New Horizons
Authors: Dan Carr
2: FACILITY FOR TROUBLED YOUTH
Copyright © 2016 by Dan Carr
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher.
Published in Canada
First Publishing, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9947881-0-8
Disclaimer:
This is a work of fiction. Any names or characters, businesses or places, events or incidents, are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
For all the Stones of the group.
Believe what you want.
--NEW HORIZONS--
Letter
Hey Val,
I barely recognized you with your hair and everything. You look pretty different. I don’t know if you remember me, but we both came here as kids when it was Camp Hedgewood and things were a lot different. I was the kid that sat down next to you the night when we were both crying. It was our first time away from home, and we just missed our mums.
I know you think you’re cruel and mean now, and I’m sure you have been at certain times in your life, but when I look at you, I vaguely remember that scared, tadpole of a kid, and I wonder how you managed to change.
It’s nice to see a familiar face at least. Maybe while we are both trapped here in this stage of our life, we’ll finally get to know each other this time. I’d really like that at least.
I’m sure you’re here under different circumstances than my own, but even so, it’s still nice to know that someone who was just as scared as me, somehow, got over it.
Thank you for that, Val. You’re not entirely bad,
- Tracy McPherson
1:
ALL BODY, NO BRAINS
I wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary to happen to me because I was already used to how things were.
But it seemed like Dad was done leaving pamphlets about behaviour modification classes for teenagers carelessly thrown around the house. There were only so many threats that could get down on paper before they became meaningless, and Dad’s needed new roots in more terrifying ways.
Finally, he had figured out what to do with me.
There was no telling what exactly I had done to set him off. It had to be the no job thing. Or maybe it was embarrassing to have a daughter without a high school diploma. That wasn’t exactly something I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs either. Whatever my issues were, they had finally made Dad look for a solution.
It was mid-afternoon, and while I tried to nap with my iPod on the highest volume it would go, Dad’s solution to my problems stormed into my bedroom.
In my dream, I had been gliding. It was from one building to the next, and the building I was coming from was slightly higher than the one I was going to. That was the only way I was ever able to fly in my dreams—if I was falling.
I woke up when my blankets were pulled from me. There were two large men standing in my room. I had no idea what was going on, and I was so startled that I almost didn’t believe it was happening.
There was a lot of things I regretted right then. Mostly what I had. I was wearing boxer shorts, a sports bra and earphones. I was listening to a country music song and I wasn’t even that much of a country music fan. My phone was plugged into the wall, charging, and I noticed the screen light up as the men moved toward me.
It was 2:30 p.m., and in the real world, people were finished having lunch and onto their next thing. Sunday chores might have been on the to-do list, or beginning to start a nice supper. My new reality was a bearded dude and a ginger man trying to take me away.
“HELP!” I screamed.
The bearded man pulled me off the bed by my leg. My ass smashed the hardwood floor, and it felt like my tailbone had shattered. I tried kicking my legs to make it more difficult for him to drag me out of the room, but I was a little, 17-year-old girl that had nothing on two, huge men.
The last thing I saw before a bag was thrown over my head was the ginger man, and I saw that he was missing a front tooth. After that, it was darkness. The bag felt like a potato sack and smelled like mildew. Flecks of dirt got in my eyes, and I wished I had contacts in to protect my eyes like a shield. But I wasn’t a contacts person in any sense of the word. I was proud to have good eyes and no friends.
“What are you doing with me?”
“You’re going away.”
Right then, for whatever reason, the dramatic scenario finally clicked. And I felt stupid for not seeing it sooner.
There were stories circulating about it before I stopped going to classes. I had disappeared from school altogether only a few months before I was supposed to graduate, and then I read about it from the articles Dad cut out of the paper, and from the websites he left on the screen of our computer monitor. They were always some sort of wilderness boot camp, or a version of that kind of thing, that broke bad kids down and tired them into their senses. At school, everyone whispered about so-and-so’s experience, and what went down with what’s-his-face.
“They take you. They treat you. They transform you,”
Lucy had said. Her hair was wide, and seemed to grow sideways from her skull. Or maybe she just had a big head. When she said it that day, she had a thick wad of gum in her mouth, and was texting with one hand.
“My cousin went there. She’s like a brand new person. I don’t even know her anymore.”
“She was in jail too, so I don’t know what you’re getting at,”
I’d said.
“Yeah, and she’s forever changed because of it.”
