A Really Awesome Mess (9 page)

“Um. ‘Achy Breaky Ass’?” I laughed at that one, as did Chip, but nobody else was impressed.

Tina sputtered, “Emmy, please, the language—”

“ ‘Ass of Stone’!” Chip piped in. Crickets.

“I don’t know American music,” Mohammed said.

“Jenny?” Diana said. “Not talkin’, huh? Okay, you get a song Kanye West wrote about Emmy. ‘Assless.’ ”

Everybody, even Emmy and Mohammed, laughed at that one. Tina was still offering feeble protests, but now it was in full swing, and we were all shouting titles out. “ ‘Assbeat’!” “ ‘Ass-Shaped Box’!” “ ‘Jar of Asses’!” “ ‘Stereo Asses’!” “ ‘Ass-break Hotel’!”

And finally Tina had had enough. She stood up, red-faced, and yelled, “All of you! Stop it right now! Now, I’m sorry you had a disappointment this week, but that doesn’t mean you get to flout every rule at Assland—Heartland Academy!”

Nobody said anything for a second. And then Diana piped up with, “Assland Academy? Tina, that is genius! Assland!”

“No, guys, listen, I misspoke with the—” Tina tried to protest,
but everybody was laughing so loud and hard she couldn’t get her sentence out.

“Assland Academy,” Chip said, “a Caring Place!”

“Nestled in the Ass of America, Assland Academy provides a therapeutic setting …” Emmy added.

“Nestled in the ass!” I panted between laughs. “Good one! Tina, this is a winner! I haven’t laughed this hard since I got to Assland!”

Tina waited patiently, blushing, until we stopped laughing. It took awhile.

“Okay, guys. I’m not knocking you down a level for this because I’m happy that you got through your rough time, and, apart from Diana’s Kanye West remark, none of it was really abusive—”

“Have you seen this girl?” Diana asked. “It’s just accurate.”

Emmy shrugged. “True. Even when I was a tub I never had much of a butt.”

Tina nodded. “Great. Anyway, I want to give you guys another chance to work together.” She offered us a double-or-nothing deal. Two hours with the iPods and twenty extra minutes on the phone for another week of good behavior. I looked around the circle and saw the wheels turning in everyone’s mind. What could I do with the extra time? Did last week’s deals still hold, or were we in new territory here?

All was answered at dinner. “So last week’s deals are still in
effect,” Mohammed said when everybody had brought their tray back to the table.

“No way,” Diana said. “I want to renegotiate.” I’d give the kid this. She had balls of steel. I was also happy because if she wanted to renegotiate, that was gonna give me two hours with the iPod. I had a semi just thinking about it.

It wasn’t Mohammed who stepped in to keep her in line, though. It was Emmy. “As the person who blew the original deal, you’re not really in the position to dictate terms.”

“Yeah, actually I am,” Diana said. “Because a) I started the ass game that resulted in the greatest name for this place ever. And b) I don’t care. I’ll go off right now and wreck the whole week for all of you. I don’t care. So you have to make me care. And Daniel Radcliffe isn’t enough. I want out.”

Everybody looked around. “Out,” Chip said. “You want to escape? To go where? You gonna go live in a cornfield?”

Diana took a big bite of her sloppy joe. The red goo oozed from between her lips, and Emmy looked totally green, like she might just barf right here and wreck it for us. “Close your eyes, for God’s sake!” I yelled at Emmy. She did, putting her palms down on the table and taking deep breaths.

“Mmm …” Diana said with a mouth full of beef and bread. “I really like the way the beef fat mixes with the tomato. Mmmfh. And after you chew and mix it with your saliva, it makes this hot slurry of—”

It was clearly touch and go with Emmy right then. “I really like to exercise,” I said, hoping to plant a reassuring image in her mind. “Just hit the treadmill for an hour and a half or so. You know, my treadmill’s broken, though, and it only tells me how many calories I’m burning in a minute. So, Emmy, if I can run at a pace that allows me to consistently burn six calories a minute—”

“Then you’re obviously not running fast enough, lazy,” Emmy said. And everybody laughed, and Diana’s evil spell was broken.

