Day Eighteen

Day Eighteen

They still haven't let us outside. Tracy and Phil and Fran take turns talking to all of us, one by one. We eat breakfast, we clean up, they say we can go into the activity room, the gym, or our rooms, but nowhere else. We can't even go to the animal pens, which seems to upset Charlotte.

Tracy is waiting for me in her office.

"Have you heard anything?" is the first thing I say as I flop into one of the easy chairs. "It's been a long time now."

She shakes her head. "Just what I know. They have a search team out, still looking. Holly didn't say anything to you?"

"No," I said. "She seemed to be doing all right. She said her fosters agreed to come."

A dark look passes across Tracy's face, but just as quickly as it appeared, she wipes it away.

"What?" I press her. "What was that look? You know something. Tell me."

"I shouldn't be telling you this," she says in a low voice, pushing a pen across her desk. "They weren't going to come. They might have told her that, but we spoke a few days ago and they were in the process of relinquishing her."

"Relinquishing her?" My voice is a squeak. "What does that mean?"

Tracy licks her lips. "Giving her back, essentially. She'd have to go back to the group home and wait for another family."

I stare at her, a pit opening up in my stomach. "Like she's some dog they can just send back to the pound? That's hideous. She's a child. Do you even know what she's been—"

Tracy holds up a hand. "I know what her background is, yes."

I stand up and pace around her office. "Well, we should call the police on them. We should do something. They can't just do that."

"I can't do anything, Bella. When you're here, I do my best. When you're beyond the compound, it's out of my hands."

"So when we get out, we're just nothing to you? We just, floof, disappear?"

I'm raising my voice.

"Bella, take a breath. Sit back down."

"No," I say.

"Bella." A warning tone to her voice. "You have Fire in two days. You don't want to lose that. You've earned that step in the program. Think very carefully about what you're doing right now."

"I'm standing up for someone. Is that wrong?"

"The world can be a very bad place, Bella. Sometimes we try to help people and they slip away anyway. And you have to let them go."

"That's some bullshit, right there," I say, and I'm so mad, I don't even care if she takes Fire, whatever exactly that is, away.

I stomp out of her office and slam the door behind me.

I'm on my bed, looking at the stars through the window high on the wall, when Brandy comes in. "Let's go," she says.

"Where?" I ask.

"The Star Pit."

"The what, now?" I vaguely recall something like that from our handbook. I squint up at her.

"The Star Pit. We get to go now that we're past our halfway point. I finally read the handbook, can you tell?" She giggles.

"I don't want to," I say. "Whatever it is."

"Listen, they're letting us outside for this one thing. We can't do anything for Holly right now, so let's do something forourselves, at least? I want to see it. Gideon says it's cool. Please?"

"Is it some mystical land of understanding and enlightenment?" I ask, getting off my bed and sighing loudly.

"God, I hope so," she says. "I could really use some enlightenment right about now because I am getting very bored here."

She grabs our parkas.

—

The Star Pit is a series of rocks arranged in a huge circle along the edge of a dug-out pit. It's farther out than the goat and chicken pens, and as we walk to it, I can see the sky getting bluer and brighter and the stars sprinkling the sky like white crystals. There are already some kids sitting and lying down in the pit.

"What did the handbook say, exactly?" I whisper. I can see tendrils of my breath in the frigid air.

"You get to come here unsupervised if you reach the halfway mark with no more than one demerit. It's just…I don't know. You can look at the sky. Or talk. Or whatever. At least it's something different at night than sitting in our beds or watching stupid movies and thinking sad things or dreaming about how fucked up we'll get when we're out." She points off into the distance. "And we aren't entirely unsupervised right now, anyway."

I look where's she's pointing. Tracy, Phil, Fran, and Chuck are sitting on lawn chairs, bundled up in blankets, around a fire.

As we get closer, I can make out Josh's face, and Gideon's, and Billy's. And two other kids, Nick and one whose name I can't remember. They all look up as we climb down into the pit. Gideon hands us a blanket.

"Welcome," she says, "to the party for people who can't party anymore. It's like group with Fran, only no Fran and no absolutely traumatic poem, but we get the stars."

Brandy and I arrange the blanket over our knees. It's woolen and warm. I pull the hood of my parka over my head and stuff my hands in my pockets.

"We're trauma-dumping," Billy says. "Care to join?"

"What?" I say.

"Just listen," Gideon says. "It will become clear soon enough."

"At my last place," drawls one of the boys whose name I can't remember, "trauma-dumping was forbidden. Granted, it was a loony palace, and people were maybe a little more on edge there, but I've never understood how you can expect fucked-up kids to get together and not trauma-dump."

"How do you even forbid that?" Brandy asks. "You can't forbid people to talk to each other."

"Heh. Like, yeah, a counselor would literally come up and separate you, that's how," the kid says. "And you'd get written up. I mean, we were in group therapy once a day! How is group not one giant session of trauma-dumping for everyone involved?"

Josh scooches over a little, closer to me. He gestures to the blanket. "Kind of freezing here. Do you have a little piece to spare?"

Brandy nudges me slyly. I open the blanket a little and Josh slides in, pressing his side gently against mine. I can feel my face heat up.

"But as we were saying," Gideon tells us, "before you showed up…Billy's dad once actually tried to sell him for drugs."

"Oh my god," I say. "That's horrifying."

But it comes back to me then, that comment he made when we were watching the house renovation show the night I had my panic attack. That he and his brother had to sleep on a couch and his dad would kick his toys. The way he stopped talking and his face got tight and how relieved he was to switch to Gumball and think of something else.

My dad might not be Dad of the Year, but at least he's not…that.

