Chapter One

All of the girls fell silent.

The woman took a few seconds to look around the room,
making eye contact with each of us. When she finally spoke,
her voice was cold, with a slight accent that said she had
lived years in places beyond our reach.

"Welcome to Hidden Oak," she said. "My name is Dr.
Spicer, and, together with Dr. Zsilinska, I'm in charge of the
psychiatric wing of the school. During this first month you'll
be undergoing some of the most strenuous tasks this school
will require of you. The Hidden Oak family works because
we're very careful about keeping you surrounded by the
most appropriate influences. Some disorders can be aggravated
by exposure to like minds, and some can be aided.
Therefore we will need to make frequent evaluations of you
and your social groupings. Please don't resist this process; it
is for your own good."

I was on my bed, pressed against the wall. The pounding
and yelling outside my door got more and more frantic. Any
moment, they'd bust in, and then they'd send me away. No
time to say good-bye to Trevor, the boyfriend they hated so
much. No time even to change clothes. I'd be stuck wearing a
shirt that smelled like the bottom of my drawer. And that's
what switched me from being scared to being mad. I started
yelling back.

I knew why they were sending me away, and in a small
way I even agreed. But I was still going to make it as hard as
possible for them. After my parents had arrived to "deal with
the incident," I'd shut myself into my room and hadn't come
out or talked to them or eaten any food except for the couple
of candy bars under my bed.

And now I was waiting for the moment my dad finally
busted open the lock, when my mom would come in and grip
my elbow in that death clutch of hers, screaming at me to
look at her. And, sure enough, the door crashed open, and I
saw in her expression how her grief had mixed with her usual
disappointment in me to combine into something new and
foreign and powerful. As she threw me toward my dresser,
her nails left red trails over my arm.

She blamed me. And now, I was going to be punished.

"I will share a few of Hidden Oak's initial rules with
you before I go any further. There is a uniform code here,
and to help enforce the dress policy, we will be locking
your belongings in storage until you leave. You may
not access your luggage for any other reason. Feminine
products and any permissible medications will be dispensed
through the school pharmacy. Any book you may
have been reading you can check out from the library once
the term starts."

She smiled like she'd made a joke.

None of us laughed.

"You may not make phone calls or access the Internet
while you are here. Your cell phones are already locked away.
We ask you to register your e-mail address and password
with us; we will check your messages for you, print out anything
appropriate, and leave it in your mailbox. If you are
uncomfortable with us having access to your e-mail, simply
don't give us the password. But this means you will not
receive any messages whatsoever. Your parents have been
instructed to contact the school directly in the event of an
emergency.

"You must understand: Your parents have signed you into
our custody for at least eighteen months. In the eyes of the
state, we are now your legal guardians. Your enrollment is
considered involuntary, and cannot be revoked except at our
discretion. In the past you may have turned to acting out as
an escape route. Misbehaving now can only result in decreasing
your freedom. Is that clear?"

None of us said anything. Dr. Spicer stared at the girl at
her side, a tall girl with a scowl and a hip, boyish haircut.
The girl stared back, and for a second it was a contest, like
they were pushing something invisible between them. I
could see it hover and then slide to the girl's side. She looked
away and said, "It's clear."

Then Dr. Spicer stared down each of us in turn, and
extracted the same answer. She ended with me.

"It's clear," I said.

"We've done the best we could for you," Mom said, not for
the first time. She'd been cooking breakfast, and hadn't
thought to put down the spatula. It was caked with egg and
green chilies, and the idea of her having spent half an hour
making a breakfast I'd refused to come out and eat just about
broke me inside.

"I don't want to go," I said, keeping my voice low and
pressing my palm against the raised lines on my arm. They'd
started to dot with blood. "I know I can't stay in Texas, and I
won't go back to Roanoke with you guys. But isn't there someone
else I can stay with?"

My mother's eyes began to brim with tears - and not the
sad kind.

"After what's happened here," she said, "I can't possibly
ask anyone I care for to take you in."

They were through with me.

They were ready to toss me away.

Dr. Spicer held my gaze for a moment. I shivered.

"I'm glad we all understand," she said. "I'll continue. Our
campus used to be home to Heath, one of the largest and
most prestigious boys' schools in the United States. In the
early 1990s, due to an event I've chosen not to discuss, the
school closed. Years later, our current headmistress obtained
a charter to found a unique therapeutic boarding program
that would provide a safe learning environment for girls at
the brink. You.

"Girls who attend Hidden Oak have similar basic traits,
though these traits can manifest themselves in very different
ways. What you all have in common is that you have
failed to respond to more traditional therapies.

