“Are you moronic or deaf? Mouth it. Fake it. Or you’ll get in trouble. Have I made myself clear?”
Before I had a chance to think of a clever reply, she had moved to the other side of the circle, where she was chanting insults so ferociously that you had to watch closely to see that she wasn’t actually making a sound.
I didn’t know what to make of her. She was a total bitch to me, insulting me as much as the counselors did, telling me how delusional I was. She might have been trying to railroad me: You could move up levels at Red Rock by narcing out your roommates (so Fascist). But her advice was kind of subversive, which had me thinking she was maybe trying to help. I did what she told me to, and it turned out to be her second piece of good advice. After I started fake name-calling in group, one of the counselors patted me on the back and said I’d begun to “work my program.” When I met with Dr. Clayton later that week, she gave me a creepy smile and said she thought I was finally ready to “deal with my demons” and “break down my walls.” Which meant promotion to Level Three, and real school—a windowless room with a dozen desks where I’d do more self-directed study while watched by guards who didn’t look like they could spell their own names. I was also moved into a shared room with three other inmates: a fat girl named Martha, a rich, snooty waif named Bebe, and blonde, bulimic Tiffany, who alternated between hysterical smiliness and hysterical tears.
When I wasn’t in school, therapy, or meals, I was doing physical therapy. This consisted of spending four hours in the hot desert heat dragging five-pound cinder blocks from a giant pile across fifty feet of dusty yard and stacking them into a wall. Sounds like pure torture, I know, but it actually wasn’t so bad. I mean, for sure my muscles killed me at first, and we worked without gloves, so my hands turned bloody and then all callused. Plus, the work made me thirsty and I had to drink a ton of water but could only pee once an hour. Still, the counselors-cum-guards were lazy and preferred to stay in the shade, so the cinder-block yard was the one place that us inmates could talk freely amongst ourselves.
“This is ruining my hands,” Bebe bitched. “My nails used to be so pretty.”
“Can it, Rodeo Drive,” scolded the Level Four girl next to her.
“How many times do I have to spell this out for you, yokel. Rodeo Drive is in Beverly Hills, and it’s where podunk tourists shop. I don’t even live in Beverly Hills. I live in the Palisades. So shut it already.” Everyone called Bebe “Rodeo Drive.” People were jealous of her, I gathered, because she was so pretty with her long, shiny black hair and blue catlike eyes. Her mom was Marguerite Howarth, a famous soap-opera actress. Bebe had been my roommate for two days but hadn’t deigned to speak to me, so I wasn’t about to put myself in her line of fire. But it was obviously my lucky day.
“Where are you from?” she asked me.
“Oregon. Portland.”
“I’ve been there. Rain and people wearing the most unattractive flannel.”
I happened to love Portland and didn’t appreciate LA people dissing it, but I had to admit she was right about the flannel.
“And what are you in for?”
“No idea.”
“Oh, come now. You must have some idea, my dear girl. Bulimia? Promiscuous behavior? Self-mutilation?” Bebe said, ticking off potential abuses.
“None of the above.”
“Well, let’s see. You have the hair and the tattoos. If I were to take a wild stab in the dark, I’d say you’re a musician or an artist.”
“Musician,” was all I said, but inwardly I was kind of surprised. My mom had been the artist.
“Ahh, her**n? Meth?” Bebe ventured.
“No, none of those. I just play in a band, have pink hair, and have a freak of a stepmother.”
“Ahh, we have a Cinderella in the house!” Bebe called to the crowd before turning her attention back to me. “How very Disney. What did Clayton diagnose you as during your intake?”
“Opposition something something.”
“Oppositional defiance disorder. You’re ODD,” said a sure voice from behind. It was the girl again, the tall bitchy Sixer with the good advice. “We all get tagged with that label. It’s a no-brainer. What’re your other offenses?”
“I don’t know.”
She sighed. “Okay, newbie. Let me give you the remedial catch-up. Red Rock inmates fall into five broad categories: You’ve got your substance abusers, but never anything worse than pot or ecstasy because a weekly AA meeting is all the drug treatment this place offers. Then there are your sexual deviants, comprising slutty girls and dykes. Cassie over there”—she pointed to a girl with short red hair and freckles—“is in on lesbo watch, and Bebe here is in on slut watch—she got caught making it with the pool boy.”
“That’s not entirely accurate, my darling Virginia,” Bebe said, shaking her long mane of hair. “I got caught making it with the Mexican pool boy. That was my real offense. An unthinkable crossing of class lines.”
“Thanks for the clarification, Karl Marx. And don’t call me Virginia. I go by V.”
“V is not a name, darling; it’s a letter.”
“And BB is two letters. What’s your point? Now where was I? Yes. The food issues. Mostly minor-league bulimics. Red Rock would never take on any serious anorexics because they need serious help, not the fraudulent counseling that passes for therapy here. Do you know, Clayton’s the only one around here with any credentials? And she’s not even a shrink. She’s an internist. She’s only here to prescribe pills. So we just get a smattering of occasional throw-up dieters and a lot of obese girls whose parents think that Red Rock is more “therapeutic” than fat camp.
