1
The weather was cool, perfect, and the landscape so beautiful. I blinked. No, that was only in my mind. It was muggy and raining today. The ocean was beautiful, but it was so far away from where we were and no one brought us there ever. I blinked again. My mind was also muggy, to match the day’s weather. They’d injected me again after my outburst the day before. Was it the day before?
I rubbed my eyes and moved from the window. I knew I had eaten breakfast. What was I supposed to be doing now? I wasn’t sure. Looking around, it came to me too slowly. I was in the kitchen. When we were in the kitchen we were either supposed to be cooking or cleaning. No one was cooking, and I’d never be in here alone to do that, so it wasn’t lunch time yet. That meant it was cleaning time. There were no dishes. So process of elimination… I had to mop the floor. Aha. Yes, the mop was out. Somehow I had managed to do that much.
That was good.
I grabbed the cleaning device and started to rub it against the floor. Humming to myself, I wondered if I could go back in my mind to that first thought, where the weather was cool, perfectand the landscape so beautiful. It was a fictional place I’d never seen, but it had to exist somewhere on this planet.
I rubbed at my neck. Why did I still look for it when I knew it was gone? My necklace that I had worn everywhere, the beautiful pink pearls that Jeremy Lent had given me in the Hamptons was gone. They had ripped it off my neck during check in here. My earrings too were no longer mine. Gorgeous sapphires that Phoenix Lent had picked out for my birthday. Fortunately, they had let me take them out or I might now have permanently ripped earlobes. Jeremy had wanted me to feel strong with that necklace. Without it… I wasn’t feeling that way at all.
When I could think about them I had to add their last names or I couldn’t manage to make them real. Barrett Lent. Julian Lent. Jeremy Lent. Phoenix Lent. They had been my boyfriends. Plural. Their family lived in secret like that, and they wanted me to be with them as their love. But they were gone. Like the whole world was gone and I was on this island, somewhere in the Caribbean, no one knew exactly where, but we knew we weren’t in the United States anymore, and no one was coming for any of us. Particularly me.
My family had dumped me here. I would stay until I was eighteen, and given that I could never think clearly, thanks to the drugs they constantly injected us with to keep us docile, I couldn’t fathom what would happen then. One girl had turned eighteen last week. They had packed her up and sent her on her way. But where?
I hadn’t known her very well, not like I had gotten to know some of the girls.
Like I’d conjured her, Betsy Roberts came into the room. She smiled at me; her pupils were huge, probably matching my own.
“Need some help? Mrs. Brown told me to make myself useful somewhere. I’d rather make myself useful with you.”
I smiled. She was so nice. Blonde haired, blue eyed. She was here, she had told me once, because she had stolen her father’s car after he beat her up and joyridden herself down to the beach. That had earned her a placement here. His beating had earned him nothing. But that was how it was for the very rich, and one thing about this place was that it absolutely cost money to keep us here. My family was paying this place to abuse me. I really had no idea why. I might never know because I couldn’t imagine I would seek them out when I was eighteen to ask. More like I would hide somewhere they could never find me.
“Hey,” she spoke again. “It’s hit you hard again. I’m sorry. Give me the mop. You keep mopping the same place over and over. I’ll do it while you just let it pass, okay?” She squeezed my arm. “Don’t worry. A year from now you won’t be so hit by the drugs. They’ll affect you but you’ll be so used to it that you won’t even notice.”
I shook my head. “A year from now I’ll be gone. I won’t be here. I don’t think. What month is it?”
She tilted her head. “Good question. I think it’s February. I know Christmas passed and it’s been enough time since then that I don’t think it’s January but not March yet. I think it’s February. Let’s go with February.”
“I turn eighteen in September.”
She frowned. “I guess that’s true. And I like having you here so much.” She sighed. “I’ll have another year. I’m just sixteen.”
Her lip was split from where one of the teachers had struck her. The sight of it made my cheek throb, and I remembered—I’d been struck too. They’d pumped me full of whatever they used to keep me quiet after I’d challenged the way they were treating a twelve-year-old, and they hit me in the process. I was probably bruised, but I’d never know. There were no mirrors.
But I would guess my hair looked pretty similar to Betsy’s. They’d shaved all of ours when we first got here and kept doingit on a schedule. Let it grow a little and then cut it again. I hadn’t had my second shave yet, so I had a thin layer of fuzz that barely counted as “length.” She did, too. I never saw anyone with it longer than this, so my next shave was probably coming soon.
“Are you in some place good? Wherever you are?” She sounded wistful. “I sort of miss that. Now I just feel nothing.”
Okay, I really had to focus. She was doing my mopping, and she had been nice to me from the second I got here, which wasn’t true for every girl in the place. There were cliques even in a place like this. As though forming groups to exclude was just something women did in general, wherever we went. Even into the mouth of hell.
“I was for a second, I think. But now I’m just lost. What kinds of things would you daydream about?”
I would scrub the counters. We always had to do that when we mopped, so I would work on that. Certainly, I could handle that much. I picked up the spray bottle that made the whole room smell like vinegar and started to scrub.
She laughed. “Well, when my mom was still alive, we used to go to Hawaii. I daydreamed about that. I’m going there when I turn eighteen. I don’t care what I do or if I have to live on the beach. I’m going there.”
Personally, I would be okay if I never spent another minute on an island. Betsy and I were part of the dead-mother club together. That was a phrase one of them had used. I didn’t know who had made it up or if it had already been a thing. Actually, huge numbers of us here were part of the dead-mother club.
“That sounds really nice.” It wasn’t for me to comment on the validity of her daydream. Okay, my head was certainly getting clearer if I could think that word.
“Will you go back to New York and the boyfriend you left?”
I’d managed to still not tell anyone about how the Lents lived. Would I? They had promised to follow me. They hadpromised wherever I went there they would be. “You know the first month I was here I was absolutely convinced that he”—they—“would come and rescue me like some kind of fairytale prince on a horse.”
“Really? I never had a boyfriend so I didn’t get to have that thought. I believed my dad would change his mind. Or my sister would find me. I guess we all have rescue fantasies.”
I sighed. “I don’t know if he would want me back.” There, I spoke it aloud. “I think maybe his not coming might mean he’s done.”
