Chapter 7 #3
There was no rehabilitation here. No real teachers.
I’d say it was a military camp in disguise.
The classrooms were empty except for chairs and tables.
Although we’d never sat there. I guess it was all for show when parents visited, hesitating, not knowing if this torture place would suit their child.
Run, I wish I could have told every one of them.
But it was a last resort for parents who couldn’t control their offspring.
And so they went here, and so did I. All of us, brought here for a year to wake up at four and do nonstop physical activities, walk in the forest, fight one another, endure solitary confinement, starvation when it was on the menu, and unfair punishment from the guards every single day.
Didn’t look down? One strike of a stick to the knees.
Didn’t make your bed properly because a giant fucking asshole unmade it for you? No food for two days.
Violence grew in this place; I could smell it.
Breeding in the walls, under the cafeteria tables, in the beds where we pretended to sleep but kept our shoes on because bare feet made you too slow.
There were guys who could be allies. One was named Matt, and as of now, we had traded a chocolate bar for a piece of bread, and I guess that was the closest thing to friendship around here.
The small kid swallowed.
“Hit him,” the big guy said again, then pushed me forward. The small kid stumbled back, hands half-raised. Just like me in front of my father every week, when he decided a whipping with his buttery leather belt was needed.
“Don’t,” he whispered. I looked over my shoulder. Johann’s grin widened.
“What? Rich boy’s got manners?” The others laughed. Some didn’t. But most of them had that unforgettable, sick, hungry hope people get when they want someone else to suffer loudly enough to distract from their own pain.
“I’m not hitting him,” I said. He shoved me so hard I hit the lockers shoulder-first. Metal screamed behind me. Pain burst down my arm, hot and immediate, and before I could breathe through it, he was in my face.
“You think you’re better than us, pretty face?”
Was I?
Not really.
I had arrived at Westbridge with expensive shoes, a family name, and the stupid belief that not wanting to be violent meant I wasn’t violent.
I thought there was a difference between me and boys like Johann because I read books, said please to adults, and knew which fork to use at dinner parties.
But in the background, my life was as ugly as theirs.
I remember after the last party my parents hosted for my mom’s birthday.
My father asked me to find him in his office late at night and teach me how to act like a man.
Do better. Be sharper. Not fucking talk to the help.
And so on. All of it taught by the end of his fist. He broke my nose twice in two years and told my mom it was rugby.
I didn’t want to break the perfect picture she had of him.
She was happy. I wasn’t. It didn’t matter.
But in times like these, I would remember rage sitting in my stomach like a dog that had been starved for years.
“I said I’m not hitting him,” I told Johann.
My head snapped sideways, the taste of copper invading my mouth.
The world tilted bright and white for one second, and in that white place I saw my father’s face.
You’ll thank me one day, Tristan. Men today are too soft.
You need to harden yourself. As if manhood was something beaten into you by strangers while adults bet on you and called it discipline.
I never wanted to be violent. But he was about to crack my neck if I didn’t act.
Calm coated me all over, and I shoved my fist right into his nose, hearing the bone snap, his scream following as silence surrounded us; long gone were the chants of his name.
I glanced at the kid who still stood by the lockers, frozen.
“Go,” I commanded calmly. And he did, with tears in his eyes, holding his arms like they could fall if he didn’t.
A guard came, slammed me against the wall, and grabbed me by the green collar of our uniform.
I didn’t fight it. I knew what would happen.
Solitary. For at least two days. Justice was a foreign word here, and with no ability to contact my parents, I had no strings to pull, as if I had any in the first place.
I still had eight months to go here. And my biggest fear wasn’t getting beaten up.
It was becoming the one salivating at the thought of it.
Not my father, I repeated to myself in those four walls I had become so accustomed to. Never like my father.
Ella
I never thought that one day, I would stand in the hallway of a private care facility, staring at the door behind which my father now slept, and wonder if I had already lost the only home I had left.
Not the house. The house had never truly been mine, had it?