It was all the same kind of scenario. Camps and wilderness trips that took teenagers out of their comfort zones, taught them how to behave, and gave them the tools to do well on their own. But it wasn’t for any normal teenager. It was for teenagers who were about to go off the edge—-
I went limp.
The men dragged me out of my room and down the hall by my arms. My legs hit every step on the stairs, but I didn’t dare make a sound. I knew exactly what was going on, and I bet the two men had never dealt with such a cooperative teenager in the past. Maybe they even thought they had the wrong house.
I didn’t hear Dad come out from whatever room he was hiding in. It was the middle of the day and I knew he was somewhere listening for an apology for being a bad daughter.
That I could change.
But the same thing happened to Jessica Richards when she was 17-years-old and being all crazy. It was just like the stories. All it took was a couple weeks and boom—they sucked the crazy out of you and your soul went with it. Since I knew what was going on, and what the men were there for, I didn’t make a scene like I’m sure they were used to with their other cases.
Maybe I was a bad kid. But I was also slowly turning to stone.
There was no one in Basinview to save me. The small town was full of basic, simple families—a mum cooking supper, and a dad working down at the dockyard. It was all the same kind of thing. There were no jobs, and it was a hard fight for a piece of something small. That wasn’t my kind of a life to look forward to out in the sticks. It was hard knowing if you wanted to become even half of what you hoped for, you had to get out and go away.
My attitude wasn’t one that matched someone who was motivated to go places in life. Dad’s cure was shipping me off to get fixed, and his warnings of doing so were finally playing out before me. I wondered how much his wallet was paying for it.
The two men put me into a car and duct-taped my wrists together in front of me. The tape pulled at the hair on my arms, and I dreaded when it would have to come off.
My biggest thought as I was being taken away was of Jordan. We were already broken up, but he was going to think I died if I wasn’t texting him back. He was still someone I talked with to hear things from around the area, and if I kept it up, I was probably going to be his girlfriend again. That was scary to think about.
Jordan was full of little issues too. He had never had two parents at once so he knew even more than I did what it was like to have a mum in one house and a dad in another. Plus, Jordan had been there for me that one night when things went stupid, and he visited me in the emergency room. That was probably what scared Dad into shipping me off.
The night I ended up in the ER was the most revealing moment of my life. Revealing, not because I had been drinking and Dad found out, but revealing because Dad made a public scene about it to try and shock me—
And I had laughed.
I didn’t know I was even going to the hospital until I woke up there. Dad was in front of me and he started yelling the moment my eyelids peeled open. I was hooked up to an IV and I puked into a plastic oval, all the while not feeling a single thing.
“I am so disappointed in you,”
he yelled.
“I wasn’t going to do anything.”
“You don’t even know how serious this is. I don’t understand you. How can someone so smart be so stupid?”
I wasn’t scared of him. I was just concerned with other people hearing him through the curtained room. I wondered what the point was of fake rooms like that. Privacy wasn’t just about not being seen. It was also about not being heard.
“You’re absolutely crazy, Valerie.”
“Maybe,”
I had said.
“But you’re the one who is screaming at a crazy person.”
After that night, I knew Dad was going to do something different. I just didn’t know what. I noticed that he stopped commenting about me moping around in my pyjamas, and he didn’t ask where I was headed when I’d leave the house. Maybe he had been busy planning for someone else to figure me out all along.
“Where are we going?”
The two men ignored me. It was silent for most of the drive.
“Are we headed out of the province?” That was what happened to Adam Slade. They sent him away for a six week stint. Like rehab, but worse. He came home and joined the Air force after. What a mess that kid was. But they got in his head.
Neither of the men had an interest in answering me. It became apparent that I was already on day one of whatever program Dad had thought would cure me. I had seen so many pamphlets with smiling girls gazing up at the sky. I imagined I was headed to Spring Academy, the military program held at the base in the valley. Push-ups were most likely in my future.
It was disorienting being unable to see where the car was driving. I tried to play it out in my head and think about what curves of the road were where, and what turns were what, but after a while, it made no difference in my head. I felt lost.
I laid my head back on the headrest. My biggest fear was missing the rest of my summer, and since that was my biggest fear at that moment, there might have been an argument somewhere that I was going exactly where I needed to be.
But I didn’t see it like that, and I fell asleep because I was exhausted after thinking about all the reasons I was going wherever I was going. And even though I closed my eyes and disappeared into my dreams, I couldn’t get away from the disastrous re-runs of my life in Basinview.