Even if it were scripture, it wouldn’t start with Joshua. Joshua might claim that, but he came after. Maybe it started with Addison, or with McCracken Hill. It probably started way before McCracken Hill because it’s not like I ended up there by chance. I made choices.

All anyone at McCracken talked about were choices. Life was a series of decisions and we had whiffed most of them. We’d been sent there to learn how to make smart choices, informed choices, positive choices that displayed proper judgment and an understanding of our role in society. That was the steadfast message of the staff and it was stenciled on our walls, carved in the massive mahogany classroom tables, even etched into the unbreakable glass of the vending machines outside the dining hall.

Those snack machines were stocked with granola bars and popcorn, vitamin water and organic juice, so it’s not like anyone actually trusted our sense of self-control. Dorm lights functioned on a timer — they snapped off at ten and blinked back on at six in the morning. When I toured McCracken with my parents, I noticed that none of the rooms we visited looked like real people lived in them. There weren’t any posters. No drawings on the walls. No clothes thrown across chairs, no laptops or phones, or even chargers left plugged into the electrical outlets. Each room had two beds with the same navy blue blanket stretched tightly across each mattress. Two identical piles of books stacked carefully on each wood desk. And the dorms all had their own self-help names: Discipline House, Self-Discovery Hall.

I say tour, but it was less of a tour than a display. We’d gone to visit colleges two years before, during my older sister’s senior year. Back then we ate in the dining halls. Eliza sat through classes. She stayed overnight a couple of times and when we retrieved her the next morning, she’d always have some new mannerism — a word I’d never heard her pronounce before or a gesture that looked too dramatic, too large for her arms. Once, after she visited NYU, we picked her up at the train station and she had a long, pink strand running through her hair. My mom freaked and then Eliza reached up and unclipped her barrette. The whole offending piece came away in her hands. My sister would never have done anything permanently bad.

And this place wasn’t NYU — we were in Shitstain, Pennsylvania, in the middle of nowhere. McCracken Hill was not a top-tier university or even an unranked community college. It probably landed somewhere between boarding school and rehab. Closer to rehab.

Mom didn’t even ride along in the car to drop me off. She didn’t iron my clothes before I packed them all up or take me anywhere for toiletries. In a way, that was a relief — neither of us pretended it was camp. In the days leading up to my departure, Mom didn’t actually talk to me much. I thought then that she felt guilty, that my dad had pushed her into the decision. She’d meant the pamphlets as a warning, but Dad had made her follow through.

In the end, I didn’t need the toiletries. When we got to the admissions office, a biology teacher named Ms. Crane went through my bag. She sorted out my shampoo, conditioner, even my contact lens solution.

“I’m assuming you wear eyeglasses?” she asked.

“I wear contacts.” I swiveled toward my dad. This was crazy.

“Not here. Not yet. Contacts are a privilege.”

“Seeing? My sight is a privilege?” My eyes watered in spite of themselves and my dad cleared his throat. For a second, it seemed like he was going to speak up. But then Ms. Crane’s fingers clamped down on my eyeglass case. She snapped it open.

“There!” she announced triumphantly. “Do you want to go to the ladies’ room to switch?”

“No.” I felt that old ache at the back of my throat and couldn’t believe I was about to cry so soon. That they’d broken me already.

My dad cleared his throat again, but before he actually spoke, Ms. Crane tapped one long nail against the laminated pamphlet on top of my pile of books. “I’m sorry — our handbook states our policy very clearly. Students must lay some groundwork of trust before earning the allowance of liquids in their rooms.”

“How am I supposed to shower?” I asked. In response, Ms. Crane set a generic bar of soap on top of my bag. “What about my hair?”

“Soap works just as well. You’ll find there’s a lot we categorize as ‘needs’ that we should really consider ‘wants.’”

“Well, I want to know why you smell like Pantene, then.” Ms. Crane’s smile didn’t waver; she just kept digging through my bag, then handed me my contacts case.

“That’s a very stylish pair of eyeglasses,” she said. The smile deepened spitefully. My glasses had thick lenses and puke-colored tortoiseshell rims and I only ever wore them in cases of pinkeye. I even slept with my contacts in. I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but I hated waking up and finding everything blurry.

