This went on for several visits. The reading voice would show up, read a couple stories to me, all from different cultures, and then disappear again. In the silence between their visits, I found my dreams becoming more and more colorful, filled with the reading voice’s stories. There was barely any room for my own memories when images of mythical creatures, willful rogues, and magical treasures filled my mind.
One particular tale that caught my interest wasHansel and Gretel. I especially liked the ending, so much so that I wished I could ask the reading voice to read it again. The two little kids were abandoned by their family and caught by a witch in a house of cake and candy. Yet, instead of giving up and becoming the cannibalistic witch’s next meal, the two kids fought back. They tricked the witch and shoved her into her own oven, killing her for good so she couldn’t hurt any more kids. Then they ran off with the witch’s treasures to presumably live happily ever after.
If only real-life evil could be defeated that way.
I was eighteen and a half when Camp Green Hill was finally shut down. It wasn’t because of anything that I did. The camp eventually went too far with their tactics and accidentally killed one of the kids. It turned out the kid was an undiagnosed diabetic, and withholding food had caused the kid to fall into a diabetic coma. Thinking the kid was faking, they hadn’t delivered aid fast enough, and the kid ended up dying.
Murder, it turned out, was a lot harder to cover up. Though they tried and I’m sure they thought they got away with it, at first. The kid’s family apparently did care enough to report the death, and the camp ended up getting investigated. It all came to light whenthe older brother of another one of the boy took it upon himself to rescue his brother. Somehow he’d known the camp was bad and fought with everything he had to get the younger teen out. From there, it was all over. Law enforcement quickly realized what was going on, and a special team of detectives was brought in to handle everything. Everyone was rounded up, and I was bundled off with all the other kids to a hospital for evaluation and treatment.
End of the story, right?
LikeHansel and Gretel, I could skip on off home with my treasures into my happily ever after.
Well, not so much. Real life wasn’t a fairytale, and stories rarely had such satisfying endings.
First, I was in the hospital for a while. The starvation I’d experienced had left my body weaker than it should be. It wasn’t just the two extreme moments of starvation I remembered. Whenever the camp staff were mad at us, they’d withhold meals. One meal at a time, little by little, over the course of year there my body had been denied nutrients it needed while it grew. At eighteen, I was underweight and shorter than I should have been based on my proportions. I was prescribed a vitamin regimen and told to get plenty of rest while my body recovered, but otherwise I was physically unharmed.
As I waited in the hospital, my father and an aunt—what little family I apparently had—were contacted but they never responded. So, with no better options, I was placed into a recovery program for victims while my body healed. There, I experienced real therapy for the first time. I talked to an actual therapist who didn’t just lecture me about morality but actually listened to me and helped me work through my own thoughts. Itwas in those therapy sessions that I was finally given a name for what I experienced at Camp Green Hill.
Abuse. It wasn’t “training”. It wasn’t correction. It was abuse.
That knowledge helped a little. For the first time in years, I didn’t feel like the crazy one. It was perfectly acceptable to dislike what the staff at that camp did to me. Nobody likes abuse, and I certainly shouldn’t feel grateful for it.
I wished I could have continued working with that therapist longer, but the recovery program had limited funding, and they couldn’t afford to keep giving me free treatment when there were so many other kids who needed help. So many other kids were worse off than me. At eighteen years old, I technically wasn’t even a kid anymore. No one had a legal obligation to me. Since I was well enough to stand on my own two feet and support myself, and I had technically aged out of “the system”, there was only so much they could do for me without taking away resources from someone else.
They still technically offered me help, in the ways they could. I was given a list of places I could apply to for work, and a small allowance for food, but nevertheless, I was basically turned out on the street and encouraged to make my own way.
It was… almost enough.
That first night out of the hospital without a roof over my head was a cold one. I went to the police station asking what I was supposed to do if I didn’t have a place to stay and was pointed toward a homeless shelter that didn’t have any vacancies.
For a couple weeks, I actually had hoped that I’d be able to make it on my own. But the list of potential jobs was out of date. Most of the places either didn’t exist or weren’t hiring. I did manageto land a few interviews for basic minimum wages jobs, but with absolutely no education to my name—even my home schooling was a joke—it didn’t go well.
No home. No money. Nothing but the clothes on my back, which I hated.
But I did have two things.
The one good thing that Camp Green Hill taught me. I knew how to survive.
And, I had Eli.
We ended up in a tent city with a hundred or so other homeless people, and for a little while it wasn’t too bad.
Then the food money ran out. It wasn’t meant to be a permanent handout. Just long enough for me to get a job and start taking care of myself. I guess they underestimated just how hard that would be, because a single month wasn’t nearly long enough. When that month ended, I needed to find an alternate means of supporting myself.
So, I did what I had to do to survive.
CHAPTER 11
Auggie
Retiringfrom the military had a lot of perks. Not only was I closer to my family, but I no longer fought for my life on a regular basis. I didn’t have to train new recruits, and I could finally set my own schedule rather than have every minute of every day planned for me. Overall, life outside the military was equivalent to a vacation, and I was very glad for the new change my life had taken.
However, sometimes I really missed when I was allowed to shoot my enemies.
The man sitting across from me in the FPA’s interview room was an absolute troglodyte of a human being. Even breathing the same air as him made me feel like I was regressing in my evolution. He hadn’t looked me in the eye once during the entire thirty minutes we’d been talking, which was probably his only saving grace, because I was barely keeping my temper in check every time he opened his mouth.
If we’d been on the battlefield and this man had been in my sightlines, I would not have hesitated to pull the trigger.