The Dead Inside: a true story
Author: Cyndy Etler
Sourcebooks Fire
On-sale: April 4,
2017
Young Adult,
Hardcover
$17.99
All Cyndy wanted was to be loved and accepted. By age fourteen,
she had escaped from her violent home, only to be reported as a runaway and
sent to a “drug rehabilitation” facility that changed her world.
To the public, Straight Inc. was a place of recovery. But behind
closed doors, the program used bizarre and intimidating methods to “treat” its
patients. In her raw and fearless memoir, Cyndy Etler recounts her sixteen
months in the living nightmare that Straight Inc. considered “healing.”
Note to Reader
You’re not going to believe this. Seriously, nobody does.
But this stuff happened, right here in America. In the warehouse down the
street.
The warehouse had a name: Straight,
Incorporated. Straight called itself a drug rehab for kids, but most of us had
barely even smoked weed. Take me, for example. In September, at age thirteen, I
smoked it for the first time. I tried smoking again in October. In November, I
got locked up in Straight—for sixteen months. The second we entered the
building, we all stopped being kids. We stopped being humans. Instead, we were
Straightlings.
Other than my father and me, each
person you read about here has a fake name. Many of the Straightlings are
smooshed-together versions of different people, but everything happened exactly
how I describe it. If you want proof, hit the epilogue. There you’ll find court
records, canceled checks, newspaper reportage, and Straight, Inc. internal
documents. Want more proof? Go online and read all of the survivor stories that
are just like mine.
And to my fellow Straightlings? Put
your armor on. You’re going back on front row.
Chapter 18:
EVERYONE MUST WEAR SHOES AND SOCKS
Something weird is going on. Something even weirder than the
regular daily freak show. I can feel it. I can hear it. I just can’t see
it yet.
Other than Amanda showing up, it’s been
a normal day—people singing stupid songs; kids sharing about their druggie
pasts; the teen staff strutting to the barstools like they’re on the red
carpet. But then the side doors open, and all these kids I’ve never seen before
come flooding in. They stand around the edges of group, wedged tight at the
shoulder in a human fortress. It’s creepy and just…wrong.
A half hour later, on some invisible
cue, they swarm around us, claw us up from our seats, and carry us across the
group room. The door goons are gone, so they march us right through the back
doors and into this empty room. The walls are bare brick and the carpet is
new-jeans blue. We’re tugged into rows, because with no talking allowed and no
chairs, how do we know where we’re supposed to sit? We should know, though. I
can tell by the way my carrier is yanking me around. She practically tears my
belt loop off.
Once we’re all
positioned and sitting cross-legged—with the boys’ side so close, if I
whistled, I’d ruffle their bangs—the bad guys show up: Matt King and the mean
blond smiler.
“Family rap!” Matt
yells.
The people around me start motivating
and I do it too, because I don’t want a fucking demon at my back. Without
anyone telling me, I put my arms up and shake them around. And that’s what gets
Matt’s attention. He’s scanning the tightly packed room, and his eyes sear into
me. They look even darker than yesterday.
“Cyyyyndy,” he goes.
The blond staff snaps her head my way.
Her smile blinks to life.
“Oh! Y-yeah?” I say back.
My fists are still up by my ears. This
isn’t what I was motivating for. I didn’t actually want to be called on.
“Stand up!” he says, fake friendly.
Everyone’s palms do the upward air
shove.
My rubbery legs make it hard to stand.
It’s silent except for the rustle of my clothes.
“So…?” Matt says from his barstool.
“What?” I say back. But I say it
confused, not snotty.
“What? What. What is that
this is family rap. You need to tell us about an incident from your
past, an incident involving your family.”
Four hundred eyes and chins are leveled
at me. They make it hard to think.
“Um…”
“Were you a good girl in your past,
Cyndy? Were you nice and sweet to your family?”
“Well, they—”
“I’m not asking about them. Were
you nice and sweet to your family?”
“Um, no?”
“That’s right, Cyndy! You’re doing
great. Now tell us about an incident with your family where you acted like your
druggie self.”
I just stand there. I don’t have a
family. I have a mother and a sister and a stepthing who’s the devil, plus his
kids. And “an incident”? I have no idea what I’m supposed to say.
“CYNDY ETLER!”
My whole name. He says my whole name.
Like he has some…ownership of me.
“Yeah?”
“We’re waiting!”
“I—I don’t know.”
I might be starting to cry a little.
He’s still staring at me, his eyebrows
pointed into sharp little horns.
“I thought I’d give you another chance,
Cyndy. But you’ve wasted enough of this group’s time. Have a seat.”
I can’t sit down fast enough, so I fall
instead. My hand catches a girl’s shoulder, but she jerks it off like she hates
me. I feel it, like a heat.
The group starts to yell a “Love ya—”
at me, but Matt cuts them off. “No!”
Next the girl who hates me stands up,
to share how she made her father beat her. “I remember, this one time?” she
starts out.
That’s Straight code for, Here’s why
my parents hate me enough to leave me here.
