All Good Children Page 11

  “Gray isn’t my color,” I said. Someone behind me laughed. Another, younger, counselor came over.

  “You need to change with the other girls,” this new one said. She wore glasses and she pushed them up on her nose and sniffed in air. I expected an “or else” but only got another shake from Grandma.

  “Come on, Eleven,” Grandma said. “There’s no need to make this difficult.”

  “My name is Jordan,” I said, tearing up at the woman’s pincher-like fingers digging into my bone.

  “No,” she said, “no names here. You’re Eleven. We’re all numbers here. You’re no different than anyone else, you got that?” That was when my eyes found the button taped to the breast of her polo shirt, right next to the tiny alligator, declaring her number Fifty-Six. Then things got a little more blurry and her hand left my elbow and traveled to my knee, where it just lay there softly, gently.

  “Come on, kid,” she said, low, like reading me a bedtime story. “Just put on the clothes, okay?”

  But these were my favorite jeans, the ones I had to fight for in the middle of a Target last August because Mom said they were too tight and I said they make me look taller and I won because I can get a lot louder than her and don’t care who’s watching; and this was my third favorite shirt because I cut the sleeves off two Halloweens ago when it was too big for me but now it fits just right and I wanted to go as a body builder and I needed to show off my arms, freshly decorated with press-on tattoos of butterflies on mushrooms and a woman with devil horns, but then later in November it got colder and I wanted the sleeves back which I saved because I knew this would happen and Mom sewed them back on with only one tsk and a small admonition to take better care of my things, which I thought was pretty big of her; and this was the bracelet I made in art class when I didn’t really want to be doing it but I took my medication that morning and didn’t have the energy to argue my way into getting to sit in the corner and pretend to read while really I napped so I made the stupid thing while the really LD kids made macaroni art and I wore it when this all started, for the woman who told me she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, save me, and I wore it today because I could hide it under my sleeves and snap it against the big blue vein in my wrist and feel okay; and now they wanted me to give them these things, these things that made me more than a number no matter what kind of bullshit they pinned to me, and I didn’t want them to have it, I wouldn’t let them take it.

  I glared up at them both with wet eyes, gripping my bracelet, willing my shirt and pants to stick to me. “Make me,” I said.

  And they did.

  That was seven days ago, according to my mark on the floorboard which I make with my fingernail, which is the sharpest thing we’re allowed to keep around here, and even those they make us cut and file every couple of days. I don’t know how else I would keep track. We get up when the bell sounds which is probably right around first light, and we’re ushered back to our cabins when the sun goes down, though no one really sticks around after that to make sure we go to sleep right away. I guess they don’t have to, because of the cameras, which are everywhere, barely hidden behind their dark black spheres in the corners of our rooms, in the dining hall, the boat house; there’s even one on the flagpole. The only place I haven’t found one is in the bathroom of our cabin. Maybe they think they’re letting us keep some of our dignity this way. Some of us are fooled by this, think it means there’s hope for some reason. Some of us think the cameras are just better hidden there, to catch us trying to hatch escape plans or developing codes to include in our letters to our parents. But I know there aren’t any cameras there, or they would’ve taken Taylor away by now.

  There are ten of us in the cabin, just like on the bus except it’s a different group of girls. We keep our boxes under our cots and we all have the same thin blanket and flat pillow. We all look the same, tired and scared but trying to fake it through, except our hair is different, and I’m still waiting for someone to come in with a pair of clippers and move us all on to Stage Two. My cot is right next to the bathroom, because I got to pick last, because I’m the youngest in our cabin. These things still matter, I guess; I guess the older girls feel safer if they treat this like some high school sleep away camp.

  Taylor’s cot is next to mine, that’s why I heard her get up that first night. I watched her shadow move into the bathroom, and saw her reflection in the mirror when she flipped on the light, before she closed the door and I got up. She has dark hair, she lets it hang down to the middle of her back and doesn’t do anything with it, at least not here, which my mom would say is such a waste. What kind of impression are we making if we can’t even take care of ourselves, hmmm? Her face is small, and pale, and the shadows under her cobalt blue eyes grow deeper every day, and her cheekbones grow sharper, and she looks at me more and more like she wants to tell me her secrets but really she hasn’t spoken to me at all since that night.

