You Know I'm No Good Page 3

  Next, they declaw me, cutting down my nails nearly to the quick.8 Then they take out my tongue piercing.9 Mary Pat and Dee hold me down by the shoulders while Nurse Melanie, with another murmured honey and a gentleness that somehow still feels ruthless, forces open my mouth. Working quickly, as if she does this all the time, and I suppose she probably does, she unscrews the ball at the top and slips out the bar from the bottom. I’ve had this bar in since sophomore year, and without it, my mouth feels weirdly empty. I run my denuded tongue against the roof of my mouth, and the hole in the flesh feels the way it used to when I was a little kid and lost a tooth. I want to spit in their faces, but the hangover and the fear have dried up my saliva.

  The last and final step is a pee test. They let me do this alone and with the door closed, in a small bathroom next to the intake room, but they make me shout-count the whole time I’m in there, I guess so they know I’m not climbing up on the toilet and hoisting myself out through the latch window and running off into the forest.

  “Okay!” Mary Pat says as I hand over the warm cup filled with bright yellow hangover pee. “The unpleasant stuff is over now. What do you say we go meet your new classmates?”

  9

  THE FIRST GIRL I MEET is my roommate, Madison, a grinning lump of insecurity dressed head to toe in bougie-brand yoga clothes who has been tasked with showing me our room and then walking me down to the cafeteria for lunch.

  My old high school was filled with girls like her: girls who dress and think strictly in pastels, girls with no chill and no spine. Girls from one of those two-golden-retrievers families, one of those matching-turtlenecks-on-the-holiday-card families, the dumbest but hardest-working student in your honors class.

  She’s pretty, I guess: with pink skin, silky yellow curls, and the buggy, wet blue eyes of a Victorian china doll that blink at me from behind a pair of chunky Kate Spade glasses. But it’s a very temporary kind of pretty. Even though she can’t be more than sixteen or seventeen, I can see that it’s already fading. In a few years, her ass will melt from round to wide, her chin will soften and then multiply, her hair will turn prematurely gray and she’ll never find a colorist who can quite restore that sunny shade of blond. I only need to take one look at her to know which box she ticks.

  Easily influenced by others; lacking a solid sense of self.

  I can picture exactly how it all went down: how her parents went out of town, leaving her in charge, with a warning that they trusted her. And she meant to do everything right, but then some popular boy flirted with her a little, convinced her to have a tiny little get-together—just a few friends! They’d play Scrabble!

  Okay, she’d said, smiling at him gummily, but seriously Tyler, just a few people.

  Of course, Madison, he’d soothed. Then he’d patted her on her pretty yellow head, turned around, whipped out his phone and invited every person he’d ever met. The mob descended across Madison’s wide green lawn, poured into the marble foyer, and destroyed everything in sight with the casual venom reserved for unpopular girls who are dumb enough to think they can buy approval by throwing parties. Was a beloved family heirloom shattered/stolen/pissed on? Was the family parrot defeathered? Did someone drown in the in-ground pool? Whatever it was, Madison’s parents thought they could bury it by sending her here, and she went willingly, her tail tucked between her pigeon-toed legs, to work on her sense of self.

  I’m so pleased with my psychological analysis of Madison’s character that it takes me a moment to notice her hands.

  I’ll admit, they throw me off.

  Because, well, they are horrifying.

  Raw and meaty, with strips of skin around her cuticles and fingertips gnawed and peeled back to the bloody underlayer. You can’t really even describe it as nail biting. It’s more like self-cannibalization. It isn’t restricted to the fingers, either. Along the thick part of her palms, there are red sores that at first I think must be eczema until I notice her methodically gnawing on the skin there, too, like a wild animal with its leg caught in a trap.

  “Doesn’t that hurt?”

  “What?” She drops her hand from her mouth sheepishly. A piece of her own skin hangs from her bottom lip. “I bite my nails.”

  “No, you eat your hands.”

  “Whatever! It’s just a bad habit. I have a thing with impulse control, especially when I’m stressed. I’ve been super nervous the last couple days because they told me I was getting a new roommate—you!”

