Paris: The Memoir(40)
I expected him to put me into the back of a cop car, but there wasn’t one. He was a bicycle cop. He put handcuffs on me, got on his bike, and made me run behind him all the way to the police station, which was only a couple blocks, but come on. Fuck you, bicycle cop. Fuck you and your hideous shorts and the lame-ass gel seat you rode in on.
I waited on a bench at the police station until the Meatheads came for me. They were seriously pissed. Mrs. Meathead was holding an ice pack on her face. The front of her shirt was spattered with blood. While Mr. Meathead was at the front desk talking to the police officer, she bent down and burbled through her swollen lips, “Fuhtt you, you libble dwat. You’re gomma be sowwy you did dat.”
When the officer came to reclaim his cuffs, I begged him, “Please, don’t let them take me. They’re trying to kidnap me. They’re going to beat me.”
“We’re her legal guardians,” said Mr. Meathead. He showed the officer some paperwork. “As you can see, she’s a violent offender.”
It took me a beat to understand what that meant—and that it was true. Mrs. Meathead was really hurt. I did that, and I did not feel bad about it. Seeing myself that way made me feel even further removed from my real life. The Meatheads took me to the airport in cuffs, and I sat on the airplane, wedged between their sweaty bodies, feeling physically and emotionally crushed.
When we arrived at Ascent, a burly woman in combat fatigues strip-searched and groped me in full view of the staff and gawking students. There was a crew-cut-and-camo white-supremacist vibe to the place: a shack with a guard, a common area with wooden benches, a circle of tepees, a mess tent with a log for a table. The only sanitation was a pair of porta-potties. Instead of showers, you got a bucket of cold water with a cup and a bar of soap. Kids were required to strip naked and wash while staff watched.
In the morning, you had sixty seconds to pull on socks and shoes and bundle your sleeping bag into a backpack. If one person messed up, everyone was punished. The first day, there was a hair on my backpack, so they tore everyone’s stuff up—probably just to make sure everyone hated me. Breakfast was a grainy cereal with milk that was obviously bad. I tried to drain off the sour milk, but the team leader said, “Eat it or I’ll shove it down your throat.”
Burly cuffed me on the back of the head. “Keep an eye on this one.”
The program was similar to CEDU except the girls were called Otters and the boys were Tatankas. Boys and girls weren’t allowed to look at each other. Another camp was being built nearby, so we spent our days hiking to and from that location, hauling logs, and digging holes. Every night, you washed your socks. If they didn’t dry, you had to go without. It took me a few days to figure out a good method, so the backs of my heels were raw with weeping blisters.
Sometimes kids passed out, and we had to carry them back to the camp. Sometimes we never saw that person again, but a girl who came back after a brief trip to the hospital told me, “I was handcuffed the whole time. No one would speak to me in the ER.”
Asking questions or voicing a complaint got you a slap across the face, and they made sure everyone saw it. Kids got punched, choked, and thrown to the ground, held facedown in the dirt with a staff person’s knee on their neck. They kept us scared and hungry. If the milk was bad, and you couldn’t eat your cereal, you had to carry it with you all day until you ate it.
Weeks went by. A blur of stiff, heartbroken misery. I was constantly scoping out the territory for any possible avenue of escape. I knew I would die if I stayed there, but traveling through the wilderness on my own—that didn’t seem possible. Most of the other students scared me, but my tentmate seemed cool and was obviously as miserable as I was, so we bonded over that.
One night I said, “I don’t want to leave you by yourself, but I have to get out of here.”
She agreed, and we made a plan. Before we went to sleep, she went out to use the porta-potty, and a few minutes later, Burly called, “Hilton, get out here.”
I went out, and she said, “What’s going on? What were you two whispering about?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“NO,” she barked. “You tell the truth.”
“Nothing’s going on. We were just—”
Burly yanked me into the firelight and made me sit on a log while she paced and berated me.
This was a thing at Ascent. You had to sit on that log hour after hour while people took turns yelling at you, poking you, and smacking the back of your head until you confessed to something.
Usually, I made up something that wasn’t very bad, like “I dumped my cereal in the bushes” or whatever. That wasn’t going to cut it this time. Burly kept me on the log all night. I was shivering cold and exhausted from the long day of manual labor, but I sat there and said nothing, because I didn’t want to get my tentmate in trouble. It didn’t sink in until morning that my tentmate had ratted me out.
When people woke up and found us still out there in this standoff, Burly lost it. She had to show them she could break me. Everyone crouched by the opening of their tent, watching with huge, scared eyes as she slapped and strangled me, yelling with her hot breath on my face.
“If you fucking run—say one word about running—try to be a bad influence on other kids—I will make your life hell, understand? You are never gonna leave here. I will bury you here, and no one will give a shit. Your parents hate you. Get it through your stupid little bimbo head! You belong to me.”