one – spatially retarded in fact – not the watch. Retard, you’d call me, but you’d say it with affection and that’s how I’d hear it too. In the dimness, the hands are too fuzzy to discern at all. The room has an undisturbed air about it, like no one but me, twisting in my unconsciousness, has moved in here for quite some time.
My memory is one thing that didn’t stop working when I passed out. I know exactly where I am, if not the precise location within the building.
And I know I’ve got to escape. I try to retrace the route in my head so I can tell Cindy. But what the heck is the name of the road, Justine? Is it right or left off the main drag? And how many miles after Harvey’s? I don’t know. Cindy will figure it out. She has to. She and Lloyd will find a map and find a way, they’ll get me out of here.
I’ve just got to reach a phone so I can call her. I survey the room, my eyes adjusting to the dark. I can make out forms though colours and textures blur into shadow. There’s the couch I’m lying on, about a foot shorter than me, and two folding chairs, leaning up against the wall to the right of the door, and a trash can, wicker maybe, looking empty and skeletal even in the dimness, and framed things on the wall, yet more needlepoint godsquad pronouncements I’m sure. To the left of the sofa where my feet have been dangling is a spindly side table and there’s something on it. It’s not a phone, though, that’s clear. It’s smaller, looks like a tube or canister of something. I lean in and squint. No, it’s a cup, a plastic cup, but it’s tipped over on its side, thanks apparently to a collision with my feet. The tabletop is a pool of liquid, dripping into the carpet. I dab my finger in it. Water, my glass of water.
I remember how thirsty I am. My lips crack with rawness and when I lick them my tongue sticks like it does to my teeth and the underside of my still foul-tasting retainer. I would hock my Michael Jackson collection and all my Esprit sweaters for a drink of water.
Why would anybody put a glass of water in a place like that, where a person could so easily reach out and kick it accidentally. It’s almost laughable, the sheer stupidity of it. But then it occurs to me. It wasn’t a stupid thing, not thoughtless at all. Plenty of thought went into it. They did it on purpose. She did it, Hilary.
She did it to spite me. She did it so that when our mom lost the steel in her lip, started feeling guilty later and called up to see how I was adjusting and asked, is my Justine OK, did you give my baby her glass of water? Then Hilary would be able to say with a straight face and clear conscience, ‘Of course we did, Mrs Ziegler.’ And Mom wouldn’t think to ask, ‘But did she drink the damn water, or did you, you evil woman, put it somewhere it was certain to get knocked over so she’d never get a drop of it?’ Mom wouldn’t think to ask that and she’d go to sleep tonight never realising how thirsty I am or how dry my lips are or how I’ve got nothing to wash down this taste of bile and vomit and betrayal.
There’s movement on the other side of the door. Rigid with fear, I listen to the chatter of the key ring on the other side, the scraping of metal on metal as the key’s teeth match up with the lock’s grooves, then the turning of the mechanisms deep inside and then the click-thud as the bolt snaps back. Should I hide? There’s nowhere. Should I pretend to be asleep? Wait behind the door to pounce? Throw the wicker wastepaper basket over her head? Even as I’m asking myself, I’m imagining Hilary twirling the massive ring of keys round her neck like a witch doctor spins a string of skulls, working his spell over each of his victims.
But when the door opens, there’s no Hilary. Instead there’s a girl. She flips on the lights too suddenly and almost blinds me, but I can see her through my squinted lids. I don’t know her. She’s dressed in a billowy red sweat suit and is several inches shorter than me and wider, almost round like a ball, with pale skin and straight red hair, greasy and slicked back into a ponytail twitching high and off-centre atop her head.
Mark and Leroy are back, lingering behind Pony Girl in the hall and they don’t enter all the way when she does. She sashays in swinging a Kmart plastic bag which she flings on to the sofa. ‘Your clothes,’ she says.
‘I’m fine in what I’m wearing, thanks.’
‘Not regulation.’ She tosses her hair and gestures towards the bag again.
I reach into it. There’s a green synthetic tunic littered with pink polka dots and a pair of brown corduroy pants. I hate cords at the best of times, the sound they make as you walk, the friction, the ribbons of material rubbing up against one another, leaving funny brush patterns and picking up lint from wherever you sit down. I hate them and these ones are two sizes too big, cheap and nasty to boot. Very cheap, judging by the price tags still attached to them as well as the tunic.
‘These aren’t my clothes,’ I tell Pony Girl.
‘Your parents brought them for you.’
Our parents?
I take a step towards her. ‘Did they come back? Are they still here?’
‘No, they left them here,’ she says, her breath stinking in my face. What’s that smell? ‘They left them when they left you.’
I rub the bridge of my nose. There’s a spot there where, if I close my eyes and press hard enough, it feels like I’m giving my brain a pinch. A little squeeze that rockets pain like prismed light into my thoughts. It hurts most when I use the knuckle of my forefinger, but it only hurts for a second and then sometimes it helps. It makes things clearer.
Like now, like how it’s clear to me now that our parents must have had this planned, who knew how far in advance. Maybe weeks, maybe hours. Time enough for Mom to go shopping at Kmart. Perhaps she went this morning while I was still asleep, dreaming of you and swimming – how long ago was that?
I can’t fathom it, nor can I fathom how my very own mother could shop for me at Kmart of all places. We never shop at Kmart. And how could she pick out quite such an atrocious outfit? I’ll look like a tree with the brown pants and the green top – a cherry tree, even, thanks to those hideous pink polka dots. What was she thinking?
But hang on a minute. Perhaps it isn’t all bad. There is only one change of clothes. You don’t give a person just one change of clothes if you expect them to be gone a long while. It is only an evaluation, isn’t it? After three days I’ll be able to go home again and everything will be peachy keen. Maybe I’ll only have to stay one day. One change of clothes, one day.
‘You can change into them after the strip-search,’ the redhead says.
‘The what?’
‘Strip-search. We’ve got to check you ain’t trying to sneak any contraband into the programme.’
‘You must be kidding.’
“Fraid not.’
‘I don’t have any contraband and I’m no way going to take my clothes off to prove it.’
‘Sorry, chickie,’ she says, not appearing the least bit apologetic. ‘Them’s the breaks.’
‘No way. Uh-uh.’
She reaches out and picks at the hem of your turtleneck. A loose thread dangles and she yanks at it until it breaks, causing the material to bunch up round the stitching at the edge. ‘I’m not gonna have to get Mark and Leroy there to restrain you, am I? You wouldn’t like it that way, I bet you wouldn’t.’
On cue, the two bruisers square their shoulders