“I remember saying
to my dad, ‘Maybe if you didn’t drink so much, Mom wouldn’t need therapy.’ I
said that to my dad. I ended up in the hospital with a broken arm after
that sweet nothing. And I deserved it, one hundred percent. He fed me and
clothed me and kept a roof over my head, and that’s the thanks I give him? I
can’t believe he’ll even still look at me.”
Matt doesn’t just
let the group tell her Love ya, he leads it. Before she even
sits, he’s all, “Love ya, Sammie!” so loud it rattles the doorknobs.
At the end of
family rap, Lucy tells us what song she wants to hear—one of those ones from
Sunday school. It goes, “They will know we are Straightlings by our love, by
our love. They will knoooow we are Straightlings by our love.”
The next slap of weird comes when they
push us back into the never-ending beige of the group room. The linked chairs
are still in rows, but they’ve been turned around to face an ocean of
gray folding chairs. There’s enough seats for all of Communist China. It’s like
a chair warehouse, which, ding! That’s what this place is! It’s a
warehouse, literally. It’s a giant storage locker where, for a fee, parents can
disappear their fuckups and rejects.
That’s another reason I’ll be outta
here tomorrow. No way does my mother have the money for this place, when she
can barely put five dollars of gas in her car. Twenty-four hours, and I’ll be
on my way back to Jo’s; forty-eight and I’m in Steve’s room. How could their
parents not let me stay with them, when they hear what I’ve been
through?
I can feel my Levi’s on my
thighs, my denim on my back. Just thinking about Levi’s feels so good, I
barely notice that I’m picking up a dinner tray and getting pushed back to the
chairs. In my mind I’m like, one hundred percent in Levi’s…until the hand in my
pants lets go while I’m still standing.
“Uh?” I kind of grunt, turning my head
to the demon behind me.
“Go down the row,” she says. “Sit in
that first open seat.”
Feeling like the balloon some little kid
let go of, I look down the row, and oh my God! It’s not the front row! I’m out
of the bull’s-eye!
“Thanks,” I say.
I get a mean Shhh! for a reply,
but it’s drowned out by this earsplitting screech.
Since I’m standing, I can see what’s going on. But, God. I wish I couldn’t.
It’s Amanda. She’s surrounded by
demons, and she’s fighting them all at once. Crouched at her back is the
biggest guy you’ve ever seen. He loops his arms around her from behind, linking
his hands in a hate hug. But even worse is what they’re doing to her arms. Two
guys are gripping her wrists, Jacque style. Matt King style. They’re spreading
them like airplane wings, out and down and fast. Tomorrow she’ll have handcuff
bruises. She’s telling them she hates them with animal sounds, not words. I
don’t know if I’m more scared for her or for them.
A fist hits my spine, so I move down
the row. I’m trying not to hear it all: the screams, the thwap of flesh
on flesh, the shriek of metal as a kicked chair scrapes across the floor. When
I get down to my seat, I can’t help it. I look back at Amanda right as the big
guy snaps his hand over her mouth. He’s—he’s gagging her. Her face is red, and
it’s getting redder. Her eyes bulge out, and she slams her head forward,
then back.
There’s a crack as her skull hits his, and a shree! as
Amanda throws opens her throat. She head-cracked the gagger. She got his hand
off her mouth.
“Gimme my fucking Doc!” she screams.
She rips her bare foot away from the
guy who was pinning it; he lunges and tackles her shin. Other guys are running
at her. That’s when I sit down. I sit and pray for somewhere to put my tray, so
I can plug my ears. Amanda’s noises are shredding me. It’s like she knows what
she’s doing, fighting off all these guys. This is why she needs armor clothes.
I don’t want to see or hear or know that it’s happening again.
“Intake room! Sit on ’er!”
It’s our hero, Matt King. He’s striding
across the room. He’s calm, he’s casual. He’s happy.
There’s more fleshy struggle sounds,
more running feet.
“Group. Look,” Matt says, in a voice
you don’t ignore. “This could be you, if you try to run.”
We spin around to watch Amanda, who’s
being carried across the room by six guys. She’s a human casket. She’s got one
boot on, and her body’s rippling, trying to shake the boys off her. And she’s
howling.
“Gimme my Doc Marten, you cock-fucking
bastards! I’ll kill you! I’ll—”
Another guy runs over and jams a hand
over her mouth. His teeth glint through his smile.
In English class, one of Mrs. Skinner’s
vocab words was “maxim,” which is a wise little phrase about life. She gave us
this example they use in Japan, to make sure everybody acts the same as
everybody else: “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” Amanda is the
sticking-up nail. But she’s not smooth and straight, like a regular nail. She’s
all knotted up. They can’t hammer her flat, so they’re killing her instead.
The funeral procession ends as the boys
carry Amanda through a door to the left of the kitchen. It’s a beige door,
painted to match the walls, like they don’t want anyone to know it’s there. The
door slams; the group room’s silent. It sounds like the end of the world.
Cyndy Etler was homeless at fourteen, summa cum
laude at thirty. In her current work as a teacher and teen life coach,
Etler happily teaches teens that books work better than drugs. She lives with
her husband and dogs in North Carolina. Find her at CyndyEtler.com.
Author: https://twitter.com/cdetler
No comments:
Post a Comment