Page 26 of Poison Wood

Student is exhibiting signs of being histrionic.She enjoys being the center of attention and she also enjoys judging others. She uses her looks to get attention. She is also quite flirty with the male staff. I will need to talk with the male teachers about how to respond to her.

On the outside Student is fun and lively. But I see her fragile sense of self at her core. She is quite threatened by the other girls’ beauty. There is an insecurity buried inside of her I will need to explore but only when the moment is right.

Privileged and Confidential

1999 Group Session Notes

Date: September 1999

Student Number: 050

From: Dr. Janet Fontenot

Student is pushing her boundaries to the point she is getting in trouble almost every day. She has a willful disobedience about her, is defiant, and has been caught in multiple lies. Her anger and irritability are front and center.

I’m still studying her behavior but it seems to fit with Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

Privileged and Confidential

1999 Group Session Notes

Date: September 1999

Student Number: 025

From: Dr. Janet Fontenot

Student is displaying intense mood swings and enjoys yelling in Group. If she is offended she will get directly in offenders face and scream as loud as she can. She is also impulsive and showing signs of an eating disorder. Student has also stated to other students she will kill herself if her boyfriend breaks up with her.

I am requesting a full psych eval for Borderline Personality Disorder. Her chronic feelings of emptiness have come out in a private session. Student will likely need to transfer to a different environment.

I knew our counselors were keeping notes—some did it while we were in group—but I’d never seen what they’d written. These are some serious diagnoses. The student numbers I saw on tests and financial statements for my dad did not correlate with these. This was a separate numbering system. A secret way to designate us.

I wonder if one of these is me. Could they have possibly diagnosed me with something like this?

Katrina’s husky voice fills my head.

“What are you in for?”

She was following me down the hall to math on my second day.

What was I going to say? Talking back to my dad? Breaking curfew? Almost having sex? I’d been there all of forty-eight hours, and I’d already heard stories about stealing cars, punching cops, and selling drugs. And that was just Katrina. She walked the halls of Poison Wood with a magnetic field surrounding her. Despite her long list of offenses, I wanted in it. Something about getting attention from her made me feel special. I liked feeling special.

So I lied to her. I told her I’d stolen my dad’s car and wrecked it into a Circle K, and we were instant friends.

Then Heather had shown up, an outsider whose aunt and uncle attended parents’ weekend, not her parents. Her parents had both died in a car accident. I’d felt so sorry for her. As angry as I was at my father for leaving me at Poison Wood, at least I still had a father to be angry at. Heather was angry too. But she always seemed to be angry at herself. I’d seen the marks on her thighs on those first warm spring days when we’d race for the back lawn after class with our towels to start our tans. Heather always kept her shorts on, but I saw the cuts.

She’d been trouble from day one. Trouble by even Poison Wood’s standards. The first day of class she walked into English wearing skintight cutoffs and a Black Sabbath T-shirt. Her nails were painted black, and her eyes looked like she’d smudged ashes around them. I’d never seen makeup like that before. She had red hair, and eyes like one of my barn cats, golden brown.

“Where’s your uniform, Heather?” our history teacher asked.

“In my room.”

“I’ll need you to go put it on. Now.”

Heather looked around at all of us in our navy-and-green plaid skirts and white starched shirts, knee-high socks and Mary Janes. And even with my skirt cut two inches shorter, I suddenly felt like a little girl.

“No,” Heather said.