"Is it terrible I want to know what drugs and what price and also…like, to who?" Brandy asks.

"Whom," Josh says.

"Whatever," Brandy says. "The trauma, dump it."

Billy leans back on his elbows, looking up at the stars. "I was eight. We were living in Orlando then. At a motel. He'd stolen me from my mother. And he was going to sell me for Oxy. The price was fifty bucks. And I didn't know exactly what that meant, because I was so young, but I can guess now, and before your minds start racing, the dude buying me was an undercover cop, so it was actually a good thing, because my dad went to jail and I went back to my mom and she ended up marrying a very nice, fairly well-off gentleman named Stuart."

"What a fantastic children's book that would make, Billy," Gideon says. "I'm picturing very pastel illustrations to illuminate the warm relationship between addict father and innocent young child being sold into sex slavery."

Beside me, Josh shivers. "That's dark, man."

Under the blanket, his hand gently searches for mine.

I kind of stop breathing a little. I let him take my hand. His is very warm.

"It turned out okay." Billy shrugs. "I mean, I didn't, but Stuart keeps paying for my rehabs, so it's all good. He cares. I just keep not caring, is all. Stuff I can't get rid of, you know?" He taps his head. "Up here." He taps his chest. "In here."

Gideon reaches across the pit and holds out her hand. "I get it."

Billy takes her hand. "Solidarity," he says.

"Right on," she answers.

Brandy chuckles. "At least he cares. My mother could care less. This time? I passed out and vomited up a bunch of blood and stuff on her brand-new rug and all she could say when they were loading me into the ambulance was ‘That rug was from Morocco.'?"

In the distance, far off, I can hear coyotes howling. It makes me a little lonely for Dad's apartment. There's an arroyo behind it, and a lot of coyotes and javelinas travel up it to move through the city. It's safe there, covered by trees on both sides. Sometimes people live there, because it's safe for them, too. Sometimes Ricci wants to go play in there, but my dad has to tell her, "That's some people's home. We don't just walk into people's houses, do we?"

I can hear the coyotes from the room I share with Ricci. I miss her so much.

I tighten my fingers in Josh's. He squeezes back.

It's very peaceful out here.

"How about you, Bella? Are you going to drop the fabulous story of your face?" Gideon teases. "I love a good fight story."

I hesitate. I can feel Josh's eyes on me.

"It's not very exciting," I tell them. "The only fight I had was with a front stoop. My friends dumped me there and I passed out and smashed my face on the cement."

"They dumped you?" That's from Nick. "That's cold. You don't dump people. I mean, at the very least, drop them at a hospital and take off, but not on a front porch."

"I read about a girl in Minnesota whose friends dumped her at her parents' house in like fifteen-degree weather and she lost her feet to frostbite," Gideon says. "I sincerely hope they are not your friends anymore, Bella. Fuck that."

"Wait," Billy says to me. "I seem to remember you, on Day Three, said something about a video. I bet there's a story." He chuckles in a lascivious way.

My face flushes again. "It wasn't like a sex tape, dumbass. And that, I don't want to talk about that, right now."

"Come on!" wheedles the guy whose name I don't know.

"Drop it," Gideon says. "If she doesn't want to, she doesn't have to."

Josh presses his shoulder tighter against mine.

"I feel like Billy is winning the trauma-dump contest at the moment, anyway," I say to change the subject from me. "Anyone else? Josh?"

Josh stirs beside me. "No. I've got nothing. My life is pretty much picture-perfect. Parents love each other. They love us. Two cats and a dog. A pool. Lot of food in the fridge. Fancy private school."

Wait, that can't be true. He said something about "busted faces" on the hike, and it seemed like it was a family thing. Why would he lie?

Maybe he's like me, and there's something he doesn't want to share.

"No," Billy says. "There has to be something. Something that made you fuck up so bad you somehow ended up here."

Josh shakes his head. In the moonlight, his face is pale and soft, smooth. His hair is perfectly cut to look that messy. I believe him about the fancy rich part.

For a minute, my brain says: Why would someone like him like someone like you ?

My heart says: Just shut up for once and enjoy this starry night and handholding, will you?

He takes a deep breath, like he's remembering something glorious and beautiful, and he says, "No drama for me. I just really, really, really love getting high."

A hush falls over the group and we're quiet for several seconds until Gideon says softly, "Yeah. Absolutely yes to that. One. Hundred. Percent."

A peal of laughter comes from the group of staff members.

"What do you think they're talking about?" I ask.

"Us," Brandy says.

Gideon and Billy giggle.

"They're obsessed with us," Josh says. "Obsessed, I tell you. They can think of nothing else."

We all laugh. It feels good to laugh.

"Come on, Bella," Billy says, "give us something, anything, if you can't talk about that video."

Before I can stop myself, because I'm feeling such a rush of warmth inside from the laughter and being out here with everyone, like I have friends or something, I say, "I held my grandmother in my arms as she died."

There's a brief, stunned silence, until the guy whose name I can't remember suddenly howls with laughter, his whole body shaking, falling backward onto the cold ground.

Brandy is laughing so hard tears are running down her face.

"I mean, it's not really funny," I say, even as I kind of start laughing a little. "It wasn't at that time, anyway. Or now, to be honest. We used to drink together."

That just makes everyone scream harder.

"Oh, Jesus," Billy says, wiping tears from his eyes. "I hate this goddamned life so much."

While they're all still hysterical, and not paying attention to us at all, Josh buries his face in my neck, just for a second, long enough to let his mouth rest there, and then he just as quickly brings his head back up again.

—

I can still feel it, hours later, back in our room.

A mouth-shaped warmth on my skin.