Prison? Not actually that bad. Boring. Boring as fuck. Monotonous - and that’s gotta be the whole point, right? ‘Cause for every minute and a half of sheer terror anyone of us experienced, there was, like, a week and a half, at least, of nothing.
I read a lot. I wrote, too - the pencils they gave us were tiny, like, 2 inches long, but that didn’t matter. You earned privileges, which gave you access to things like rec rooms (I found a music room). I learned that you had to sign out tampons one by one... and how many tens of dozens of times someone can get stabbed before they can’t walk away from it on their own.
I’ll give them one thing, though; as dangerous as this probably was, I got to keep my hair. Thank god. I know it would’ve grown back, but it was mine... and I got to keep it.
Adrian grew up in Albuquerque. Her family broke several years after her youngest sister was born through a simple, no-fault divorce
Adrian’s two little sisters have the same diagnosis; both are profoundly disabled, with problems having to do with their microcephaly, including CP and extreme dwarfism - making them the both, at the ages of 12 and 17, the size and likely the cognitive awareness of babies.
Being that the focus was rarely on her, Adrian got away with quite a bit. She never resented her sisters, but she did take advantage of her situation, testing how far she could push boundaries… and never getting in trouble in the process
Her mother remarried when Adrian was 14 to a man who happened to have a 14 year old son. In her new step-brother, Adrian found someone to dodge trouble with, and they did so. Often.
Eventually, everyone in their clique was caught after what was effectively a contest of one-upping each other in progressively riskier ways; Adrian’s step brother tried to throw himself under the bus for her, but Adrian was also arrested.
Adrian’s mother and stepfather were dealing with a health crisis in one of their disabled kids at the time. They were both beyond overwhelmed, and when a “youth counselor” representing the “Antioch Christian Redemption Academy for Boys and Girls” pitched a no-fuss, Christ-focused means to fixing their situation with Adrian and her stepbrother, they ate it up easily and far too uncritically.
Seemingly out of nowhere, Adrian was woken up out of a dead sleep by large, masked men who effectively “kidnapped” her while she screamed for help from her folks. To her astonishment, they did nothing but watch from their doorway.
Adrian ended up at an unregulated Christian “Wilderness Therapy Program” in the middle of rural Utah at the age of 15, where she and the other campers spent their time mostly digging holes, doing other pointless manual labor, and praying for absolution while the staff enforced authoritarian measures and subjected the campers to physical and psychological torture. ((Yes, this all does happen irl))
Adrian graduated from her “therapy” “program” when she turned 18 and went directly from being a camper to a staff. She then quickly found herself getting extremely drunk on power, acting towards the campers the way the staff had usually acted towards her. It was disturbing how naturally this came; with the participation of all the other staff, encouraging each other to take things further and further until tragedy finally struck, Adrian was as much at fault as anyone else.
Upon the death of a camper, CPS came to investigate and promptly arrested all the staff. Adrian, along with everyone else, was charged with criminal neglect of a minor and spent 3 years in prison. She’d made off somewhat easily and has just been released.
With no desire to reconcile with her folks, Adrian headed towards a small town in Nevada, where she’s pretty sure one of her great uncles resides.
She’s not proud of what she’s done to get here, but she’s got enough pocket change as a result to check into a motel, so she doesn’t have to sleep in a restroom, or on the streets, as she had been doing since being released from the Utah Women’s Correctional Facility, where she’d been serving time for the last three years.
