"KidsPeace" by Shannon Frost Greenstein
It’s called KidsPeace.
It’s called KidsPeace, and I have never had a bigger laugh than when I first heard this, except for when my WASP-y, Junior League, Professional-Philanthropist-mother learned I had a heroin problem. That was even funnier.
But now I’m here, and while I can still find the black humor in naming a treatment facility for adolescent addicts after any variation of John Lennon’s concept of “Peace,” I’m rapidly running out of patience for anything else this place might have to offer.
I mean, this isn’t my first rodeo.
I’ve gone through the rehab thing more times than I care to count. It must have started around the age of 13, and now, however many attempts later, my 18th birthday is glimmering on the horizon like a mirage, a mirage promising crystal clear water and a respite from the sun and the inability of my so-called “parents” to intervene any further in my life, my vicious opiate addiction notwithstanding.
I mean, sure, I tried it their way, in the beginning. I DBT’d and CBT’d and practiced Mindfulness and made Crisis Intervention Plans and took up kickboxing; I tried to build “a life worth living,” as one Dr. Linehan is fond of saying.
But when you have both nature and nurture against you – when generations of mental illness, never discussed, never “appropriate” for polite conversation, rear their head; when you’re not allowed to talk about crazy old Great-Aunt Greta, who literally spent the majority of her manic-depressive adult life locked in the family attic back in Germany, lest any nosy neighbors find out; when you are abused throughout your formative years because money has never, ever, ever equaled class – you kind of take the resulting Substance Abuse Disorder in stride.
I’m not a bad person, you know. I’m not lazy, or depraved, or a poor little rich girl who can’t cut out the party drugs. I’ve just always, always, relentlessly always been in pain, and self-medicating is the only thing that’s ever given me any relief. And, oh, do I need that relief; I require it like I require oxygen and protein and glucose and water.
Because when I have it – when I have a reprieve from my usual all-consuming misery, when I have that blessed room in my head to breathe and feel and dream and just be, in that sacred place far removed from the omnipresent noise that plagues my every thought – I firmly believe I contain extraordinary, monumental things I can offer this world.
I am blessed, you see, with extremely high intelligence. This belief that I will change humanity is not unfounded; I’ve been told as much by the numerous psychologists and educators to which my parents have dragged me for over a decade. To put it plainly, if I overcome this addiction without succumbing to overdose first, I will, in all likelihood, make a substantial contribution to history. It’s because my brain – as frightening a place as it is to reside within – is a truly formidable force to behold.
However, literally nothing is going to happen while I’m locked away here. There’s only so much group therapy and cathartic art projects can do to help you realize your full potential, particularly when you’re sequestered from the world among the sharp peaks and jagged valleys of the Poconos, cloistered in an ancient opulent mansion with locked entrances, supposedly healing but really just rotting away in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
I don’t need this place to heal. I can heal on my own. I need to leave.
I feel it getting worse by the day. I can’t breathe in here. There is no space for my brain to maneuver, no opportunity for it to generate worthwhile thought. These girls, bless their hearts, they’re not going to contribute anything to mankind. They are all ordinary, with a capital O, and mediocre, with an equally capital M, and please don’t think me arrogant for saying so. I mean, our world runs on the ordinary and the mediocre, and they are the ones who keep things moving when geniuses like Leonardo Da Vinci or Nikola Tesla or me gum up the works of society. These young women deserve inner peace just as much as anyone else, but KidsPeace, I guarantee, is not the way to find it. Not for them, and definitely not for me.
If I’m ever going to get on top of heroin, I know I will have to do it entirely on my own.
After all, I’ve had enough therapy to give me the tools to overcome my addiction; I have the intelligence and the willpower and the drive. I just need freedom, freedom to do all the work, without parents, or doctors, or turnkeys who watch me like Foucault’s jailers; without adults who lord over therapy sessions and pour medication down my throat and force me into bed at the end of the night. Without any of that, and with just a little freedom, I might actually have a chance to accomplish something significant; to be remembered; to fulfill my destiny.
I can beat this. I know I can. I just can’t be here while I do it.
So…I’m out.
###
“Goodnight, Lyndsay,” says the counselor, flipping off the light switch.
“Goodnight,” I sigh, wide awake, mind churning, yet again horizontal in bed about eight hours earlier than I would typically think about going to sleep, given my usual (and apparently unhealthy!) nocturnal schedule back home.
It has been another day, a day painfully like every other day I have experienced while locked up at KidsPeace. Someday, I’ll take the time to write out my postmodernist philosophical theory about restraint versus rehabilitation versus recovery, but suffice to say, no one who works here presently is particularly concerned about those nuances.