“Listen,” Mohammed said through clenched teeth. “If we get our rewards two more weeks in a row, we’ll get a field trip anyway. You don’t have to break out to get off campus.”

Diana chewed on this information and her sloppy joe. “I don’t care. I can’t wait two weeks. I’ll lose it. I mean, I’m losing it already. I need some fresh air. Look at this place—” She gestured around at our subterranean dining hall, with the high windows covered in wire mesh and the ancient green-and-white linoleum squares on the floor, and it was easy to see what she meant. “I can’t breathe in here. You guys help me break out, I’ll be an angel until then.”

“Do we have to come with you?” Chip asked. “Because then you’re basically asking us to never ever get out of here. You know breaking out shows that you still have to work on your issues with authority, that you’re not taking responsibility for your own actions—”

“That you’re still blaming others for your own bad decisions,” Emmy piped in.

“That you can’t see it’s not that the world is against you, it’s that you are against the world,” Chip said. “And you haven’t achieved balance and wholeness.”

“Yeah, I’m really not supposed to be here anyway,” I said. “The whole thing was a misunderstanding. So I am damn sure not signing up for more time in this place just so you can go play
Children of the Corn
.”

“What the hell is that?” Diana asked.

“It’s a horror movie about psychotic kids,” I said. “I think you’d identify.” And Diana was up off the bench and ready to come over the table at me.

“Fifty bucks on Diana,” Emmy said, laughing, as Chip restrained Diana and got her back in her seat.

Mohammed gave me a look. And then he spoke. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll break you out.
After
you behave for a week.” He extended his hand, and Diana reached out and shook it.

I should have been happy that I had something to look forward to. When I’d gotten into my bed, I had a smile on my face.

And then I woke up in the morning, and something was wrong. My head wasn’t right.

I stumbled through academic classes, including Fitness, which turned out to involve walking around the track out back.

And then it was Max time.

“How are you doing today?” he said.

I’d been resisting Max pretty effectively up until now—giving him glib sarcasm as much as possible and never saying anything meaningful. But today I didn’t have the fight left. This, of course, was how they got you.

“I’m numb,” I said.

Max looked up from his iPad. “Physically?” he said.

“No. Just emotionally. You know. I just don’t feel anything.”

“Why do you think that is?”

They always asked this question. And it always pissed me off. I didn’t know why. I mean, my parents were divorced, but that just made me like about half the kids in America. I had a pretty good life.

“There is no reason, Max,” I said. “That’s why this is a waste of time. Because we can talk and talk and talk and we’ll never figure out why I’m screwed up. It’s just the way my brain works. Or doesn’t work. Sometimes I just start feeling numb, and then after that it gets painful, and I don’t know why. I can’t figure out why now, after I had the best day I ever had at this hellhole, I suddenly get numb.”

“You haven’t been palming the meds or anything, have you?”

I’d been on a low dose of Citalopram, the cheapest antidepressant, since the acetaminophen incident. It helped. But not enough. I rolled my eyes. “I’m taking my medicine.”

“Well,” Max said. “So you don’t want to talk about causes. Fine. Then let’s focus on strategies. If you’re headed into a rough
patch, how do you get through it?”

“I don’t know. I mean, that’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”

Max smiled at me like I’d made some kind of breakthrough.

“Okay. So tell me what it’s like.”

“I mean. It’s like. I don’t feel anything for a while. Not happy, not sad. Like, my AM group might get a field trip or whatever if we’re all good for two weeks, and I’m not looking forward to it. I just don’t feel anything right now. It’s not bad. But it’s not good.”

“Okay,” Max said, tapping frantically on his iPad and nearly salivating at the therapeutic breakthrough he thought we were having. “So then what?”

“Then, when the numbness goes away, the pain hits.”

“And then what?”

“And then … well. I get mean. I alienate people. And I do stupid things.”

“You gonna do that stuff here?”

