Very LeFreak by Rachel Cohn

Author:Rachel Cohn [Cohn, Rachel]
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-375-89552-4
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2010-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

White Noise (The Real Kind)

CHAPTER 18

ESCAPE, Emergency Services for Computer-Addicted Persons Everywhere, was a former fat farm fallen on hard times. Originally built as a summer vacation lodge during the post–World War II period, it developed a reputation as a refuge for plump housewives seeking to discreetly shed pounds at discount rates during the off-season. The lodge became a full-fledged fat farm during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, when the Vermont lake resort targeted a new clientele and transformed to cater year-round to a pampered elite of suddenly wealthy/suddenly porky millionaires. But a shyster accountant and global economic turmoil ultimately forced the family who’d owned the establishment to sell it off. The controlling interest was bought by a faceless conglomerate (IBM and Microsoft were both rumored; a consortium of dot-com fat farm graduates was the more likely candidate—skinny people could get so mean and vindictive). The new regime was looking to profit from the flip side of the new technology economy: technology addiction. The conglomerate hired Dr. Joyce Kuntz, a New Age shrink who’d dreamed of finding a cheap resort that could be converted into a technology dry-out clinic, to run the new endeavor. She preferred to be known professionally as “Dr. Joy,” for obvious reasons.

Very had seen the ESCAPE infomercial once, when she was in high school, on the television in her dentist’s office in New Haven. The TV had been set up to distract patients during root canal procedures.

“Hi, I’m Dr. Joy. I’d like to tell you and your technology-addicted loved ones about a program I’ve started, at a place where overstressed, overstimulated people can go for guidance and strength, to learn about the beauty in their hearts, away from the numbing addiction of their machines. Located along the scenic Lake Champlain shoreline in Vermont, ESCAPE is a resort clinic where you or your loved ones can withdraw from technology and travel to the inner depths of the soul. At ESCAPE, you’ll receive premium physical and mental rehabilitation, in a relaxed natural setting. Call the number on your television screen now for more information.”

Lavinia had promised the place would be like spa rehab.

Lavinia had been wrong.

Newly technology-less residents roamed the ESCAPE grounds like automatons, mindlessly performing stupid provincial chores foisted upon them as “voluntary,” like churning butter and picking berries to make into jam. They gardened and trimmed bushes and trees on the property, under the guise of “nature time.” Residents had to launder their own clothes and sheets, using old-fashioned wringers and washboards, and then hang the laundry on outdoor lines to dry. There wasn’t even a manicurist on site to fix inmates’—er, residents’—hands after all that hard work.

In Very’s opinion, the “spa rehab” was more like a technology-free indentured servitude zone, without Google and iTunes and satellite TV and a Wii—in other words, all the perks that were supposed to come along with basic existence. The ESCAPE brochure—with all the pretty Vermont pictures and 12 Steps jargon and quotes from “healed” technophiles—was just a subterfuge.

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