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at the same time, I snapped back to the present. I knewwhat she was thinking. Check your pride at the door. Get it over with. Give the dogs some meat to chew on or they’ll really come after you. And I knew she was right. I’d been to CT enough to see how it worked: Confess, cry, get out of the circle. But I was afraid that if I opened my mouth about anything, I was going to say things I didn’t want anyone to know.
    “You think you’re so strong, with your punked-out hair and piercings. Except your hair’s fading and your piercings are gone, so what are you now?” V screamed. “You’re just an ordinary girl with some ink in her skin. You’re nobody special.” Her eyes searched my face, imploring me, and I understood what she was doing. She was throwing out softballs, laying a false scent for the dogs so they wouldn’t catch me. I knew then that she was a friend.
    “You think you’re tough, but I’ve heard you cry,” Tiffany said, jumping right in with her mightiest effort, which was in fact total BS. I didn’t cry anymore. I gave Tiffany my most withering glare until she looked like she was going to cry. Brown-nosing wuss.
    A few other girls threw out similarly lame comments but they failed to provoke. I just summonedsome of that strength Jed had told me I had, and glared at everyone, daring them to mess with me. Without air a flame dies, and Sheriff didn’t have the patience of some of the other counselors, who’d leave you in the ring for the whole hour. After ten minutes, I was pulled from the circle. It meant I could be moving down to Level Two, but I didn’t care.
    “Miss Wallace,” Sheriff called. He had his rifle sight pointed at Martha, my overweight roommate, and I immediately felt my stomach lurch. No one got it in CT like the fat girls, and Sheriff, a man beyond clueless to the travails of being young, female, and overweight, was notoriously cruel. What’s worse was that the whole room was amped up with unspent energy because I hadn’t given up a thing. I knew Martha was going to take the beating I should have.
    “Hey, fatty.”
    “Hey, lardass. Why do you eat so much?”
    A couple of the girls were oinking like pigs. Sheriff was wearing a self-satisfied grin. He liked to say that you had to break before you could be fixed, but this was too much. Back at my school in Portland, this kind of name-calling would get you detention, buthere it was called therapy. As the taunts rose into a chorus, Martha looked down, her face hidden behind her lank brown hair, and shuffled her feet in that way of hers, like she was an elephant trying to disappear behind a mouse. She stared at the floor while the chants continued. No one was even trying to pretend to be supportive here; there was none of the usual talk about using food to fight loneliness or to hide her beauty. Just two dozen girls taking out their body-image issues on the size-18 sucker in the mush pot. Like me, Martha didn’t say anything, but she made the mistake of averting her gaze, the sign of defeat. Her back was to me, so I didn’t know that she was crying until I saw the spatter of tears on the blue mat. Usually, once you let the waterworks go, you got a group hug, and pats on the back, and words of encouragement, but all Martha got was a Kleenex.
    In the cafeteria that night, I sat next to Martha, who, like me, usually sat by herself. To my surprise, Bebe, Cassie, and V sat down next to us.
    “I’m so sorry, Martha,” I said. “It was my fault you got nailed today.”
    “No, it wasn’t,” V said. Her face was red withanger. “Neither of you is at fault. It’s this place’s fault. Cruelty described as therapy. No wonder so many girls leave here more messed up than when they came.”
    “It was particularly brutal today, roomie,” Bebe said. “And I thought my slut intervention was bad.”
    “Bad? You were havin’ a grand ole time,” Cassie said.
    “It was kind of amusing. I mean, so what? Who isn’t a slut these