Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 4

Growing Together marketed itself as a tough-love treatment center, but the truth was that it left the love out of it. By the time I took a seat in Eppinger’s limo, I’d been trying to escape for nearly a year. I hadn’t volunteered to become a Growing Together “client.” My mother, Lynn, tricked me, saying we were going to the eye doctor. Instead, when we entered the tall blue intake building about twenty miles from my family’s one-and-a-quarter-acre farm in Loxahatchee, Florida, I found myself surrounded by uniformed men holding clipboards and a few muscled guards. Mom ducked out—I can still recall what she looked like, walking away. Even from the back, I’d know her fiery red hair anywhere.

My mother had recently declared me “out of control,” which was basically true. Once an enthusiastic reader and hardworking student, I had become an angry truant, defiant and prone to emotional meltdowns. Whenever I could, I hung out with older kids, drinking and partying, and there was hardly a drug I hadn’t taken. So yes, Mom, you were right that as a young teen, I was a rebellious mess. I just wish you’d asked me why.

Growing Together’s banana-yellow building sat just south of West Palm Beach, in a town called Lake Worth. That was funny to me, since it seemed that the facility was determined to make the thirty or so teenagers enrolled there feel worthless. In the name of healing, Growing Together’s staff forced kids between the ages of thirteen and seventeen to stand in front of the mirror and berate themselves at the top of their lungs. “I am a whore, a slut, a druggie,” we girls would yell, staring into our own eyes. We had no choice but to comply. The place was like a fortress, with security gates and barred windows, as well as a special cell—the White Room—where staff sent us when we fought back. Eventually, I would spend a lot of time in the White Room, which had no toilet, no mattress, only a cold concrete floor coated in the filth previous occupants had left behind. My longest stretch in solitary confinement was three weeks. But that came later.

At the beginning of my time there, I tried to give Growing Together a chance. During the day, in group-therapy sessions, I opened up a bit to the counselors. I told them about how when my mom was drinking, it was as if she became another person. One moment she’d be laughing, the next she’d be yelling. She threw things—coffee cups, cold macaroni and cheese—at me and my little brother, Skydy, who was five years younger and whom I adored. But Skydy was just caught in the crossfire. I was the one Mom always seemed furious at. She’d get this look in her blue eyes—Skydy and I called it “The Evil Eye”—that felt as if it could pierce skin. When she was really angry, she’d send me out to the yard to cut a thorny branch from one of her prized rosebushes. “Pick a switch,” she’d say. Then, she’d make me pull down my pants, in front of the neighbors and anyone else who was around, so she could whip me with it.

At Growing Together, I began to talk about these painful things, removing a few bricks from the psychic wall I’d built around myself. I told staff about a time just months before when two boys, one seventeen and the other eighteen, assaulted me in the back of a car while I was unconscious. We’d been drinking and smoking pot before I passed out, but I awoke to find them taking turns on top of me. I would never forget their giddy voices or how hot and sour each boy’s breath felt on my face. In all, I said, the ordeal had lasted five to seven hours. Talking about all this with the counselors at Growing Together was difficult, but it gave me something I hadn’t expected: the first stirrings of relief.

That reprieve wouldn’t last, though. Not for nothing would Growing Together eventually be dubbed “Suffering Together” in an exposé in New Times, an alternative weekly newspaper that was a sister publication of The Village Voice . In December 2004, seven years after I entered Growing Together, this article would report that for years, kids there had endured “beatings, restraint, imprisonment, and systematic humiliation.” The piece identified families that had sued Growing Together for hurting, not helping, their children. It described a girl whose arm had been broken by a counselor, a boy who’d attempted suicide but was never referred to a psychologist. One mother called the program “a concentration camp for clients and parents.” The article also noted that the nonprofit facility raked in roughly $1 million a year from donations and fees—typically $14,000 a year per “client”—paid by parents of drug-addicted kids, some of whom were ordered by judges to attend. (I’m not sure who paid to put me there, since my parents had no money.) Eighteen months after the New Times piece ran, the place closed for good. But for two decades, it was a miserable hellhole for kids like me.

