Who Owns Kelly Paddik (3 page)

I could see Chris over by the equipment room, still putting on her skates. If she didn't get on the floor soon, she was going to miss the whole evening. About my seventh time around the gym, I got tired and slowed down. I was doing circles, going into a back corner, when a group came up behind me. They swarmed me and someone shoved me.

“Pit Bull, eh?” a voice hissed.

My shirt tore, and I stumbled. I put out my hands, but the wall slammed into my shoulder. I think I hit my head — for a second everything went dark. Then the gym came back, but it was pretty quiet. Someone had shut off the music.

“Everyone off the floor,” a staff called.

I was all right, but my shoulder ached and my head hurt. As I turned, three girls skated away from me. Pit Bull was one of them. Breathing hard, I rested against the wall. Fran skated up.

“Everything all right?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

“C'mon over to the equipment room,” she said.

I followed her, saying, “I'm all right, I'm all right.” Another staff called Pit Bull and her friends to the equipment room. As Fran and
I skated up to them, my body felt heavy and fat again. I stared at my feet. Someone put the music back on and the other girls started skating. But they were watching me — everyone was watching.

Pit Bull put on big innocent eyes, blinked them a lot and said, “It was an accident!” Then she looked at me and said, “Right, Kelly?” She didn't wait for my answer. “We just wanted to talk to her, but we got going too fast and bumped into her.”

“Is that right, Kelly?” Fran asked.

“Sure.” I wanted this to be over. Pit Bull ran these girls. It was obvious that she'd told one of her friends to shove me into the wall. I was lucky, really. It could have been a lot worse. If I complained now, who knew what would happen next time? Besides, I didn't like all these people watching me. I wanted to get some space. Then I saw Pit Bull's eyes slide down my left arm. I followed her gaze and felt sick. So that was what tore when I was pushed. My left sleeve was ripped. Everyone could see the stitches in my arm. Slowly I pulled one of the torn ends over the cut.
No matter how bad things get
, I thought,
they can always get worse
.

“Since you can't control yourselves, you
three ladies are off the floor for the evening,” Fran said, sounding angry. “C'mon — off with the skates.”

After Pit Bull and her friends took off their skates, they left the gym with one of the staff.
Great
, I thought.
Now Pit Bull has another reason to get mad at me
. She must have heard Chris giggling about the nickname. Chris was definitely someone I needed to stay away from. Going to the opposite end of the gym, I sat down. I was finished with skating for the evening. All I wanted was for it to end so that I could go back to my room. As I started unlacing my skates, someone sat down beside me.

“Get lost,” I said, without looking up. I meant it too. I was ready to haul off and shove anyone who came too close.

“When Terri does stuff like that to me, I feel like I'm outside.” It was Chris, talking so softly that I could hardly hear her. What was her problem? Couldn't she take a hint, or didn't people from Churchill know how to do that? I stared at the skaters, but she kept right on talking. “I feel outside,” she said, “like I'm on the road, out in the cold. Like no one will take me. Like I've got no family.”

I shot Chris a sideways glance. Her face looked as sad as an old story, and she kept twisting her hands. Why didn't she just shut up and go away? This wasn't her problem.

“Terri makes me feel as if I can't be who I want to be,” she said, glancing at me.

So what?
I wanted to say. I didn't like talking about sad stuff, and I sure didn't want to hear about anyone else's problems. I had enough of my own to keep me busy, thank you. I started snapping my fingers to the music. “Can't let it get to you.” I shrugged.

“It gets to me,” Chris said, watching the skaters. “Does your arm get itchy? Y'know — when it's getting better?”

“I guess.” My arm hadn't had time to get better yet. But then, nothing in my life had ever gotten better.

“I don't like skating night.” Chris laughed, her voice high and nervous. “Too many people. I'm not a very good skater.”

I finally had to smile. Here was Chris, sitting in a back corner of the gym, keeping an eye on the new girl. She wasn't dumping her problems on me, she was just trying to make me feel better. And her words were real, not just
some dumb saying on a poster.