“Our precious roomie, Martha, for instance,” Bebe said. “She’s a fat-camper.”
“Correct,” said V. “Then we have a handful of cutters—you know, the self-mutilating types. And a grab bag of your garden-variety runaways and petty thieves—we’ve got lots of kleptos here. And last but not least, the suicidal-ideation girls.”
“Like our Virginia,” Bebe said.
“You? You tried to kill yourself?” I asked.
“No. Too Sylvia Plath. If I had, Red Rock would’ve been afraid to let me in. I just wrote some poems and stories about a girl who kills herself. Spooked my mom enough to send me away. And I’ve been here ever since. Almost a year and a half.”
“V is for veteran.” Bebe smirked.
“No, V is for Virginia, and for victory and for vixen.”
“You’re incorrigible, you bad, bad girl. I’m so impressed,” Bebe faked a yawn.
“Sarcasm creates a chasm between yourself and others,” V said with mock piousness. She turned to me. “Another Red Rock nugget of wisdom. Anyway, I’m in Level Six now and I intend to be back home before Christmas.”
“Where’s home?”
“Manhattan.”
“Back to work, ladies. Cut the chitchat,” one of the counselors yelled from the patio, where she was reading a copy of Us Weekly.
“Ugh,” Bebe groaned. “They really need to provide us with sunblock. When I have to Botox, I’m going to bill Red Rock for each and every wrinkle.”
“Hey, look, we finished the wall,” I said. We’d been so busy talking, I hadn’t noticed that every last cinder block was stacked up neatly. Bebe and V looked at each other, laughing at me.
“Yes, the wall is finished. And now we break it down,” V said.
“The wall is meant to teach us that our existence is futile, dears,” Bebe said. “Welcome to Red Rock logic.”
Later that night in our dorm, I asked Bebe which soap her mom had been on. She narrowed her eyes at me and turned away, like I’d asked some ridiculously inappropriate personal question. I didn’t get her. Or V, either. They were like Jekyll and Hyde, giving advice one minute and icing me the next. I was starting to think it might be better to keep to myself, because after Bebe snubbed me, I’d felt worse than I had when I took my first fully supervised shower. I even cried into my pillow that night, something I hadn’t done in weeks. The next morning, though, I found a note tucked into the pocket of my Red Rock shirt.
Cinderella, the walls have eyes (notice the cameras?) and ears (beware of Tiffany). Ratting is a way of life around here. No chat in the building. Cinder-block yard only.BB I crumpled up the note and smiled. Someone had my back.
Chapter 5
When I was growing up, I never had the sense that someone had my back, because I never knew what it was like when someone didn’t. It would never have occurred to me that I could end up alone and vulnerable, since in those days, my family was the best, the coolest, the tightest.
My parents met at a U2 concert. Dad was working as a roadie, and Bono pulled my mom onstage to dance. He used to do that at every concert. Every girl in the audience probably thought she was worthy, but Mom really was. She had this thing about her, this light—an energy that made you want to be around her because when you were, life was giddy. Free spirit is such a clichéd term, but it totally fit my mom. When she went floating backstage that night, she looked up at Dad in her post-Bono ecstasy and kissed him. He was probably a goner right there and then.
After that, it was like some bohemian fairy tale. They tromped around Europe and Africa together, with Mom selling her paintings to earn money. They got married on a cliff top in Morocco, and she got pregnant with me in a Portobello Road hotel in London—hence my name, Brit (middle name is Paula for Bono, whose real name is Paul). Then they moved to Portland and bought a ramshackle house on Salmon Street and started CoffeeNation, a coffeehouse/art gallery/club.
I don’t know how many kids can say that they once crayoned in a Muppets coloring book with Kurt Cobain, but I can. Tons of musicians and artists hung around CoffeeNation, which was funny because neither Mom nor Dad knew an A from an A minor. But they had a weekly open-mic night, and a lot of bands got their start there, and I think the place just got a reputation as a music haven.
We pretty much lived at CoffeeNation. After school, I’d sit down at my own reserved table, and Dad would fix me a hot chocolate before I started my homework. It never took me long because I had like forty pseudo big brothers and sisters there to help me—musicians are weirdly good at math, which is probably one reason that back in my own school, I would’ve been taking calculus in my junior year. My favorite customer was Reggie, a tattoo artist whose arms, legs, and torso were like a mosaic. A lot of people probably thought he looked like a thug, but he was the nicest guy ever. He loved to read almost as much as he liked to talk, and he used to check out a copy of whatever book I was reading for school, so we could have literary discussions together. I was only eight when we met, and Reggie and I read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. together.
When my friends complained about their parents, I didn’t even pretend to agree. I hung out with my parents most afternoons at the café until Mom and I went home to cook up these wild dinners—like the night she decided everything had to be purple (eggplant stew with beets and grapes isn’t half bad, by the way). We’d eat late when Dad got home, and I never got sick of being around them.