Leanna, p.6
Leanna, page 6
"I'm summoned to get naked. Later."
It took me a few seconds of trying and failing to banish the mental images coming to mind to understand she meant it was her turn for the showers. Letting myself flop back onto my bed, I stared up at the water damaged ceiling above me, feeling my heart's not quite steady beats in my chest.
Back home, I hadn't tried very hard to please anyone in particular, either at home or at school. There weren't any people that stuck out to me at school enough to want to try to guess what I would have to do to make them like me. At home, I felt so unnecessary and out of place that I didn't want anyone to notice me more than they had to for anything, even doing well at things. My specialty for as long as I could remember was to do what I could to slip under everyone's notice, to ghost by with as little expended effort as possible.
But it was different here, at least when it came to Olivia. She was the first person in at least the past year or two who caught my interest, the first person I really wanted to like and approve of me. I actually felt like I had enough energy and motivation to try to figure out how she saw me, what she wanted from me, and what I could do that would most interest or please her. With Olivia, I finally felt a stir of emotion that was something other than apathy, shame, or pain. With Olivia, I actually felt like I had a potential, maybe, to feel happy. Maybe not every second or every day, but sometimes. Just a week ago, I couldn't imagine that being happy for even a minute would be possible.
I knew I didn't love Olivia. I've heard enough people mouth words of love empty of any meaning or truth in my life to know that what I felt for her, the interest I had in her, still wasn't real love. But as I lay there, feeling my lips curve into a smile without even trying, I told myself that even if Olivia didn't love me, I would make sure that she at the very least, considered me her friend.
Chapter 6
My first night at Michael Newman School, I lay awake in my bed, the sky still just barely dimming into darkness outside my small window. Across the room from me, Olivia was very still, her eyes closed, but I was pretty sure from the quick rise and fall of her chest that she wasn't actually asleep. I listened to Miss Ileana's heels click clack down the hallway as she walked past the open doorways, checking in on everyone, and almost didn't hear Olivia's quick whisper.
"They switch off shifts at eleven. We can't do anything tonight, but tomorrow night I'm pretty sure we have Miss Odessa and Miss Bonnie. We can do whatever we want then. Those two don't give a damn."
I didn't know what she thought we could do that was so entertaining, but I just nodded. I didn't want to risk asking and looking stupid.
I wasn't used to going to bed so early, or even sleeping much at all. Lately it seemed like no matter how tired I was, in body or mind, I couldn't seem to get any rest. That first night was no exception, so as Olivia lay in quiet, waiting, I guess, for the house parents to switch shifts, my thoughts turned to my family.
I had a vague sense that I should miss them all now, that this would probably be the normal way to feel. At the very least, I should probably feel sorry that I'd been difficult and embarrassing enough for them to deal with that they wanted to send me away, or felt that they didn't have any other option for me. But I didn't. I wasn't happy to be away from them, but I wasn't sad either. I didn't feel angry, like I had when they first told me they were taking me in for an assessment, or hurt. I didn't feel anything at all.
It seemed wrong, somehow, that when I thought of my family, the people that I should feel the most for of everyone and everything, I only felt numb. They showed so much feeling towards me, even if most of them weren't ones I enjoyed experiencing. Wasn't I supposed to do the same?
***
"Leanna," my mother said carefully, making an effort to keep her voice calm. "Now that you're out of the hospital and back home, where you belong, we have to talk about what happened."
I studied the scratched surface of our kitchen table, my head lowered just enough that I didn't have to meet her eyes. I could see the tension in my father's shoulders beside her, the emotion in my mother's face that she couldn't control as much as her voice, and I knew that nothing I could tell them would satisfy them. They would not, could not understand.
How could I blame them, when I didn't either?
"We need to know what happened to make you so…upset," my mother continued, swallowing. I was pretty sure she couldn't stand the feeling of the word "suicide" on her tongue. "This isn't like you, Leanna. We're your parents. We need to know what happened to make you do such a terrible thing."
I noticed my father wasn't saying anything. I was pretty sure that wouldn't last, as it became more and more obvious that I was only going to continue to disappoint them.
I couldn't think of anything to say that hadn't been already said before, in the hospital. There was nothing new I could add, no secrets, no sudden insights that had occurred. But they kept asking, they kept poking, like my answer would change if they only asked me the right questions. I was beginning to suspect that they would be relieved if I would tell them something terrible had happened, just so they could have something to blame, something they could understand. Something that would make my actions just a little bit more acceptable.
"Are you being bullied?" my mother pressed, leaning in close to me and trying to meet my eyes. "Are you using drugs or alcohol, Leanna? You can tell us if you are. You won't be in trouble. We just want to give you the help you need."
