Free My Story by Chris Stewart, Elizabeth Smart Page A

when I woke up in the middle of the night and thought that I was home. It didn’t happen on that first night. In fact, it didn’t happen until several months after I had been taken, when I woke up searching for my alarm clock. For a moment, I was confused. When I couldn’t find it, I finally remembered where I was.
    But this only happened once.
    On the morning of June 6, I woke up and knew immediately where I was.
    It had been a long night. For one thing, it had rained. The sides of the tent were dripping with condensation. But Mitchell had dug a small trench around the outside to funnel the water away, so at least our bedding was not wet. Another thing that made it a long night was the fact that Mitchell kept getting out of bed. He’d get up, unzip the tent, and go outside. I could hear him out there, huffing and puffing through some kind of exercise. He did this every night. Get up. Go outside. Work through a series of stretching exercises, puffing as he bent and stretched and worked his muscles. I don’t know if he did it because he was nervous or if it was part of his fanatical exercise routine, but I don’t think he ever slept through the night for the entire time that I was with him.
    When I woke up, the sun was just beginning to break over the top of the mountains. It was only a few weeks from the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and it was very early. Mitchell, always anxious to begin talking or drinking or getting naked or whatever else he had in mind for that day, apparently didn’t like to lie around. He and Barzee got up with the sun. Which meant that I got up as well.
    My mouth was dry. I ached from sleeping on the ground, pressed against the side of the tent, trying to put some space between my captor and myself. And my stomach was already churning as I remembered Mitchell’s words: We’re going to be like the children of Eden. We’re going to go naked.
    As daylight broke, the birds began to chatter from above us. Then the wind began to stir, moving down the canyon to the valley floor below. Mitchell and Barzee crawled out from underneath their bedding. I grew tight, afraid to move. If I kept my eyes closed, maybe they would go back to sleep. If I didn’t move, maybe they would leave me alone. If I pretended I was asleep, maybe they would just go away.
    The cable was tight against my leg and I felt cramped and claustrophobic. It was a bright morning. We were a long way up the mountain and the air was still cool.
    A few minutes passed until Mitchell announced, “Okay, let’s get naked now.”
    I was instantly mortified. I am a very bashful person. I always have been. And, being so young, I was very self-conscious about my body. So I pretended I didn’t hear him and didn’t move.
    Mitchell started to grow anxious. “Take it off! You have to take it off,” he said.
    I looked down at my linen robe. The day before, I thought it was the most disgusting piece of clothing that I had ever seen. Now it was my shield. I wanted to keep it on more than anything I had ever worn before. I longed for my red pajamas with the high collar and wondered what Mitchell had done with them. (A few months later, I would learn that he had very weird plans for the clothing I had been wearing on the night that I was captured.)
    Seeing that I was not responding, Mitchell started growing angry, his dark eyes darting here and there. He had a cool way about him. Evil. Calculating. He stroked his beard without thinking, as if he were … I don’t know, trying to calm himself. His lips curled back in agitation and I thought of his knife. Barzee was also getting anxious as she looked at me in anger.
    “Take it off,” he sneered a final time.
    I knew I couldn’t defy him any longer. Moving as if in slow motion, wanting to delay the moment for every fraction of a second that I could, I slipped out of the robe. Sitting in a corner of the tent, I grabbed a pillow and held it in front of me, grasping it as if it were a