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when designing this school. The outside world can be such a distraction from . . .”
    I stopped listening to her lecture. Dust clogged the air as we crossed the barren yard. Hundreds of resistant feet had obviously beat any grass into submission. My translator finally kicked in as she unlocked door number three. Meditation Center = solitary confinement.
    Dr. Mordoch guided me into the closet of a room. It was sweltering and reeked of sweat. My chest squeezed tight with anxiety. I wanted to bolt, but I already knew there was no place to go. Plus, Dr. Mordoch was blocking the only exit.
    I took it in quickly. Six feet wide and eight feet long. Cement floor. A wooden platform stuck a couple of feet out of the back wall. A large metal ring was mounted near the floor.
I don’t even want to know
.
    “Swami Sivananda once said, ‘Meditation is painful in the beginning but it bestows immortal Bliss and supreme joy in the end.’ Faye, sometimes pain is the only way.” She gave me a benign smile and shut the door.
    Then I was alone in the blackness. I tried to push down the panic. But the adrenaline rush from this morning had gone clean through my body, making me feel washed out and weak. There was no inside doorknob, but I shoved my shoulder into the door anyway. Hoping.
    The lock held and fire ripped down my already bruised arm. A low animal moan escaped my throat.
    “Fear is an illusion. I’m in control of my own reality.” My words sounded muffled in the walled-off space, making me feel even smaller.
    How did I end up here?
It’d just started out as bad dreams. Night terrors, the doctor had called them. Always the blue waves rushing at me. Pulling me down. But the nightmares of drowning were less terrifying than the kids who cried just because I looked at them. Or the teachers who called me a liar and a bully.
    Doctors checked my eyes, my ears, my brain, searching for a reason for my strangeness. They tested me for ADHD and dyslexia. By junior high I’d been poked and prodded and screened for everything in the book, and they still had nothing to blame it on. But by then I’d figured out how to hide it. At night, I took refuge in the empty streets of the Cooperative. Out under the dark sky, there were no lies to tiptoe around. No eyes to avoid. There was no one to hear my screams.
    But, last year, the nightmares had found their way into the daylight and everything had fallen apart. My parents realized I would never be like everybody else. And I realized I didn’t want to be.
    So here I was. Locked away in a place where I couldn’t pretend even if I wanted to.
    Pacing, my boots thumped out a steady rhythm on the cement floor. Blood pounded in my ears, keeping time.
Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh
. My shins hit the platform at the end of the room.
Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.
I ran into the door.
    The drumbeat from last night came back to me.
It’s time.
The song pulsed in my veins.
For you.
It throbbed through my head until it hurt to move. I leaned against the door, letting it hold me up.
    Fresh air wisped through the spaces between the close-fitting boards. As I breathed in the sweet smell of pine sap, something stirred inside me.
    Under the insistent drumbeat and the whooshing in my head, I could hear the creaking of the branches. I imagined swaying in the breeze. The sound of the wind rustling through leaves.
    I clung to that sensation of being outside. I pressed my hand into the wood, trying to share its solidness as the music hammered at me. My feet rooted to the floor, even as my head spun.
    I didn’t want to lose myself here in the dark. “Please.”
    Something shattered inside me when I heard my feeble voice pleading with a locked door. Throwing my head back, I screamed. I screamed at my father, who’d left me here. At my mother, who was too big a coward to even come. At Dr. Mordoch, who thought she had some special right to drug and imprison me.
    I threw my body into the door and pain thrilled through me. I used it,