New Horizons (29 page)

The mess hall had all thirty residents sprawled out in different areas. Some up on the stage, some lying on the tables. Thirty, because two girls had disappeared, and one was a deer-like girl who had hung herself from an outhouse ceiling. And when they pulled her down, her halo fell off her head and into the hole where people’s waste disappeared to. I wondered what knot she used to do the trick. I hadn’t paid enough attention to really learn them.

None of the residents knew what was going on. Nobody did. It was the middle of the night, when we were supposed to be dead asleep, and the counsellors were surrounding us, watching us like we would throw a sheet around the rafters and jump off a table.

Larry led me past my group to a table at the back, alone. I didn’t sit at it.

“Please, be good.”

“I am so sick of hearing that,” I said. “I’m not even doing anything.”

“Val.”

“It’s Valerie,” I said. “You can’t switch now.”

Larry left me alone and went to the front of the mess hall. My group watched me—maybe they thought that I knew something. Or maybe they thought I was being my typical self, and needed to be segregated as punishment. I kept my back to them, because one look at any of their faces, and I would explode.

I went along the back wall instead, and searched for the hand I had placed on the wall years ago. The one dipped in green. Green, because I couldn’t have the colour I wanted. That was the trend, apparently. I stopped when I found my splotched, little green print, and I placed my hand over it.

“That’s cute.”

Lisa Hatcher was sitting at a table in the corner. She got up slowly and walked toward me. Each step made the boards under her feet moan. When she came up beside me, she put her hand on the print next to mine. Her hand completely covered it. When she removed her hand, the name popped out at me.

Tracy McPherson

For a second, I imagined that I wasn’t being crazy—that I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. But the name was printed in block letters, clear for a kid who had no idea what life was going to put her through. Tracy McPherson, with a red print, was a girl who was just as scared as I was back in my first time at camp, who cried like I did, who missed her mum. I hadn’t paid much attention to her after that first night at camp because we were different, and I hadn’t paid much attention again—because we were different. I didn’t know who Tracy McPherson was, and that was my fault.

I just knew Bambi.

Bambi had straight bangs, huge doe eyes, and liked reading books instead of existing in the real world. Bambi was timid in a terrifying way, and made herself a threat without having to open her mouth. The print beside my little green one was of a fellow camper who I didn’t get to know all that well, who had gotten the colour I wanted, who had given me green.

“What are you thinking?” Lisa Hatcher asked. She had no idea what she had just put her hand on.

“Nothing.”

“Sure you are—I know why we’re here. I know what’s going on.”

I looked at her.

“And you do too,” she said.

“Do I?”

“We know Jenny is out there, and they know they messed up—”

“You’re a fucking idiot.”

She stared at me with her wide eyes on either side of her head. Lisa Hatcher was disgusting to look at. And she had done it to herself. She was so bad looking that there wasn’t an easy way to imagine her to be pretty somewhere.

“Jenny never got out of here and you’re a dumb fuck for thinking that. You should never have started that rumour,” I told her.

“Rumour?” She laughed at that. “You’re the dumb one. That’s why we’re all here. She’s missing and they’re scared that they’re gonna lose us too.”

“I wish that was why we were here, but you’ve never been more wrong.”

“You’re just tired, Valerie Campbell. You’re not thinking clearly. You’re letting yourself get fixed.”

One last time, I looked at the handprint of Tracy McPherson. It was dipped in red. It was vivid and bright and scary. It looked like blood. Finally, I was glad to have a green print. It didn’t seem so bad compared to how red looked when it dried.

“It’s crazy that things happen when you don’t think they can,” Lisa Hatcher said. “Jenny made things happen. Because she didn’t like being scared. Isn’t that weird?—that there are people in the world more scared than you. That they are out there, and you don’t think of them or really ever see them because you’re wrapped up in your own shit instead.” She smiled. “But everybody is scared of something, and you either let it scare you for a bit and get over it,
or
, be scared forever, and maybe even let it take your life.”

Take your life.
That was amazing. The only way you could actually take your life anywhere was ending it. What a horrible way to say someone killed themself—that they took their life. Maybe it was brilliant though.

The counsellors were spread around the room, watching us like they were supposed to do. But they hadn’t yet listened. Because New Horizons wasn’t the place for people with problems. It didn’t have what we needed to get better. And a girl was dead because of that. Some of us had been more than troubled youth. Some of us needed more help than talking about ideas and building dream catchers and existing away from our real world.

“What are you going to do?” Lisa Hatcher asked. Her voice was a whisper and she cracked a smirk. “You helped Jenny escape and none of the residents really know what is going on—-”

I lunged for her.

That was what she wanted, maybe. A scene, and a moment, and a reason to have her hair pulled and to punch someone in the mouth. And I was all for being punched in the mouth, and having my own hair yanked at the roots. Because I was furious, and it felt good to be hurt that way.

Rick and Mary ripped us apart. But the moment I was back on my feet, with my arms held on either side of me, I screamed what I should have screamed an hour ago—

“TRACY KILLED HERSELF!”

There wasn’t really a huge reaction at first. Because most of the residents didn’t know who Tracy was. She was a face without a name. And since I couldn’t throw a picture up of her dead eyes, the only people who knew her were the only reactions that mattered.

“What’s going on?” Logan stood up. She looked at Sharon.

Sharon’s eyes were wide. Her hand was gripped around a walkie.

“Tell them, Larry.” I pulled my hand out of a counsellor’s grip and pointed at him. “Tell them.”