Neither the walls I knew like the back of my hand, nor the kitchen I had cleaned until my fingers ached.
All of it belonged to Mara the second she decided I was useful only as something to take from.
But Dad… Dad had been home. And now he was here, in a room two streets from Tristan’s house, surrounded by machines and nurses and the sterile scent of safety I was still learning to trust. Mara and my sisters had tried to end me, and now it was my duty to protect my father from their hands too.
Matt, a tall blond man with scars on his face and the build of a soldier, had driven us here, then followed us through the facility entrance.
Tristan walked by my side, his left hand roaming under his suit jacket once in a while, as if I had not noticed his holster.
It changed the way he moved. With it, he looked wider, his step heavier.
I had seen the gun, and it did not scare me. On the contrary.
“Stand by,” Tristan muttered to Matt, who exchanged a nod with him before stopping near the hallway entrance, facing outward, guarding us.
All I managed was a small thank you that would surely never be enough.
This stranger was guarding us with his life, and I could not be more grateful.
Waving from the tip of my chin toward him, I signed, thank you, hoping he would understand. Mat gave me a short nod.
I had expected something resembling a hospital, but the place looked more like a home than a medical facility, with plants, sage and pumpkin-colored walls, polished wooden floors, and large prints of European capitals lining the hallways.
Framed watercolor landscapes hung here, photographs of vegetables and birds there, and the faint scent of lavender mixed with disinfectant floated through the air.
Flowers sat on a reception desk, a glass water dispenser filled with slices of lemon and cucumber, and wide windows let in pale morning light.
Even the air smelled expensive, and I was glad for it.
Dad deserved the best, and Tristan had delivered.
A woman's voice came from behind the door, cheerful and unlike Mara’s.
Right. The personal nurse Tristan had hired in addition to the already existing staff here.
Gretchen. Tristan had told me her name in the car, slowly, watching my hands in case I needed him to repeat it.
She was the one who had taken care of Dad during my absence.
“Do you want me to come in with you?” Tristan asks, voice low.
I shake my head. Then stop. I do not know.
I do not know what I want. I’m underwater, and someone underwater cannot talk, cannot ask or answer a question, cannot decide.
All they can do is struggle and try not to drown.
As if reading my distress, Tristan swallows, clenches his hand, and stands near Dad’s bedroom door like a bodyguard, waiting on me while giving me space.
Approaching the door, I stop ever so slightly, and I cannot be sure if it just happens, if it is me or him but as I pass the door, the backs of our hands brush against one another.
The air shifts in the almost imperceptible touch of his skin, lighting candles back in my cavern of misery, opening doors and windows and letting a ray of sunshine collapse on its walls. I do not flinch. And that’s something.
Pushing the door open, I step inside. Dad is there.
Alive. Sleeping. His bed is wider than the one he had at home, with clean white sheets, a navy blanket folded at his waist, and several machines placed neatly on one side.
A small sitting area, a dresser, a wall-mounted television, and a window overlooking a courtyard with tall grass moving in the wind.
On his dresser sits the framed photo of me from his bedroom.
A small Black woman stands by Dad’s bed, holding a remote near him.
“Right, just a tiny bit more and…” Noticing me, she holds one finger in the air.
“Almost done, almost done. And…right. All good.” She places the remote neatly on the side table, looks at Dad, then circles the bottom of the bed to come to me.
Frozen, two feet inside the door, I stare at my father while Tristan watches me from the corner of my eye.
I had pictured Dad dead so many times in twelve days that I am not sure if he can actually be alive now.
My bones seem to carry the weight of every version of grief I rehearsed in the dark.
“Nice to meet you, Ella. I’m Gretchen,” the nurse says, with the smile of a woman who has seen it all and somehow still kept a heart big enough to hold other people’s worries.
“Mr. Ashford hired me to take care of your dad and supervise his transfer here. I’m sure you have many questions.
Would you like a glass of water?” From the side table, she takes a notebook and a pen and hands them to me.
I take them with both hands, but I do not move. Stunned. Watching my father.