Page 5 of Broken Things

Brynn

Now

Friday night is movie night at Four Corners, and after dinner all the girls pile into the media room, half of them already in their pajamas. The DVD collection at Four Corners is pathetic and features exactly two kinds of entertainment: “recovery dramas”—bad TV movies about hard-core addicts getting to rock bottom and then having some epiphany and moving to Costa Rica to find love and do charity work—or the handful of normal features that meet Four Corners’ rules against any cursing, depictions of sex, violence, alcohol, or drugs, aka pretty much every single thing that makes a movie worth watching unless you’re six years old. The old Tom Hanks movieBigmakes the cut. So doesFrozen, supposedly because it celebrates the idea of self-acceptance. But I’m pretty sure it’s just because one of our counselors, Trish, loves the music.

Tonight everyone votes to turn on the local news. The bigstorm moving through the Northeast is supposed to reach us by midnight, and everyone’s freaking out about power outages and the water shutting off and being stranded with no AC for days.

“I didn’t even know we had TV,” a girl—I think her name is Alyssa—says. She looks kind of like a Muppet. She even has weird orangey skin. Either she really likes tanning beds or she grew up next to a nuclear power plant and is now radioactive.

“Do we have Showtime?” another girl, Monroe, asks. “Or HBO?” Monroe’s supposedly in for opiates, like me, but I’m pretty sure she might just be addicted to being the most annoying person alive. Every time she tells a story she has to include a metaphor from some dumb TV show.I felt the way that Arianna felt on season two ofThe Romance Doctorswhen she got passed over at the very last minute even though everyone thought she was going to win.

“Local news only,” Jocelyn, one of my favorite counselors, says. She punches at the remote.Input/Output Erroris blinking on the screen.

“What about ABC?” Monroe asks, with increasing desperation, like this is a life-or-death, stranded-in-the-desert situation and she’s asking how much time is left before we have to start eating people. “Or the CW?”

“Local news only, Monroe,” Jocelyn repeats, and Monroe slumps back against the sofa.

Jocelyn pushes a few more buttons and the TV blinks into life, showing a reporter clutching a microphone and holding on to the hood of a rain slicker with the other hand. Behind her, trees arebent practically sideways by a hard wind; even as she’s standing there, an awning rips off from one of the stores behind her and goes tumbling down the street.

It takes the sound a few seconds to catch up to the visuals. “... standing here on Main Street in East Wellington,” the reporter is saying, raising her voice to be heard over the wind. “And as you can see from the scene behind me, Tropical Storm Samantha has also arrived....”

East Wellington is where Wade lives. That’s only two towns over from Twin Lakes. For some reason, it isn’t my mom and sister but Mia who comes to mind: Mia locked up in her big house, listening to the wind batter the shutters. Even though I haven’t spoken to her in five years, haven’t even seen her from a distance in maybe three, I suddenly wish I could call her and make sure she’s okay.

“Tropical storm?” Alyssa reaches for the popcorn. “I thought they were saying hurricane.”

“Shhh,” another girl hushes her.

“What’s the difference?” someone else says.

“Shhh.” Now several girls speak at once.

“... Meteorologists are saying that so far wind gusts have reached only forty miles per hour, and so the storm has been downgraded from original reports predicting a historic hurricane,” the reporter says. “Still, they warn that the storm is just beginning and is expected to worsen as it meets the cold front coming off the Atlantic. It is still possible that we’ll be facinghurricane conditions—record winds, flooding, power loss, and road closures. Basically, a big mess.”

The screen cuts to another reporter, this one sitting behind a studio desk and wearing a badly fitting suit, with teeth way too square and white to be real. “Stay safe and stay home, people....”

“There goes visiting day.” Rachel makes a face. Rachel is in for depression and mood disorders, a cluster that includes everyone with serious suicidal tendencies—people who’ve done far more than, say, stick a thumbtack in their arm just to see if it would hurt. (It did.) Rachel has the sharp, sweet face of a squirrel and looks like the kind of girl you’d want to cheat off during a math test—until she rolls up her sleeves and all her old track marks are visible.

“What do you mean?” I say.

She jerks her chin toward the screen. “We’re marooned. See? Flood zone number one.” Now there’s a big map on TV showing different portions of Vermont and how much water they can expect. Addison County is highlighted in a fire-engine shade of red.

“The weather reports always exaggerate,” I say quickly. “They’re just trying to boost ratings.”

Rachel shrugs. “Maybe.”

“When’s the last time we had a tornado in Vermont?”

“Like, four years ago,” she says. “Why do you even care, anyway? No one’s coming for you.”

Stupidly, hearing the words out loud like that, I get a weird pingin my chest, like a popcorn kernel has gone down the wrong pipe.

“My cousin’s coming,” I say, which is mostly true. Wade Turner is actually my mom’s cousin’s son, which makes him once removed or twice baked or whatever you call it. For the past five years, he’s run a conspiracy site dedicated to the murder at Brickhouse Lane. He’s convinced, for reasons I don’t completely understand, that he can find the truth and clear my name. For twenty bucks in gas money—half of what my mom gives me for the month for incidentals, like candy bars and recovery-themed sweatshirts and postcards—he’ll drive an hour and a half from East Wellington to Four Corners to drop off bottles of dirty pee. He’d probably do it even if I didn’t pay him, just for the chance to grill me on what happened—not that I ever have anything new to say.

Wade is weird as hell, but at least he’ssomeone. My mom hasn’t visited Four Corners at all, and my older sister—her face narrowed so much it has achieved the look of an exclamation point—came only once, still wearing scrubs, to drop off a stack of magazines I hadn’t asked for and tell me that I was disappointing everybody. And my dad has been out of the picture forever, a fact that has never much bothered me but has been used time and again by therapists and bloggers and the state-appointed attorney who argued against my transfer to criminal court to explain everything from my supposed juvenile delinquency to the fact that I don’t like math.

My system with Wade is simple. Once every ten days, he makes the seventy-four-mile drive from East Wellington with a bottle ofyellow Gatorade rattling around on the floor of his old truck—a bottle that just happens to contains pee he snuck out of the state-sponsored clinic for junkies and drunks where he works during the week. He gets to Four Corners and signs in at the lobby. Then, pretending he’s desperate to use the bathroom after the drive, he ducks into the visitors’ bathroom and drops the Gatorade bottle in the toilet tank, which only occasionally gets checked for bags of pills or floating vodka bottles.

Later, after Wade and I do our obligatory chat—the most painful part of the whole process, as far as I’m concerned, since I have to pretend to actually be happy to see him and he just sits there with a dopey smile on his face, like a kid in front of a mall Santa Claus—I walk out with him to say goodbye, carrying an empty plastic soda cup from the cafeteria, fitted with a lid and straw. There are always so many people signing in and getting waved through security or blubbering while they talk to the counselors, it’s no big deal to use the visitors’ bathroom without anyone noticing. The pee goes in the soda cup, and then in the shot-glass-size containers the counselors distribute with my name written in Magic Marker on the label. Just in time to flunk my drug test and land myself a very late checkout.

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