Growing Together’s treatment model was a JV version of Alcoholics Anonymous, with six steps instead of twelve. But unlike AA, this protocol depended on pitting kids against one another as we attempted to move between steps, or “levels.” When kids first arrived, they were called “newcomers,” and the goal was to graduate to become an “oldcomer.” If you succeeded, your reward was to be put in charge of other children. Newcomers were not allowed to move around the facility without an oldcomer holding them by the belt, or “belt looping” them. This meant no privacy—not in the toilet, not in the shower, nowhere. Belt looping didn’t just make kid-on-kid violence possible, it actively encouraged it.

Having kids supervise and restrain other kids was illegal, yet it must have been efficient, financially speaking (you don’t need as many paid staff when you’ve assigned your wards to police each other). The result was a Lord of the Flies– like atmosphere, with terrible hazing rituals and near-constant physical and sexual abuse. Though boys and girls were not supposed to speak to one another, I befriended a slight, pale boy named Chris. When older, bigger boys arrived in the program, they singled him out from across the room: Rape Kid. After they did their worst to Chris, I’d hold his hand and tell him I was sorry. Looking in his flat, gray eyes, I worried that a part of him was already dead and that the rest was not far behind. The girls treated each other just as savagely. A gang of the meanest ones accosted a girl I knew, holding her down and molesting her with some sort of object. That wouldn’t happen to me, I vowed. I’d been hypervigilant since long before Growing Together. I saw no reason to change.

Peril was everywhere. Staff members were either ineffectual or cruel. There was one guard, a white guy with curly, blondish hair and a burnt-orange tan, who we called The Enforcer. He loved to put his hands on kids and throw them to the floor or against the walls. Roslyn, meanwhile, was a Hispanic chick with a power complex. She did to our psyches what The Enforcer did to our bodies. She seemed to enjoy humiliating us.

The food was disgusting, and the dinner menus never changed: Mondays, tacos; Tuesdays, Salisbury steak. On Wednesdays, we were served a nasty mushroom soup. I hated mushrooms, but I forced myself to eat because I knew that kids who didn’t clean their plates were made to sit at the table until they obeyed, chewed, and swallowed. One Wednesday, though, I just couldn’t do it. The smell of the watery, gray liquid made me gag. “ Eat! ” Roslyn yelled, so I tried. But after a few spoonfuls, it wouldn’t stay down, and I vomited into my bowl. Roslyn’s face broke into a sadistic smile. “No problem,” she said. “Now eat until that bowl is empty.”

“What goes on here, stays here,” staff would often say. The longer I spent at Growing Together, the more I understood why. Rules were rigid. Boys had to keep their heads shaved nearly bald. Girls, though, weren’t allowed to shave their legs or underarms. It was as if the staff wanted to mark us, to make us look as abnormal on the outside as they told us we were on the inside. Strip searches and pepper spray were the methods they used to keep us “in line.” The squalid building, meanwhile, was overrun with cockroaches and rats.

Nonetheless, every Friday, parents gathered in a large, well-lit room that hid all that. Friday was open-house night, and I remember well the dog-and-pony show the administrators put on. Imagine fifty adults at one end of a banquet room, their “problem kids” herded together at the other end, all dressed in those matching navy-and-khaki uniforms. Before open house began, parents and children were separated by an accordion-like room divider. But when the meeting was called to order, the partition was pulled back, music burst from a loudspeaker, and we kids were made to sing. We knew that if we refused, we’d be sent to the White Room.

“I am a promise, I am a possibility,” we chirped, sounding more like nursery schoolers than troubled and abused teens. “I am a promise with a capital P . I am a great big bundle of potentiality. And I am learning to hear God’s voice. And I am trying to make the right choice. I am a promise to be anything that God wants me to be.”

Staff would then hand a microphone to one of the moms or dads and ask them to describe their child’s misdeeds. Chosen parents would recite their lists—drug abuse, petty theft, fistfights, violent outbursts, whatever—without a nod to whatever role they might have played in their kids’ acting out. It was like watching prosecutors during a trial, except that when the microphone was finally handed to the accused, he or she was not allowed to mount a defense. Instead, we were expected to use our time to confess. Only by confessing could we move up in the hierarchy that divided the punishers from the punished.

