Stephanie Leonard...when not one star gave a sputterI wish I was invisible; that I couldn’t be seen. I wish I was hidden, as small as a key. I was lost. No one knew where my third school was going to be. I would have to go back to Burncoat. I had gone to that atrocious place before; it was a residential place for bad kids and it was also a place they gave you therapy to find out how to diagnose you. They would do testing on me. That’s were I met Chris. He was just one of those pathetic dopes that thinks he must have been made for you. This guy knew when a girl was in desperation. He tried stalking me. Then he asked me to marry him when I was fifteen and he was twenty although he lied about his age and said he was nineteen – what a loser. He said he wanted to runaway and get hitched. He was out of his brains! The chump started writing me sickening four to five page love letters everyday. They said things like ‘My dearest Sakura’…a Japanese name he gave me. He said it was a secret name of love and devotion. There were a bunch of bitches in Burncoat that thought they were all tough because they lived in the projects and on the streets. They were mostly Puerto Rican, and Spanish, and a few were white girls. I had been through so much trauma. I looked at the girls in awe mostly. I didn’t mean to — I was just daydreaming. Then they would yell at me one of them, a big macho Puerto Rican girl said she’d kill me. Chris kept pursuing me even though the jerk-wad couldn’t tell that I was an an emotional wreck. That night when the moon had been full, I vanished into the bathroom with a silvery pair of jagged scissors. I locked the bathroom door. I looked at my foreboding image in the mirror: what could Chris possibly see in me? I began to hack at my hair with the scissors, cutting chunks and extents of my mousy brown hair off. It fell to the bathroom floor. My mother relentlessly pounded on the bathroom door. She shrieked when she saw what I had done. I had to live with what I had done until it grew out. I had to deal with the state my life was in until it got better. * I was finally free from tricks and I could finally relax and settle down. I was looking forward to my new school. I knew things had to get better but first they had to get a little worse. I’ve been holding these thoughts back for what seems like eternity. I must let you know these concerns that have been bothering me for years. It’s like the tide; low tide comes and I forget the things that happened because life is much better and fulfilling when people care to put me first. But then high tide comes drifting in my mind and they come to haunt me night and day. They leave me with depression, sadness, and grief. Open the door no one there. Open the window no breeze. Open your heart no love. Open your eyes you can’t see. Open your lips, can’t talk. Open your ears, can’t hear a sound. Everything is closed nothing is of value to you. You just keep persisting, keep on living without a cause like a log drifting in a current. You feel hopeless and incomplete. You feel like a name forgotten. You feel like a person forgotten, like a lost key that can never be found. Forgotten like a needle in a haystack. I got sent to the school The Learning Clinic in Connecticut. It appeared to be a stunning school with ponies and horses. It was my first residential placement. It looked like such a beautiful place but looks can fool anyone. It had five living easements and a barn filled with horses. It kind of looked too good to be true. I first started living in Breeze with three other preps: Sam, a two faced girl who spoke about me behind my back; Meghan, a deranged twit; and Britney, a psychopath. To begin with they seemed like very nice girls but they soon turned into mischievous sprites. My first night the girls began to talk with me. We start talking about girly things and we got around to boys. That’s when I began to wish I had a boyfriend. I told them. They said they would hook me up with someone – all I had to do was simply choose the guy. They passed their school yearbook around and went through the guys saying who was cute and if they were taken or not. I spotted this boy Josh. I said he was kind of cute. The next day I was in for a surprise when I went to school and was confronted by Josh. "What kind of music do you like? " I answered his questions. "Cool I like them too, " he told me. The girls from my room had told him I thought he was cute and wanted a boyfriend. Later I went to art class and I noticed there was this girl drawing fairies and I told her I liked unicorns and mystical creatures too. Her name was Elise she was decked out in Goth clothes and heavy makeup. "Who cares," she said in a gigantic attitude. Then one day I forgot to flush the toilet. We had a bathroom in our room that me and the girls shared. Anyway Brittany was so mad that she started to shriek and she began to get in fights with me every day. We used race to the staff office to tell on each other; it was like a game of cat and mouse. Then one night she lined up her glass