  She smiles at me with such urgent goodwill that I half expect her to throw her arms around me, and maybe she would have, except for the fact that, brochure of girls hugging on a log notwithstanding, in actuality we are not allowed to touch each other under any circumstances.10

  The lunchroom looks like a regular school cafeteria, except that its five small tables only seat about twenty kids, max, and there are no boys and out the huge picture windows there is no parking lot or football field, just wilderness, flamingly beautiful in its fall colors.

  As we approach the counter, a big-breasted lunch lady in a Minnesota Vikings T-shirt smiles and greets us—both of us, even though it’s only my first day and I’ve never even met her—by name. Hi, Madison! Hi, Mia! I look down at what she’s dumped onto my tray: plain peanut butter on white bread. Unripened pear. Orange Jell-O.

  Prison food.

  We move to the beverage station. There is no pop or coffee—“caffeine is an addictive substance!” Madison explains sunnily—only orange juice, milk, or water, and these tiny little plastic cups, like we’re in preschool.

  “Is that why you’re here?” I watch as Madison pours herself three cups of OJ. “Because of your thing with impulse control?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Bullshit!”

  A tall skinny girl with a long tangle of black hair and a sun-starved olive complexion bangs her tray down next to us. She’s wearing Docs and a sundress made of a thin yellow fabric that shows her nipples. She must be freezing—it’s mid-October and we’re in Minnesota—and her bare, hairy arms bristle with goose bumps.

  “Shut up, Vera.” Madison bites into her sandwich.

  Vera has small, straight teeth and a sharp, zit-spackled face, divided down the middle by a large beaky nose. With those features, it feels like she should be ugly, but when you put them all together, somehow, like a cubist painting, it sums up into something beautiful. She smells like men’s Old Spice and BO and unwashed hair, and despite my vow to hate everyone and everything at Red Oak Academy, I like her immediately.

  “Be honest, Madison,” she says, winking at me. “Hold yourself accountable. The real reason you’re here is because you’re a stalker.”

  Madison sighs. “For the millionth time, I’m not a stalker. I went through a bad breakup.”

  “Lots of people go through bad breakups. Few people decide to make a homemade pipe bomb and stick it under their ex-girlfriend’s car.” Vera unpeels the crust from her sandwich bread in one long piece, like skinning a fish, and discards it onto the corner of her tray. “Luckily,” she explains to me, “this is Madison we’re talking about, so of course the bomb didn’t work right. When it exploded, all it did was blow out a tire, but the poor chick happened to be driving on the freeway, so she crashed into the median and broke her arm and like three ribs.”

  “Yeah, which was exactly what I intended. I only meant to scare her. If I had really wanted to kill her, I would have constructed the stupid bomb with steel, which has a much higher concussive force than plastic. It’s not like I learned nothing in those five summers of STEM camp my parents forced me into. Jeez.”

  “Come on now, Madison,” says another girl with flawless dark skin and black braids pushed back from her face with a wide pink headband, as she slides in next to Vera. “You know what Mary Pat says: ‘Only by owning our actions can we begin to reconcile them.’”

  “Yeah,” Madison snaps, “like you guys are all so perfect.”

  “No need to raise your voice, dear,” the girl t
eases, her Southern drawl morphing into a clipped, earnest Midwestern accent that’s a dead ringer for Mary Pat. “You know what I always say: ‘Anger is a secondhand emotion.’”

  Madison rolls her big wet eyes and adjusts her glasses. She puts her sandwich back on her tray to resume eating her hand instead.

  “I’m Trinity.” The girl with the headband is looking me over now. “Who are you?”

  “Mia.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Chicago.”

  “They take your phone yet?”

  I nod.

  “Dammit.”

  “Did you really think they’d forget something like that?” asks Madison. “That’s like ‘standard intake procedure.’”

  “Ugh,” I say. “If I have to hear that phrase one more time.”

  “They search your coochie?”

  I nod, annoyed at myself for the involuntary flare of heat in my face.

  “You can thank this one for that.” Trinity jabs a thumb in Vera’s direction. “The squat search didn’t used to be part of the deal until she decided to sneak in a bottle of airplane vodka up her vajayjay last semester.”

