New Horizons (9 page)

I looked over at Karen. She was on her back and motionless. Dead asleep. It was funny that she and I were in the same cabin, because that was the way of the world. Karen was the type of girl back home that bothered me. And apparently, I was the type of girl that bothered her too.

There was always someone, somewhere, that was bothered by some kind of person, and the universe was paying us both back for being shitty human beings. We were in the same kind of boat. Mean girls were rotten, and girls like us died from the inside, out.

The morning was fantastic until I got out of bed, and then my body wanted to crumble to the ground. After climbing down the ladder, I laid down on the dirty, wooden floor and fell into a brief daydream about the freedom of owning a cell phone. I realized that cell phones offered entertainment, connection, and security—what humans could offer each other, without the commitment. I missed my cell phone.

We were supposed to be putting on our shorts, socks and boots, but my eyes were on the ceiling, procrastinating. Little Bambi stepped out of her bottom bunk, and instead of asking me what I was doing down there, she stepped right over me and didn’t even look at me. She pretended it was normal to step over a body in the dead of morning—like it happened all the time.

“Did you want help up?” Green Gables asked. She held out her hand.

“No.”

Green Gables wasn’t pretty from that angle. I guess looking at her chin and the skin on her neck wasn’t a fair judgement of what she actually looked like. I felt like I was in a coffin, and these were the people who were looking down at me in the ground, wondering what had happened for me to end up like that. On the floor, spread out, and gazing up.

Karen jumped down from her bunk. When she stepped around me her foot stepped on my hand. I knew what she was up to. There was no such thing as an accident with her.

“You just stepped on my hand.”

“Sticks and stones,” she said.

“You remembered.” I smiled, and there was so much sleep in my eyes that it felt like it was ripping my tear ducts.

Bambi stepped back over me. She had forgotten 66, and quickly moved to get it. She picked up her jug, and went to step over me again to get outside. But instead of keeping her eyes forward, she took a quick glance at me as she stepped over my body.

It was the weirdest thing making eye contact with her from down there. It wasn’t an angle you were supposed to look at someone from. Unless they were dead, of course. And I was alive, and I didn’t feel like myself, and I saw that she thought I was crazy.

“Oh please, like you’re perfect,” I said.

She didn’t turn around. She pretended not to hear anything. Maybe her mother had taught her that. Mum had taught me that too—if you had nothing nice to say, say nothing at all. I was a mute in school. In my head, fireworks were going off and my bones were scraping against my skin, trying to shake me out of myself.

“Get up, Valerie,” Sharon said from the door.

I got up slowly, and then I grabbed 49 off the floor. He was half full and I took a sip even though I wasn’t thirsty. My socks were crunchy, but I put them on anyway since my boots would rub my feet raw without them. The walk up to the mess hall was chilly. Waking up before the sun was painful, and it had been a while since I had done that. There was easily no worse time of day, and that’s why they were making sure we witnessed it. If you could survive seeing a sunrise, you could survive anything.

We were led to a field with a few other groups of girls. It was the same field Karen and I had sweat our guts out onto the previous day. The boys were somewhere else, bettering themselves in a different way with other counsellors. I wondered where Murray was, and what kind of torture he was enduring. At least he didn’t have to see the lake and imagine how cold it was.

The first event was dynamic stretching. That was something new to me. It was stretching while moving, because they didn’t want us staying still. We skipped across the field, and lifted our knees high. The whistle kept us together, and we were encouraged to go as a team. Karen’s speed was the slowest, and we tried to match hers. It was almost painful running slow if you were used to a different pace—it forced you to concentrate harder. It’d be easier to ditch your comrades and speed through to the finish. But that wasn’t the drill.

Larry called us to break. Most girls collapsed onto their backs and covered their faces with their hands. I took a drink from 49 and placed him beside my hip. We sat and listened to Larry, who had a whistle around his neck.

“You have two options. You can either run or talk.”

I already knew which one I was choosing. I wasn’t exactly a runner, but between the two options, I was definitely more of a runner than a talker. There was nothing to talk about with me.

“You can run laps for as long as you like. And if you make it to running for forty-five minutes, you don’t have to talk with us. But if you don’t, you have to stop and have a conversation with your counsellor, where he or she will ask you questions. And you have to have real answers. If your answers aren’t real, you go run again until those answers come to you.”

My answers were never going to come to me. I jumped up and ran, and the girls followed me. We were spread out around the track of the field, and the crusher dust blew up into my face. Even though we had a good track to keep moving on, one by one, the girls got slower and slower. It was funny how we all started out quick, but the pace died down even if you didn’t want it to. I slowed down to a comfortable jog, where I knew I could keep it for a while.

“Valerie, want to talk about anything?” a woman yelled.

I looked up and it was the counsellor with the stomach. And the little eyes. And the big nose. I ignored her and kept running, which was big for me—to keep going and not say anything. I just didn’t want to use any energy. I was in it for the long haul.

Karen was the first to die. She dropped down and then Larry went over to her. He sat down beside her and it was just disgusting how they were sitting and talking. I couldn’t even look at the scene.

Next was Twin.

I wanted to scream at her. That she could stay in it for her sister, Twinner. That she had to keep going. But she stopped running, and then bent over so that her head was nearly between her legs. Her blonde hair was glued to the side of her face, soaked in sweat. She should have put it up so she could see what she was doing. She probably just needed a smoke.

“What a slut,” I said. There was no one close enough to hear me. It just made sense to say right then, and made me feel better.