  I went to the door and listened, I don’t know why. Because I couldn’t sleep, because it was either listen at the door to the sound of her showering or peeing or whatever, or lie there on my hard cot and listen to eight girls try not to cry themselves into unconsciousness. That night she was a number, number Fifteen. I put my ear to the door and I heard her sobbing, and then I heard something else, like something ripping, and then I heard her cry out, and then I opened the door.

  She stood in the shower, her pants on the floor, her hand beneath her, pulling something out from between her legs. She didn’t stop when I came in. She cried out again and pulled and I let the door close behind me. The thing she pulled out was in a bag, there was blood on it, but not much. She threw it on the floor, at my bare feet.

  “You can use it too,” she said, her voice wet, not looking at me. “If you need to.”

  She turned on the shower and started washing her legs. I stood there for a minute, trying, and failing, to think. I picked up the bag. It was a Zip Loc, and inside was a cardboard carton, no bigger than a matchbox, with white block letters declaring a company logo, DO IT BEST. I opened the box. A single razor blade, the kind guys shave with, fell into my palm.

  Fifteen turned the shower off and dried her legs with one of the off-white towels in the pantry, hung it over the shower rod. I watched her pull her pants back on. She held out her hand. “I’ll take that back now, Eleven,” she said.

  But I couldn’t give it back to her, not right away, because my name was Jordan and I wanted her to know that, and I wanted to remember it, and I didn’t want anyone to be able to take it away from me, like they were, so goddamn easily, able to take away my clothes, my brothers, and everything else.

  “My name is Jordan,” I said. I put the blade to the underside of my arm and it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it should. I looked at her while I did this, started to cry and tried to suck it back in, looking at her watching me, watching my arm, the cross-top of the J appearing in bright red on my skin. Then she grabbed my wrist, not the one holding the blade but the other.

  “Wait,” she said, “don’t do it there. Pick some place no one will see.”

  I had to stop and examine my body, actually had to look myself over, trying to remember the parts of myself that stayed covered most often.

  “Here.” Fifteen rolled up the bottom of my shirt to my navel, and traced a finger beneath the hole where my piercing used to be. “Right here. Don’t go too deep.”

  I pressed the blade to the spot she’d touched but I didn’t feel it, only the lingering warmth her skin left on mine. Then I couldn’t feel my own fingers, couldn’t grip the blade right, scared, fuck it, too goddamn scared.

  Without a word, Fifteen took the blade from me. With her right hand she pushed and pulled the blade through my skin, lightly, delicately, so it stung, but only like a scrape, like a bee sting. Her left hand gripped my right hand, mostly around the thumb, steadying herself, steadying me. I closed my eyes and listened to the blood drip onto the tiled floor.

  When she was done, my face was wet
and hot from trying not to breathe. But I have them now, the letters, my name, the only thing I get to take with me here. The letters are jagged and they don’t connect well; it looks like a third grader wrote it, just learning his cursive alphabet. But it’s there, my name, forever.

  Fifteen washed the blade in the sink and gave me a towel to hold to my stomach, pressing it there herself until I stopped shaking and replaced her hands with mine. She straightened up, taller than me, looked into my eyes, and just said, “Hello.” It was the last thing she said to me before she put the blade to her own stomach, lower than where she’d done mine, along the indentation of the waistband of her sweatpants, and that’s how I learned her name is Taylor. That’s how I know there are no cameras in that bathroom because the razor blade is still hidden under a loose tile in there, where she checks it every night to make sure, where it will stay until she needs it, or until the next girl does, if Taylor’s lucky.