  “That’s why they call it nature’s pocket,” Vera says cheerfully.

  Madison looks at me, scrunching up her face in disgust. “And they think I’m the freak.”

  “For real, though,” Trinity says, looking around the table. “I need to get my hands on somebody’s phone. I am in serious need of access to my platforms.”

  “You see, Mia,” Vera explains, “Trinity had over a hundred thousand Instagram followers when her parents sent her here.”

  “I was an influencer,” Trinity says proudly. “I was making money. But I haven’t been able to post content in months. Without content, I have no personal brand. And without personal branding, I don’t have a chance.”

  Vera laughs, a husky, windblown snicker that sends goose bumps threading up my own skin. “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody Boomerangs it and adds it to their story, did it really even happen?”

  “Trin,” says Madison, pulling her hand away from her face as a thread of drool extends, glistening like a spider’s web, “most of your followers were old perverts who just liked ogling those pictures of you so you could star in their gross fantasies. Not to sound judgy or anything, but that would make me feel so, like, violated.”

  “Oh, shut up, Madison. One time I was on the train, wearing baggy sweats, no makeup, every inch of my body covered, and some fool whipped his dick out at me anyway. There are certain kinds of men, girls our age give them nasty thoughts just by being alive. So if you can’t control other people’s fantasies, why not at least make money off them?”

  “I get that logic,” says Vera. “Too bad your mom didn’t.”

  “She’s super Christian,” Madison explains.

  “And a United States congresswoman,” adds Vera.

  “Former United States congresswoman,” Madison corrects her. “She lost her reelection last year. People figured, if she couldn’t control her daughter, how could she control, like, the economy or whatever?”

  Trinity just yawns. She doesn’t look sorry.

  “Anyway, you’ll get used to it, not having a phone,” Vera says to me. “I barely even remember how to take a selfie. Or why someone would want to take a selfie. I’m like a pioneer woman. Or a cult wife. Or a fucking astronaut. I don’t live in the world anymore—I live in Red Oak.”

  “How long have you been here?” I ask.

  “Almost two years.”

  “Two years?”

  I thought maybe my dad and Alanna would stick me here for a couple weeks, thirty days at the absolute most. Just long enough to teach me a lesson. It hadn’t even occurred to me until now that I could be stuck here for the rest of high school. They would never do that to me, though. Would they? Well, Dad wouldn’t. But Alanna . . . I start to feel that tingling sensation in the center of my chest, the first whispering tendrils of a panic attack. If I don’t get in front of this, the tingling can turn quickly into a drowning feeling, like someone’s just pulled a plastic bag over my head and is starting to tie it up tightly. I want a narcotic intervention. Like, now. But since my last psychiatrist discontinued all my prescription meds due to my “addictive personality,” and a strip search, a confiscated phone, and several hundred miles of highway stand between me and one of Xander’s little orange pills, I put a hand up to my throat and breathe deeply through my nose the way she taught me. It’s better than nothing, I guess.

  “Don’t worry, Mia.” Madison’s eyes behind her glasses are filled with roommately concern. “Most people don’t stay that long. Vera’s a special case.”

  I nod gratefully and breathe out.

  “Yeah, it’s been a minute.” Vera kicks a long stubbly leg up onto our lunch table and points to her scuffed Docs. “I’ve completely lost touch with contemporary culture. Are these even cool anymore?”

  “Docs never were cool, in my world,” says Trinity. She sighs. “I miss my Louboutins.”11

  “Oh, Trinity,” Vera says. “It’s so sad how you succumb to toxic princess culture, not to mention the hegemonic structures that equalize femininity with walking around on torturous stilts. Not to mention the fact that Louboutins, despite their absurd price tag, are just so tragically basic.”

  “Only white girls can be basic. We’ve been over this.”

  “I disagree,” Madison begins. “There was this one girl at my old school—”

  “Shut up, Madison,” the other two say in unison, and I feel like I can breathe again, because even though (if the Who Is a Red Oak Girl? list is any indication) these girls are all insane, the way they bicker with each other feels reassuringly normal.

