“Darlings, we’re getting off to a bad start. Can we just begin?”

“I feel like we oughta have some kinda ‘Hear ye, hear ye’ announcement,” Cassie said. “To make it all official.”

“I see your point,” V agreed. “Ladies, welcome to our new, what is it, a club? A clique?”

“Oh, let’s call it a club,” Martha said excitedly.

“A divinely fabulous…..” Bebe said.

“Ultra-exclusive,” I interrupted.

“Club,” Martha crowed.

“Of the cuckoos!” Cassie added.

“Okay then. Welcome to the Divinely Fabulous Ultra-Exclusive Club of the Cuckoos,” V said. “Now, it’s time to get serious. After a year and half I’ve discovered ways to get around many of Red Rock’s rules. I hate this place, and I’ll do anything to fight it. I consider it my revolution from within.”

V, Bebe, and Cassie went on to explain to Martha and me, among other things, how to sneak out letters by giving them to a sympathetic soon-to-be graduate or a trustworthy Level Fiver or Sixer before a town break. Failing that, one or two of the food-service guys could usually be trusted to smuggle a letter out.

“But you better check with us before you give a letter to anyone,” V warned. “Red Rock gives the staff bonuses if they rat us out, but they also pay them crap the rest of the time, so some of the guys would rather stick it to them than earn twenty bucks for being a stool pigeon.”

“Plus, I guarantee that after you’ve been here a while, you’ll be able to get letters from non-family.” Cassie gave me a reassuring wink.

“How?” I asked incredulously. “They read everything.”

“Brit, darling, listen and learn,” Bebe said. “You just have the person pretend to be your mother or brother or whoever. They read our outgoing mail, but they only skim the incoming stuff and if it says ‘Love, Mom and Dad,’ they’ll buy it. They are so pathetically lazy, thank goodness.”

“This is true, but you have to be careful and make sure to speak in code. Because if the letter gets tagged, you’re screwed,” V warned.

“What’s the code?” I asked.

“Do you guys hear something?” Martha asked.

We all froze. “I swore I heard a voice,” Martha whispered. V put her fingers to her lips. We all went silent. The only sound was our breathing and a clock ticking in the hall. I held my breath for extra insurance. I didn’t want to get caught now that I was finally making friends.

After five minutes of silence, V went out for a look and saw the guard snoring away. “False alarm. We’re fine.”

“I’m sorry, I just thought…..” Martha said.

“No, it’s good to be vigilant.” V gave Martha a reassuring nod.

“Can you get back to this code thing?” I asked, thinking of a person I’d like to get mail from.

“Right. Here’s what we’ve done, and it’s worked so far,” V instructed us. “Discussions about the conditions at Red Rock should be veiled as worries about the health of Grandma, Grandpa, or Aunt Josephine or whoever. Declarations of affection or love from friends or boyfriends should be made through gushy descriptions of nice weather. Of course, the first contraband letter you mail should explain all the basic rules. After that it’s up to you to come up with your own code. It’s all a big wink-wink nudge-nudge thing. You’ll know what you guys are talking about. Bebe has even managed to have some mail sex with her pool boy, all in code, and he doesn’t speak English.”

“His name is Pedro and yes he does,” Bebe shot back.

“But don’t get complacent, and don’t get too clever or cute. You never know when they might single out a letter. That Clayton is smart, and if she smells a rat your goose is cooked.”

“Ain’t that a mixed metaphor?” Cassie asked.

V shot her a serious look. “If you get caught, bad diction will be the least of your troubles. Be careful. Be alert. And watch yourself here. Because they’re watching us.”

We all sat there in an ominous silence for a few minutes. V checked the hall clock. “It’s almost three, so we should get back, but there’s one more thing I want to tell you about. After you’ve been here a while, it’s possible, under very particular conditions, to arrange a breakout for a few hours. Once you get town privileges, you can slip away for a while. Cassie’s done it. This one girl, Deanna, even managed to disappear from a forced overnight hike and came back the next day with the staff none the wiser. That happened before I got here, but she’s famous for it. We’re miles from anything worth seeing, so breakouts are more of a last-ditch resort, when you just need to escape for a little while—and I don’t think you newbies should try just yet. But it makes you feel better knowing it’s an option, doesn’t it?” We all nodded. Martha raised her hand.

“Martha, we’re not in class—what is it?”

“The food,” she squeaked.

“Oh, of course. It’s so simple I forgot,” V said. “Socks.”

“Huh?”

“Socks,” Bebe elaborated. “Wear those big white sweat socks, the terribly unfashionable ones that bunch down your legs. And sneak your food into them. No one will ever notice, and you can dump the stuff in the yard.”

Martha looked at her own thick white socks. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“We need to get back before the guard wakes up,” V said. “So listen to this last bit. It’s important. This place is not about fixing you. It’s about warehousing you while your clueless parents are bilked out of thousands of dollars. Sheriff, Clayton, and the counselors do not care about us. And they don’t want us to care about each other, so we’ve got to be sneaky. If we rely on each other, we won’t go as nuts as our parents think we are.” V put her arm into the circle.

