Dear Cassie (4 page)

Never again.

“What’s his name?” Nez whispered.

“Asshole,” I whispered back.

“Wick,” Rawe said, her voice exploding out of her like a volcano, “if I say your name one more time . . .”

“Jeez Louise,” Nez whispered. “You better make this one.”

I lifted the ax, looking at the log like a bull’s-eye. I could do this. I
had
to do this. I closed my eyes and thought about Aaron, put his face in the center of the log. I would smash it. I would destroy it. I would annihilate it. Do everything I never had the chance to do.

I swung and hit right in the middle. The log cracked in two.

“I did it,” I said, feeling weirdly relieved. No one else could hear me. They were all chopping, too, the sound around me like homerun after homerun after homerun. I turned back to Rawe. I wanted to make sure she had seen.

“Great,” she said with a sarcastic thumbs-up. “Only four hundred more logs to go.”

Aw, fuck.

Hours later, in bed and diarying, all I can feel is searing, burning pain in my shoulders and hands, splinters I can’t even see, and calluses the size of almonds on my fingers. This was supposedly our day off, and it was pretty much the worst day of my life so far.

Well, the worst day I’m willing to write about.

Not that I have to. I’m supposed to be writing about my family.

Rawe said that if we knew where we came from, it would be easier to see how we’d ended up where we’d ended up.

The crap not falling far from the butthole and all that. Or maybe that was just my family.

I can’t help thinking about when I was a kid and we had this same assignment in class. Back then I always said,
I have a mom and a dad and a brother and I love them all. And they all love me.

It was a lie then and it’s more of a lie now.

I have a mom, but she’s an alcoholic. I have a dad, but he’s in the army like my brother and he isn’t home a lot. He’s deployed most of the year. When he comes home, my mother tolerates us and he tries to figure out everything that has happened while he was gone. When he leaves, my mother gets drunk.

She couldn’t even wake up to say good-bye to me the morning I left for this camp. My father had gone on his deployment right after I was sentenced and when I went into my mother’s bedroom to tell her I was leaving, she was passed out, unconscious, her empty bottle of vodka sleeping in my father’s spot.

Not that I was surprised. She was too drunk to say good-bye to me most mornings, but most mornings I wasn’t leaving for thirty days.

When I was little I used to be embarrassed for her. I didn’t understand.

But now I do. I know my mother would say she drank because she missed my father, because she didn’t know what else to do. It makes me sick that I know this, that I understand what it really feels like to not know what else to do.

That I punish myself, make myself remember, because I don’t know what else to do.

27 Fucking Days to Go

I
t was still dark in the cabin when I woke up. Troyer was sitting in her bed, a flashlight on in her lap. Even from the side, I could tell that her eyes were closed. I guess she was meditating, but I wondered why someone who didn’t talk needed to meditate. Wasn’t she able to keep the noise of the world out by keeping her mouth shut?

“What are you doing?” I whispered into the dark cabin.

She turned to look at me, her eyes opening slowly like a bullfrog sunning itself. She blinked once, twice, then turned back and closed them again. Forget Nez—I was beginning to wonder what
Troyer
was capable of.

I could see Nez, a lump in her sleeping bag, could hear her even, long breaths from across the cabin. I tried to fall back to sleep, back into one of the ways I used to turn my thoughts off, but I couldn’t. I tossed and turned, seeing Aaron, seeing Ben, seeing the flashing lights of a cop car. I rubbed my eyes and knew that sleep, along with the cinnamon gum that had been confiscated, was another thing that could no longer keep me sane.

After morning chores and a shower (!), we stood around the bonfire pit waiting for Rawe to speak. The pit looked like it had been used in the past for the kind of singing, marshmallow-roasting fires we were sure never to have. Our fire was all about survival—staying warm and cooking food and, apparently, scaring away the bears that lived in this neck of the woods. I did also consider that Rawe might use a bonfire as a way to get us to open up, the way she was doing with our diaries. Even I knew there was something about being in the dark with a fire going that allowed you to talk like you’d had a couple beers—well, at least when the people sitting around it were normal. It was becoming obvious that
we
were not.

“Okay, get on your knees,” Rawe said, not getting on her knees. We were going to learn how to build a fire without matches or a lighter—as if my hands weren’t already fists of tenderized meat on the end of my arms. As if they weren’t already raw, Rawe.

“There is no way I am getting on my knees,” I said, kind of surprised that I did, but maybe like Rawe appeared to be testing us, I was testing her. What would she do if I said no?

“Wick,” Rawe said.

“Here,” I said, still pushing. It was hard to be afraid of her, she was so thin. Honestly, if it came down to it, I was pretty sure I could take her.

“I’m not going to ask again,” Rawe said.

Troyer nudged me, her eyes screaming,
Can we please just get this over with?

I looked at Nez. I could see she was trying to stifle a giggle.

“Only because I’m tired of standing,” I said, kneeling down. Troyer was right—there
was
something to just getting this over with.

“No boys today?” Nez asked.

Rawe shook her head and held two sticks in front of her. They kind of looked like drumsticks, which made me think of Ben and made me glad he wasn’t here. At least I wouldn’t have to expend the energy I was supposed to put toward building a fire toward failed attempts to ignore him.

“Awesome,” Nez said, her body in full mope.

