The Girls of No Return (5 page)

“What did you say?” Her voice had the same quality as thunder, like when you hear it rumbling in the distance and know you're in for it now, buster, that storm's gonna get you.

“I mean,” said Gwen, faltering, “it's just that, you know, Margaret might have left it alone if we hadn't said anything.” She looked sideways while she talked. It was clear that eye contact was out of the question.

“Right,” said Boone. Her voice leaked contempt. “Sure. Then again, she might have just lifted up that T-shirt and found the bottle, and then she would have been obligated to turn it, and
us
, in.”

Then she looked at me. She looked me up and down. Took in my sneakers, baggy cords, blue T-shirt, stringy hair. I felt like an old coat that had been hanging for some time in her closet. One that she was thinking about throwing away.

“You look terrible.”

That was the first thing she said to me.

The second was, “How far did you crawl to get here?”

I shrugged. I had no idea what to say.

“What Boone means,” said my bunkmate, Karen, who was now standing in a yoga pose on one leg with her arms above her head, “is that she'd like to know where you're from.” Karen had dark mahogany skin and a head full of hair that cascaded past her shoulders in tight black ringlets. She fell forward so that her nose touched her knee.

“Bruno,” I said. My voice came out high and scratchy, and I blushed.

Boone raised an eyebrow at me as Karen said, “Bruno, what? Is that a town in California?”

“No,” said Boone. “It's here in Idaho. She's a local.” She never took her eyes off me as she said it.

I guess I hadn't thought about it before, but with a price tag like Alice Marshall's, I should have known that a real, bona fide Idahoan would be about as rare as a yeti.

“Great!” said the girl with a sunburn, getting up from her lower bunk and stretching. “Maybe you two know the same people!”

Boone glared at her. “Doubtful, Jules. Idaho is hardly one big school cafeteria.”

I hazarded a look at Boone's face. “Oh,” I said, “are you from Bruno too?”

“No,” she said, and her voice was falsely sweet, as if she was talking to a child. “I'm from no place you've ever heard of. At least, nowhere you'd want to go.”

I opened my mouth to tell her I'd been to plenty of places, but was interrupted by the sound of a bell ringing monotonously. The girls from the top bunks swung down, and everyone shuffled toward the door. I didn't think anyone would miss me if I didn't show up to whatever torture chamber everyone was headed to now, so I was just turning back to my bunk when I felt a hand grasp my elbow and swing me around.

“Door's this way,” said the sunburned girl (
Jules?
)
,
a half smile on her face. “You might as well stick with us today. We're all you've got now.” She pulled me outside.

 

The rest of the day went pretty much as you'd expect your first seven hours in a labyrinth to go. I couldn't find my way out of a shoe box. Every building was named for its function, which didn't help me since all the buildings looked the same from the outside. The only place I could reliably find was the Bathhouse, and I kept ending up there when we were supposed to be at the Mess Hall (a spacious room with round tables throughout for eating and an industrial-sized salad bar at one end), say, or the Rec Lodge. Usually it would be Jules who would come and find me, hissing, “Stay with the group! Follow me!”

And that wouldn't have been hard, if I'd known who was in my group. There were almost fifty girls at Alice Marshall, but we were grouped by age in our cabins as well as our classes. My cabinmates and I were part of the largest group, studying with the other twelve sixteen-year-olds, but I had never been very good at discerning people's ages at a glance, and I kept wandering into class with the Fourteens, as they were called, or the Seventeens. Everything seemed veiled in dense fog. I felt every girl's eyes on me all day, and I knew that they were deciding that I was going to be the stock unattractive character in their own personal story of
My Time at Alice Marshall
. The dim one with dull hair and a poor sense of direction. What did I care? I didn't have any use for them either.

(Everyone else, it should be noted, was beautiful. Or at least, very nearly beautiful. Or at the very least edgy, with the potential for prettiness.)

Luckily, I only had the afternoon classes to get through. And dinner. (I sat with my cabin in the raucous Mess Hall, everyone talking about some guy named Bob, me holding the plastic silverware in my hand and staring at the swamp of mashed potatoes and gravy on my plate, deciding that I wasn't hungry for any of it.) And then the campfire, another drawn-out set of social customs that I didn't get yet and that involved not only singing but also acting, cheering, and holding hands in a circle as we stood around a five-foot-high inferno next to the lake.

Singing in unison has always embarrassed me. It's one of the reasons why I've never liked school recitals, the Pledge of Allegiance, or church. I was able to get a good look at the rest of the girls during the campfire, though, since no one could see me staring through the firelight. I have to say, watching them sing and clap, I had the distinct impression that I'd been sent to the wrong school. No one here looked capable of destruction, Boone aside. They looked more like they were trying for a merit badge at Girl Scout camp. I wondered when I'd see their other faces, the ones that would be more familiar to me.

By the time Lights-Out came around, I couldn't have been happier to see my new sleeping bag. While it had been fairly warm during the day, the cold had blasted in somewhere around dinner, and even my fingernails felt icy. Climbing up to my bunk was the sweetest thing I'd done all day.

Bev knocked on the door as she opened it. I supposed her job relied heavily on the element of surprise.

“Jesus!” cried Gwen, pulling her sleeping bag up to her neck. “I wasn't dressed yet!”

