It’s just as easy to fuck with people by fucking with the routine. That was part of the genius of it, if you could call it that. Sometimes the schedule would be so rigid and repetitive that going insane would have been a relief. They’d make us stick to the schedule no matter what, with plenty of punishments for anybody who screwed it up. They beat the schedule into us. Starved it into us. Screamed it into us. Anything they could think of.

Then it would turn on a dime.

Once they had us ready to die from boredom or monotony or the pain, they’d switch everything up again. Then the fear would keep us on our toes. Didn’t make anything better. It just meant my heart would race all the time. Most nights I couldn’t fall asleep. The nightmare of the day sleeping with me at night.

When they’d change the schedule, there was almost never any point in falling asleep. They’d just wake us up again. They did that to keep us desperate and focused on when we could lay down again. They did that to drive us insane. Like they wanted a fresh start so they’d break us down until we didn’t know what was right and what was wrong.

It worked.

They wouldn’t have done it if it didn’t. Hell, they had success stories to brag about which led to all the federal money they scraped up.

God, they loved that schedule shit. It was the perfect way to control us. From the outside, nobody could argue with the schedule. We were troubled teens, so we needed boundaries and a routine we could rely on. Even when some of us tried to explain how it was—and it was never often, because parents weren’t allowed to visit more than a couple times a year, and when they left, you ended up right back where you started. We were fucked if we tried to tell them anything, and even more fucked if our parents tried to talk to anyone at the school. The police even came once and the only thing that happened is that they arrested the kid. It was like everyone was against us and we really were so fucking bad to the core, that everyone wanted to hurt us. And they could get away with it, over and over again.

That was the kind of thing everybody learned fastest. Asking for help, or even seeming like you might need it, would only get you hurt, and usually pretty badly.

It was never worth it to explain.