Every Secret Thing

The campaign had begun by accident, around the time of her fourteenth birthday. Ro

She couldn’t have said why she liked it. After all, it was a program for crazy kids, and her family had fought hard against the assumption that she must be crazy, or confused about right and wrong, perhaps even retarded. The buildings at Poolesville were new and clean, and Ro

But she understood that she could not say she wanted to go to Shechter, quite the opposite; she had to pretend to be going along with the rules and structure of Poolesville, had to deny the evidence of her own made-up craziness.

Patiently, she began to cut herself with any implement she could find, nicking her body with pop-tops and pencils, nibbling herself with her own teeth, and when all else failed, scratching herself raw, until her calves were lined with long red tracks. What could they do? No matter how closely they trimmed her nails, they always grew back. They could cover the tips with Band-Aids, put her hands in restraints at night, but unless they were willing to rip out her nails all the way to the beds and extract her teeth, they could not disarm her.

“You’re smarter than Yossarian,” her doctor said when she finally got her permanent bed at Shechter.

“Who?”

“Catch-22? ‘I am not the bombardier’?” Ro

She liked the doctor, as much as she could like anyone who got to tell her what to do, who decided when she was right and when she was wrong. He seemed to be on her side. But she couldn’t be too forthcoming with him because he might turn on her, too. Ro

Home. She had tried out the word on the new place the day she first saw it. So this was home. It was set up in the usual rowhouse floor plan. Good, there was a dishwasher. One less chore for her. And a microwave, too. She imagined her father bringing it into the house, imagined her mother asking, with equal parts pleasure and irritation: “What truck did that fall off of?” Ro

Ro

Her room, the dark room in the middle, had a bed, a dresser, a small lamp-and nothing else. She pulled two bills from her back pocket and looked for a place to hide them. It was hard to hide things in an all-but-empty room. She took the clothes she had packed in her overnight bag and placed them in one of the drawers, then hid the money in the folds of a T-shirt. No, her mother might go there. The bed was made with a new spread, white with little raised dots. When she left home, her bed had been covered with a Scooby-Doo spread, which would be pretty stupid now, but Ro

The money had been intended for cab fare and it had started out as two tens and a twenty, old bills almost reproachful in their limpness, as if her parents wanted Ro

Of course, the staff never would have allowed such a thing, so she had gone through the pretense of summoning a cab to the top of the hill, of waving to them all as she climbed in. It was then that the counselor had given her the small gift-wrapped box, the one still in her bag. She had felt grand, a bit like a girl in a movie-perhaps the one about the girl who learned she was a princess-riding down the hill.

Then, as soon as the cab was off the grounds of the hospital and a few blocks down the street, she tapped on the Plexiglas and asked the cabdriver to let her out.

“What?” he barked. He was white but foreign, with a strange accent and an acrid body odor. “You call for ride to Saint Agnes Lane, over by Route 40. You can’t get out here.”

“Why not?”

“Is illegal.”

She was pretty sure he was lying, but she made the mistake of sounding weak: “You have to let me out if I ask?”

“No, is dangerous. I get ticket if I discharge you here.”

“So pull into that 7-Eleven parking lot.”

“No. You call for long ride. You must go or pay.”

She knew from the way his story shifted that he was making this all up. He was a cheater. Ro

“Please pull over.”

“You will pay.”

“Pull over.”

With a sigh so forceful it might as well have been a shout, he did just that. The meter said $3.50. Ro

“You can’t take ten dollars for a three-fifty fare,” she said.

“Extra dollar for call,” he said, pointing to a red light on the meter box.

“That’s still only four-fifty.”

He was ripping her off. Because she was a girl, because she was young. Such encounters had once made Ro

Here, in the parking lot at the 7-Eleven, there was no one to sort things out between Ro

“I came for big fare, not little fare. Plus, you owe me tip.”

She got out of the cab, frightened of her own feelings, frightened by the fix she was in. Now she had only thirty dollars, and thirty dollars might not be enough to take a cab all the way home. She could take a bus, but it would have to be at least two buses, and which two buses? Plus, she needed change for the bus, and no one would give her change unless she bought something, which would mean losing another dollar or two out of the thirty. Aware of the cabdriver’s eyes on her, she walked into the 7-Eleven with her head high, as if this had been her destination all along. Then she hid in the chip aisle until she was sure he was gone.

Back on the street, she knew her only choice was to find a ride. She had never done this before, but her older brothers had. And there had been a girl at Shechter who had bragged about getting rides all the time. “I never had to do anything, either,” the girl, Victoria, had said.