"You are all lonely. You are all self-hating. For whatever
reason, you have decided that you have no control over your
future. Perhaps you never received affirmation at school.
Perhaps you feel that your guardians never gave you enough
attention, or perhaps they gave you inappropriate attention.
You are unable to imagine a happier future, so you rely
instead on immediate gratification. Your despair is so
entrenched that you can handle it only on a moment-tomoment
basis, turning to drugs, promiscuity, self-mutilation,
and criminal behavior."

"I didn't kill him," I said.

"Just pack your bags," Mom told me.

"Most of you have been informed that you're chemically
depressed. For a minority of you, this might actually be the
case. The rest of you have been misdiagnosed. What you are
is negatively minded, which is not the same as chemical
depression. You are dishonest with your most basic self. Once
we refocus your mind, these depressive symptoms should
subside.

"We will not accept self-pathologizing as an excuse for
bad behavior. If you get an F on an essay because it isn't
finished, do not claim you have attention deficit disorder.
You got an F because you didn't work long enough or hard
enough. Due to chronic overuse, we will not be prescribing
any attention-focusing medications. None."

This probably wasn't the best time to let my mind wander.
But I couldn't help but look at my fellow inmates. Truth
be told, I wasn't impressed. I wanted deviant girls to have
spiked bracelets, scars, angry expressions. Well, there were a
few angry expressions, for sure. But otherwise we could
have been any group of girls waiting for the first day of
school.

The only girl I'd really met was my future roommate. Her
name was Carmen, which is the kind of name a girl should
have if she's rose-between-her-teeth gorgeous. But this girl
was a Martha, or a Bertha, or some other character from an
assigned book you wouldn't bother to read.

I wondered which of the other girls would become my
friends. If any. I hoped there would at least be one. But there
was no guarantee. Other girls were always nasty to me. At
the far side of the room, there was a pair of really big skanks
that could have been sisters, and next to them was an Asian
girl (Filipina, maybe?) with that unfamiliar set to her face
that said she was actually foreign, not Asian American. I
watched two girls pass a note and felt a pang of jealousy,
because bonds were already being formed. The only person
near enough for me to pass a note to was Carmen. But she
didn't seem the type.

I switched my attention back to the doctor. Because now
she was getting to the good stuff.

"Most of you also have a history of significant alcohol or
drug abuse. You may have already wound up in a hospital,
or in jail. You may have resorted to theft to finance your
habits. You may have attempted suicide during an altered
state. Most of you have disordered eating. Many of you have
a history of sexual or physical abuse. In your previous school
situations, you have, consciously or not, used these histories
to impress others, to prove how different and deeper you are
than the average person. You have taken a perverse pride in
being so far off course. This is an inappropriate source of
self-esteem. Don't expect to get out of bathroom duty because
you had a flashback to cutting your arms. You will have frequent
individual therapy sessions, which are the sole venues
for expressing such feelings. This rule, like the others, is not
intended to be harsh or unfeeling; it is for your benefit.

"There will be no exclusive relationships here. You are
not here for sex or love. You are here to get better."

They didn't let me say good-bye to Trevor. They acted like
he'd never existed.

But he'd existed for me. At that moment, he was all that
existed for me.

They wouldn't even drop me off at the bus station in person,
and had a taxi take me. As I waited before the smudgy
glass doors, I realized how alone I'd suddenly become. How
alone I'd always been.

Dr. Spicer's hair kneeled on her scalp in rigid steel curls.
I tried not to stare at them.

She cleared her throat and stared us down. Her meaning
was clear:

Pay attention. Because I can destroy you.

"I'll end with the most important rule at Hidden Oak: You
may never discuss your past with your schoolmates. Every
girl here has dark stories that she would love to share late at
night when the lights are down, but you may not, under any
circumstances. You have been enrolled here as a last-ditch
effort, because your problem behaviors have ingrained themselves.
This is your one chance at rebirth. Fail at Hidden Oak
and you can only expect failure until the end of your life. Is
that clear?"

She shifted her focus around the room until each girl
nodded.

"You think your life has been spent battling insurmountable
forces that keep you from being happy. We won't dispute
the fact that harsh things may have happened to you. But
outside of those few uncontrollable events, the significant
majority of your crises have been created through your own
destructive and dangerous thought patterns.

"You are your own worst enemy. And together we will
defeat that enemy."

She didn't ask us if we had any questions. She didn't tell
us we had anything to look forward to.

She barely even pretended that we were worth saving.
I looked at my new classmates, these "destructive and
dangerous" girls. You could see it on our faces: We didn't
want her to know she'd hit the mark. There was something
rigid about our group scoffing, like it was a reflex more
than a real response. I would have expected some of us to
have argued back. How could we survive with no phones, no
clothes, no e-mail, and no talking about our pasts?
But despite our seeming disbelief, no one had said anything
the whole time, other than, "It's clear."