“What is this?” she asked, holding up a worm that was desperately trying to escape her evil clutches.
“It's a worm,” Bobby Smith said helpfully. I made up his name. It's close enough.
“I know it's a worm! I want to know how it got in my cloakroom!” She looked around at our terrified faces, her eyes boring into our tiny brains. We couldn't run, we couldn't hide! We also couldn't talk, so we just sat there with our tongues glued to the insides of our mouths.
“Did you do this?” she glared at me with eyes like lasers. I shook my head. Annie shook her head too, even though MRS. FINDLAY wasn't even looking at her. I think that's what gave us away. That, and the fact that the worms were busily crawling out of the pockets of two little yellow coats with Annie and Madison labels stitched carefully into the collars.
We didn't get eaten and no one got burned. But we did
have our first detention that day. We didn't even know what the word meant, but we knew it was pretty bad. It came with a note that we had to take home to our parents. We couldn't read yet, so we didn't know what horrors the mishmash of ABCs contained. I was kind of surprised when I showed my mom the note and she laughed about it. I didn't think that having a dragon for a teacher was very funny. I never did find out what the note said.
Annie and I were best friends from that day forward, bonded for life by a mutual fear of dragons. When we got a little older, we stopped being afraid of them and developed a kind of obsession with them. We bought each other dragon stuff for years on every birthday and Christmas and any other occasion we could come up with. I have practically every size, shape, and color of dragon you could imagine.
Annie and I aren't friends anymore, though. I think she's part of the reason I'm in this place. I guess the bond wasn't for life after all.
I wonder if she kept all her dragons.
March 16
One of the nameless horde of prison guards just came in to give me my protein shake. That's what they call it. Isn't that a joke? They tell me it isn't fattening or anything, that it's just full of vitamins, nutrients, and vegetable juice. Yum. I know they're lying. It's thick and gross and disgusting and I can tell it has more calories in it than a McD's triple thick shake. I have to drink it, though. If I don't, I'll get solitary confinement. That means I would have to sit in this little room where
they'd have someone watching my every move. They'll take me away from everything I have that makes me feel a little bit like me.
Not that I have much in this place â a few books, my CD player, a pillow that I brought from home that has a dragon embroidered on it. I think Annie gave it to me, so I guess I shouldn't have brought it. Anyway, it's comfortable, but I bet I wouldn't be allowed to have it with me because they'd likely think I was going to put it over my face and suffocate myself. I bet they wouldn't even let me take my writing stuff in case I write myself to death. All I'd be left with is thinking. I don't really like to think for extended periods of time. It makes my brain hurt. Not hurt as in physical pain, like a headache. It's just that there seems to be too much to think about. My body, my parents, my friends, my weight, my school, what to eat, when to exercise, how to get out of here, why my life sucksâ¦. It's like my thoughts start moving too fast and filling up all of the empty spaces so that I can't separate them from each other. I literally can't think straight because I don't have room to keep them organized. The pressure builds until I feel like I might explode if one more thought tries to squeeze in there, so I try to make them all go away. The problem is that the more I try not to think, the more I think about thinking, which starts to make me feel basically nuts. So, thinking is not really my favorite sport.
So, I take the proteins and suck them back like a model prisoner, which I am. But they're not as smart as they think they are. I have unsupervised bathroom privileges because I've been such a good girl, so the protein shake can always visit
Mr. Toilet when no one is around. I can do it with no sound at all, so even if Big Red and her squad of bathroom police are listening outside the door, they figure I'm just doing what people do in the can. It's my game. Madison, oneâRedheaded Demon, zero.
I can't believe it took me a whole chapter to get up to kindergarten. The good news is that the rest of my childhood, up until I hit the whole teen thing, is mostly one boring run-on sentence, with blurred images here and there. I don't even bother with thirty-second commercial memories â more like five-second sound bites. I do remember being a nerd-baby in school. I wanted to be the smartest and never quite managed it. I would always wait when the tests or report cards were handed out, sure that this time I would be the number one geek. But there was always someone with one mark higher. Come to think of it, it was always the same someone. I hated her for years and now I can't even remember her name. Weird.
Annie was always so much cooler than me about everything. She was super smart but didn't feel the need to show it off. Annie was actually named by her grandmother, who was a big fan of the book
Anne of Green Gables
. Annie has her grandma's Japanese copy of the book and she brought it to school and tried to read a bit to us, but she didn't really know all that
much Japanese so it was kind of funny. Annie even reminds me of Anne, all strong willed and creative and full of answers. Except that Annie's hair is black instead of red. She did try to dye it once just to see what she would look like, but it turned out kind of mud-colored. If it had been me, I would have dyed it back to black before anyone saw me, but she left it that way. She never seemed to really care what people thought about her. There's this expression I've heard about marching to your own drummer. That's what Annie has always been able to do. She has her own music playing in her head and the sounds from the people outside never manage to drown it out. The music in my head always has the volume turned down so low that I can't hear my own music over everyone else's.
Music. Now, that's something I do remember. I played the piano from the time I could read. My first piano lessons were in the lunchroom in my elementary school and we all sat at the lunch tables with cardboard cutouts of the keyboard. There was only one piano and maybe twelve kids or so, so we all had to wait for our two-minute turn on the real deal. I loved it from day one. We had an old player piano at home that you could pedal with your feet and make amazing songs come out. I used to sit on my dad's knee and try to hit the pedals when I was little. I remember being so excited the first time I managed it on my own. It was easy to get excited back then, I guess.
A few years later, I got the chance to play on a real grand piano in a music studio my piano teacher rented for our annual recital downtown. On the day of the concert, I spent equal time trying to improve my piano playing and trying to improve my appearance. I had this theory that I would play better if I looked
good. About an hour before we were due to leave the house, I put on my best outfit and went to the bathroom to inspect myself in the mirror and see if I looked pretty enough to play beautiful music.
