New Horizons (22 page)

“Why the hell are you still here then?”

“Because she’s an idiot.”

And then there were three.

On the other side of me, across the room, where I thought more empty cots sat, was another body. It was tilted up and laying still. She had a mushroom cut like a boy. She was closer to me, and I could see that she wasn’t lying there by choice. She was strapped to the bed like a mental patient. Her arms were at her sides, and her legs were locked in too.

“Please, help me,” the pointy shouldered girl begged.

“Don’t do it, she’s a fucking maniac.” The mushroom girl laughed.

“Can neither of you move?” I asked.

“We’re buckled into the bed,” the mushroom girl said. She thrashed her arms against the braces. “See, we’re stuck.”

“Please, help me out,” Shoulders whispered. “I’ll help you if you help me.”

“I shouldn’t. I’ll get in trouble.” That was funny to me. All the sudden, when I was around what seemed like the real kind of crazy, I realized that I didn’t want to be around it in case I became infected by it.

“Come on,” she whispered. “Please! If you don’t help me they’ll do what they did to me, to you.”

“What did they do to you?”

“Don’t listen to Jenny,” Mushroom said. “She’s so full of shit.”

“Help me and I’ll tell you,” Jenny Shoulders whispered.

I had no idea why I got out of bed. Maybe in my head I thought I would just go over and see what she was doing. But when I slid out of my bed, and made my way across the room, that Jenny Shoulders looked right at me and made my stomach drop in fear.

“Hurry,” she whispered.

I reached out and undid a buckle. That was all it took to set everything in motion.

She wiggled her arm out of it too fast and she unbuckled the other one. Before I could ask her what was going on, she jumped out of her cot, picked up the chair at the end of her bed, and threw it through the window.

“Are you crazy!?” I covered my ears from the noise of the chair falling to the deck below.

“No, you are—don’t believe anything that anybody tells you!” She jumped out the window. There was no thought or hesitation to it. She just jumped out and there was a thud of her body hitting the deck outside.

I thought maybe she died. She had to have at least broken a bone. When I looked out the window, she was already pulling herself across the deck, in escape mode. I wondered where she was headed—

“Now you’ve done it.”

I looked over my shoulder at the other girl. She was still there, completely calm. The worst part was that I had helped spring a lunatic. I had no idea what I would tell the counsellors, and I didn’t have time to come up with a story.

The lights turned on in the room, and there I was, standing in front of the broken window, not in my bed, next to an empty cot.

“What’s going on?” Nurse Janice asked. Her eyes flew to the window. “Where’s Jenny?!”

“Who?” I asked. I moved away from the window and tried not to look at Jenny Shoulders’ cot. “What are you saying?”

“HELP!” she screamed. “GET IN HERE!”

Two huge men entered the room. They grabbed me on either arm before she could give instructions.

“Listen, I know it looks bad, but I really had nothing to do with it.”

“Yeah right, you unbuckled her and broke the window for her to escape.”

“What?!” I turned and glared at Mushroom, who was accusing me of exactly the things I had done. It sounded horrible when I heard it out loud.

Nurse Janice left the room. The other men put me in a cot. This time, they buckled me in. Like Mushroom. Like Jenny Shoulders. Like a crazy person.

Larry entered the room shortly after. I immediately stopped struggling against the straps and laid still.

“Hello Larry. How are you?”

“Valerie, stop it.” Larry took a seat on a cot. He laid right out and put his hands on his head. I wondered if he was comfortable lying in the ward on a crazy girl’s cot. “May I be frank with you?”

“Sure Frank.”

“This place, these cabins, these groups, these activities—it’s all just a bunch of
stuff
. And this stuff—it sometimes doesn’t work on people like you.”

“Maybe you could tell my parents that.”

He shook his head. “No, it’s going to be harder than that. Because people like you have people back home who want to hear good things. They care about you and want to see something good for you. They want to give you a chance before getting serious. But people like you don’t react to messages of hope, or ideas that put better thoughts in your head.”

“Beautiful.”

“And that’s why this program isn’t for you—because you need a military program to beat the reality into you. The only way to wake up someone like you is with fear.”

“I’m pretty scared.”

“You’re not scared. You’re amused. And I want you terrified so you can finally see what you’re dealing with. That’s why I let you stick around—so that when you do get out of here, you see how good your parents were to you. How much they cared. You’re here for a reason.” He stared at the wall in front of him. He seemed tired and exhausted by the conversation. How many other residents had he given this speech to? “There is something about you that makes you unagreeable, but I can work with that. You’re a bad example, and bad examples make good examples out of other people.”

I looked over at the other girl who was on her side, facing the other wall. I wondered if she was hearing this talk for the second time. Maybe she was rolling her eyes.

“You don’t want to be like Jenny.”

“Jenny was scared though,” I said. “That’s why she escaped.”

“No she wasn’t. People who jump out of windows aren’t afraid—they’re motivated. Jenny isn’t afraid of what’s here—she just wants what’s out there. And that’s motivation enough to do something really stupid.”

I didn’t know if that was true. You had to be scared of something to jump out of a window. Maybe she was scared of the wrong kind of things, and showed bravery for even worse things.

“You’re going to get in trouble when you get out of here. People in the real world don’t have a tolerance for people who don’t care about anything. That is your number one problem, Valerie. You are apathetic to everything around you, and that isn’t normal.”

“That doesn’t bother me. If it’s not normal to feel how I do, then why do I feel it? And if you want to talk about the real world, I imagine you’ll get in a lot of trouble for losing a resident. She knows it too—that’s why I bet she’s out there hiding.”