Twenty minutes later, Green Gables and Twinner quit at the same time. Only when Green Gables stopped, her stomach decided to unload everything she had in her. She puked so hard that it nearly flew up into the sky and disappeared. It just went everywhere.

“Come on!” I yelled. It was infuriating that they were dropping out so quickly. And it killed me to see a counsellor go over to them, when they were at their weakest, and pick and pry at them. I didn’t want to think about what they were talking about.

There was so much crud under my nails and you wouldn’t think so much could fit in such a small place. It had been a couple days since removing my nail polish, and my hair colour was a deep brown. I wasn’t even a brunette—I was dirty blonde. You could still act out your hair colour though.

“You have to feel something by now, Valerie!” Larry yelled over to me.

I waved at him. It took everything in me not to give him the finger. I was doing good. My pace was constant, and my breathing was okay. I kept my shoulders relaxed, and considering I was carrying heavy boots, I was going to make it.

And then Bambi dropped dead.

I tried not to look in her direction. Maybe I could pretend it wasn’t happening because that one hurt. Bambi was a wild card. You didn’t know anything about her, or what kind of a person she was because she kept it all to herself. And there she was, on her back, with her guts spilling out for everyone to clean up.

When I passed her, I looked down at her, like she had done to me, and when we made eye contact, I looked away. There was nothing I could do for her, and she could do nothing for me, and I just wanted to keep going. Nobody could hold me back.

The worst happened when they told me how much time was left.

“Five minutes, Valerie!”

That was a long time—five minutes had the potential for many scenarios to play out. You could do absolutely everything in five minutes, and stretch it out, and exhaust yourself, and kill yourself. Five minutes was the longest amount of time, and when they told me that, I wanted to drop down and cry.

“Four minutes and thirty seconds, Valerie!”

I really wanted to cry. Because it was fucking exhausting being out there around people I didn’t know, missing people far away, and knowing that there were so many more exhausting days ahead of me doing something I didn’t want to do. Sweat beading down my face, and I imagined it looked like tears.

But I kept dragging along, and I pushed through. It was supposed to hurt. I was supposed to ache. And when I heard Larry’s whistle, I stopped.

He came over to me. “Was it hard?” he asked.

“No shit.”

“Watch your language.”

“I can’t see it.”

“No, but I can. Everything you say is written across your skin. Don’t you care?”

“I don’t have tattoos. I’m not a tattoo person.”

“Valerie, someday you’re going to say something bad. And you’re going to regret it. Which happens to everyone. But it’s going to happen a lot to you if you don’t smarten up.”

There was no such thing as smartening up for me. I was a worthless piece of shit, and I didn’t have a high school GED. I was going nowhere. If I could have it my way, I would just shrivel up and die.

6:
HEY VALERIE

If there was one thing more exhausting than running all day, it was sitting at a desk, in a classroom, with someone staring at you.
Sharon wanted us to write a letter to someone, because writing had a magical, pretty way of healing the infected things of your soul. That was what Sharon believed.

“Write a letter to someone else. It can be to whoever you like. Maybe a celebrity, or a family member. Whatever the case, I just want you to write to someone and just talk to them. Don’t worry about length or style—just get the words out of your head so that you can look at them on the page. I want you to then read them back to yourself. This is to see what you’ve come up with. Once you like what you see, you have the option of reading it out loud. You don’t have to read it out loud if you don’t want to share—that’s perfectly fine. But you will have the option tonight at the fire pit, when you bring these letters with you.”

We were each given one sheet of foolscap. Foolscap was terrifying. It reminded me of exams, and how even though you knew the answers and knew you had enough time, as soon as the teacher said go, your mind disappeared and you wrote like a shaky, nervous kid.

Around me, pencils were flying. Murray was on the other side of the room with his face two inches from his paper. He was really taking the directions literally. I wondered what he was writing. I hoped he read his out loud later at the fire pit.

After five minutes of listening to pencils fly, I finally figured out how I was going to fill all the empty lines in front of me.

I wrote a letter to myself, Valerie Campbell. She was the version of myself that the program was searching for, and trying to pull out of me—the good one. She was also someone I wanted to warn.

Hey Valerie.

I just wanted to let you know a few things in case you’re listening somewhere else. It doesn’t matter who you are, or what you do—you’re always going to have your past as a constant reminder of what you have been. And even though you think this program fixed something inside of you, I want you to know something——

You’re still all in there.

Your life is all in your head. The good and especially the bad. But if you keep yourself as a buddy, nobody else can mess with you.

In case they brainwash you into thinking you’re fixed, I just want to remind you that nothing was ever wrong with you in the first place.

You’re fine. It’s in your capacity to have a messed up life or not. Decide to be good, and everyone else can go fuck themselves.

Don’t let them get you.

-Val

I folded the paper up into a square and put it in my pocket. I looked around at everyone else finishing up their thoughts, and wondered if they believed what they were writing. Shortly after, everyone else finished up and put their letters away and headed to the mess hall. It was supper time, and we were having spaghetti. In another world, spaghetti could be a comfort food. But there was nothing about this kind of spaghetti that made it comforting. There was no sauce, meat balls or cheese—just bland noodles boiled and placed on a plate. It was like we were in the depression. Most of us probably were.

Twinner was eating her spaghetti like a slob. It hung out of her mouth and she slurped it up quickly. She had a few holes in her face, most likely from piercings that had been cut from her to become appropriate for her stay at New Horizons. Her earlobes were loose too, from gauges that had been taken away. She looked like an elephant with floppy ears. Karen stared at her from across the table, and Twinner smiled.