“C'mon,” I said. “I can show you some moves if you want. It's easy, once you get going. And now that Pit Bull's gone, we'll have lots of room to move around.”

That night I lay awake for a long time, holding my stuffed bear and staring out the window. On the other side of the wire, the tiny moon looked far away. In my last group home I used to lie in bed and pretend that I could fly to the moon. Like some thin white bird, I would fly up and away, leaving my body behind on the bed. With all that wire crisscrossed over the moon, though, it was hard to pretend. I hate crying. My pillow gets soaked. My nose feels thick as a tree trunk,
and I think I'll never be able to breathe normally again. Why do you have to feel
and
look like crap at the same time?

My nose was back to normal by the time Fran stuck her head through my doorway in the morning. “Time to get up,” she said cheerfully.

I opened one eye, then closed it. She had on a bright yellow shirt and a big smile. As usual, her curly red hair looked as if it had never met a comb.

“Don't you get enough of this place?” I groaned. “Are you always here?”

Fran laughed. “Nah, you just got lucky. Washroom's to your left, in case you forgot.”

I dragged myself to the washroom and looked in the mirror. My hair looked just like Fran's. It's short and blond and usually looks like the morning after. I stuck it under a tap to calm it down.

Without looking up, I knew when Pit Bull came into the washroom. I could feel her standing there, just looking at me. I figured I couldn't let Pit Bull
think
she could scare me. Very slowly, I picked up my towel, walked up to her and looked her in the eye.

“Slasher, eh?” she said softly.

I felt my face heat up, but I kept looking her right in the eye.

“Okay, Terri and Kelly — let's get moving!” It was Fran. They watched you pretty close in this place, but for once it was a relief. Without saying anything, I walked around Pit Bull and straight to my room.

Before school, Fran called me into the office. As I came in I saw Pit Bull sitting on a small couch, staring at the wall. “Terri has something to say to you,” Fran said.

Pit Bull cleared her throat. “I'm sorry I bumped into you and tore your shirt,” she said politely to the wall. She didn't even look at me. I thought about letting her wait for the wall to give her an answer. But if I acted like that, I would never get out of this place.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, just as politely, to the same wall.

Without looking at me, Pit Bull stood up and shoved a note at me. It was a written apology. “So, can I go now?” she asked, turning to Fran. “I did what you said.”

Fran sighed. “Sure, Terri. Off you go.” Leaning out the door, she called out, “Everyone ready for school?”

My first class was math. I sat by the window.
More wire between me and the sky
, I thought. Leaves blew past the window, blurring into a long yellow streak. I blinked quickly and everything sorted itself out.
You're useless
, I thought to myself.
Crying will get you nowhere except stuck inside your crazy no-good head
.

There was a knock at the door and then Fran popped her head in. She whispered something to the teacher.

“Kelly, you've got a meeting with your social worker,” the teacher told me.

Not another one
, I thought, following Fran. Sometimes it seemed as if I was always talking to social workers and counselors, people asking me questions. And I'd get the feeling they all knew my secret. That was the worst feeling of all — when I thought they could read my mind. As we walked, my stomach started to hurt. Fran turned into the social workers' hallway and knocked on a door.

“C'mon in,” said a man's voice. I went stiff. I always need extra time to get ready if I'm walking into a room with a man in it. I followed Fran through the door.

“Hello, Kelly,” said the man at the desk. “Remember me? I'm Jim.” He was the man
who'd chased me down the street and taken my pet rock.

I sat down in one of the chairs and made myself look at him. “Oh yeah,” I said.

A tiny smile picked up a corner of Jim's mouth. “How are things going?” he asked. “I hear you had a bit of a rough time last night in the gym.”

“So?” I looked him right in the eye without blinking. If I thought of him as part of the wall — a part that talked — nothing he said would matter.

He was looking at me thoughtfully. “You think you're a tough kid, don't you, Kelly?”

“I'm not going to tell you what I think,” I said.

It got so quiet that I could almost hear the thoughts in Jim's head. He had very large eyebrows that jumped around a lot, and he was half-bald. He looked all right, as if he could take a joke. I had to work hard to keep thinking of him as part of the wall.

