New Horizons Read Online Free Page B

break through. I just had to be patient and keep up the pace. That was all anything required, really.
    Guy opened the door before I could escape on my own. The breeze alone made me stop what I was doing and forget about being trapped. The cold felt so good on my skin, and I calmed down.
    "Come on. You look like hell." Guy reached down and lifted me up by my wrists.
    The tape pulled at the hairs on my arm but I pretended to feel nothing. I wanted to have no reaction. He pulled me outside, but I missed the step down, and landed hard on my knees and elbows.
    “That hurt,” I groaned. There wasn’t a way to catch myself, and my bones felt the shock of being slammed into the ground. I dropped my face into the dirt because there was no point holding up my head any longer. I could feel the dirt sticking to the sweat on my skin.
    Guy yanked me back up. He was rough and I could feel the bruises already forming. That was something I probably had to get used to. Being pushed around and doing things by force. There was no waiting around for me to get up—the counsellors were there to drag me. Dad always said I needed a good kick in the ass.
    Guy seemed to think he had me under his control—that I had given up. I realized it was my chance to teach him that the most interesting people in life were the people you didn’t trust. And I was one of those interesting people.
    I bolted.
    The scene must have looked amazing. It was me sprinting with my hands taped in front, and Guy chasing after me. I had never run anywhere like that before, and it felt so funny. If I died and went to heaven, I would ask God to replay that moment for me to see from a bystander point of view. That had to be a thing. All our moments in our lives should be on tape somewhere up in the clouds. What else was the point of doing crazy things? You had to be able to see it again.
    There wasn’t really anywhere to go. I slowed down, and Guy tackled me to the ground. He landed on top of me, and I was back to square one again, with my face pressed into the ground, and my elbows and knees scrapped up.
    “There had to be a better way to stop me,” I said.
    Guy ripped me up even more aggressively. Next time I’m sure it would be by the bun of my hair. And I would pretend I felt nothing, because that was the plan. If you held it in, sometimes, it really did disappear. I almost believed that how you imagined your bad experiences, determined how they affected you. That’s what I was going with.
    Guy pushed me ahead of him, but held tightly onto my elbow. He instructed me to walk toward the dirt path in the distance.
    “Sure thing.” I turned and looked at him. Behind him, Larry was watching us. I tried to give him the finger, but with how my hands were taped together, it looked like I was praying. Maybe I needed all the help I could get, even from the sky.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    3: CABIN 519
     
    Guy wasn’t just taking me on a walk. I mean, I would have loved a good walk. What couldn’t a walk cure? That was what Granny always told me to do when I was complaining about something.
    “Oh Val, you sound like you could use a good walk,” she’d say.
    Granny died of a broken hip. Actually, she died of a lot of things. But the broken hip added to it. I would like to say she died mostly of old age, but that wasn’t really a thing. She had a lot of other ailments that living a long time seemed to do to a person. That was the beauty of the twenty-first century. There were too many options to die from that you couldn’t just burn out from one thing. It was amazing. She could sit on the toilet wrong and die. She could get the flu and somehow manage to die. Being old must be brutal.
    If I could have one thing in life, it would be to die of something normal. Like a car accident. Maybe I would die at New Horizons. A death in the program would surely set someone straight.
    Guy took me to the ward. The ward was a small building off of the mess hall that was full of rooms with