In the Company of Crazies

  Karen had the room across the hall from mine. There was a bathroom (unlocked) and shower between us. The stairs leading up actually passed right through the nursery school. I could see the little kids busy playing and coloring and building with blocks. I almost walked right by. I didn’t notice it right away, but something out of the corner of my eye told me this scene was not quite right.

  On our way back out, I made it a point to look more closely. These kids all had problems, real problems—the kind of problems you can see and hear if you listen. Some clearly had Down’s syndrome, and I wondered how I could have missed that on my way in. A couple of the kids were wearing helmets. One boy was in a wheelchair.

  By now it was five o’clock, time to come into Gretchen’s house for dinner.

  It wasn’t until I was inside, finally left alone to think a minute, that I realized this wasn’t a school that looked like someone’s house; rather, it was someone’s house that looked very little like a school, which was infinitely worse. And it only remotely looked like a school because there was more of everything. The table had a lot more chairs around it. The kitchen had more stacks of plates and more cups. The stove had more burners. The mud-room had a long row of hooks, coats and jackets. On the floor were scattered lots and lots of ratty shoes.

  Which was another awful thing.

  You had to take off your shoes when you came into the house. Nobody wore shoes in Gretchen’s house except Gretchen. She had a pair of shoes that looked like little worn-out Chinese slippers.

  I hate not having my shoes on.

  I don’t know what it is or when it started. I’m sure I went barefoot when I was a baby, just like every other baby. But somewhere along the line I came to hate bare feet. Even in the summer, I wear shoes. I don’t even like sandals. I like socks. With shoes on top of them.

  But not in Gretchen’s house.

  Mountain Laurel.

  Everybody here is crazy.

  Maybe I’ll fit right in.

  * * *

  So the reason everyone got upset about my phone call to the attendance secretary wasn’t just because I, obviously, wasn’t dead and therefore should have been in school. The reason everyone got really upset with me was because on that day one year before, there was someone who had died in my school.

  Debbie Sanders.

  I didn’t know Debbie very well. Hardly at all. She was in the grade above me. We lived on the same street so she rode my bus. Or I rode her bus. And we were both on the middle-school volleyball team. Debbie died in a “freak” car accident. That’s what they call it when somebody dies when nobody should have. As if there could be a kind of car accident where somebody should die. But you know when there’s an accident and everybody is so relieved because they say, if the car had been just one fraction of an inch to the left or the right, or if it had happened a second earlier or a second later or whatever, they would have hit that tree and died?

  Well, Debbie’s accident was that one fraction of an inch and that single second. And she died.

  A freak accident.

  Nobody knew it until the next morning, though. She was one of about fifteen of us who were supposed to show up at the VFW that night for the fund-raising ziti dinner. She was actually one of two kids who didn’t come.

  Joanne Murphy and her mom weren’t there either.

  Everyone on the girls’ volleyball team had sold tickets to the dinner, ten dollars a plate. Then all the parents donated the food and the players cooked and served it that night. Each of us got a big round table to wait on, and even though there was only one choice ziti—it was still kind of fun. Like playing restaurant. There were more girls than tables, so when Debbie Sanders and Joanne Murphy didn’t show up, it actually worked out better. Every girl got to wait on her own table.

  There was a ton of work to do and we had to do it really fast. The dinner started at 6:30. The moms were cooking pasta like crazy, and most of us were setting up the tables. We had to drag the heavy chairs from where they were stacked up against the wall. Twelve place settings at every table. Plastic utensils wrapped in a paper napkin. A tall plastic cup and one glass Parmesan cheese dispenser. (The VFW let us use theirs.) Then, when the people started showing up, it got even more hectic. Every girl was running around, filling up glasses of lemonade and plates of ziti. It was advertised as “all you can eat,” which I had never really understood until that night. Some people really like to take advantage of that.

  Nobody had time to call Debbie or Joanne.

  It turned out that Joanne Murphy was doing her homework and she just forgot all about it.

  “It was last night?” she said the next day in school. “I can’t believe it. I had my tennis lesson. Then my math tutor. I just completely forgot!”

  “Yeah, right,” Marcella said. “The whole team is really furious with you.”

  Which was true for a few minutes that morning, until we found out what happened to Debbie Sanders. Then nobody cared that Joanne Murphy had crapped out on the all-you-can-eat ziti dinner.

  * * *

  “Stand up, Mia,” Gretchen said. She raised her hands in the air and gestured up and down like she thought she could move things with just her will.

  “Come now. Stand up.” It was an order apparently. I think everything Gretchen said was an order. And I noticed already that everyone obeyed. Even the grown-ups.

  I stood up.

  It was pretty dark in the dining room. There were a few lights in the living room, but only one table lamp was on, and only one dim light hung from the ceiling above the dining table. It was definitely one of those houses where they are always worrying about money and trying to save energy because it was cold, like the heat was down. Way down. My feet were freezing.

  Still, I could see all the faces looking right at me. The same faces I saw through the window in the rectangle building. They called that the School House. The main building, what I first thought was a farmhouse, Gretchen’s house, where the boys’ rooms were upstairs, where we were now sitting down to eat dinner, was simply called the House. As if there were no other house in the world.

