So she did.
twenty
April 14
“What are we going to do now?” Cassie asked Thatcher as they watched the reporter walk out the door of the coffee shop.
It took a long time for him to answer. Finally he shook his head and said, “I don’t know.”
“But if we don’t do something, then more kids will die.”
“I know that,” he said as he got up to throw away their now-empty cups. “I just don’t know what else we can do.”
Cassie realized Thatcher had done a lot. He had believed her when anyone else might not even have stopped to listen, let alone to care. But she had one thing driving her that he didn’t: She still saw Darren’s face in her dreams, still remembered what it had been like to walk past his bloodstains on the street.
She said, “I’d better get home. But this isn’t going to stop me. I’m going to figure out a way. There has to be something we can do.” Across the street, the bus was pulling into the stop. “Look, there’s the bus. I’ve got to go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay. I’ll call you tonight if I think of anything.”
“Better wait until tomorrow. Don’t call when my stepdad might be there.”
Ten minutes later, Cassie got off the bus and walked up the hill toward her house. A white van she didn’t recognize was parked in the driveway.
twenty-one
April 30
Cassie spent the rest of her first day in OP trying not to cry because it just made the floor even more disgusting. The throbbing in her left shoulder went up her neck and into her jaw, and her tongue was swollen where she had bit it. Hector had left with Mr. Chadwick, and the other guard was silent, except for every two hours, when he told them in heavily accented English that it was okay to sit up and drink water. At the first break, Cassie prodded her shoulder, moving it back and forth. It still felt like it was on fire, but nothing seemed out of place or broken.
She hadn’t heard the guard coming up behind her, and she let out a gasp when he pressed something into her palm. “What are they?” she asked, looking at the two small white pills.
“You take,” he said, nodding his head exaggeratedly. “Feel better.” She looked at his narrow, pockmarked face, trying to decide if he was telling the truth.
The boy with the white-tipped hair said, “Go ahead. They make you sleep. That’s the best thing to do here.” The other boy nodded, then looked away.
With a gulp from her water bottle, Cassie swallowed the pills, only half wondering what they were.
Suddenly, footsteps echoed in the corridor. The guard quickly stepped back against the wall and clapped his hands. “Everybody resume position.”
Picking a spot that looked drier, Cassie stretched out on the floor. The world grew fuzzy at the edges. She closed her eyes, welcoming sleep. In her dreams she saw her mother holding a baby, but she couldn’t get close enough to see its face. Thatcher whispered to her, his face contorted with urgency, but she couldn’t make out the words. And then she was picking her way down the face of the cliff below Peaceful Cove, finding handholds and toe-holds, when a rock loosened in her hand and she cartwheeled backward, free-falling. Cassie’s eyelids flickered open for a few seconds, but then she was pulled down again into something that was more than sleep.
At the next break, she wouldn’t have bothered to get up, except that the guard shook her good shoulder. “Not good sleep so long.”
The boy who had talked to her earlier helped her to her feet and then looked closely at her face. “Man, Eduardo, her eyes are like pinpricks.” He and the guard exchanged looks. Cassie was too blurred by whatever Eduardo had given her to care. Even now that she was on her feet, it was as if she were watching a movie, one that had nothing to do with her.
As their break was ending, a man Cassie recognized as Father Willy, one of the housefathers, came into the room. He stood over the blond boy, his hands fisted on his hips.
“If you truly tell me you are sorry, Joshua, then you shall be allowed to come back to the Dignity Family.”
Joshua, who hadn’t made a single sound since Cassie had arrived, began to blubber. “I am sorry. I’m truly, truly sorry.” He crawled forward and began kissing Father Willy’s scuffed shoes.
“That is enough,” Father Willy said, stepping backward with alacrity. “Your apology is accepted.”
Joshua left so fast that Eduardo had to call him back for his water bottle. Cassie slipped again into the river of sleep, welcoming the feeling of it closing over her.