  “My point,” Vera says, kicking her feet back to the floor, “is that I prefer, whenever possible, to be comfortable.” She begins sawing at her pear with a plastic knife. I see Dee, the Red Oak equivalent of a lunch monitor, standing in the middle of the room and holding a clipboard. I notice that she doesn’t take her eyes off us until Vera puts down her knife.

  “So if two years isn’t the standard,” I say, trying to sound casual as the rhythm of my heartbeat starts to even out, “what is?”

  “Every girl comes to us exhibiting her own unique battery of issues,” explains Trinity, and I can’t tell if she’s still making fun of Mary Pat or if Red Oak girls are so therapized that this is just how they talk. “And every girl’s treatment plan and LOS12 varies. Not sure if you heard, but we do not adhere to patriarchal, militaristic methods, which means that your release date will be soft and negotiable, depending on how well Mary Pat and your individual counselor think you’re doing the emotional work.”

  “My individual counselor?”

  “Yeah, there’s three of them. Everybody gets assigned one. They meet with you two times a week and they’re like your point person here. Your counselor pretty much holds the key to your exit. Lemme see your schedule, and we can see who you’ve got.”

  I produce the printout Mary Pat gave me at intake, and Trinity points to a name in the top right-hand corner of the folded paper. St. John, Dr. Vivian.

  “Lucky.” Madison pouts. “I’ve got Carolyn, and Carolyn sort of sucks.”

  “And I’ve got Bad Breath Brit,” Trin says, with an epic eye roll. “You’re lucky, Mia. People love Vivian.”

  “And those people,” Vera says, “suffer from Stockholm syndrome.” She forks a slice of pear, nibbles off a tiny corner of flesh, and looks at me. “I’ve got Vivian, too. Our sessions are painfully pointless—don’t expect miracles. And anyway, it doesn’t even matter who you’ve got, because what an LOS really comes down to is how fucked up you actually are. So the question is: Are you someone like me, who is truly and incorrigibly bad? Or are you simply a girl who isn’t ‘good,’ with parents who don’t know how to deal, like Trinity here?”

  “I may have been an Instagram porn star,” Trinity says, sitting up straight and primly lacing her fingers together, “bu
t I’m still a virgin who loves Jesus.”

  “So which one are you?” Madison looks at me eagerly. “Bad, or just not good?”

  “No, let us figure it out,” Vera says before I can answer. “It’s more fun that way! The first thing we need to know is why you’re here. You didn’t threaten to shoot up your school, did you?”

  “Nah,” says Trinity. “She doesn’t look like the violent type. I say drugs.”

  “Meth? No—that’s not really a Chicago thing. It’d be coke. Or some sort of opioid.”

  “You banged your teacher.”

  “Or your best friend’s daddy.”

  “Or your best friend’s mom?”

  “Did you steal a car? And then crash it through the front window of a Build-A-Bear Workshop?”

  “Shut up, Madison. That was Olivia who did that. The same thing isn’t going to happen twice.”

  “Are you gang affiliated?”

  “Are you a kleptomaniac?”

  “Are you a huge slut?”

  “She definitely associates with an unhealthy peer group.”

  “I’m telling y’all, it’s drugs. But which ones?”

  “Cat? Horse? Amy?”

  “Molly? White Girl? China Girl?”

  “Sizzurp? Special K? Oxy? O Bombs?”

  “Adderall? Ritalin? Vicadin? Demerol?”

  “Weed? Wine? Whippits?”

  “Dusting?”

  “Hold up.” Trinity lifts a hand, and her nails are beautiful—just short enough to be handbook compliant, but perfectly filed and painted an impeccable, glossy pink. They are in every way the opposite of Madison’s chewed nightmares, and I wonder how she maintains them in the midst of this deranged Girl Scout camp. “What in the name of the Lord is dusting?”

  “You know those cans of air that you use to spray out the dust from between your keyboard keys?” says Vera. “People huff them.”

  “That’s a thing?”

  “Sure.”

  “I didn’t think Upper East Side girls fucked with that kind of nonsense.”