The dogs wiggle around me as I walk in and drop everything on the breakfast table.
The couple of bites of salad I had at Lasyone’s burned off hours ago. I’m starving.
I scan the counter and see the remaining red velvet cupcakes. Debby’s early Valentine’s to my father.
I take one from the plate. One bite won’t kill me. I peel the paper back and sink my teeth into the buttercream icing. It could quite possibly be the best thing I’ve ever tasted. My taste buds ache for another bite, but I open the cabinet under the sink and throw it in the trash can. I pause before shutting the cabinet door. There’s no trash in the bin, only a paper towel, so if I wanted one more bite, I could grab it quickly and take one. Before I explore that option another second, I grab the dish soap next to the sink and squirt it all over the top of the cupcake. I’d like to destroy every last one of those cupcakes, but I force myself to set the soap down and go for something even less healthy.
In the bar opposite the kitchen, I make a scotch and carry the mail to my father’s study.
This room was off-limits when I was a kid. I could roam the woods around this property by myself even after dark, but this room was forbidden.
I ease inside and drop the mail on the polished wood desk, my eyes catching sight of a keypad on the lower right drawer. When I was younger, it had a keyhole. It’s been upgraded like the front gates. I glance at the office door. The dogs sit, watching me. “You won’t tell, will you?” I glance back at the keypad. “Let’s just see.” I type the gate code in, 0707, and the lock whirs open.
“Oh shit.” I pull the drawer open enough to see one of my mother’s old denim painting shirts in it. I push it shut. Oh Dad. Like me, you’re still trying to keep her locked up too.
I step away from his desk and shut the door behind me.
After a shower, I set the box and my tote on the bed and take a sip of scotch that’s bigger than I intended. But the burn in my throat is nice. After the burn comes the warmth.
I take the folders from my tote and set them next to the generic black suitcase I pulled from the closet last night. I hoist the box ofjournals up next to it and remove the lid, ignoring all thoughts of Pandora’s box and understanding that by reading these private words I’m as wrong as the school administrators who didn’t get rid of them in the first place. Nonetheless, I keep reading. I always keep reading. Keep looking. Keep digging.
The three dogs run in and join me, their little nails clicking on the hardwood floor.
They all three jump up on the bed as I open my phone and make notes on everything I’ve read. Most of the journals are only whining and complaining and bragging. But, like the forms, a few stand out. I remember the day B.O. handed me a blank dark-green journal and my secret name and told me Poison Wood would be my safe place to heal.
I release a long, slow breath. Then I separate a few of the journals from the others. The ones that weren’t damaged by water or yellowed by time or left blank. The ones where words are faded but still legible.
I think about Katrina and Summer, scribbling in theirs at all hours of the night. I try to remember their handwriting styles but can’t quite attach a style to a girl. Was Katrina’s loopy and Summer’s slanted or had it been the other way around? And was it Heather who wrote with the curvyR’s or was that Katrina? The details, like so much from my time there, stay fuzzy.
What isn’t fuzzy is the memory of the line of girls at the house phone waiting their turn to call their wealthy parents to come get them. Except for one girl.
Heather.
The rest of us had family names that grabbed attention when spoken. Parents who wanted their reckless daughters to learn how to straighten up and fly right and make sure the family name wasn’t tarnished.
The thought snaps off as something my father said earlier comes back to me: The DA on the Adair trial told him about Laura Sanders.
I rummage through the old suitcase on the bed next to me and pull out a folder with trial clippings in it.
The list of men who were integral in Johnny Adair being prosecuted and convicted was long and distinguished. I run my finger along the lines in one article and stop on the DA’s name: Hank Donovan. Katrina’s father.
But he wasn’t the only heavy hitter with a kid at that school.
Parents’ weekend at Poison Wood was a regular who’s who of wealthy, powerful people. Businessmen, governors ... judges. My father always held court there, pun intended. He’d sit with the other fathers and Crowley, our headmaster, and have them laughing and swearing and whispering like the schoolgirls who were their daughters. Crowley. Every parents’ weekend, it felt as if he were running for mayor. He shook hands and slapped backs and reminded the parents how their support, a.k.a. money, was the key to Poison Wood’s success. I swallow the acid trying to come up in my throat as the phrasegood old boys’ clubfloats to the surface.
But there was one parent who trumped everyone in the good old boys’ club. Mainly because she wasn’t a good old boy. She was the governor at the time. She was part of a hunting group with my father and Katrina’s father. My father said she always came home with the most deer because of her patience. But at some point she lost patience with her daughter, Summer Chamberlain. The staff tiptoed around Summer as if she were made of Murano glass. Nobody mentioning why Summer was there in the first place. Rumors abounded, from using hard drugs to stealing to seducing her mother’s security guard. Thing is, rumors were always rampant at that school. None of us ever knew where lies ended and truth began.
I had walked up on Summer near the woods about two weeks after I’d arrived at Poison Wood. She was crying by a circle of pines separated from the other trees that the girls called the pity party patch. It’s a spot girls gravitated to when they needed a good cry. It felt safe and protected. I’d already done my time in the PPP, the day I realized my father really wasn’t coming back to get me.
Summer was sobbing, and, when I sat next to her, she said between sniffles, “I’ll never forgive her.”
“Who?” I said.
“My mother. She thinks I’m some problem that needs to be fixed.” She took a large breath, dried her eyes. “You’d think it’d be some great thing that I was a governor’s kid. But it’s the opposite. She doesn’t care about me. She only cares about this school fixing me.”
“What happens if you don’t get fixed?” I asked, thinking of myself as well. What would my father do if I didn’t come back fixed?
Summer chewed her fingernail and spoke with her finger still in her mouth. “She said I wouldn’t want to find out.”
