Rhett McLaughlin - The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek

“That’s the Roll?” Alicia asked. She was honestly a bit disappointed in the Whitewood faculty’s lack of imagination. After all the buildup, the steady stream of threatening references to “the Roll” from all the helpers, Alicia had almost started to look forward to being sent there, if only to see if reality matched the image in her head. She’d been picturing a human-sized hamster wheel, or at least something that moved.

“Lie down,” Flattop instructed, ungraciously arranging her so that her head hung over the carpet’s edge. “Keep your arms at your sides.”

Once she was lying on the carpet, the smell was unmistakable. Stale urine. Flattop proceeded to push her across the room, her entire body tightly entombed up to the neck as he rolled her to the opposite wall. She came to a rest with her face pointing toward the ceiling. Alicia wished she’d inhaled as deeply as possible before being rolled up, as she immediately found it difficult to take a satisfactory breath.

“Snug as a bug in a rug,” Flattop said, smiling at the quip he’d obviously made before, then placing his knee on the Roll right at her chest. Breathing became almost impossible.

“Good one,” she said in a strained but defiant voice.

The helper grabbed a roll of duct tape from the corner and secured the carpet to itself, sealing her in place like the creme filling in some sadistic Swiss cake roll. “Didn’t I tell you to watch your mouth?” He placed the heel of his work boot on the Roll and pulled it away from the wall, Alicia completing two and a half disorienting revolutions before stopping in the middle of the room, her face now toward the floor.

“Whee!” Alicia said, trying to push down her fear and the feeling that her chest was caving in.

“Wrong answer,” Flattop said. He rested his foot on the Roll again, then thrust his leg forward aggressively, sending Alicia rocketing across the floor. After a few bewildering rotations, she slammed into the wall, what little breath she had squeezed out, her lunch of vegetable soup and creamed corn gurgling in her stomach.

“You done?” Flattop asked.

Alicia just looked at him, the room a spinning, jumbled mess.

“Good. Now take some time to think about what you’ve done. Oh, and if you tell your parents about this during your monthly phone call, we’ll let them know you’ve developed a problem with lying. A problem that would definitely require more time here. I doubt you’re interested in an extra year.” When he closed the door, the room was still shifting.

Alicia attempted to move her body, thinking maybe she could somehow wriggle her way out. It wasn’t happening. She was stuck here for as long as they wanted her to be.

Alicia finally allowed herself to cry.

As silently as possible.

Eventually, she fell asleep. She dreamt that she was with Rex and Leif on their island in the Cape Fear River, sitting on a third rock that was bigger than both of theirs. “Look, we hate to do this,” Rex said, “but we have to recast you in PolterDog .”

“You can’t do that,” she said.

“No, we have to.” Leif spoke in the form of a statement even though he was on the smaller rock. “Candace Cameron wants to play Jessica. This could be huge for us.”

“D.J.? From Full House ?” Alicia asked with disgust.

“Yup.” Leif nodded smugly. “D.J. From Full House . And we were nominated for an Oscar!”

“Wait, how?” Alicia felt so confused. “We didn’t even finish making the movie yet.”

“We didn’t have to,” Rex said. “We got nominated for most original idea for a movie. It’s a new category!” He high-fived Leif.

Alicia awoke, forgetting where she was until her eyes focused on the dingy green tiles all around her. The sunlight coming through the small frosted window in the door had dimmed considerably.

She desperately needed to pee.

Alicia began to wonder if she was going to join the ranks of Rollers before her who had given in and relieved themselves. Based on the stains and the smell, it had been quite a few.

She decided she could hold it.

As she lay there, unsure if she would be left overnight in this backwoods torture device, Alicia couldn’t help but feel a little proud of herself for being here in the first place. It meant she was brave. Or idiotic. But still, she definitely hadn’t seen any other students get sent to the Roll. She hadn’t seen any of the other students do much of anything but follow, really. Given the state of the carpet, she guessed some of them had been sent in the past, the impulse to disobey squeezed right out of them. She didn’t want that to happen to her. She didn’t want to become like them.

At her first breakfast, Alicia had recognized Cindy Fisher, who had been sent to Whitewood at the end of the previous school year after her parents found a condom in her bedroom. It didn’t matter that it was unused—even knowing that she was considering having sex—safe or not—was enough for her parents to call up Mr. Whitewood. Though Alicia had never been close with Cindy, she’d known her well enough to consider her kind, outgoing, and even funny. But Alicia saw none of that in Cindy’s eyes when she’d sat next to her in the cafeteria, where they were forbidden to speak as they ate. When Cindy had looked at her, Alicia had raised her eyebrows to signal her recognition; Cindy had quickly looked back down at her Cream of Wheat.

There were a couple dozen other Bleak Creek kids that Alicia knew, the youngest seeming around ten years old, the oldest a high school senior named Todd something. But the others—maybe forty students, as well as her roommate—were complete strangers. Alicia had never really stopped to consider whether there were students from out of town at Whitewood, but that was clearly the case. However, none of them—whether Bleak Creekians or outsiders—had made any effort to connect with her at all. She figured this was just the way things were at Whitewood, but she also knew that her particular offense—injuring the headmaster himself—had made her a special brand of untouchable. She was the blackest sheep in a herd of black sheep.

Maybe this stand she was taking was incredibly foolish. Maybe she should just follow, or at least pretend to. But she felt like it was more important to not lose her grip on who she was, even if it would ensure her a longer stay in this hell. And she was still holding out a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, bucking the system this way would allow her to find the school’s Achilles’ heel, which could be her ticket out of there. It was unlikely. But she had to keep believing.

The sunlight was gone now.

After another thirty minutes of resisting, Alicia finally let herself relax, warm urine spilling into her jumpsuit.

9

JANINE STROLLED DOWN Walnut Street, the sidewalk still wet from the previous night’s thunderstorm. She passed an elderly lady sitting on her front porch, the old woman’s head swiveling to track her as she crossed the width of her yard. Janine had always seemed to attract these kinds of stares in Bleak Creek, a town with a knack for identifying outsiders. Of course, she was making that a particularly easy task with her camera bag, black leggings, cutoff jorts, combat boots, and off-the-shoulder gray T-shirt that gave all Bleak Creekians a pristine view of her left collarbone. She offered a friendly wave to the woman, who reflexively waved back, never losing her quizzical expression.

After Janine had learned that Donna was a former Whitewood student, she’d made the decision to stick around town. She had to learn more about this strange institution, about what had happened there to transform her cousin into a shell of her former self. Naturally, she’d first tried to talk to Donna, striding to the back of Li’l Dino’s even before her lightheadedness had gone away (and before offering to help Big Gary clean up his stones), where Donna made it clear that yes, she went to that school, and no, she didn’t want to talk about it.