New Horizons (11 page)

The freckled boy's eyes got big.

"You see, by that look on your face, Landon, I believe that you do
in fact have something that you think you need in your life." She dangled the iPod by the earbuds and watched him try to avoid eye contact with it.

Freckled Landon didn't speak up.

"So since you don't need it." She tossed the iPod into the fire. Everyone gasped while we watched the flames take over.

My stomach dropped. I knew where the group session was headed. But I didn’t think another kid across the fire knew what was up. He was laughing at Freckled Landon’s pained face from losing something he simply liked a lot. Why didn’t that laughing kid put two-and-two together?—that bad things had a tendency to circle.

"Jack, what's so funny? Are you like Landon? Is there nothing that helps you sustain your life on this earth?" Rick asked.

"I have to admit, I do need certain things in my life."

He nodded. "That's understandable. We can't all be like Landon." He bent down and pulled something from the bag. Jack suddenly jumped from his seat.

"Not my sunglasses!" he yelled. “Those were expensive!”

"Sit down Jack," Rick said.

"Rick, I need them. I admit that so can't I have them?"

"No Jack. This is an experience. I want to show you that you don't need these things to have an enjoyable life." He chucked the glasses into the fire. Jack covered his face with his hands.

I tried to think of something Dad would’ve sent that would mean a lot to me. I couldn't think of a single thing that really mattered to me. There were pieces of clothing I liked, and maybe some jewelry, but if I lost it that stuff wouldn’t get a huge reaction out of me. My hospital bracelet had been the only thing I had arrived with that I would’ve liked to hold onto, but it had been cut from me even before I could make a huge deal about losing it. My nail polish was gone. My hair was brown. The group activity seemed to have nothing over me.

"Tracy." Sharon turned to meet Bambi's huge dark eyes. She peered out from under her straight bangs across her forehead. Her eyelashes were miles long in the light from the fire and her lips were slightly parted. "What do you think about needing objects or items in life?"

Bambi fidgeted and looked at her hands.

“Tracy?”

"I guess that…maybe there are things I want…but I don't know about necessarily needing."

"So you believe that you have wants in life, but not really any needs?" Sharon dug through the bag. I was curious to see what Bambi would apparently need in life. Bambi didn't answer her. I looked at her face when Sharon pulled out a ratty book. It was
Tuck Everlasting
. Maybe our little Bambi didn’t want to live forever.

Bambi eyed the book in Sharon's hands but didn't make a fuss or any movements toward it.

"Would you agree that this book is a want of yours?" Sharon dangled the book from its mangled pages.

Bambi looked blankly at it. "Yes."

“But not a need?”

“Correct.”

Sharon seemed to be giving up on getting a reaction from her. She threw the mangled book into the fire.

Rick turned to Murray. “You like Hockey?”

“At one point, sure,” Murray said. He shrugged. His shoulders looked so big when he did that. The tattoos on his arms glowed from the fire. I couldn’t picture him ever playing a sport. All I pictured was him lying in bed, smoking.

“Okay.” Rick pulled out a jersey. It had an autograph across the number on the back. I didn’t know Hockey well enough to know if it was something valuable or not. But the look on Murray’s face showed that it meant something to him. Rick dropped it into the fire like it was nothing.

"Logan?" Sharon turned to Karen.

I held back a smile. She was the most interesting to me because you couldn’t tell what she liked or what kind of girl she was. Did she like girly things? Was her prized possession a doll? There was no way.

Karen widened her eyes when Sharon pulled out her item. It was a pink stuffed elephant with purple tusks and a little purple tail. It was the weirdest thing to care about. A stuffed animal. A toy. But she probably had it since she was a kid, and the things you had since you were a kid were hard to let go of.

"Is this yours?" Sharon asked, holding it over the fire.

Karen eyed it carefully. "Maybe it is."

"Okay, well I guess it's not anymore." Sharon dropped it into the fire.

Karen closed her eyes. Maybe she couldn't bear to witness her best friend burning alive. That had to hurt. Your childhood friend who had seen everything you had seen—it was dead! Pink elephants with purple tusks didn’t exist, but they most certainly weren’t supposed to burn that way. It wasn’t a thing.

Green Gables shrunk back into herself when Sharon looked at her and began to search through the duffel bag. For an old lady she was ruthless and quick.

"Overalls?” Sharon chucked the ratty pair into the fire even before asking her anything about them.

“Let me guess,” Karen said, looking at Green Gables. “Those must be the overalls that help you hold onto your virginity.”

“Oh, I am no virgin. Quite far from it, actually.”

“That’s enough, Brooke.” Sharon said. Her arms were folded and then she looked at me. “
Y
ou're next, Valerie."

I tucked a strand of dried up hair back into the bun on top of my head. I could smell my armpits, and my body felt like I had been dragged through an obstacle course. Every bone in my body ached, and I felt like shit, and I liked that I felt like that. It was good to feel low, because it was something I knew how to exist in. I had gotten used to it.

Sharon bent down and pulled out a piece of paper from the duffel bag. She held it out to show me. "Does this look familiar?" she asked.

"Oh no, it's the paper I write stuff on."

"Look closer." She walked over to me and held it up to my face.

On the paper was a coloured photo. And in the photo was a background of my yard with a familiar bicycle. She pulled the photo away just as I was grasping what was being taken from me.

"Obviously that's your bike." She crumbled up the paper and threw it into the fire. "Well, it was your bike."

I caught a gasp before it could make it out of my throat. The fire was dancing all around itself, little wispy movements, and I felt nauseous. That was my bicycle I had bought from my neighbour. I used it to get around when Dad didn’t let me use his car. It was something I needed for when I wanted to escape for a bit—it was my freedom.