  The House.

  “I want everyone to meet Mia,” Gretchen said.

  “Hi, Mia.” One of the boys said it first. I recognized his face. The round face with the dark hair. Now I could see he had freckles and he looked about twelve or thirteen. Maybe fourteen. He smiled too big and totally insincerely. He was sitting across from me, a few boys down.

  I felt my face heating up. To ease the focus of everyone on me, I made a mental tally of who was in the room. There were six, seven, eight, nine boys in total. Karen, the teacher who had taken me on my grand tour, sat at one end. Another teacher, a man, flanked the boys at the other end of the table. Gretchen sat at the head, near the kitchen, and the woman who had cooked dinner beside her. Thirteen in total.

  No, fourteen. Counting me.

  I really just wanted my shoes back and on my feet.

  “Hi,” another boy said. He looked younger. Frailer than the other boys. He was blond and thin and when he smiled it seemed real. He also seemed nervous, very nervous. So I smiled back.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “That was Tommy,” Gretchen said. “And Drew.” She nodded to the nervous boy.

  “I’m Billy.”

  Billy was kind of chubby and he looked very young. Billy smiled and waved to me, but as soon as he could get his hand back into his mouth he did. He started biting his nails.

  Gretchen went down the table like that. Everyone was introduced and then said hello. The man teacher was Mr. Simone. He was the only one who was called by his last name. And his name wasn’t Simone like Simon says. It was Simone with three syllables, like ba-lon-ey.

  There was one really huge boy, and the huge boy was really strange. His shirt was buttoned all the way to the top and he hadn’t talked until Gretchen made him. When he did, he sounded very formal and stiff. He had a big square head, too, that matched his voice. He looked like Frankenstein. Hi
s name was John, but that’s the way I was going to remember him—Frankenstein. It’s not that I was mean or that I gave a shit. It was more like reading road signs: SLIPPERY WHEN WET, BUMP, HIDDEN DRIVE. They’re necessary to stay alive, assuming that is your objective.

  Gretchen directed the whole thing. Everybody answered. Everybody said hello, but you could tell who was doing it sarcastically, because the other boys smirked or laughed, and who meant it. So far, I thought only Drew had meant it. Maybe that boy Billy, who was still biting his nails. Another boy at the far end only nodded when Gretchen introduced him. His name was Angel. Gretchen pronounced it differently, but everyone else just called him Angel, as in angel.

  “Is Mia going to be my roommate?” one of the boys, Tommy, I think, asked, which got a big laugh and a lot of rude noises.

  “There’s an extra bed in my room,” Carl said. He was the boy with the pimples. That was how I was going to remember him. It was obvious Tommy and Carl were friends. And leaders.

  “If she were in your bed, you wouldn’t know what to do,” Tommy said.

  “We all know you would,” Carl shot back. “We hear you practicing every night.”

  Gretchen stood up.

  “Enough,” she said sharply.

  They were really not much different from the boys at my old school on any given bad day, on any given lunchroom afternoon, during any football game, in any locker room, bathroom, hallway when they think no grown-ups are listening.

  The only difference was these boys didn’t seem to care that grown-ups were listening. Grown-ups were sitting right at the table. I was sitting right at the table.

  “You’re all very funny,” Gretchen said. “One more comment like that and you’ll be sleeping outside. All week.”

  You got the feeling she was the type to follow through with her threats.

  And it all got very quiet.

  * * *

  School had always come pretty easy for me. I was kind of a teacher favorite almost all the way to seventh grade, before things kind of fell apart. I don’t think I ever didn’t get 100 percent on a spelling test, if not on the pretest, then certainly on the Friday spelling test. In sixth grade I got moved up for math and put into the highest reading group. At my parent/teacher conference they said it was highly unusual for a student to excel in both math and language arts.

  But that was me.

  And my parents loved it. I mean, they pretended it wasn’t such a big deal. But my mom couldn’t wait to ask me how I did if she knew I’d had a test that day. It got to the point I could tell when she was trying not to ask, trying not to put too much pressure on me to do well. I could tell because she’d ask me about something stupid when I got home from school, while I was sitting having my snack. She’d talk about something totally opposite from what she really wanted to know.

  I got new pillows for the guest-room bed, she’d say. Did you notice them?

  Or:

  Daddy is really due for an oil change in his car. Maybe tomorrow he can take mine so I can run it over to the garage for him.

  I could literally feel her waiting.

  She’d wait all afternoon.

  And eventually I’d tell her because I used to love her reaction. I loved her big smile and the way she’d look at me. It made me feel good.

  But then one day, it didn’t.

  It happened slowly. In sixth grade, we started switching classes and teachers, and things were a little different. I was taking seventh-grade pre-algebra. It was hard and the teacher didn’t really like me.

  I got my first detention ever from that teacher. I had to stay in for recess and she sent a note home to my parents informing them that I had received a detention. I thought I was going to throw up when that letter came in the mail.

  But the real change was at home. I don’t remember when it first became so clear to me that my mother cared more than I did. But it was sometime during that sixth-grade year.