Rawe placed one stick between both hands and threw the other on the pile of kindling below her. I tried to picture her at the kind of bonfires this pit was meant for, telling ghost stories and tales about her grandmother who used to make her apple pie that she would eat with whole milk. It wasn’t easy to picture, yet I knew she had to have a life before this one, like we all did.

Rawe started rubbing her hands together—the stick in the middle as if she were warming her hands to give someone a massage. “Like this,” she said. “All of you, let’s go.”

“But won’t we have you to start our fires?” I asked, buying time. I might have gotten on my knees, but I didn’t want to pick up my stick. I didn’t want to do anything with my hands other than bathe them in ice water and lather them with Vaseline. My hands and arms and shoulders ached, felt like they had been jackhammered all night as I slept.

“Not always,” Rawe said. She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t have to. I knew that meant there would be times we would be alone in the woods and would have to start our own fires, so we didn’t starve to death, freeze to death, or get mauled by a bear.

I was beyond not looking forward to those times.

I rolled the stick in my hands like Rawe did and tried to ignore the pain.

Troyer wrote something on her pad and held it up.
My hands hurt.

I was kind of surprised she had the guts to say it—well, write it—because I was pretty sure that was exactly what Rawe wanted. I was pretty sure that was the whole point. As the days went on, there probably wouldn’t be a part of our body that didn’t feel like it had been through a pasta maker.

“Tough,” Rawe said, her lips thin white dashes. “This isn’t a hospital. Get building, or it’s four hundred push-ups
then
building, which will hurt a lot worse.”

I looked at Troyer. She dropped her pad and picked up her stick. The only one of us who had done any push-ups so far was Nez, and considering how badly she seemed to be craving male company, she appeared to enjoy the pelvis-thrusting part of it.

“This would be a lot easier with a guy in front of me to get me in the mood,” Nez whispered.

I couldn’t help it; I laughed.

Nez played it up, pretending to kiss her stick. She may have been as boy-crazy as Lila, but she was a hell of a lot funnier.

“Wick, you think starvation is a joke?” Rawe asked, spinning her neck as fast as a top to look at me. “If you want to eat, you build a fire.” She sounded like she had repeated this a million times before. I was pretty sure she had. We certainly weren’t the first set of girls to hear it, and knowing kids my age, we certainly wouldn’t be the last.

Our fires were supposed to heat up something that would help us make breakfast—not like that was any kind of incentive for me. It was hard to be hungry when there was a pit toilet waiting for you on the other side. It was hard to be hungry when, for my sanity, I needed to keep my stomach a painful, hollow cavern.

I continued to roll my stick between my fingers in the center of my kindling pile. I wanted to be finished with this before my hands fell off.

“This is lame,” Nez whispered.

“Whatever,” I said, which was how I was going to have to deal with all of this. I couldn’t care either way or I would lose it.

And like I said, I didn’t
do
losing it.

I looked at Troyer, tears pricking her eyes as she tried to start her fire. She really was in pain. Pain enough to cry—unless something else was making her cry. Not that she would ever tell anyone what it was. It made me wonder for a moment if she was actually writing everything Rawe was telling her to write in her Assessment Diary, like I am in mine. Well, everything I’m willing to write.

“Keep working,” Rawe said, her voice booming. “I’ll go get breakfast supplies.” I watched her walk away, her braid swishing.

Nez dropped her stick the minute Rawe left us. “What’s up with Zipper Lips?” she asked, jutting her chin at Troyer.

“Leave her alone,” I said, still rolling my stick. I could feel heat starting to come from my hands. Hot enough to start a fire? Probably not, but I wasn’t stopping until I started one. I needed to stare at the flames and try to lose myself in them.

Part of the reason I liked smoking so much was fire—that you could hold something so uncontrollable and deadly in your hand. That you could bend it to your will with simply a flick . . . well, when you were allowed to use a damn lighter.

“Fine,” Nez said, looking at me. “Then what’s with you?”

“Nothing,” I said, still rolling my stick, harder, faster, trying to drown her out.

“Maybe not now,” she said, slithering closer to me, “but there was something. I can see it following you around like a shadow.”

She could
see
it? Could she see what I was desperate to forget but felt the need to make myself remember? No way. No one but my brother knew the truth and no one ever would. “Why don’t you go tongue your stick,” I said, not looking at her.

“I’m just saying you’re not fooling anyone,” she added, her hands on her hips, her arms sticking out like butterfly wings.

“You’re not fooling anyone, either,” I said, dropping my stick and meeting her gaze. The thing is, I’m not sure why I said it. She was. She was fooling me. She seemed unaffected by everything, by all of this.

“You know the woods can sense if you’re uncomfortable,” Nez said.

“Nez, please spare me your Native American mumbo jumbo,” I said, thinking I could smell smoke, but it might have been the skin on my hands burning off.

“Listen,” Nez said, and I could feel her stare tighten. “One of us understands all this”—she gestured, her hands going up—“and one of us is terrified by it. I’m trying to help you. I’m just saying that it can tell, and your feelings breed more fear.”

Troyer turned to look at me. She put her stick down and wrote something on her pad. Then she ripped off the sheet of paper, folded it up, and put it in my pocket.

“What, are you passing notes now?” Nez cackled.

“If you want I can write my own note and pass it to you, but it would require surgery to remove,” I said. My palms felt hot, as hot as the sun on my face. I was starting to sweat. I could feel it rolling from my forehead to my lips.