Her Side, Part 3

(EDITOR’S NOTE- In an effort to remove some of the stagnating WordPress pages on my domain, I am reposting some old content here. This novella originally was posted June 9, 2009. Her Side is not for kids. At all. Learn more here. )

Now, among the animals was El-Ahrairah, the Prince of Rabbits. He had many friends and they all ate grass together. But after a time, the rabbits wandered everywhere, multiplying and eating as they went. Then Frith said to El-Ahrairah, “Prince Rabbit, if you cannot control your people, I shall find ways to control them.”
~Narrator, Watership Down

Mom always used to tell me to look on the bright side. So let’s do that.

Room. Check. Bed. Check. Desk. Check.

I had a window overlooking the brick courtyard, and in the afternoon it was kinda pretty. Like a desert can be pretty, but devoid of life.

Oh, wait, that’s negative again.

Positive thoughts. Right. So my things were searched when I got there, but they didn’t take anything away from me. I’m not one of the ones who has her notebook searched, which is a good thing. But they wouldn’t have known the stuff I had in there was dangerous.

I had a schedule handed to me by the guardian of our hall, a young woman who was from England and said things like “SHED-yule” and “or-gan-I-za-shun.” Wake-up was 7am, followed by group yoga and breakfast. Then group therapy. Library time. Lunch. Solo therapy followed, then free time, then dinner. After dinner was another group therapy session. Bedtime curfew was nine o’clock. Apparently I was in a “short term treatment” plan. Some kids went to classes and therapy, I just was to focus on getting “better.”

It had been hard enough to try to make friends in the new DC school, and I found that the girls at The Hutch were all pretty self-contained. The boys cut up more, and I noticed they had more guardians than we did. Girls had one guardian for every ten girls, boys had one for every seven.

A small girl with a blonde bob hiding her left cheek eyed me at breakfast. “You’re new.”

“Yeah.”

“Political refugee?” she asked, spooning tasteless eggs into her mouth.

“Sorry?” I asked.

“Mom or dad in politics? Didn’t want you messing things up for them? Sent you here?”

“Oh!” I said. “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

She held out her hand, the nails bitten short. I shook it. “I’ve been here for a year, I get it. I’m C.V. No last name. If you say your last name it’s assumed you are pulling rank. Stories are a president’s son got sent here and tried to use his connections to get what he wanted. That ended… real fast.”

I wondered if she was being deliberately vague or just trying to scare me. “OK. I’m Clara. No last name.”

“Are you a preemptive strike or a carpet bomb?”

I blinked at her. She sighed and blew her bangs out of her eyes. “I mean, did they send you here because they were afraid you were going to fuck up, or did they send you here because you already fucked up?”

I laughed, a short, fake sound. “That’s less personal than my last name?”

She regarded me with wide brown eyes. “Sure it is. In twenty years I can say, ‘You know Jane Smith, Senator John Smith’s daughter – the one running for Senate? – I met her in The Hutch when we were teens.’ OR I could say, ‘When I was a teenager I was in The Hutch with a fucked up girl who cut herself.”

I tried to school my face, but she narrowed her eyes. “Oh. You’re a cutter. I was just throwing out a hypothetical. Lucky guess.”

I didn’t look at her. The eggs had lost their limited appeal for me. “So what do people do around here for free time?”

C.V. resumed eating her eggs. “Nice subject change, but you’ll have to get better than that if you’re trying to do it in therapy. We watch television. Read. There used to be an XBox in the basement, but Peter got mad that we didn’t have Left For Dead and broke the thing. Assholes in DC say violent games make kids violent; it’s more like kids get violent when they play too much Bejeweled.”

She sighed. “Although we have no sports teams, there’s a field out back where there’s sometimes a game of soccer or football.”

Sports. Great. “So we don’t have any rules?”

“Oh there are always rules,” she said, slugging back her orange juice, dribbling some down her chin and wiping it off with her sweatshirt sleeve. “But free time is free time. I’d recommend going for a walk and learning the ropes.”

The bell rang, and we were herded to our morning therapy sessions.

Morning group therapy was surprisingly uneventful. I was introduced but not focused on. A group of eight kids and two counselors talked about self esteem and how others view us and how we view ourselves. I was mostly silent. The other kid who didn’t talk was a tall, dark haired boy. He sat across the circle from me, his brown eyes fixated on me. They’d flick to my arms, then back up at me.

At lunch I avoided C.V. I tried her habit of biting her nails, and discovered I could get my right thumb pretty ragged. I excused myself to the bathroom for some private time before my personal therapy session.

That went well. I relaxed. Talked. The woman looked like Mom.

During free time, I walked outside and decided to explore. The courtyard near my window was empty, but for the black haired boy. He leaned against a wall and sucked on a clove cigarette.

“How did you get cloves in here?”

“How did you get a knife in here?” he asked.

I flushed. “I didn’t.”

“If you’re going to cut, do it where they can see it,” he said. “You won’t make them feel like they’re helping you if you don’t.”

“How do you – I mean, what-” I looked down and sighed. “How did you know?”

He looked at me at last. “I watched you at lunch. And there’s blood on your shirt.”

He reached out with his hand, the cigarette coming close to my stomach, as he grabbed my shirt and lifted it a couple of inches to reveal the jagged cut. I held my breath, excitement clogging my throat as the heat from the cigarette got closer.

“Innovative. I’m Joseph,” he said.

“Clara,” I said.

“Want a smoke?”

There are several points where I look back and think, “There was a turning point.” But the biggest turning point was the moment that Joseph held his cigarette close to my bleeding stomach. The heat, the lingering stinging, his beautiful brown eyes studying me like I was a bug on a microscope slide.
That began my slide.

And I went in feet first, eyes closed, ready for anything.

Feet first. Eyes closed.