  That’s what got me into trouble with the group thing, those six letters that mean so much to me now, all I am reduced to a scar I have to hide but at least it’s something, more than these other girls have. Well, really what got me kicked out of group—which, if they think that is a punishment they are as deluded as the genius who came up with high school suspensions—was their refusal to let me keep my meds. Mood stabilizers, so I don’t act out, or, you know, feel too much of anything. But everything we had on us when we arrived was taken and traded for those numbered brown boxes and I tried to explain but it doesn’t matter. They took ’em, I lose. I bet they pass ’em around at night, in their camp counselor suite, to take the edge off the coming day. If there’s any left by now, which I bet there aren’t. Anyway.

  We didn’t start with these group meetings until Day Three. Before that we didn’t do much of anything, it seemed. They took us one by one from our cabins to a tent near the mess hall that had a big red cross on it, and inside they said this woman was a doctor and this man was a nurse, and to sit on this wooden table they covered with a paper sheet and let these two people look in our ears and up our noses with their tools and open wide and say ah. They even checked for lice. We took some written sort of psych evaluation later, the ones with those oh so relevant true/false statements that reveal you sometimes want to punch people who smoke, or you consider it poetic justice to take Post-Its from the office’s storage cabinet. Mostly, we were just left alone, to wander around but only in the yard or to each other’s cabins or to the mess hall at meal times. No one interacted much, except the desperately positive girls, the ones who preferred to braid each other’s hair and list their favorite pop stars over sitting on their bare bunks contemplating the usefulness of drawing up some sort of will; the ones who could take one look at me eating oatmeal by myself in the morning and picking at the scab they couldn’t see and know not to invite me to their slumber parties. But Day Three began a stricter routine.

  If you sleep in a cabin together, you don’t go to group together, though it is about the same number of girls, give or take. Groups meet after lunch, and every day, and they start like this:

  “Okay kids, it’s Share Time. Everyone think of one thing they miss about home, and one thing they are happy to be away from. And let’s not forget to use our Emotions Vocabulary! Who wants to start?”

  The woman leading these merry sessions is number Eighty-eight; she’s waif thin and has the stringy hair of a street walker, and it’s almost all gray but the lines in her face put her at about thirty-five, maybe closer to forty. Her voice rises at the end of her sentences, turning all of her statements into questions. She narrows her makeup-less eyes and purses her chapped lips at whomever is speaking, tapping her pen, which is practically glued to her fingers, against her knee and leaning forward like she’s oh so interested in the puppy you won’t get to see grow up and the nightmare of grass-stained jeans you’ll never have to worry about scrubbing out. I started calling her Gertrude immediately, because she looked like a lady I used to see in the feed store at home, who bought sixteen pounds of chicken feed every week when everyone knew she lived in her son’s basement in a two-family Tudor, and the closest thing they kept to chickens was a zebra finch that died when I was about ten. They do have a shed in the backyard, but it’s pretty small. Maybe she ate the feed herself? Anyway, she died because she was old, and her son moved. I call the group therapy leader Gertrude, and she hates it.

  I guess when I say hate I mean she was pretty indifferent about it. More so I think she got peeved when I wouldn’t participate in Share Time. When the room got quiet and everyone looked at me, waiting, a link in the circle of chairs but feeling like I was in the middle, called out, stupidly, to talk about some inanity that was so far beneath any of us now, I couldn’t open my mouth, because I might have laughed, or I might have cried. Or I might have told them about my mother and how she chews her food as if she’s masticating a living creature and I can’t eat in the same room with her or I’ll want to stab forks in my ears; and how, when she told me there was no such thing as Santa Claus when I was seven and getting wise but still wanted to believe and she told me, I called her a liar and I threw my teddy bear into the fireplace because it was something “he” had given me and if he wasn’t real then neither were any of his gifts. But that’s when I knew it was therapy, and I had enough of that at home, and maybe I should have said that was something I was glad to be away from, but, see, here it was again. So I crossed my arms. I closed my eyes. The talking picked up again without me, more sharing. Getting to know each other, sans proper nouns.