And that's when I saw it.
Huge, red, and ready to ooze. An angry volcano sitting in the middle of my right cheek, pulsing with the fires of the earth's core. I could see it throbbing steadily, preparing to erupt. I could almost feel the lava coursing down my face and dripping off my chin. I could only imagine the crater that would be left behind, a gaping hole where I once had a face!
I ran to the bathroom, hand held tightly against my cheek, trying desperately to hold back nature's fury. There had to be something I could do! Something that could make my face come back again. Then I remembered. Steve. He was old, almost three years older than me. He was almost fifteen. He might have something that could tame the beast before I had to show my face in public.
“Steve!” I yelled, running down the hall. “I need your help!”
“Why are you holding your face? Is it falling off?” My brother thinks he has a sense of humor. He is alone in that opinion.
“I have a facial problem. I need some cream or something. You must have something.”
“Move your hand so I can see.”
“No! Just give me something to make it go away!”
Steve rolled his eyes and came over to try and pry my hand away but I was too quick for him. Or so I thought for about thirty seconds until he caught up with me and managed to pull
my hand away from my face. He stood back, still holding my hand so I couldn't run and hide, and stared at me intently.
“Oh,” he finally said, after what seemed like hours. “You have a zit. Wow, is it your first one? Starting young, are you? Would you like some zit stuff? I will get that for you.” He patted me on the head like a puppy and walked over to his dresser.
“A zit! You make it sound so small! Look at me!” This couldn't be defined with only three letters! Something this big deserved at least half the alphabet! “I can't go to the concert!”
“Maddie, get over yourself. You have a small zit â sorry, pimple â on your cheek. It will most likely be gone by tomorrow. You can hide it, anyway. Ask Mom for some makeup or something. You are seriously out of your strange little mind.” He turned his back on me and went back to his computer.
I took the bottle he gave me, read the directions carefully, and put the cream on my face. The bump still looked totally disgusting and the bottle said it could take up to a week to cure it. I didn't want to ask Mom for makeup because I was pretty sure she wouldn't have any and even if she did, she would say I was too young to wear it and that pimples were a normal part of growing up. That was the kind of thing my mom said about a lot of the stuff I tried to talk to her about. Looking back, I guess it was mostly kid stuff, like friend troubles and school and hair starting to grow in strange places, but it all seemed important to me at the time. I was pretty sure pimples would fall under her category of normal.
Annie didn't wear makeup and she didn't seem to have anything strange and new developing on her face yet, so I
couldn't really ask her either. It figures that if I was going to be better and faster than Annie at something, it would be growing pimples!
So, I went to the concert, pimple prominently displayed on my cheek, and played my piece as badly as I had ever played it. My teacher was disappointed and didn't seem too impressed with my explanation. She just didn't see the connection between my cheek and my fingers. I told my mother that my teacher was disappointed in me and that I felt disappointed in myself. Mom said that I shouldn't worry about it and that dealing with disappointment was a normal part of growing up. Then she mentioned that I had a pimple on my cheek and asked me if I wanted to borrow some cover-up when we got home.
March 20
I can't believe it! They caught me! How could they possibly know? I am the champion of garbage removal. No fingers down the throat, no gross noises. Nothing. I've practiced for ages. I can't believe they just walked in and caught me. Is there no privacy in this place? Obviously not. Score one point for the Redheaded Demon of the Ward.
So now my whole good girl image is in the toilet along with the stupid protein shake. I can't believe this place! What did I do to deserve this? I'm going to be sitting in this room forever if this keeps up. I'm on what they call an “individualized schedule,” meaning I'm a pain in their collective butts and I'm not out with all the model prisoners doing fun things like circle time and group discussions. I'd rather have my
teeth pulled one at a time than be part of the gang mentality around here but if I don't persuade them of what a good girl I am and join their little pseudo-community, I don't know if I'll ever get out of this place. It's like we graduate from one level to another here. I wonder if there's a ceremony. A cap and gown would be nice. Especially as, at this rate, I don't think I'll be graduating from high school any time soon! Anyway, most people start on the individual schedule, which means we have private counseling and work mostly in our own space. We exercise with a worker standing there keeping watch and eat on our own, with our own customized diet.
They like to think that they give us choices here and they keep telling me I can join the group schedule when I feel ready. They really mean that I can join when I show them that I am behaving myself according to their rules. I don't like their rules.
So they can just wait because I'm not ready to play the game their way yet. There has to be a way out of this place without doing what they want me to do.
When I was a little girl, I used to think my mom knew pretty much everything. She was the one who told me what I needed to know about life. She taught me things like how to ride my bike and swim, and she helped me with my homework. I thought that she had all of the answers. The older I got, though, the less she seemed to understand about real life. My real life, anyway. It's not that she was mean or anything like those evil mothers you see on TV. She was just sort of off in her own space. Motherland, where everything made sense to her in her own mind and she didn't think she had to look inside mine. She couldn't see what bothered me or scared me or embarrassed me any more, even when I tried to tell her. Like the day she took me to buy my first bra.
When my body decided to make its journey from kidhood to adolescence, the first thing that decided to “blossom” was my chest. That's the polite way of saying that I started growing boobs before pretty much anyone I knew. I know that this is supposed to be a good thing. These wobbly mounds of flesh
are supposed to be attractive and womanly and sexy and all those wonderful things. Only, I was just a kid, like eleven, and none of those things mattered to me at all. What mattered to me is that I suddenly looked funny in a T-shirt and that boys were looking at my chest instead of my face and I was embarrassed to change for gym class. The worst part is that it took my mom forever to notice and when she did, her solution to the problem wasn't much help.