The two counsellors began to drag me toward the door. And it wasn’t something I wanted to happen. I wanted to stay where I was. I wanted to stay with the other residents. Because for once, I finally wanted to speak up about something that absolutely mattered to me.

“Tracy killed herself because that’s what people do when they want to die!” I yelled.

Murray stood up from his table. I didn’t even have to scream for him. He headed right for me because he liked getting involved in things that could blow up.

“Take a seat or you will be out of here too, Murray,” Rick said.

“Murray, they’re hurting me,” I said.

They weren’t hurting me. They were doing their job and trying to diffuse a situation. But I knew exactly what I was doing. And exactly what he would do if he heard that.

“Let her go.” Murray tried to get the counsellors off of me. He grabbed my arm and tried to pull me away. But they wouldn’t let me go. “Come on, let her go. She’s not even doing anything,” he said.

That was my problem. I had stopped doing something in life, stopped doing well, because something had hit me. And it was a dark shadow that I couldn’t shake off. What was scary was that nobody else could see it, and I couldn’t do anything with it around me. I knew that maybe I was sick, but nobody saw it like that. And then I ended up in New Horizons, and Murray punched the counsellor holding me back—

Two counsellors grabbed Murray by each arm. One of them was Guy. They began to drag him out the door just like they were doing to me. The residents around us were paralysed, and I looked back to get one last glimpse of my group.

Brooke was laughing. Her braces were a sharp contrast against her wide, open face. Her teeth were in the midst of being fixed, though, and maybe someday they would be absolutely perfect. Twin had her hand over her mouth, some how shocked by my display. It was something to do though. Maybe she was hiding a smirk because it had to be good to see someone else getting into trouble. Kenzie was just watching me, waiting for the scene to play out in different ways. The whites of her eyes were so big and excited.

Last was Logan. And with a wide smirk on her face, she waved at me as I went out the door. It was a fluttering, weak, lazy wave because she didn’t know she was never,
ever
, going to see me again. She would have waved better, surely.

And I grinned. Because I had no idea either.

Right then, staring at my bunk mates who knew nothing about me because I hadn’t shared, I realized that crazy was simply a perspective. That you had no idea about other people if you didn’t take the time to get in their head, or put yourself beside them. That context mattered, and if you kept doing similar things over and over, they added up and defined who you were.

With two outbursts in a row, I was officially off the hinges and crying wolf. Nobody was taking me seriously, and they had no reason to. I was simply a wild card, and something entertaining to watch.

To them, I must have looked nuts.

I was taken away, outside, away from people that we could scream at and influence. The rain slapped me in the face and stung my eyes. I was soaked immediately, we all were, and I tried running when the men dropped me. I was pushed into the ground, and then I was dragged to the buildings I had thought were outhouses on my first day.

Murray was put in one first. Guy shut the door, and slid the wooden bar across the door, the only thing trapping him in there. It was simple and easy and effective. Guy came over and helped the men wrestle me into the building. I wasn’t letting it be an easy job.

“Val, you have to calm down. You’re acting out.”

“Acting out is that Jenny girl who jumped out the window for no reason.”

“Stop it, you’re not thinking.”

“No. She was smart. She knew what she was doing. If you jump out a window, you’re going to break your leg. If you hang yourself, you’re going to die. Those are rules of life. And both scenarios, you get to go home.”

“You’re not like them, Valerie. You’re fine.” He shut the door.

I went limp. A few random tears went down my face, into my ears, and then into my hair. That was what exhausted tears did. And I was lying on my back, and it was the only place they could go. I wished I could see the stars. I had the ceiling to look at instead, and I listened to counsellors talk back and forth on their walkie-talkies far, far away from me.

“They’re on their way.”

It was out. Bambi was dead. She had killed herself. I was trapped. And Murray was beside me and there was a storm outside that was ready to destroy what was left of us. Murray pounded on the wall of his solitary confinement building. He was that neighbour I didn’t exactly know that closely, but knew enough about to not want anything to do with. We could still be friendly though.

“Murray?”

“I’m here Val.”

I wasn’t a nail biter. But my hands were in my mouth, and there was I was, ripping the nails off my fingers with my teeth and spitting them away.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I covered my face. It was so dark and I was soaked. There were drips of water coming through the ceiling. It felt nice on my skin. There was a crack of light in the corner. A lighter version of black that caught my eye. I stared at, as if in a trance, until I realized what it meant.

I was back to square one.

On my first day, I had been put in the very same confinement building. The one with the weak walls, the one with the bent boards, and the one I had nearly broken out of—-

My feet smashed into the wall. I imagined it to be people’s faces, I imagined there to be a fire inside, I imagined that there was someone else in the room that I needed to get away from—

“Just calm down, Val,” Murray yelled.

I couldn’t stop. I kicked and banged my feet against the wall. And it was breaking because I kept kicking and kicking and kicking—-

“Stop it. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

I kicked and kicked and kicked, and then my foot went through the crack, and the crack turned into a hole. I pulled my foot out, and I stared out into the dark, mad world of New Horizons. The sky was sobbing in between screams of thunder, and I felt like the only person in the whole world who was mad and angry and depressed about so much. Without even testing a small part of me, I pushed my arms, head, and shoulders first into the hole, and dragged the rest of myself through it. My hips got stuck for a second, but I wiggled them until I burst through to the outside.

“Murray—Murray I’m free!” I yelled to him. There couldn’t be a good reason for why I was smiling. My heart was pounding and I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t expected to break free. There was nothing keeping me trapped, but I was hesitating.