“You got another idea for me? Because, and you know how much it kills me to say this, I am actually pretty open right now.”

Max stroked his Old Testament beard for a minute. “The thing is,” he finally said, “it has to come from you. I can’t tell you how to get through it because it’s different for everybody.”

“Awesome. Now I see why they pay you the big bucks around here,” I said.

The next day I was still numb, and I probably wouldn’t have
gotten out of bed except I knew if I so much as missed breakfast I’d blow it for everybody and Mohammed would beat the snot out of me. Not that I was too concerned about that. I mean … I wasn’t afraid of it. In fact I kind of wondered if it might be worth it just to feel something. I decided to leave that option for another day. I hopped in the shower and shuffled down to breakfast, where Emmy was doing an autopsy on a slice of honeydew.

“No smartass thing to say about my breakfast?” she asked, smiling.

I put a spoonful of something in my mouth. It didn’t taste like anything. “I’m too numb to be my usual sparkling self,” I said. “You know, the numbness?”

Emmy chewed a sliver of honeydew twenty-seven times and looked at me. “No. I don’t get that. What’s it like?”

“It’s like nothing. Like I just feel totally flat.”

“Like, sad? I have crying jags.”

“Nope. Not sad. Just nothing.”

She picked up another sliver of honeydew with her fork and chewed it twenty-seven times. “Doesn’t sound so bad,” she finally said. “You want my bacon? I obviously have to get rid of it before Jenny gets down here.”

“Not really. But you know Chip will be all over it.”

“Yeah. So how long does it last? The feeling nothing, not your hatred of bacon.”

I cracked a weak smile. “Depends. A day, a week, a month? I
don’t know. I don’t really mind. It’s better than the pain, which usually comes after. You know, when you have this feeling in your guts like it just hurts to be alive?”

Emmy pointed her fork—which sported another seven molecules of melon on the end—at me. “Now that one,” she said, “I’m totally familiar with.”

Last time I felt that way I’d taken a lot of Tylenol. Which didn’t really help. Obviously. But I thought, you know, painkillers. Didn’t kill the pain, though. But then the pain just kind of left on its own a couple of weeks later. I didn’t know why.

I kept hearing Max’s question. “How do you get through it?”

He was asking about my latest downturn, but I guessed the question could apply to life, too. And I didn’t know the answer.

TWO DAYS A WEEK, INSTEAD OF STUDY HALL I WENT TO A ONE-ON-ONE
session with my assigned therapist. I’d only met with her twice so far, and had spent the entire time trying to convince her my admission to Heartland was all a big mistake.

It totally didn’t work, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to keep trying.

“So how how is it going this week? Are you adjusting to being away from home and getting used to the rules here at Heartland?” Brittany was asking me.

Brittany seemed like a better name for a sorority sister than a therapist. She looked like a college kid, too, with her perfectly cut bangs and perky boobs. Her age and hotness made me fairly certain I would eventually outsmart her.

“It hasn’t been a problem at all for
me
,” I said, emphasizing that I wasn’t the one with issues.

My words just hung out there as Brittany nodded, unblinking. I figured she wasn’t picking up on what I was laying down, so I gave her a little hint. “I mean, I appreciate the structure that Heartland provides and it’s been a real eye-opener. I understand now that my mom was pretty concerned about me not eating as healthfully as I should have been, and posting mean things about a classmate.”

Brittany smiled encouragingly. This was going to be so easy, it was laughable. “And I really think I’ve learned my lesson and I’m ready to go home. But Tina has me tethered to a pretty messed-up group—”

Brittany raised an eyebrow.

“I’m sorry, I know that sounded mean. But it’s just that these kids seem to have way bigger problems than just making poor eating choices and using Facebook inappropriately. And I really feel like they’re impeding my progress. So do you think we could come up with a mutually acceptable release plan, preferably by the end of this month so I can pursue my dream of attending Simon’s Rock this academic year?”

Brittany looked at me so sweetly I thought for sure I was golden. Until she came back with this. “Do you think you could cut the bullshit for a second so we can talk about what’s really going on with you?”