Finally he said, “Thinking is the most private thing you can do.”

That surprised me, but all I did was shrug and say, “I guess.”

Jim talked about the different programs they ran at Marymound, and then he cleared his throat. I could tell that he was getting to the important stuff. Social workers don't like to come to the point right away. They try to make you relax first. That means you get to sit on pins and needles until they tell you the real reason you're in their office.

Jim smiled at me. “Last week, while you were in the hospital,” he said, “I met with your mother.”

So that was why we were having this meeting
. Right away I wanted to ask about my sister and brother. But just thinking about them made me remember my dad. My stomach twisted itself into an ugly fist.

“You don't feel very comfortable around your mother, do you, Kelly?” asked Jim.

“I haven't seen her in years,” I said.

“Would you like to meet her again?” Jim asked. “We could meet here in my office.”

“No.” I didn't want to talk to my mom. I never looked at the pictures I had of her in that envelope. I hated her. Even though I had some good memories, I still hated her. When I told her about the things that happened to me, the things
my dad did to me, she called me a liar. She didn't believe me. How could she not believe me? She didn't try to stop any of it, so it kept happening. That was why I started to run away from home when I was ten. I met up with some people who got me into a lot of trouble, working the streets.

Jim knows
, I thought.
He's read my mind. Now he's going to make me remember
. I looked away.
Think of him as the wall
, I reminded myself.

Jim cleared his throat again. “Your mother says she's tried to contact you, and you won't talk to her.”

“That's right.” I stared past him at the wall. As I did, the wall started to move around. I could see a face starting to take shape inside it — the eyes, nose and mouth. I knew that face.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Jim asked.

“No!” I said loudly.

“You don't think you could just sit here and let her talk to you?” Jim asked. “Just listen to her for a bit?”

The nightmare face was swelling up, taking over the whole wall. “No!” I repeated, louder this time. “I just want to get out of here.”

I started to kick the chair leg. I couldn't
talk to my mom. She would want to talk about the past, and she'd make me remember. It was too awful to remember. I worked so hard to forget. I worked so hard to keep my dad small and in dark places inside me. Anything could remind me of what he did to me when I was little. There he was right now, stepping out of the wall and coming towards me. Seeing him again made me so scared that I started screaming. Jim's office faded away. Suddenly I was five years old and my dad was coming into my bedroom. He was going to do those things to me all over again, and I was too little to stop him. It hurt, it hurt worse than I could ever tell you.

Finally Jim's office came back again. Fran was holding my left arm. Jim was on the other side, holding that arm. There was blood on my stitches. I guess I'd tried to scratch the cut open again.

Fran took me to the nurse, who said that my arm just needed cleaning. None of the stitches had come out. Fran and Jim must have moved fast. The nurse put peroxide on my arm. As I watched her clean the cut, my arm seemed to leave my body and float beside me in the air. I can do this sometimes — turn parts of my body off
or make them feel like someone else's body.

“I don't ever want to see my mom again,” I said slowly to Fran. “Never again. You can't make me.”

“Why, Kelly?” Fran asked. “Can you tell us why?”

Inside, my dad had shrunk down very small, so small that I couldn't feel him. But I knew he was there. He was always there.

“No.” I shook my head and stared at the wall. “Never. I can handle it. I'll take care of everything myself.”

For the next few days, all I saw were doors and windows. It didn't take long to figure out that the wired-over windows were no way out. But I noticed that most of the doors were opened with the same key. Every teacher, social worker, nun and staff seemed to have one of those keys. That meant there were lots of them around, and all I needed was one.

The stitches in my left arm were no longer a secret. The nurse had wrapped my forearm in
a white bandage. Twice a day, one of the staff would unwrap the bandage and clean the stitches. Every time I looked up, a girl seemed to be staring at my arm. Most of them had a scared look on their faces, but Pit Bull's friends laughed. When they did, I fixed my eyes on the nearest door and thought of taking off through it. Doors were pretty much taking over my mind — who opened and closed them, which key went where. Let those girls laugh. When I got out of this place, I wouldn't be taking any of them with me.