My dad valiantly forced words out. “I don’t see this as necessary — Greer’s hygiene —”

“This has nothing to do with hygiene, Mr. Cannon.” Ms. Crane’s voice rose and then plateaued back to even-keel territory again. “I’m sure it won’t surprise you that some of our students struggle with substance abuse issues. In the interest of maintaining an alcohol-free environment, we monitor liquids very carefully, especially containers coming from off campus.”

My dad rubbed at his temples. “Can’t you just sniff it?” I could tell he was wishing he had just put me on a train. That’s what the admissions team had recommended. “Greer — there’s nothing in —” He turned to confirm that I hadn’t yet resorted to smuggling vodka in Bausch & Lomb bottles. I didn’t bother to answer. He had already remembered that I wasn’t to be trusted.

If Ms. Crane hadn’t taken such obvious glee in the whole process, I would have laughed at McCracken Hill’s ridiculous liquid policy. But I met most of my classmates wearing my Army of Dorkness glasses, with the residue of cheap soap caking my hair.

I told myself it didn’t matter what I looked like. And it didn’t, at least not for a few weeks.

 

I suffered through a full month of classes and counseling to get to the point where the team designated me fit for shampoo and other bottled fluids. My treatment team consisted of my four academic instructors, the principal, vice principal, and my counselor. Because I struggled with “self-destructive eating patterns,” I also had to meet with a nutritionist. Some kids went to Narcotics Anonymous and others went to AA instead, and twice a month the school even bused a bunch of kids to Philadelphia for a Gamblers Anonymous meeting. They sent my lab partner, Dale, there and he said the kids spent most of the ride trying to bribe the driver to take them to Mohegan Sun.

I’d never been on parole — nothing had ever gotten that serious. Even still, I imagined a parole board review would feel cozier than a McCracken treatment team session. First of all, sessions took place in one of three conference rooms, all named for dead kids. There was a framed picture in each room and a plaque. And so you sat there under a photograph of a dead kid, surrounded by the adults who judged you every day. No one ever explained how the kids had died.

Under the dead kid’s watchful eyes, you sat there and reviewed your choices. Each member of the team brought a file, so you got to explain why you chose to turn in your last lit essay late, why you decided to sneak out of peer tutoring. You sat there while they dissected you and it really felt like that — a series of slices across your belly. You realized how exposed you were when you listened to all of the tiny, stupid, little decisions that you didn’t even realize you were making. They wrote them all down. In that room, at least, it seemed like they noticed everything.

No one asked me about stealing. I hadn’t stepped off campus since I’d arrived, so maybe they figured it was a nonissue. And I’d landed a single, so no roommates to pilfer from. Instead they pointed out that I hadn’t yet joined a club. “Extracurriculars give us the chance to focus our energies on our passions,” the principal told me. I recognized the language from the student handbook and wondered if that meant he’d written it or just memorized it.

Greer, are you happy? No one asked this. We sat around and measured how productive I’d been, how cooperative. I waited for someone to point out that I hadn’t yet made a single friend. I planned to blame the glasses — but no one mentioned it. Making friends wasn’t the point; it’s not like any of us were gunning for reform school homecoming queen. It took me that little bit to get used to McCracken. Keeping focused, holding myself accountable, all of those buzzwords pretty much made the idea of “happy” obsolete. That’s what I left that first treatment session knowing. No one really cared. But at least they gave me back liquids.

I washed my hair twice that night. Swirled Listerine around my mouth and slipped in my contacts and felt so absurdly euphoric about it that I almost knocked on the other doors lining the girls’ corridor of Empowerment Hall. I nearly asked the dorm counselor if I could sign out my cell phone and call home to share my renewed appreciation for leave-in conditioner.

But I didn’t do either of those things. I finally felt clean and decided not to ruin that by reaching out to someone who’d most likely disappoint me. I ambled from the hall bathroom to my single, with my plastic bucket of irreproachable toiletries knocking hopefully against my leg. That night, my bare room seemed more pure than forlorn, like a monk’s cell. I remember feeling like I was readying myself for something miraculous, something life altering.

Or someone. Right after that, Addison showed up. It turned out I’d been preparing myself for him.