63 Days

The third night we sat around the campfire, talking, listening to everyone else tell their stories. Jeff was there because he was a gang banger in Miami. He’d shot up a convenience store trying to pick off a guy who’d touched his sister’s ass. He was sentenced to the program. Stacy was there because she was an acid freak and because her parents said she was promiscuous. She was a quiet little hippie chick. I liked her. Jeremy was a boy who’d been sent to the program because his parents found out he’d been stealing money from his grandparents and buying weed. He was a chubby kid, and he had a really hard time keeping up with us. Stephanie, she was there because she was anorexic. She’d been handcuffed to the chair legs that were bolted to the floor in her parents motorhome and had been driven out by Challenger staff to Utah to be taught how to eat. Silly…rediculous! There were more of us, but I can’t remember their stories. Perhaps it will come to me later.

I went over my story. I’d been sexually active, I smoked pot on occasion, I drank when we could get into someone’s parent’s liquor cabinet and I ditched school sometimes. I knew I was wrong, I knew I’d been a little shit, but I was 15 and there was stuff that I was running from…numbing myself from the realities of a past I was just remembering.

Then the nicknames came. I got called “Barbie” and “Princess” and they weren’t used in a cutesey way, they were to make me feel like a shallow whore. The others got names, and we were told to go in and write in our journals. On the way to our blankets that were laying on the ground under another overhang, I noticed Stephanie the anorexic one over in the bushes with her hand down her throat. None of us had eaten in 3 days now, so I wondered what she could be getting rid of in her stomach.

When she came and layed down by me, I asked her “Hey, you ok?”

“Yeah,” she said, southern accent as thick as the snow around us. “Ahhm jess pewkin’ uhp mah warter. I don’ wanna get fayut and who knows whots in this warter, it could be shurger from awl the berries arayound here. Look!” she said, pointing to a bush with tiny red berries on it. I noticed her hand, as it pointed, and it was shaking and her fingernails were blue. I’d remember this in a few days and wish to the dear Lord that I’d told somebody about it. I don’t even think it would have mattered to them, but at least I would have tried.

We layed down on our blankets, wrapping them around us tightly til it was silent. That night I got the first glimpse into what happens to your brain when you’re dehydrated and hungry and exhausted mentally and physically. As I lay under the stars and air before I drifted off to sleep, I saw the sky literally unzip.