Paris: The Memoir(41)
I can’t even try to be funny about this or pretend I was a tough cookie. That chick scared the living shit out of me. I cried and begged her to stop, and every day after that, I did whatever she told me to do. I worked my ass off, ate whatever crap they put in front of me, and never ever said another word about running away. I played a familiar character: the stupid rich girl. The blond bimbo they expected me to be. I pretended to be all excited if I saw an elk and never said another word to anyone except when I was forced to participate in their insane rituals.
Years later, when I finally found the courage to google it, I was glad to see this place had been shut down. Kids had died there, and the lawsuits finally got to be too much. But other places just like it sprang up. It’s infuriating how widespread this type of thing is—and that a lot of people have known about it for a long time.
In October 2007, Gregory D. Kutz, managing director of forensic audits and special investigations for the US Government Accountability Office, and Andy O’Connell, assistant director, testified before the House Committee on Education and Labor, presenting a report, “Residential Treatment Programs: Concerns Regarding Abuse and Death in Certain Programs for Troubled Youth.”
Under the heading “What GAO Found”:
GAO found thousands of allegations of abuse, some of which involved death, at residential treatment programs across the country and in American-owned and American-operated facilities abroad between the years 1990 and 2007. . . . GAO could not identify a more concrete number of allegations because it could not locate a single Web site, federal agency, or other entity that collects comprehensive nationwide data.
Burly wasn’t lying. She really could have buried me there, and no one in any official capacity would have known or cared.
The report goes on to cite one agonized example after another:
May 1990—Female, 15—died while hiking after reporting symptoms of dehydration for two days; left on dirt road for eighteen hours
September 2000—Male, 15—held facedown in the dirt for forty-five minutes; died of severed artery in the neck
February 2001—Male, 14—attempted to commit suicide severing artery with camp-issued pocketknife (knife was not taken away); hanged himself in his tent the following day
July 2002—Male, 14—died of heat stroke exertion while hiking; staff member hid behind a tree to observe if he was “faking it”; checked for pulse after child lay motionless for more than ten minutes
November 2004—Male, 15—forced to wear twenty-pound sandbag around his neck as punishment for being “too weak”; collapsed and died; autopsy revealed bruises over entire body.
This list goes on and on like a beatbox loop and doesn’t even address the thousands of kids who suffered these horrific conditions and survived.
I’ve testified before House committees, so I know what it’s like presenting information like this in a cold conference hall, facing a sea of men in dark suits. Most of them are there because they sincerely want to make a difference, but after a while, they look numb. It’s impossible for them to see these statistics as children—but it’s impossible for me to see these children as statistics.
I see that kid. I know that kid.
I am that kid.
After a couple of months at Ascent, I was as stoic and lean as the blade of an ax. The skin-crawling reality of the observed bucket shower had become normalized. I learned how to take a bitch slap. Go with the momentum instead of trying to duck. I no longer felt the sting when they talked about my parents hating me or told me I’d be a crack whore and die in a gutter and had no future. What did that even mean? The only future I could think about was surviving another day on that fucking mountain.
Haul another log.
Dig another hole.
Shiver uncontrollably through another night.
One day, they told us it was time to go on this thing called “Track”—or maybe “Trek”—that involved hiking over some mountains in Montana. They gave us some perfunctory survival training—how to pack our eighty-pound backpacks, pitch a tent in the snow, build a fire, find water—Naked and Afraid–type stuff, which would be hard even if you wanted to do it, and none of us did. Burly kept saying how life changing and awesome Track/Trek was, and I pretended to be excited about it, but inside I was like, Nope.
I’d been watching the way the moon came and went. Sometimes it was pitch black at night; other times the moon was so bright you could see your shadow on the way to the porta-potty. Sometimes in the morning, fog rose from the ravines so thick you couldn’t see a tree ten feet away. I’d been weighing the advantages and disadvantages, the opportunity to hide versus the ability to cover the greatest distance as fast as possible. Counselors warned us about wild animals, but bears and mountain lions scared me less than these twisted people. I tried to find the courage to go alone, but at the last minute, I caved. Sometimes it takes more courage to trust someone.
There was a young girl who’d arrived recently and was having a bad time, mouthing off and getting slapped around a lot. (Let’s just call her Tess.) One night, I whispered to her, “Let’s get out of here. I’ll tell you when.”
Tess nodded, scared but resolute.
At two in the morning, we took off through the trees, down the mountain to a dirt road. She struggled to keep up, and I badgered her like a football coach.
“Keep going! You can do this! We can’t slow down!”