That’s a snapshot of what happened inside the facility during the day. Other abuses occurred each night, when we were shipped off to sleep at private foster homes endorsed by Growing Together administrators. Typically these were houses owned by parents of children enrolled in the program, and most accommodated five kids at a time. All these homes—mine included, because my parents sometimes took in kids—had been renovated to meet Growing Together’s specifications. Pictures and mirrors were removed from walls, so there’d be no glass to break. Kitchen knives were hidden. Bathrooms were stripped, leaving only the sink, toilet, and bathtub. Usually, the windows and doors of the bedrooms where we slept were rigged with alarm systems. Bedtime was 10:00 p.m., and we couldn’t exit our rooms until the next morning. That meant no bathroom visits. We had to hold it or pee in buckets.

There was one ritual at Growing Together that I embraced: before bed, we were expected to write in our journals. Staff called these entries “moral inventories.” They told us to catalog bad things we’d done, painful things we’d endured, and how we’d been affected by both. The more you confessed, the higher up the hierarchy you were allowed to move, which meant more freedoms—the right to go to the toilet unsupervised, say, or to attend school outside the facility. Inventories that included sexual abuse or underage sex were particularly encouraged. Given these incentives, lots of kids made stuff up. I, however, didn’t need to lie. I had plenty of awful experiences to draw on. In the beginning, I hoped that after reading my accounts of past abuses, the staff would take steps to punish those who’d hurt me. Maybe the boys who raped me in the back of that car could be held to account? But I soon realized that wasn’t the purpose of our journals. The purpose was to gather information that the staff could use to keep us inmates in check.

I’ve kept a journal, off and on, ever since. At times I’ve felt as if the act of recording what’s happened and how I feel about it is the only thing keeping me sane. But back then, in that horrible place, the journaling—not the cockroaches or the mushroom soup—is what ultimately broke me. To have chronicled, in blue ink on white paper, even a few of the atrocities I’d suffered and to have nothing done about them? Counselors told me they’d alerted the police about my rape allegation, but apparently the boys said I had consented to the threesome, so no charges were filed. That’s what made me see the truth. At Growing Together, my pain was nothing more than a sick form of currency, valuable only if used to climb the program’s supposed ladder of “achievement.” Once I figured that out, I reinforced my psychic brick wall. “See? There’s no point,” I scolded myself. “Nobody cares. Fuck the world.”

I responded by running away. Over and over. Sometimes I fled from the cars that delivered us from Growing Together to our overnight lodgings. The moment the door locks popped open, I’d make a break for it. That was by far the easiest way to escape. Other times I waited until I got inside those fortified foster homes, with their deadbolts and their alarms. Then I’d find any sharp object and hold it to my throat, threatening to kill myself. More often than not, the parent host would crumble. Who needs the hassle of a dead teenager in their kitchen? So they’d throw open their doors and let me run into the night. I would then be free, sort of, until I was caught and returned to Growing Together. Though I usually disguised my identity when I was on the run, introducing myself as Rachel (my “runaway name”) to anyone who asked, I wasn’t hard to track. The facility’s staff had figured out where I liked to loiter and beg for change—the local Dunkin’ Donuts was my spot. Eventually they’d find me and take me back to the White Room. But the next chance I got, I ran again.

This is just some of what I’d been through before I met Eppinger. Perhaps it helps explain why I so readily got into a limousine with an old man I didn’t know. It wasn’t just that I’d been brutally raped a few hours before, barely fleeing with my life. No, I had felt worthless for years. Sometimes I worried that what the counselors at Growing Together made me say was true: that I was a whore, a slut, a druggie.

But even if I were all those things, I hadn’t always been. Once, I’d been a daughter, a sister, a beloved little girl. I hated to think about that. But thinking about it was crucial, I see now. Remembering a better time, a time when I had value, may have been the only thing that kept me from giving up.