Ten months after Debbie Sanders died but still a month and a half before my mother found me a prestigious spot at Mountain Laurel, I was starting seventh grade in my old school. We were supposed to read Animal Farm, which, by the way, I never got around to doing. I was in the highest reading group, riding on my reputation from fifth and sixth grade, I assume, because it certainly had nothing to do with my efforts so far that year. I suppose knowing that my mother was hot on the find-Mia-a boarding-school trail didn’t help with my motivation.
Maybe Animal Farm is a good book, but I was sure if we read it in school, I would hate it.
Everyone in my group got a wrinkled-up paperback copy and an assignment: Read chapters one and two. Never read ahead. One person was supposed to write about Theme, someone else about Connections, someone else about Vocabulary. One person, believe it or not, had to draw a Picture.
At least I didn’t have to draw a picture. I like drawing and I’m kind of good at it, but I’m not an A+ kind of drawer. Usually I get my mother to draw for me. She’s really good at it, but she always starts out saying, “I’m not doing your homework for you, Mia.”
Then I explain to her, “But it’s English, not art class. Why should I get a bad grade just because I can’t draw?” Then, of course, she does it for me.
And she’s not such an incredible artist that anyone ever knows. Besides, everyone has their parents make their projects for them. For fifth-grade colonial day, Lucas Spencer’s homemade wig could have fooled George Washington. Johnny DiScala had real working bellows in his blacksmith shop.
For Animal Farm, I was supposed to do the chapter summary (chapter summaries, in my opinion, ruin any and every book). I looked down at the paperback in my hands. The top cover and about the first twenty pages or so were stuck in a sort of warped curl. I imagined all the kids before me opening the book and reading. I imagined someone before me having to write a chapter summary. And a chapter summary. And a chapter summary.
I opened the front cover of my paperback to see who had read this very same copy of Animal Farm before me.
The last name, in neat pencil print, was Debbie Sanders.
* * *
If I were back home I’d be in—I looked at my watch—I’d be in social studies right now. I’d be sitting at a desk in a dark room, because my seventh-grade social studies teacher, Mr. James, put everything up on the overhead projector. He had hundreds of plastic sheets filled with handwritten notes. He’d flip from one to the other and then lecture from them. You could tell he used the same ones over and over, year after year. He didn’t even have to waste his energy writing on the board or thinking up new thoughts. He didn’t even have to waste any chalk.
But instead I’m working in a vegetable garden. At 10:15 in the morning.
“I forgot to tell you Gretchen’s soap trick,” Karen said. She was kneeling a couple of rows away. In the sun I could see she was older than I thought before. She had lots of gray hair mixed in with her long black curls, and she had wrinkles around her eyes when she smiled. In a way she looked old, but in another she looked almost my age.
“What’s the soap trick?”
Karen stopped weeding. “Well, you scratch a bar of soap with your fingernails and it forces the soap underneath. It’s not real comfortable but it keeps the dirt out when you’re gardening,” she said.
“That’s okay,” I said. I meant that. I wasn’t sure I wanted soap forced under my fingernails.
“Next time,” Karen said, and she went back to her row.
“Next time?” I asked.
Karen stood up. She rubbed her back and then stretched her arms up in the air. I could see how she had become almost part of this whole place, this garden, this school. How long had that taken? Everything that seemed so foreign to me Karen seemed so comfortable with.
“Well, not all the time but when it needs to get done,” she said. “Anyway, you couldn’t ask for a more beautiful classroom, could you?”
I looked around. The changing leaves had turned the whole world into a crazily colorful mix. It was almost too vividly red and too gold and bright green to believe. And pretty soon they’d all turn brown and drop to the ground, not caring one bit about their wasted beauty.
Nothing like Mr. James’s room, when you stopped to think about it.
Mountain Laurel.
The leaves here have already changed color. They hadn’t turned when I left home, had they? I don’t know anymore. Maybe they have turned there now too. My grandmother waits all year until the weatherman tells her when the peak color weekend will be and then she rushes upstate and looks at the leaves.
Sometimes I just want to scream at her. Aren’t they beautiful all year? What are you waiting for? Red? Green? Purple? who cares?
What are you waiting for?
What?
* * *
I only went to Debbie Sanders’s funeral because my mother made me go. She told me that if I didn’t go, I’d regret it someday. But, she added, it was my choice. Yeah, right.