"No," I managed, because it was true. I wasn't being bullied. I wasn't using anything. It wasn't that simple.
"Did a boy dump you?" Mom continued, as though she had memorized a list of all the possibilities she could imagine. "Did someone…hurt you? Abuse you?"
"No," I said a little more loudly, almost laughing at the thought. I had turned down the last boy who had seemed sort of interested in me. Dating seemed strange and undesirable to me, certainly nothing to kill myself over.
"This isn't funny, Leanna," my father said tightly, noticing my snicker. "Your mother and I need to hear what happened, whether you want to tell us or not. It isn't normal to do what you did, and we need to know what happened that would make you do something so…so…"
He cut himself off, pressing his lips together and shaking his head tightly. It occurred to me then that it didn't matter to them that I was telling the truth. They weren't going to believe me.
"Did a girl stop being friends with you, or steal your boyfriend?" Mom continued to guess, so wildly off base I just shook my head, incredulous. "Are you failing your classes? Did you witness a crime? Please, Leanna, you have to tell us what happened. You have to tell us so we can help."
She was almost crying, her face soft and fallen with her pleading. It would have been easier to lie to her. But a lie would mean details, a story that I would have to remember and react off of. I was too tired, too damn tired for that.
"I keep telling you, nothing happened," I said wearily. "I just…I just wanted everything to stop. I don't know why."
They stared at me; my answer nowhere close to fitting into their ideas of how the world should work. When my father spoke, his voice was heavy with barely controlled anger.
"No one takes pills until they puke and cuts their wrist for no reason. If nothing happened and no one hurt you, that means you did this because you wanted something from somebody. From us. What was it, Leanna? Attention? To make us feel sorry for you? To get back at us for something?"
"What? No!" I cried, genuinely shocked that he would think that of me, that this was the answer he would come up with. "No!"
But as I looked at my mother, tears still brimming in her eyes, I could see that even if she didn't completely agree with my father, a part of her wondered. Because she didn't say anything to correct him. She didn't tell him to stop.
"Your mother and I need to think about what to do next," my father announced abruptly, as though I hadn't said anything at all to him to deny what he'd accused me of. "We'll talk again later."
He pushed himself away from the table then, his back taut as he walked away. My mother looked at me, biting her lip, but in the end, she left too.
They always told me they would be there for me, that they were my family and that meant forever. But then, when I only wanted them to stay, to try to understand, they both walked away.
***
As this memory flashed through my thoughts, I sighed quietly, trying to focus my attention on something else. Anything else. But Olivia was either asleep or doing a great job of pretending she was, and the room was bare enough in décor and objects that there was nothing all that interesting to look at. I closed my eyes, finding my thoughts focused back on my family despite my efforts to distract.
I was pretty sure that none of them would be in bed at such an early hour. I was also pretty sure I could predict with good accuracy what they were doing right now. Jenny was probably talking on the phone to her boyfriend, her homework perfectly completed and neatly stored away in her book bag. She would already have her clothes and makeup for the next day laid out and she would probably be painting her nails while she talked to him. I was sure she would be happy that her bedroom, in my absence, would be that much easier to keep as clean as she wanted.
Jocelyn was probably reading one of her ten thousand anime books, twirling a strand of hair around her finger until it snarled or split. Either that, or she was on her tablet, playing something pointless like Candy Crush. Jesse would probably be playing a video game or maybe, just maybe, he would be the one out of them all who would be thinking about me, wondering what I was doing as he brushed his teeth or put on his pajamas for the night. Mom, I knew, would be cleaning and straightening almost compulsively, and Dad would probably work late tonight. I didn't think he would think of me at all. In his mind, the problem of his daughter had been solved, so there was no point in thinking about it further. That was my guess.
I was sure that the one thing they wouldn't be doing was lying unable to sleep, wondering what I was doing. Their sleep would be untroubled, their lives simpler and happier, without me taking part in them anymore.
Didn't they realize that was one of the things I had thought, before I tried to die? Didn't they realize that by sending me away, they were only confirming that I was right, and they really would be better off without me around?
***
Everything my parents read online, heard at my assessment, or assumed out of hope and trust about what a wonderful, specialized educational center that Michael Newman School is was a complete and total lie.
I've never been the best student, more out of lack of effort than because I couldn't be, if I wanted to. But I could tell within the first five minutes in my first class of the day that I was going to be able to get straight A's with about a thousand percent less effort than it had taken me to get C's in regular school. In fact, I seriously wondered if just going up to class alive would get you passing grades in this place.