  The session when I got in trouble, yesterday, when they kicked me out, that was the day everyone shared what animal was their favorite and which ones made them kind of uneasy, like bats or spiders, which isn’t an animal but no one split any hairs about it when Four brought it up. And after this, Gertie opened up her clipboard and pulled out a laminated copy of a photograph, and said, “Now I need each of you to look at this picture and try not to react to it outwardly, but do react inwardly, and pause on that reaction, and think about it, and when everyone has finished looking at the picture, we’ll discuss our inward reactions.”

  The picture passed through five girls’ hands before it got all but pitched into mine. The first girl gasped—very little self control, must not have been held enough as a baby—and tried to fling the photo at the next girl, but our fearless leader admonished, “Don’t be so hasty to pass the picture on, Twenty-six. Look at it, at all of it, slowly. Don’t fight your reaction, but hold onto it, keep it inside. Go on.”

  And so it went, and so I was curious, watching everyone pull faces they quickly tried to cover up, and watching Gertie, too, sweet Gertie, watching these reactions like she was watching some secret porno she “accidentally” picked up at the video store and her boyfriend would be home any minute and boy would her face be red, but how exciting, getting caught looking. And then I had the picture, and my inward reaction took a flying leap from my gut out through my throat in the form of a sound I hadn’t heard since Omalis came to our house that first time.

  I laughed.

  The picture was of a boy, too hairless to be a man, lying naked on his back on a stainless steel table. His face was covered with a sheet pocked with cherry bloodstains, his skin peeled back from his chest. There was an embalming tube half inside him, with the gloved-white hand of his coroner holding back a fold of skin, directing the tube. I understood why some of the girls would gasp, or crinkle up their noses at the blood, or at his ash-grey hue of death, the clinical incisions, so close up. But those weren’t the only things I saw when I looked at the picture, they barely even registered, really. What caught me, what tickled something inside me that decided to burst out so absurdly, was his tattoo; inked into his left forearm, a simple darkened outline of a woman, the kind you see on truck mud flaps, something he didn’t pay too much for, or did himself, with initials underneath it, M.P. And I thought, in that instant of seeing it, I thought about another girl, or a woman, or a boy, or a man, being handed th
is same picture, in this same circumstance, and seeing first the shocking muscle tissue inside his chest cavity—and taking a moment to pause and react—and then flicking her eyes down about a centimeter, and there it is, that mud-flap lady with those initials, calling to her, glaring, screaming, “Hey, hey you, don’t I look familiar? Didn’t you wonder where’d I’d gone? Didn’t you wonder why I stopped coming to class, or delivering your paper, or fucking you in the backseat of my Dad’s Cutlass? Well, you found me.”

  And so I laughed, at the absurdity and the cruelty of possibility. Gertrude didn’t think it was funny, neither did the next girl I passed the photo to, or Twenty-six, whom I thought of as a Brenda, who started to cry. I took in a deep breath to stop laughing, to maybe start trying to explain, but Gertrude stood up.

  “Clearly, Eleven,” she began, her high notes brought down an octave but still church-choir worthy. “Clearly you have difficulty following instructions. Your behavior is most disruptive, and it is not a positive influence on this class or these girls.”

  “Class?” I couldn’t help myself. “What exactly are you teaching us?”

  Good ol’ Gertie chose to ignore me. “What do you think I should do about your behavior, hmm? Clearly it is unacceptable, at this juncture.”

  “Clearly,” I said, still not over the eye-rolling I enjoyed so much back home. “I guess the only thing you can do is send me home. Let me burden my mother, she’s used to it.”

  I almost got a snicker out of one of the girls to my left, I swore I heard it. But then Gertrude said this: “Or we could accelerate the program, Eleven. How would that be? Get you out of here expediently, as you’ve expressed quite unquestionably to be preferable to joining in our activities. Yes, perhaps I should phone your Liaison, have her inform your parents that your tract will be decided at the end of the week? Hmm, Eleven, how does that sound?”