The Elissas by Samantha Leach

Author:Samantha Leach [LEACH, SAMANTHA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2023-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XI

Alyssa

Alyssa’s eighteenth birthday fell on October 23, 2010, the same day as her classmate Allie’s. Birthdays were always a big deal at Ponca Pines, and the girls awaited October 23 with an unparalleled furor. Ecstatic at the process of having not one birthday cake with dinner, but two.

Despite their shared birthdays, Allie and Alyssa weren’t particularly close. Allie seemed to get along better with her pet betta fish, Mojo, than the other girls. She’d transferred to Ponca Pines from Island View, a Utah-based therapeutic boarding school. Though the school has since closed, in just under fifteen years, 219 emergency calls were placed to the local police department, some of them related to allegations of abuse, sex offenses, or suicide attempts.1 While Allie was at Island View, she broke her foot. It’s not uncommon for Troubled Teen Industry staffers to deny students medical care, despite the fact that the practice has led to both lawsuits and deaths, like in the case of Aaron Bacon, who died as a result of not being treated for acute peritonitis while at a wilderness program. (Bacon was also subjected to a litany of other abuses, such as going without food for eleven days and being denied a sleeping bag for two weeks, despite the average overnight temperature being thirty-two degrees.)2 And when Allie went to the staff about her foot, they told her that she was an attention-seeker and refused to get her help until the break had become so severe that she required surgery. Though Allie much preferred Ponca Pines to Island View, she was quietly counting down the days until her birthday—and what she knew she’d do once that day came.

Taking in these admissions is as maddening as it is excruciating, imagining my best friend’s final years, confined to such darkness. The stories Allie tells are not only of her injury, but also of the times she was locked in an eight-by-eight windowless isolation room, smeared with urine and fecal matter stains. Or the meds she was forced to take, with someone placing them in her mouth and watching until she swallowed. How they made her so tired that she couldn’t stop herself from falling asleep in class, an act that would lead her to be placed back in the isolation room as her punishment. An experience that’s not unique to Allie, as governmental protection and advocacy groups found instances of misuse and overuse of psychiatric medication during monitored visits of youth residential facilities. It’s incomprehensible to me that there are so many who would inflict such torment on teenagers. That there are networks full of adults abusing kids in the name of tough love. That even considering the many people I talk to, I will never know the full extent of the abuse Elissa absorbed.

Not all staff who enter the Troubled Teen Industry come in with the aim of inflicting hurt on teenagers. There are some who are clearly in it for the money. Wanting to exploit the exorbitant price tags associated with these programs, not the students themselves.

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