bottles that she would collect. She lined them up around my bed – lined them up like soldiers in the middle of the night. I think she was hoping I would step on them. One day after school I found out that a young man named Joe would be coming back from his vacation. Joe was foulness…he was like decomposing squashed animals flattened by tires. When Joe came back he took an interest in me. We went to the back yard to converse. As soon as I was talking to Joe he begun to discuss things that were tasteless. He begun to assume things with not his brain but something in his masculine self. I begun to play a game with him and I had told him I had a secret weapon and he said "What’s your secret weapon your crotch?" All I could do is smile in embarrassment. * I moved to the house Abington. My housemates were Elise the girl who gave me attitude, and Sarah and Cara and a different Joe. Elise teased me a lot and Cara seemed like a beautiful nice girl but she did not like me and one night was so sick of me that she said she would kill me. I could not sleep. I asked if I could sleep somewhere else or she could be watched by staff. My life was at risk even though she wasn’t severe about he r words. The staff said there was nothing they could do and if I was upset I could go out on the porch to cool down and that’s what I did. But I ran away in the woods because I was petrified. I lay in the darkness at the end of my driveway. No staff were coming for me. They were phoning my mother saying that it was eleven pm and I was somewhere off in the woods. "Somewhere?" my mom said, "Go find her. Go do something about it. " Well they said they only had one staff on and my mom said go look for my daughter. They came out finally calling my name. Then they saw my eyes glistening at the end of the drive way and they told me to get back in the house. As soon I was in the house my heart started to be calm but the very next morning I was on the verge dropping milk bottles and letting them spill all over the floor. My boyfriend Josh was always trying to get me in trouble and asking me for more with his begging dog eyes. He always asked me to French kiss him and to see my body and he pushed up against me when I kissed him. Then he called me his ‘bitch’ and I took it the wrong way. I said that I wanted to break up with him. Some people where happy that I broke up with him but most of the students thought we belonged together and he was the only right one for me. Regardless of their opinions this was my time to break away from him. But soon after Josh I was having bad boundaries with more boys. My counselor Vince was trying to explain the steps of relationships and I wasn’t hearing it. I ran out of his office like a loose bell into rows and rows of cornfields. I bawled and curled up in pity. When my mother came to visit I’d weep and beg her to take me home. And then the owner of the program would come in and say this place isn’t so bad, your mom is going to have to leave if you keep acting like this. They said they were feeding us all this great food. They had menus – splendid menus – posted up on the fridge. They were all fake. They didn’t go shopping and they had barely any food in the house. Roast beef on stale bread and salad dressing was all that I could eat for lunch one day when I was upset and forgot to pack a lunch for the school. ‘Clean’ they said. ‘Make this place pure’ they said. The health inspectors were coming. We begun to scrub frantically with toothbrushes. We begun to floss the sinks. Whoever heard of such a pitiful thing? It was when we took a paper towel and runned it under the places we couldn’t reach and the dirt and grime would of course hemorrhage on the paper towel. Then we had to stand on the couches and clean the walls of dirt. We had to sweep and vacuum the floor and dust and wipe the counters. We waited days for the health inspectors and they never came. Where Doc’s house was by the farm he had three snarling dogs. I heard stories that the brutes bit students. We had to take care of Doc’s sheep and his horses. They were supposed to pay you for this work but most of time I got screwed out of a paycheck. Sadly, the only thing I liked about place was the horses that we barely got to ride because we had to do our chores first. Then Doc told me he was going to pull me out of the farm program because Joe, the guy who asked me to touch his genital regions, was going to the farm as well. It was a trap to put us together like vinegar and water. When mixed the water begins to bubble and seethe like oil. It was just a ploy that Doc had made up to piss me off and as soon as I could me and my mother were stepping on the gas of our car puttying the pedal to the medal and speeding away from the rustic school that had Tender Love and Care posted on its swinging picket sign promising that it was a good quality program. But it wasn’t. The place, like I said, was a jail that incarcerated me. Songs of its hard knock life were banging in my head like bullets.
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