"Your father decided to get rid of it for you. I'm not sure if you noticed in the picture, but there was a for sale sign on it for twenty dollars."

“Twenty bucks.”

"From what I'm told though, not too many fish were biting. He eventually just gave it away."

I stood up.

"Sit down, Valerie." She pointed at the spot behind me.

There were a lot of things running through my mind. Mostly that I missed Basinview. The smell of the air near the coast was so fresh that it could make anybody miss being away from it. I was merely kilometres away from my hometown, yet I was still so homesick for it. Things seemed so far away when you weren’t allowed where you wished to be. I felt stuck right then. I was in a place full of people who weren’t my family. There were no aunts and uncles asking me what my plans were for university, there were no teachers telling me to do better, and my parents weren’t around to make me feel uncomfortable when they were screaming at each other. The things I was used to in life, the comforts and the constraints, were all taken away from me, and it was like tiny pieces of who I was were missing.

“Come on, it’s just a bike,” she said. “There are worse things to lose.”

I took a step forward. “Like what?”

“Valerie, I’m not going to tell you again. Sit down.”

"You
sit down."

And I shoved Sharon.

7:
NEW HORIZONS

I had never shoved anybody like that, let alone an old woman before. I hadn’t meant for her to fly—it just happened that way. She gasped because maybe she hadn’t realized there was a crazy person in front of her. Maybe she thought I was just a little girl and wouldn’t do something wrong. But I knew it was wrong and I did it, and she hadn’t seen it coming.

Sharon just seemed to fly over the log directly behind her, and when I saw the bottom of her feet flailing in the air, the fire pit quickly became a giant blur.

I panicked.

The last thing I saw before turning and running was Murray. His eyes were wide and his mouth was open in shock. Had he not seen that coming? Did he not know that he knew someone who would shove an old woman to the ground?

I hadn’t exactly expected or seen it coming either. But it was horrible to see someone shocked by the kind of person I really was. I was a crazy, terrible person—and that was why I was at a place that wanted to reset me.

It didn’t register at the time that I had no idea where I was running to. I didn’t know what I was doing. It was dark and people were screaming behind me and I was doing exactly what bad kids were wired to do. We were there to be straightened out, and before that could happen, we flew off course.

I ran out of the woods, and down past the mess hall. I sprinted so fast, and counsellors were screaming and blowing their whistles all around me. I ran all the way to the front gate, the one with the new, shiny sign with the bolts cracking the wood.

It was Burrito Eater and Avril guarding the gate. There was no getting through them or the fence. But that wasn’t the point. I was just being bad, and I slammed into the fence like I hadn’t seen the chain links or the metal. I fell onto my back like Sharon, only nobody had pushed me. That was my whole problem. Nobody was doing anything to me. I was doing it all to myself.

When I realized I was looking up at the sky, just lying there, I got up off the ground and shook the fence violently, as if I could rip through it. On either side of me, Burrito Eater and Avril watched the mad kid they had dropped off just a couple days ago. I was the complete opposite of that limp girl from before. I had finally woken up and shown them why I was there.

“This place is bullshit!” I screamed into the night.

“You’ll have to swim out of here if you ever want out,” Avril said.

I stopped shaking the fence.

The two men grabbed me by the arms and I went limp, just like the old days. When they dragged me away, I looked back at the fence and stared at the lake in the distance, where the only hole in the system seemed to exist.

Larry’s office wasn’t intimidating to me and that’s probably why I was there again. Back to square one. Maybe pushing Sharon wasn't the right thing to do. It was weird how I knew it was wrong when it was happening, yet I still did it. It felt good to chuck her into the woods, and that was just messed up.

I fidgeted in my chair. Larry's desk was empty and free from any papers. I waited for my punishment to come, and I turned around in my chair when the office door cracked open. Guy entered the room instead of Larry.

"Wipe that smile off your face, Val," he said.

I removed it just because he said to. On the inside, though, I was relieved.

"You're in a lot of trouble," Guy said. He walked across the room and took a seat across from me. He folded his hands on the desk, maybe to intimidate me.

“Where’s Larry?”

“Working with someone else."

“Oh, I’m not the only troubled soul? That’s kind of nice to know.”

“We’re here to help you, Val. You can’t like the kind of person you are. You can’t like that you attacked an elderly woman.”

“I’m fine with who I am. The problem is people telling me that I can’t be okay with who I am—that’s why I’m miserable. I don’t want to be here because a sane person isn’t okay with being in an insane asylum. I know I’ve made mistakes, and those other girls don’t see that in themselves. But the real world isn’t all that sane either. Where the hell am I supposed to go where I can act how I want? And where I can feel how I want? Where in the world can I do what I want?”

“There is no such thing.”

“Doesn’t that scare the shit out of you? We are all so far away from normal. It’s fucked up. The world is fucked up.”

“I'm going to put it straight with you. New Horizons is an option, a good option, for you to have a starting point at being a decent person. It can give you the tools to do well in school—maybe get a GED—and show you why having an education is important. If you keep trying to find these loopholes you're going to continue down this negative path. Your juvenile antics will follow you into your adult life and put you in jail. It shouldn’t be taken lightly that you physically assaulted someone. It’s bad here, and it’s bad out there."

"I know it’s bad."

“Then don’t do it. A normal person sees the distinction between good and bad and does the right thing. It’s not hard.”

I didn't say anything. There was nothing to say because it was all so dumb and obvious when he said it like that. But there was always a context that wasn’t mentioned when people were preaching about the wide and open rules of life.