“Language, Miss Sutter,” said Bev. She surveyed the room calmly. The pile of clothes (and the bottle) had been removed at some point during the day, though I couldn't say which of my cabinmates had found the time to do it. Now everything looked too clean, as bare and depressing as a homesteader's cabin.

Bev walked in a slow circle around the room, checking on each of us. I watched her eyes. She seemed to be looking everywhere at once. She stopped next to my bunk. “How are you fitting in, Lida?”

I attempted a smile, which crashed and burned. “Fine.”

“ ‘Fine,' ” she repeated. “ ‘Fine.' I can see that we'll have to work on your vocabulary.” She turned toward the door and paused with her hand on the light switch. “Tomorrow is a new day,” she said. “New challenges, new possibilities. How will
you
greet the day?” She turned off the light and closed the door behind her.

There was a snort and a giggle from one of the other bunks. Someone else whispered, “Shhh!” After that, it was silent for five or ten minutes, during which I fell into a state of almost-sleep and dreamed that my sleeping bag was being sewn up with me inside. Which is to say, I kept jerking awake and pulling the sleeping bag down around my shoulders.

Finally, when all of the sounds from outside had died down (cabin doors closing, Bev's clear voice saying “challenges, possibilities” over and over), someone, I'm not sure who, spoke up.

“The lady needs a new closing line.”

“She needs to work on her material.” Laughter.

“ ‘How will you beat the day?' ”

“Or, ‘Another day, another three hundred of your parents' bucks.' ”

“How about, ‘Have a nice sleep, and P.S., fuck all y'all.' ” That voice, I thought, belonged to Boone.

There was more laughter, a joke or two that I couldn't quite hear, rustling and shifting as the other girls settled into their beds. I turned onto my side, clutching a fistful of sleeping bag and drawing it up to my face like a baby blanket.

“So, Lida.” Boone's voice came at me from her lower bunk. “What's your Thing?”

Startled, I let go of the sleeping bag blankie and hugged my arms to my chest. No one could see me. “What do you mean?”

“Your Thing. Whatever you did that was bad enough to get you carted up here. What'd you do?”

“Everyone's got their Thing,” Gwen piped in. “What's yours?”

The cabin was very quiet.

“I stole a car,” I said finally.

“You stole a car,” repeated Boone. “Whose car? How'd you wreck it?”

“I don't want to talk about it,” I said. I was feeling rather brave inside my sleeping bag.

Boone laughed sharply. “Whatever,” she said. “You'll learn to talk eventually.”

Suddenly, the thought of talking, of explaining who I was and painting even the roughest picture of myself through one-liners and anecdotes, or — worse — through long, drawn-out conversations in which I bared myself, bared it all, for these girls who I would also have to learn in turn, like one learns a language or memorizes a song (laboriously, through repetition and mouthing “watermelon, watermelon, watermelon” when you don't know the words), just to get to a place where I felt like I knew the rules and could only
then
start playing . . . Suddenly, the whole thing exhausted me. I wanted to sleep for a month, preferably waking up to another life. I shut my eyes.

The last thing I heard before I fell into a deep, exhausted sleep was Boone's muted voice.

“Welcome to Alice Marshall, Townie.”

When I woke up, they'd cut off my hair.

 

 

My dad and Terri don't know I'm writing this. Only Dr. Hemler knows, and I won't let him read it. I keep it locked in a vintage briefcase that I bought at Reruns Thrift and Save. I'm the only person who has the combination. Well, me and whoever donated the briefcase to the store with a small slip of paper tucked inside that said “1.8.3.3.” (Underneath the numbers, the same person had scratched the words “Go to it.” I love the shit you find at thrift stores.)

At least it's a healthier secret than the one I used to keep from my dad and Terri, though I don't know if they'd agree, if they read this. Sometimes I'm amazed when I think about how little they know of my time at Alice Marshall. They have the bare facts, and that's all they need. Parents are too easily frightened by the world their children live in. We have to protect them from harm, keep them safe as long as we can, no matter how we feel about them. It's our duty. I didn't know this going in, but I do now.

 

 

I TOLD BEV THAT I'D DONE IT. I TOLD HER THAT I NEEDED A
change, and that I cut it with my nail scissors after everyone else had gone to sleep. I told her that I'd always wanted short hair, that this would be easier to manage, that I was sorry I hadn't cut it before I got to school.

She confiscated the nail scissors, which had been thoughtfully placed next to my backpack.

Of course, the truth was that it would have taken hours of meticulous snipping to chop off my hair with those tiny scissors. Whatever they'd used for the job had to have been more machete-like. What had been an easy-to-maintain, shoulder-length mess of pulled pork now resembled the waving, reaching tentacles of a sea anemone. Small tufts of hair sprouted from the top of my head, while the sides had been cut closer to the skull. They hadn't touched the back, probably because they couldn't get at it without waking me. So yes, that I
did
do. When I finally made it to the Bathhouse the next morning and saw what they'd accomplished, I took the nail scissors to the back of my head and cut straight across, hoping at the very least to save myself the humiliation of a PE teacher's mullet. The result was negligible.

What was amazing was that no one at the school seemed fazed by it. There were looks, to be sure, and even some poorly muffled laughter from a group of girls in the Mess Hall who looked like they'd walked out of an issue of
Teen Vogue
, but it felt as if I had crossed some threshold. Like, even though I still blended in as well as a pebble in pancake batter, they were willing to let me just sit there at the bottom of the bowl.