Of course I went, but I didn’t want to and it wasn’t just because I was scared, which I was. I just didn’t think I belonged. I didn’t think I knew Debbie well enough. I hadn’t even cried yet. It wasn’t that I didn’t like her. Or that I didn’t feel really bad. But I kept asking myself, if I died, would I want to see Debbie Sanders at my funeral?
So why was I going?
I didn’t think it would matter.
There was school that day, but the funeral was at one o’clock so a lot of kids were getting picked up. The whole day was crazy, kind of frenetic. We were in school but we weren’t. My mother said she’d pick me up in front. Marcella was going with her mother too.
“Do you feel funny?” I asked Marcella.
“I don’t know,” she said, and shrugged. “No.” Then, “Yes.”
We both sat on the cold floor outside the main office where we could see our moms when they pulled up to get us. We had our huge backpacks on our laps, waiting with us.
“Wanna hear this weird thing?” I asked.
Marcella turned to look at me.
“I was in line in the cafeteria last week.” As I began to talk, I was remembering it at the same time. “Debbie Sanders was a couple of people in front of me. She was with her friends. You know, Jamie and Alison.”
Marcella nodded.
“But she didn’t buy lunch. She just got a milk.”
“So?” Marcella said.
“I heard her telling her friends she wasn’t going to buy lunch all week, just milk, so she could save up her lunch money to get this CD.”
I paused, thinking. Trying to figure it out. I couldn’t really put what I was feeling into the right words. Why that made me so unbelievably sad. “I guess she never got to buy it.”
Marcella’s mother drove up in her van.
“That’s my car,” Marcella said, getting up.
* * *
The funeral was so crowded that there was no room inside the sanctuary. Most of the grown-ups made their way inside, including my mother. She tried to get me to come with her, but I said I wanted to stand in the lobby with the other kids from my grade and she let me.
A lot of people had to stand against the back wall, my mother told me later. There were no seats left. No space anywhere. Even more people spilled out into the waiting room. There were loudspeakers set up so everyone could hear what was being said.
* * *
By my third day at Mountain Laurel, everyone seemed pretty used to me. But just used to me enough to realize I changed the mix. We all sat in the living room. It was pretty crowded. Gretchen was the only one with an assigned seat. Her seat. A big armchair with a hard back that looked really uncomfortable. Perfect for her.
Mr. Simone was there. I figured out he usually went home at night and came back in the morning, right after breakfast. But this evening he was in the living room too, on a piano bench that had no piano. Karen was on the floor with her legs crossed. Gretchen was in her big, uncom
fortable chair. Some of the younger boys were in their pajamas. It was all so weird. Like we were having some kind of little sleepover, like this was normal.
But at least it was warm. There was a fire in the fireplace. I was hoping to soak up as much of the heat as I could, maybe store it in my skin cells. I felt like I hadn’t been warm since I got here. The first thing I was going to do when I got home—in two more days, but who’s counting?—was take a really hot, filled-up-to-the-top bath and not care about wasting water, heating oil, or electricity. And I would wear my shoes all day, maybe even sleep in them.
“Find a seat, gentlemen. Find a seat,” Gretchen was saying, waving her arms again. “And ladies.” She looked at me.
John was the only kid already sitting down. It looked as though he had been there awhile. He was on the couch. He had his knees pressed together and a small rubber ball, which he started squeezing in his fist.
“Quickly, everyone,” Gretchen said. “Quietly.”
It took me awhile to realize that nobody but John had chosen a seat yet. They were waiting for me, for very different reasons. But in order to do so without looking obvious, everyone was shifting around the room, which was making John very upset. Drew seemed to take this as a sign and sat down on the exact far side of the same couch where John sat. His legs bounced up and down with the precision of a piston engine. Billy, still in army fatigues, took a chair by the door. He started complaining for everyone to sit down, loudly and then under his breath.
I decided to sit on the couch right in between Drew and John. It seemed a fairly safe place to be. Considering.
“Move,” Tommy said. He was suddenly standing right in front of John.
It reminded me of the lunchroom at school, or the camp bus or the auditorium, or anywhere there are seats and people, and people picking where they are going to sit. Those on the upper end of the food chain get to pick where they will sit and the ones on the lower end are out of luck.
It’s the same everywhere.
But John didn’t budge. He acted as if he hadn’t heard. So Tommy kicked him.
“Get up. I’m sitting here,” