The year is 2012. Hurricane Sandy sweeps up the East Coast, shutting down virtually all activity in town in a lot of areas. My high school was closed for 10 school days across 3 weeks. When we got back, something was a little different, but we weren't sure what it was.
Soon we realized a girl had disappeared. She was pretty, very druggy, the kind of person I'd consider cool even if she wasn't Most Likely To Succeed. Any attempt to contact her was a dead end, and any attempt to contact her parents was a dead end to the point where her closest friends drove to her house and wouldn't stop knocking on the door until it was answered, upon which they were met by her parents ordering them to leave or the police would be called.
No one knew what happened to her, the remaining years of high school went by without any story ever coming forward. We graduated and all went our separate ways.
Last fall a photo popped up on my news feed of a friend of mine standing with her on the beach in our hometown. I was stunned, I immediately contacted this friend and asked what the hell had happened. She relayed the story of what had happened to this girl during the hurricane.
Her parents, well known abusers of alcohol, painkillers, antidepressants, anxiolytics, and anything else that you can't get in legal trouble for doing, had grown tired of their daughter's weed-smoking, socially-drinking, and occaisional-'caine-snooting ways and decided to get rid of her. The storm was the perfect moment to pull the trigger: many of us were out of contact with one another, and focusing on other things. They were right; we didn't notice she was gone until we got back to school.
As she tells the story, she was woken up at 3 am by her parents directing 2 men she had never met to take her out of the house and into their vehicle, upon which they drove nonstop to wilderness in Georgia where she was kept for 7 weeks at some become-one-with-nature-and-stop-disobeying-your-parents camp. After that time was up she was enrolled in one of those Jesus Saves internment ca boarding schools in the mountains of West Virginia. At this facility she really realized her situation was screwed up because everyone else there was either hooked on heroin, a serial cutter, or prone to extreme aggression and violence. Tokin' on the maryjane was akin to picking daisies in a field compared to the other girls' track records. She began acting out and stuck to it for as long and severe as it took to the point where the punishments would have to cross the threshold into illegal to be effective and they had to expel her.
She was driven several hours away but does not know where she ended up at this point. She stayed at another camp for 12 weeks in an attempt to calm her down, and when that was over her parents finally decided to send her to a boarding school for normal people in western Massachusetts, where she remained for a long time. Shortly before last Thanksgiving she was expelled for leaving the property and smoking weed. By this point she had been a legal adult for some time even if she was a few years behind in high school, and her parents just basically stopped giving a fuck. They weren't going to pay her way any more, and she wasn't welcome at home either. She returned to stay with the family of a very loyal old friend, the kind of people who aren't too preoccupied with themselves to lend a hadn to someone who really needed it. She nannied and took classes in New York for a while, commuting between there and our hometown each day before getting her GED.
She reactivated her Facebook account and got a new phone. I got back in touch with her, and was really happy to hear she's doing well. Now, she lives in the city and nannies for several families and hopes to someday get a college education. She has weathered a lot; you can see it in her attitude now, but I don't think that experience made her forget how to be the person she truly is at heart.