Miguel, the new guard who came on in the midafternoon, tried to find ways to alleviate his own boredom. Every few minutes he would accuse one of them of moving, sometimes accompanying his accusation with a kick. In this way, Cassie learned that the other boy’s name was Ryan. After an hour or two of this, Miguel called out, “Fitness!” Ryan got to his feet, so Cassie did, too. Miguel ordered them to do jumping jacks, with only thirty-second breaks in between groups of fifty, then sit-ups and push-ups. Following Ryan’s lead, Cassie did them as sloppily as she could. Even so, her clothes were sopping wet with sweat by the end.
Not long after that, one of the women who worked in the cafeteria brought in tortillas and refilled their water bottles. Since there had been no lunch, Cassie and Ryan fell on the tortillas like starving dogs. Miguel said he had to go to the toilet and told the cafeteria woman to watch them. Once he left the room, she looked both ways before slipping them each a piece of yellow cheese from her apron pocket. But in a few seconds it was gone, and Miguel was back.
In the late afternoon, another person was dragged in by Hector, Mr. Chadwick prancing behind. It was Hayley. Hector had both fists clenched in her short red-gold hair. Her mouth was pulled open in pain. The cords stood out in her neck as she scrambled forward, trying to keep her weight off her hair, but she didn’t make a sound. Hector lunged forward, and Hayley’s face skidded into the floor.
Then Miguel barked, “Head to the right, Hayley. The rest of you, too!” Cassie was ashamed of how fast she whipped her head to the other side, how still she lay, how afraid she was that Hector might turn his attentions on her instead of Hayley.
She tried to hide her shaking at the tick-tock sound of Mr. Chadwick slowly walking around her. A pair of snakeskin cowboy boots appeared in front of her nose. One of the pointed toes poked her in the side. “Cassie, I’m here to see if you are remorseful.”
She started to lever herself up on her elbows, but he put his boot between her shoulders, pressing her back down to the floor while her shoulder screamed in protest. Cassie gritted her teeth. She would say what they wanted, but they couldn’t touch her on the inside.
“I really, really am sorry, Mr. Chadwick. I promise to abide by your orders in the future.”
“ ‘Abide,’ ” he echoed in a mocking voice. “ ‘Abide.’ Do you think this is some kind of advanced-placement English class? You could just say obey, Cassie. That would be simpler. Step out of your image and stop manipulating. I want you to think about that until I come back.” With that, he turned on his stacked heels and walked out the door. She could hear Hector’s heavy footsteps following.
Cassie was afraid to look at Hayley until Miguel called for a break. When they sat up, blood was still leaking from the corner of Hayley’s swollen lips, and her chin looked like raw meat, but she managed to smile at Cassie. Her freckles stood out on her pale skin like drops of paint on a white canvas.
“No talking!” Miguel barked, even though neither of them had said anything yet. So they kept silent, but all the same Cassie felt like they were having a conversation.
As night fell, Cassie learned that kids in OP were allowed to curl up and sleep, each of them in a separate corner, but the bright electric light stayed on. Earlier, under the influence of the drugs, she had slept so much that now it seemed impossible. Her bones ached as if she had the flu. She lay facing Hayley, who was also awake. Miguel had tipped his chair back against the wall, chin on his chest, so Cassie kept looking into Hayley’s eyes. Normally, she could never have looked at anyone so long without needing to look away, but Peaceful Cove was not normal, so she stared into Hayley’s eyes without feeling anxious or embarrassed. Cassie blinked more and more slowly, and then, it seemed, not at all. After long minutes, or hours, or even days, something shifted. Hayley’s face morphed into a butterfly, then an elaborate harlequin mask, then transformed into liquid gold, then melted away into a geometric shape. Cassie felt like she was sitting back inside her head, observing it all as if it were happening to someone else. After a while, she must have slept, although she didn’t remember closing her eyes.
Sometime in the long night they got a new guard. Hayley knew him and started joking with him in Spanish. He let Cassie and Hayley move a little closer together and talk softly in English.
“Is it okay?” Cassie kept her voice low and only indicated the guard with her eyes.
“Cesar? He’s cool. He started here about the same time I did.”
“Only for him it’s a job,” Cassie said miserably. “For you, it’s your life.”
“No, it’s not,” Hayley said seriously. “This isn’t my real life. You can’t think about Peaceful Cove like that or you would go crazy.”
