Chapter Two Growing Together #2
Staff would then hand a microphone to one of the moms or dads and ask them to describe their child’s misdeeds.
Chosen parents would recite their lists—drug abuse, petty theft, fistfights, violent outbursts, whatever—without a nod to whatever role they might have played in their kids’ acting out.
It was like watching prosecutors during a trial, except that when the microphone was finally handed to the accused, he or she was not allowed to mount a defense.
Instead, we were expected to use our time to confess.
Only by confessing could we move up in the hierarchy that divided the punishers from the punished.
That’s a snapshot of what happened inside the facility during the day.
Other abuses occurred each night, when we were shipped off to sleep at private foster homes endorsed by Growing Together administrators.
Typically these were houses owned by parents of children enrolled in the program, and most accommodated five kids at a time.
All these homes—mine included, because my parents sometimes took in kids—had been renovated to meet Growing Together’s specifications.
Pictures and mirrors were removed from walls, so there’d be no glass to break.
Kitchen knives were hidden. Bathrooms were stripped, leaving only the sink, toilet, and bathtub.
Usually, the windows and doors of the bedrooms where we slept were rigged with alarm systems. Bedtime was 10:00 p.m., and we couldn’t exit our rooms until the next morning.
That meant no bathroom visits. We had to hold it or pee in buckets.
There was one ritual at Growing Together that I embraced: before bed, we were expected to write in our journals.
Staff called these entries “moral inventories.” They told us to catalog bad things we’d done, painful things we’d endured, and how we’d been affected by both.
The more you confessed, the higher up the hierarchy you were allowed to move, which meant more freedoms—the right to go to the toilet unsupervised, say, or to attend school outside the facility.
Inventories that included sexual abuse or underage sex were particularly encouraged.
Given these incentives, lots of kids made stuff up.
I, however, didn’t need to lie. I had plenty of awful experiences to draw on.
In the beginning, I hoped that after reading my accounts of past abuses, the staff would take steps to punish those who’d hurt me.
Maybe the boys who raped me in the back of that car could be held to account?
But I soon realized that wasn’t the purpose of our journals.
The purpose was to gather information that the staff could use to keep us inmates in check.
I’ve kept a journal, off and on, ever since.
At times I’ve felt as if the act of recording what’s happened and how I feel about it is the only thing keeping me sane.
But back then, in that horrible place, the journaling—not the cockroaches or the mushroom soup—is what ultimately broke me.
To have chronicled, in blue ink on white paper, even a few of the atrocities I’d suffered and to have nothing done about them?
Counselors told me they’d alerted the police about my rape allegation, but apparently the boys said I had consented to the threesome, so no charges were filed.
That’s what made me see the truth. At Growing Together, my pain was nothing more than a sick form of currency, valuable only if used to climb the program’s supposed ladder of “achievement.” Once I figured that out, I reinforced my psychic brick wall.
“See? There’s no point,” I scolded myself. “Nobody cares. Fuck the world.”
I responded by running away. Over and over.
Sometimes I fled from the cars that delivered us from Growing Together to our overnight lodgings.
The moment the door locks popped open, I’d make a break for it.
That was by far the easiest way to escape.
Other times I waited until I got inside those fortified foster homes, with their deadbolts and their alarms. Then I’d find any sharp object and hold it to my throat, threatening to kill myself.
More often than not, the parent host would crumble.
Who needs the hassle of a dead teenager in their kitchen?
So they’d throw open their doors and let me run into the night.
I would then be free, sort of, until I was caught and returned to Growing Together.
Though I usually disguised my identity when I was on the run, introducing myself as Rachel (my “runaway name”) to anyone who asked, I wasn’t hard to track.
The facility’s staff had figured out where I liked to loiter and beg for change—the local Dunkin’ Donuts was my spot.
Eventually they’d find me and take me back to the White Room. But the next chance I got, I ran again.
This is just some of what I’d been through before I met Eppinger.
Perhaps it helps explain why I so readily got into a limousine with an old man I didn’t know.
It wasn’t just that I’d been brutally raped a few hours before, barely fleeing with my life.
No, I had felt worthless for years. Sometimes I worried that what the counselors at Growing Together made me say was true: that I was a whore, a slut, a druggie.
But even if I were all those things, I hadn’t always been.
Once, I’d been a daughter, a sister, a beloved little girl.
I hated to think about that. But thinking about it was crucial, I see now.
Remembering a better time, a time when I had value, may have been the only thing that kept me from giving up.