put her hands on me, display her dominance. I realize that I hate her. It feels good. One of my little rules of life is that if you’re ever in a situation where you’re feeling vulnerable, the best thing to do is pick out somebody to hate. Hate is an uncomplicated emotion. It will give you something to latch on to, clean out your mind and strip you down to the animal that you are, reminding you that, as an animal, you have only one real job to accomplish, which is to survive.

  I stare Dee down as I unbutton my jeans.

  I’m still wearing Xander’s favo
rite bra—the black lacy one with the sheer band and the straps that dig into my shoulders. He bought it for me, which is why it’s the completely wrong size—he was unaware that bra sizes had numbers and letters. I never wear it except when I know I’m going to be seeing him. As I unhook it and toss it into the bin, even my humiliation can’t prevent me from feeling the physical sensation of relief every girl experiences when she takes off an ill-fitting undergarment for the day. I hope that Alanna, in her haste to get rid of me, at least remembered to pack me a sports bra.

  I pull down my underwear quickly, squeeze it into a ball, and toss it into the bin. I stare up at the particleboard ceiling, blinking carefully because I’m afraid, suddenly, that I might cry. Goose bumps prick my skin as Mary Pat skims my shoulders and waist with her gloved hands.

  “Almost done,” I hear her say. “You’re doing just fine, Mia. Now, bend over, please, and place your hands on the floor.”

  I can feel Dee watching me, feel the imbalance of power that her smirk implies, as I touch my palms to the concrete. I tell myself again that my body is just a body and the me of who I am is something they can’t see or touch. If you cry right now, I think to myself as Mary Pat’s gloved fingers begin to probe me, then they’ll see you. If you let them see you, you’re letting them win.

  They even make me squat to make sure I didn’t smuggle in anything up my vagina, like I’m some desperate drug mule. When I comply, Mary Pat and Dee and Nurse Melanie all stand there looking at the floor, as if they expect a gun to fall out or something. When nothing does, I swear Dee almost looks disappointed.

  I hurry to put my clothes back on, thinking this is finally over, but then Mary Pat informs me that they need to make some “stylistic changes” to my person in order to make me dress code compliant. Nurse Melanie sits me down in one of the chairs and, with an apologetic murmur, snips off the colored ends of my hair.7 I watch the lavender curls sift to the floor, thinking of the day I bleached them with Eve, my sort-of friend, in the flickering basement light of her mom’s boyfriend’s apartment, while washing machines hummed and shook all around us like rows of giant hatching eggs.