“So—what?—you act like it’s a dream or something?” Cassie rotated her shoulder back and forth, trying to ease the stiffness.
“Not a dream. A game. It’s like a video game, one with all these levels most people don’t even know about.”
It sounded like a crazy idea, but no crazier than what was really happening here. “How do you score points?”
“Every time you break a rule and you don’t get caught. Or every time you do get caught but you don’t cry.” Hayley wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, leaving rusty-brown marks on her skin.
“But can’t you get out faster by following the rules?”
“That’s a game, too. You can’t really get out unless they want you to, or unless you get lucky and your parents realize what’s going on and pull you out. It’s like in school, when they try to tell you that anyone can be on student council, but then only the popular kids get elected. Why do you think hardly anyone makes it to Level Six? Think about it. Where are the incentives for the school? I know I’m not going to get out until I’m eighteen—so that gives me a lot more freedom than the rest of these kids, the ones who think that following the rules is really going to get them someplace.”
“Why don’t parents know what’s going on?”
“Because they tell them in advance how you’ll lie to them. They even let you write what you want to, but it doesn’t make any difference. ‘Mom, get me out of here. Dad, it’s terrible. Mom, they beat me. The food is awful and has bones in it. Mom, it’s nothing like the brochure.’ But what they do, see, is give your parents a handbook about how you will try to manipulate them. And it explains the different stages you go through. First, denial—‘I don’t belong here.’ Then the guilt trip—‘You don’t know how terrible it is here, or you would get me out.’ Next, anger. ‘You’ll wish you had never done this to me.’ And last, negotiation. ‘If you bring me home, I promise there won’t be any more problems.’ The Stateside rep has already warned them that you’ll say anything to manipulate them, that you’ll twist things and lie. They’ve got it all figured out. And if the graduates complain, they have a whole PR department to explain how they are troubled drug addicts and petty thieves who still haven’t learned to take responsibility for their own actions.”
At first, Cassie had trouble placing the emotion in Hayley’s voice. And then she finally did. It was a twisted kind of admiration.
Cassie must have closed her eyes then and slept, because the next thing she knew it was morning again. For breakfast, each of them got more tortillas and four tiny bananas no bigger than their fingers. Over the next few days, Cassie was deemed unrepentant by Mr. Chadwick, Ryan was judged worthy to leave, and another boy and girl were dragged in. Playing by Hayley’s rules, Cassie and Hayley took turns deflecting the guard’s attention, passing each other bits of food, and exchanging smiles or winks when his back was turned. Hayley got caught once and earned another three days in OP. Cassie opened her mouth to protest, but Hayley gave her a look and she didn’t say anything.
“Fitness!” Miguel yelled on Cassie’s last day in OP. He reached up and cranked the window closed. She knew the drill now, and with the rest she clambered to her feet. “We start with jumping jacks.”
The new girl—Chelsea—didn’t seem to know what she was in for. She snapped her legs and arms out straight for each one. She didn’t know they were going to do at least 300, or maybe 500, depending on Miguel’s mood. After 100, they got a 30-second break. Cassie drank so fast that water ran out of her mouth and down her neck, where it mingled with the sweat that had already soaked through her shirt. By now, she could smell herself. Steam clouded the window until condensation rolled down it like rain.
When the jumping jacks were over, Chelsea stood with her head drooping, her hands on her knees, her breath huffing in and out of her mouth.
“All right! Down on the floor. It’s time for sit-ups! One, two, three . . .” At 50, they got another 30-second break. Cassie tried to distract herself. If you thought about it, if you thought about what was happening now and what would happen soon, you would go crazy. The break went by so fast, and then it was time for another 50, another break, another 50, until they finally had made it up to 200. Yesterday, just for fun, Miguel had pretended that the last set had really put them up only to 150. The new boy had protested and was rewarded with another three days in OP.
The finale was 25 push-ups. Miguel let Hayley, Chelsea, and Cassie do them girl-style, from the knees, but still Cassie’s arms shook so hard that she was afraid she would collapse. Collapsing or simply refusing to do something was no refuge. Miguel would just force you back on your feet again.