They had emphasized during my assessment the "small, personal class sizes with focused, individual attention from teachers." They hadn't mentioned that there were only four girls in my entire grade and we would all have every single class together every day, all day. They had mentioned that "students could progress at their own pace and even catch up to the correct grade level," but they hadn't spelled out that this was because most of our so called assignments were either online tests, worksheets that looked to me like they were seventh grade level, and crossword puzzles of vocabulary words. When I walked into my first classroom, there were no posters or projects on the walls, no student work displayed anywhere, and I wasn't given a syllabus of the assignments we were going to do throughout the year. When I asked Olivia, careful to whisper only when the teacher's back was turned, she just rolled her eyes at me.
"Lee, the teachers here make shit up on a whim every day, they don't plan ahead of time. If they bother to teach at all, it's maybe fifteen minutes long. The rest of the day they're babysitters."
I thought maybe she was exaggerating, but pretty soon it became obvious she was right. When I raised my hand, asking the teacher of my first class if she was going to give me a textbook, she just looked at me blankly.
"Oh, we don't have any textbooks in this school," she replied. "Here, just read this summary of To Kill a Mockingbird and then answer the questions at the end."
So much for a specialized education experience. Who the hell ever heard of a school that not only didn't have books, but didn't even ask you to read anything but a summary of a book?
Olivia, Dominika, and Halley were the other girls in my class, and though all of them did their work, none of them took longer than twenty minutes to finish it. We were supposed to stay in the class for an hour. The rest of the time, it was more or less a slumber party in a classroom. They doodled, passed notes, played tick tack toe and hangman, and even did makeup and nails.
I felt strange as they included me in what they were doing, like I was somehow doing something wrong to join in. It didn't feel right for Dominika to sit on my desk, instructing me when to blink and close my eyes as she put eyeshadow and mascara on my face. But the teacher didn't speak up to correct anyone or give us any kind of instructions. She barely even seemed to notice we were in the same room. Most of the time, she was glued to her phone, texting or playing some kind of game on it.
"Is it always like this?" I asked in a low voice as Dominika finished up with me, gesturing for Halley to come kneel in front of her instead. Olivia raised an eyebrow, smirking.
"Didn't you hear what I said? This ain't a school. It's a zoo, and I haven't worked out yet who's the animals and who's the keepers."
As though on cue, a shrill screech rang out somewhere nearby, and I heard the sound of feet thudding down the hallway. My head shot up, and I looked anxiously at the teacher, who barely looked up from her phone in response, turning her head towards the doorway. Halley kept her head down, letting out a soft sigh, but Olivia and Dominika grinned.
"Show's about to start. We get a few of these every day. If we had any money, we could place bets on it."
I could hear an enraged female voice; shrieking swears at someone who didn't seem to be yelling back in response. To me, this was incredible. My siblings and I had gone to a small, fairly quiet and boring set of schools since we were adopted, and it was considered a shock if a kid had a tantrum or cried in school. I couldn't imagine a kid screaming up and down the halls without having the police called, and they would definitely have ended up expelled.
Then again, this was the place they sent kids who had been expelled. Why was I so surprised?
It became clear to me gradually from the girl's words that she was screaming at her teacher. I looked again at my own teacher, unable to believe that she wouldn't at least go see what was going on and if the other teacher needed help, but all she did was heave herself up, walk over to the doorway, and peer out into the hall. Turning back towards us, she shook her head, muttering loudly enough for me to hear.
"That Electra. I'm not going to have her pull this with me today, I'll send her straight to Mr. Daniels, see if I won't."
And that was it. Electra continued to yell and curse and from what I could tell, hit things in the hallway, but no one, other than the teacher she was screaming at, really paid it any mind at all.
"That girl's crazy," Olivia informed me. "She'll fight anyone who breathes her way. She's not as badass as she thinks she is, though."
"I don't pay her no mind," Dominika said with some surprising heat in her tone, crossing her arms over her chest and leaning back in the chair she had just recently sat back down in. "You can't trust her, she tries to squeeze her way in on everything and everyone, but she's not worth my time."
Listening to the girl in question cursing out everything she could find the words for; I couldn't say I could blame them for their stance.
That was far from the last drama of the morning. During my next "class," if you could call it that, I could hear the sound of more girls, running down the halls laughing. This time I couldn't resist going to see what was going on for myself. I figured the teacher wouldn't stop me, and I was right. As I peered out into the hallway for myself, I saw that Tatiana, Bryony, and some other girl who looked around their age were running up and down the halls, giggling, with a male adult I guessed was their teacher chasing after them, calling breathlessly for them to stop. It seemed to be a game to them, and very probably something they did often, maybe daily.
I returned to my seat slowly, reeling. This was going to be my life, seven hours out of every day, five days of the week. It didn't matter if we had the best textbooks in the world with the best projects planned out for us and the best teachers to teach the subjects. These kids were so damn crazy that there was no way I could have learned, even if I wanted to.
Chapter 7