“One for all and all for one?” Martha said, like a question. V nodded, and Martha put her hand in the circle.

“We, my dears, mustn’t forget that we are the Divinely Fabulous Ultra-Exclusive Club of the Cuckoos,” Bebe said, adding her hand.

“Sisters,” said Cassie, putting her hand in.

“Sisters,” I said, clapping my right hand on top of theirs. I felt the full strength of all of us together. “Sisters in Sanity.”

Chapter 9

Dear Brit:Happy Thanksgiving. Looking forward to a big turkey dinner at school? It’ll be a quiet one at home. Your grandmother had hoped to join us, but her hip is hurting too much for the drive and she hates to fly. I’m sure if you were here, she would make the trip, though. She’d do anything for you.We have received a few progress reports from the school. I understand your grades are up, which your mother and I are very happy about. The psychiatrist explains that you are making progress but are also resistant to facing up to some things. I hope you will take advantage of this opportunity to work through your anger.We have also been told that you are now permitted to write letters. I look forward to hearing from you. Perhaps we will come for a visit after Christmas, if that is acceptable to your teachers.I don’t know what else to tell you. Rainy and dark here as usual. We’ve all been sick with bad colds for the last month. Tell me about where you are. While I know you don’t want to be there, it must be a relief to have escaped the gray of Portland.I love you.
 DadP.S. I’ll take a picture of Billy holding a drumstick for you!Dear Dad:I’m sure Thanksgiving will be fantastic this year. We’ll all sit around in our warm cozy rooms and eat a home-cooked dinner and talk about how thankful we are for the constant supervision and the forced labor and the insults and the spying. Then we’ll pig out on pumpkin pie and watch It’s a Wonderful Life on TV. The next day, we’ll go to the mall to shop for presents.Hello? I know you think I’m the deluded one, but just what kind of place do you think you sent me to? I’m not supposed to tell you how awful Red Rock is, and you probably wouldn’t believe me anyway.Still, I don’t understand why I’m here. The counselors seem to think the trauma of Mom has turned me into some wild, bad girl, but you and I know that’s not true. I think the real reason I’m here is not because of you or me or what happened to Mom, but because of your wife. She obviously wants a family of three, and she’s made it crystal clear that four’s a crowd. Now she’s brainwashed you into thinking the same thing.As for Mom, I have been dealing with her issues for three years, and just because I don’t feel like whining to some cold fish of a doctor (who, by the way, is not even a shrink—did you bother to check credentials?) doesn’t mean I’m in denial. What am I supposed to do, wear a badge that says, “Hi, My Name’s Brit and My Mom’s a Schizo”? Because that’s what would pass for progress around here.I can’t think too much about how I got here, because when I do I feel like I’ve been betrayed by you, and that makes me feel worse than everything else that’s happened. Does Grandma know where you’ve sent me? I’m sure she’d be furious, but then again, you’ve never let anything she says change your mind.You should come and visit. Maybe seeing this place up close would make you rethink your, or should I say, her, decision.Brit.P.S. The reason my grades have jumped is that the school here is completely remedial. Billy could get A’s here.
 P.P.S. I’d take a year of Portland rain over a sunny day in this hellhole. “I see you haven’t written your parents a letter,” Clayton said to me, tapping her pen against a clipboard, something I swear she did to remind us all of the power she could wield with her little Bic. “Would you like to tell me why not? Most students are quite enthusiastic when they reach Level Four and are permitted to start communicating with family. Around the holidays, it’s customary for students to send cards.”

This was true. Red Rock even printed up these jolly cards with a picture of a bunch of smiling students in Santa hats and shorts for us to send home. They were total propaganda as far as I was concerned.

I had written my dad several versions of the same letter, but in the end I just tore them up and buried them in the quarry—in part because, as V warned me, outgoing letters would be scrutinized by staff, so you had to watch your attitude or they’d hold what you’d written against you in therapy. Clayton already acted as if she knew me better than I knew myself, and her smug attitude gave me the urge to smash things. There was no way I was going to let her read my mail to my dad, and I didn’t think I could fake a casual, hey-how’s-it-going letter to him either.

See, the thing was that in two months at Red Rock I’d had a lot of time to think, maybe too much time. I thought about Jed constantly; it was the only thing that made me feel good. But the rest of the time, I thought about Dad and Mom and me and, unfortunately, Stepmonster. And I thought about how much Dad had changed. As much as I wanted to pin this whole thing on Stepmonster, the sad reality was that Dad had gone along with her plan to send me away. If you had told me five years ago that my mellow, sweet father would dump his kid off at a boot camp, I would’ve told you that nothing, not even a gun to the head, could have pushed him to do such a thing.