  “Don’t you have a math test tomorrow?” my mother asked me. She was doing the dishes or folding laundry or something like that.

  “Yeah,” I said. I was watching a rerun of Friends.

  “Do you want me to study with you?” She kept working on what she happened to be doing, folding or rinsing or wiping the counter. Trying so hard to appear only casually interested.

  “No.”

  “Daddy will be home soon. He’s better at math than me anyway,” she said. It was driving her crazy.

  This time I didn’t say anything. I didn’t respond at all. I just stared at the TV.

  “Mia, did you hear me?”

  I had heard her, of course. My inside was fighting with my outside because I felt like I should be studying too. My outside was watching TV. My legs were comfortable. My neck was comfortable. I didn’t want to move, get up, and drag my fifty-pound backpack onto the couch and dig for my math book.

  My inside was worrying about the test the next day. Exponents and negative numbers, balancing equations. I should read the chapter again, I thought. I should get up. Maybe my mother could test me from my homework.

  But it didn’t happen like that.

  My mother walked into the den, right in front of me, and flipped off the TV.

  “Enough,” she said. “It’s time to study.”

  I was so surprised for a second I just sat there. To be honest, I didn’t think I was going to turn the TV back on, lay on the couch for the whole night, and never study one page. At first, I didn’t even consider that.

  But there was something in her face.

  Or her body, the way she was standing there, blocking the cable box so I couldn’t use the remote. Her hands were wet because (now I remember) she was doing the dishes. She must have just put the dishwashing detergent in the little thingy, flipped the handle, and started the machine.

  I could hear the steady hum of the dishwasher.

  She had a dish towel in her hand. She was standing and I was sitting. She was the grown-up and I was the kid, but I suddenly realized I was more powerful than she was. And it terrified me.

  “I don’t need to,” I said. “I know it all.” I leaned over with the clicker to get around her body and pointed it at the box. The sound of the TV filled the space between us.

  I’m not saying that’s all it was. I’m not saying I slipped right off the deep end that very afternoon, but it was the beginning and it was the end.

  I know there are plenty of kids whose parents check their homework every night and make them redo it. I know a girl in my class whose father and mother come into the school and demand to see the list of books that will be assigned for the year. And then they refuse to let their daughter waste her time on books below her reading level.

  They slash off Island of the Blue Dolphins.

  They draw lines through My Brother Sam Is Dead and Sarah, Plain and Tall and Bud, Not Buddy.

  And they write their own list that looks like a high-school syllabus: Johnny Tremain, A Raisin in the Sun, and Julius Caesar.

  I’ve heard of parents who have their kids tutored all summer and all school year, every week, unwilling to leave anything to chance. Intent on making sure their kids have every advantage. Even (no, especially) the kids in the top reading and math classes. It’s not about getting help, it’s about staying ahead.

  Then, at some point while I was pretending not to care, I really didn’t. I’m not saying it only had to do with my math teacher, my grades, or that detention, or my mother, or Debbie Sanders, who was probably doing homework right up to the minute before she left for the ziti dinner.

  I’m not saying anything.

  * * *

  If was so cold at Mountain Laurel. Cold everywhere, but colder inside than out. And much colder at night. I had the kind of bed they give you at sleep-away camp, with metal springs and a flimsy, striped mattress that is so hideous you have to cover it right away with a top sheet, hoping you’ll forget what it looks like when you’re lying on it at night.

  I was freezing. I pulled m
y blanket up to my chin and made sure no pockets of air could slip in from anywhere. I didn’t remember ever being this lonely before. Or this cold.

  My mattress was so lumpy and thin. All I could do was lie there and count the nights until the weekend. I knew that most of the boarders at Mountain Laurel went home on Friday and came back Sunday afternoon. But when I went home I was going to tell my mom. “Never. No way. Not in a million years am I going to go back there.”

  My mom always came through, no matter how mad she was at me. No matter how mad I was at her.

  I’m sure she missed me. I bet she was crying right now, thinking about me. It made me feel a little better to think that she was feeling as bad as I was. I was sure she was.

  Karen was in the room right across the hall. She was nice enough. That night, she made sure I had everything I needed: sheets, blankets, towels, soap. Mountain Laurel provided all that. She was telling me about the schedule and then about how she came to work here and why she loved it. She was trying to make me comfortable, I suppose.

  “I used to teach in the real world.” She laughed. I was a high school English teacher. AP exams, SATII tutoring. The whole works. It’s different here. You’ll see. It’s safe here. It’s peaceful.”

  I thought that was an odd adjective for this place, but I didn’t say so.

  “I’m right across the hall if you need me.” Karen pointed.

  “Thanks,” I said. I did want to ask her some things. What about the bathroom? What time did we have to get up? Was Gretchen always so mean? How could Karen like it here? Then, all of a sudden, Karen looked really tired. I recognized the look in her face, so I told her it had been a long day and I probably should go to bed. She said that was a good idea and she went into her room and I went into the other room. The nursery school was dark. As we came up, I had noticed the tiny chairs all standing upside down on top of the tiny tables, just like any regular nursery school. Almost.