“Are you going to sleep?” asks my roommate, a waifish girl of 15 who got hooked on her mother’s benzodiazepines and was unceremoniously dropped on the porch of KidsPeace after stealing the family car in a daze and demolishing a statue in the center square of her bucolic little town.
We both typically burrow under our comforters with contraband flashlights and books to pass the first few hours after lights out, me reading Hegel, her reading Jennifer Weiner. I am not not growing fond of her, if only because her appearance completely belies grand theft auto and I enjoy that dialectic. Like I said, I’m reading Hegel.
“I’m going to try,” I say. “I’m not in the mood to read tonight,” I say. “If I don’t hear my alarm tomorrow, will you get me up?” I say.
It is a ruse, of course. I am never not in the mood to read, and there’s no way I will sleep through my alarm in the morning, simply because I will not be here.
Tonight, I am running away.
“Of course,” she says, sweetly, and I feel a stab of guilt. They will wake her up when they find me missing, absent from the hourly bed checks, and grill her about my whereabouts.
I have taken pains, naturally, to keep anything from appearing suspicious or out of the ordinary; come morning, I will have simply vanished. My one qualm remains that she might get heat for my disappearance afterwards, the powers-that-be finding it hard to believe she could not know the specifics of my plan. I am certain, however, that she does not know, that she is completely unaware of my intentions; after all, I do know how to make a graceful exit without leaving any tracks. Like I said, this isn’t my first rodeo.
“Goodnight, Jamie,” I say, mentally wishing her well in the future. She is a nice girl, a girl who swallows her mother’s pills to forget what her stepfather does to her at night, to forget that no one believed her when she spoke up about it, and I am completely sincere when I say I want nothing but peace for her, too; if she can even find it on the outside, because it is currently nowhere to be found in here.
I lie awake for hours, eyes closed, hearing the bustle of med techs and night nurses in the hall, feigning sleep every hour on the hour when a security guard opens the door to confirm our combined presence in the room.
I sense Jamie finally turn out her flashlight, close her book in a bedside drawer, turn over and rustle the covers. Eventually, her breathing becomes deep and regular, and I start to review the plan I’ve put together over the past few months.
I’ve compiled bits of data like a scavenger: Exit routes, shift changes, security lighting and the sweeping paths of the video cameras outside, information patiently gathered over a matter of weeks during those precious supervised walks along the grounds; the autumn leaves drifting down, a chill in the air, the first flakes of snow leaking from the leaden clouds.
I have a contingency plan, and a contingency plan for that plan; I’ve thought through every tributary of this escape. I’m ready for any situation I may face on my way out the door, forearmed with a strategy for each eventuality, steps on a list, an algorithm ensuring my total success.
Finally, the door opens again, the guard shining her light briefly on our faces, and shuts quietly. I immediately sit up, throw on the sweatshirt I’ve hidden under my pillow, and tie the shoes waiting under my bed. I know exactly when the guard will next walk by my door; I know exactly when this shift of nurses will transition to the next, attention momentarily scattered, a brief lack of supervision that equals my red carpet out the door.
I slip out of the room and down the hall, pausing temporarily in the wide maw of a coat closet as a janitor walks by with a push brush. With no eyes on me, I sprint to the emergency stairs, run silently to the ground floor, peer out through the window pane in the fire door, and prepare for a final hurried passage down the visitors’ hall to arrive at the lavish entryway.
There is no one in sight, of course, because I have planned this well, and I am – are you ready for it? – able to walk directly out of the front door, the only door not automatically locked from the inside. I stand outside in the brisk air for only a second, getting my bearings and inhaling my freedom, before dashing around the side of the building, taking pains to avoid the wide swatch of lawn visible to the nearest camera. I descend the grassy hill down to the old fence marking the perimeter of the property, my flashlight sketching unsteady trails of weak light through the nighttime darkness. Then I scale the rickety wooden posts and drop gracefully onto the other side.
I am no longer a resident of KidsPeace, and I take a moment, just a moment, to revel in that fact. Then I glance skyward, to discover one contingency I have, surprisingly, not considered; namely, that the sky would be overcast, the miles of forest between me and the highway totally obscured by thick clouds over the moon and stars. I must confess, my face grows red as I realize my mistake: I was so focused on escaping the actual building that I did not fully consider every angle of trekking to safety afterward.
But time was of the essence, I think you can agree, and removing myself from the facility’s surveillance system was, after all, the primary objective. I am still way better off now – alone in the dark woods, shivering slightly, proudly a resident of that location called nowhere in particular – than I was just a few minutes ago.
