Free A Really Awesome Mess by Trish Cook Page B

said. “You want to escape? To go where? You gonna go live in a cornfield?”
    Diana took a big bite of her sloppy joe. The red goo oozed from between her lips, and Emmy looked totally green, like she might just barf right here and wreck it for us. “Close your eyes, for God’s sake!” I yelled at Emmy. She did, putting her palms down on the table and taking deep breaths.
    “Mmm …” Diana said with a mouth full of beef and bread. “I really like the way the beef fat mixes with the tomato. Mmmfh. And after you chew and mix it with your saliva, it makes this hot slurry of—”
    It was clearly touch and go with Emmy right then. “I really like to exercise,” I said, hoping to plant a reassuring image in her mind. “Just hit the treadmill for an hour and a half or so. You know, my treadmill’s broken, though, and it only tells me how many calories I’m burning in a minute. So, Emmy, if I can run at a pace that allows me to consistently burn six calories a minute—”
    “Then you’re obviously not running fast enough, lazy,” Emmy said. And everybody laughed, and Diana’s evil spell was broken.
    “Listen,” Mohammed said through clenched teeth. “If we get our rewards two more weeks in a row, we’ll get a field trip anyway. You don’t have to break out to get off campus.”
    Diana chewed on this information and her sloppy joe. “I don’t care. I can’t wait two weeks. I’ll lose it. I mean, I’m losing it already. I need some fresh air. Look at this place—” She gestured around at our subterranean dining hall, with the high windows covered in wire mesh and the ancient green-and-white linoleum squares on the floor, and it was easy to see what she meant. “I can’t breathe in here. You guys help me break out, I’ll be an angel until then.”
    “Do we have to come with you?” Chip asked. “Because then you’re basically asking us to never ever get out of here. You know breaking out shows that you still have to work on your issues with authority, that you’re not taking responsibility for your own actions—”
    “That you’re still blaming others for your own bad decisions,” Emmy piped in.
    “That you can’t see it’s not that the world is against you, it’s that you are against the world,” Chip said. “And you haven’t achieved balance and wholeness.”
    “Yeah, I’m really not supposed to be here anyway,” I said. “The whole thing was a misunderstanding. So I am damn sure not signing up for more time in this place just so you can go play
Children of the Corn
.”
    “What the hell is that?” Diana asked.
    “It’s a horror movie about psychotic kids,” I said. “I think you’d identify.” And Diana was up off the bench and ready to come over the table at me.
    “Fifty bucks on Diana,” Emmy said, laughing, as Chip restrained Diana and got her back in her seat.
    Mohammed gave me a look. And then he spoke. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll break you out.
After
you behave for a week.” He extended his hand, and Diana reached out and shook it.
    I should have been happy that I had something to look forward to. When I’d gotten into my bed, I had a smile on my face.
    And then I woke up in the morning, and something was wrong. My head wasn’t right.
    I stumbled through academic classes, including Fitness, which turned out to involve walking around the track out back.
    And then it was Max time.
    “How are you doing today?” he said.
    I’d been resisting Max pretty effectively up until now—giving him glib sarcasm as much as possible and never saying anything meaningful. But today I didn’t have the fight left. This, of course, was how they got you.
    “I’m numb,” I said.
    Max looked up from his iPad. “Physically?” he said.
    “No. Just emotionally. You know. I just don’t feel anything.”
    “Why do you think that is?”
    They always asked this question. And it always pissed me off. I didn’t know why. I mean, my parents were divorced, but that just made me