“No, we got her.”

“I don’t believe you. It’s your job to lie to me.”

“Believe what you want.”

“Trust me, I always do. And that’s why the world thinks I’ve gone mad.” That was a dangerous thing to tell someone, and it wasn’t something he should have told someone like me. I knew no other way to live than to believe in what I wanted, and it had put me in New Horizons. It was my constant battle, and he was preaching about something he didn’t really believe.

All he knew was the rules of behaviour modification, and I knew that if Larry lost a resident there was no way he would ever tell me. It was one thing for someone to break out, but it was a whole other thing if they were actually free.

The sky outside the window had lightened, and Mushroom and I were still strapped to our beds. At least we had a breeze coming through the broken window. Nurse Janice had already cleaned up the shards of glass. Apparently there wasn’t an urgency to move us back to our cabins, which I didn’t like. I wanted to go back to my bunk.

I looked at Mushroom across the room. In the morning light I could see much more of her. She had short, orange hair that could be pretty if it was cut differently. But she didn’t have nice eyes. Her eyes were far apart, one on each side of her head. She was drastically strange looking, and it almost hurt to search for something smooth to focus on.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Val.”

“Your full name.”

“Valerie Campbell.”

“I’m Lisa Hatcher. How funny is that?”

“What?”

“Lisa Hatcher and Valerie Campbell. It doesn’t make any sense on either of us.”

I glanced at Lisa Hatcher. Lisa hatcher was mad looking with her orange mushroom cut and blue eyes.

“I bet Jenny is free.”

I laughed.

“Why is that funny?”

“Well, there’s a fence. So I doubt she’s free.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

The straps were tight around my arms and legs. I had never been strapped to anything before. Never held against my will. It was for my safety, they told me. So I couldn’t hurt myself or anyone else. I found that funny. It was hurting me more to have me held down like that.

Lisa Hatcher was staring at me.

“What?”

“There’s a hole in the fence.”

“And where would that be?”

“The farthest side, in the very right corner, where the two sides come together.”

“Says who?”

“Says Jenny. She found it. And she’s probably through it now.”

“Why didn’t you ever go through it then if you knew where it was?”

“Oh I will, it’s something I dream about. I dream about a lot of things. Like killing Breanna Maclean. But you know why I can’t? Besides the fact that I have no idea where in the world she is, of course. It’s that she doesn’t remember that she was a bully. Because she’s
different
now. You know, the only worse thing than a bully is a bully who doesn’t remember it.”

“Well maybe she was a kid. People change.”

“So was I. Breanna Maclean was evil. She used to tell me my breath stank. And then she made fun of me when I’d go and use the bathroom at lunch time. I was terrified of sitting on the toilet because I knew she and her little friends would go outside the stall and laugh at the sound of my piss. Who does that? I was scared to take a piss. Nobody should ever be scared to take a piss.”

I didn’t have a bunk bed to jump up into and pretend I was asleep. We were both on the same level of cots lined up along a wall, one after the other. I had no idea when I was going back to my group. All I knew was that I didn’t want to talk to Lisa Hatcher, or have anything to do with someone so weird. I didn’t want her to rub off on me.

Nurse Janice came in with a clipboard. She had counsellors on either side of her. One of them stepped in front of my cot and looked right at me.

“How is your head?” he asked.

“Fine.” I had no idea who he was or why he was talking to me. “But I’m kind of hungry.”

Nurse Janice marked some scribbles down on top of her clipboard.

“Nurse Janice, I said I’m hungry,” I repeated.

“If you keep misbehaving out there, you will never progress to anything before you leave.” She pointed her pen at me. Maybe she was going to throw it at my face. “And if you don’t learn anything here, your life outside this program is going to be even harder.”

“I realize that. Thank you so much.”

When she left the room, the counsellors went with her. I was back to being alone with Lisa Hatcher. She was still watching me from across the room.

“What?”

“She thinks you give a shit about this place.”

I looked away from her. The wall was white, and there wasn’t a crack of anything in it. I wanted there to be a speck of dirt to notice, but my eyes wondered the room instead.

“I bet you blame a lot of people for your bad hair and shitty skin and fucked up teeth. You go around all sad pretending there’s some crazy reason for it all. But you don’t really want to get anything fixed. Not really. And I can tell why—because there’s nothing
wrong
with you. You’re dramatic, and you feel different. I’ll tell you right now, there’s nothing special about that—everyone feels different. You could change yourself on the drop of a hat—what does that tell you? But I know you won’t change, because it’s so much better to pretend to be broken than to realize you’re pathetic for no particular,
exact
reason,” Lisa Hatcher said.

“That was beautiful.”

Lisa Hatcher slid out of her bed.

“You’re not strapped in.” I tried to pull my arms out of the straps. But they were tight and secure. They were doing their job.

Lisa Hatcher smiled.

“What are you doing?”

“I want to help you.” She began to walk toward my cot.

“No thank you, I’m fine.” I kicked my legs, but they were stuck.

Lisa Hatcher jumped on top of me. Her legs straddled my waist, and I had no way of stopping her.

“HELP ME! SHE’S GONNA KILL ME!” I screamed.

Lisa Hatcher wrapped a sheet around my throat. Maybe that was why we weren’t allowed sheets in our cabins—so we couldn’t hang ourselves or kill each other with them.

I tried to get away from her but I was strapped down. I wasn’t allowed to have control of my arms or legs. Only normal people were allowed that kind of control.