I can, I realize now, take all the time I want getting myself to the main road; I am able to take all night if I need. Because I am, as of this moment in space and time, free. I am free from abuse, and from adults who are less intelligent than me on a good day, and from talk therapy against my will, and even – right now, at least – free from the pervasive angst I endure that only heroin manages to quiet. Right now, I am free, and I am happy.
I glance forlornly at the sky a final time, study the length of the fence in either direction, peer outward into the abyss of night, aim my flashlight, and start to walk.
###
I walk, and walk.
The sound of the highway comes closer. My flashlight batteries start to die, and the light dims.
I walk, until my foot comes down wrong directly on a large rock in the middle of the path, and my ankle turns. I pitch sideways, a pang of agony traveling through my nervous system, up to my brain and back again, and, unable to regain my balance, hit the ground with tremendous force; rolling, gaining speed, down the steep face of the forest floor. I stop only when my leg wedges in a rocky crevasse, my body abruptly ceasing its flailing, my femur breaking cleanly down the middle.
###
I black out.
###
“Lyndsay!” “Lyndsay!”
I come to consciousness gradually for a few seconds, then the rest of the way all at once.
“Lyndsay, where are you?!”
The sky might be imperceptibly lighter than it was when I escaped, or maybe it is just the combined stream of several dozen flashlights; big, industrial ones, the flashlights usually reserved for combing through accident debris in the middle of the night for evidence and teeth. Those flashlights mean first responders, and as I slowly take in my surroundings, I indeed see bright blues and reds flashing against the tree trunks above me.
Shit, I think, and then say, aloud and with venom, “SHIT.”
I cannot exactly feel my broken leg, so cold are all my limbs right now, but I also cannot not feel it, and I am scared to move. It would not take much right now to make me scream, and, call me unrealistic, but I am still fully committed to seeing this escape through. I am determined to remain hidden, because it simply would not do to be discovered now, after coming so far.
I am, that is to say, NOT going to return to KidsPeace tonight, but as I frantically run through my options and the voices calling my name get closer and the pain becomes harder and harder to ignore, I begin to feel the first traces of desperation.
Then I see it, I see the pool of light from a flashlight approach the divot of rock in the earth where I am lying, and in an instant, I feel the desperation take over. I am no longer a teenaged genius, and I am no longer a master of escape, and I am no longer the player at this table with the upper hand. Instead, I am only my parents’ daughter once more, and a perpetual disappointment yet again; I am a heroin user still unable to find relief, and a frightened child as I was before, nowhere safe to turn. And in this moment of realization and rage, I feel the veneer of civility, of my humanity, slip away at the sheer unfairness of it all.
“Lyndsay, can you hear me?” I hear an adult voice call, and I am suddenly powerless to react otherwise.
“GO AWAY!” I scream, uncontrollably. “GO AWAY, DON’T TOUCH ME, STAY AWAY!”
“I found her!” I hear, but I am too far gone emotionally. The brain of which I am so proud, of which everyone has always been so proud, despite my demons, despite my addiction, has lost its grip on reality. I am, in this second, faced with a return to how thing have always been, faced with all-encompassing suffering and cruelty and pain, a seventeen year-old Sisyphus alone on a hill with a rock of unfathomable dimension to carry for all of existence, and I am dissociating at the trauma of it all.
“JUST GO, LET ME DIE, DON’T TOUCH ME!” I continue shrieking, as I see bodies rappelling down the rock face, awash in blinking blue and red. Light rips through my corneas as I am illuminated by the beams of multiple flashlights, and still I yell, truly believing the sheer force of my anger and despair will physically repel those who have come to deliver me back unto my own personal Hell.
“It’s going to be OK!” I hear over and over, empty reassurances for a being who is beyond capable of hearing or understanding them. “Lyndsay, don’t be scared, we have you, we’re coming!”
But I am hysterical now, and unable to take in anything empirically beyond the visceral feel of vitriol spilling from my lips, directed at my ebullient rescuers, and my harsh, rapid breathing in the spaces between.
“Lyndsay, we’re coming!”
But what will you find? I wonder between wild screams, instinctual, primordial, originating from deep within my lizard brain, where the survival urge lives. What will be left, and where can I possibly go from there?
Eventually, I get too tired to keep yelling.
Shannon Frost Greenstein resides in Philadelphia with her children, soulmate, and persnickety cats. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, a Contributing Editor for Barren Magazine, and a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy. Shannon was awarded a writing residency through Sundress Academy for the Arts in October 2019. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Crab Fat Magazine, Chaleur Magazine, Bone & Ink Lit Zine, Spelk Fiction, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter at @mrsgreenstein or her website: shannonfrostgreenstein.wordpress.com. She comes up when you Google her.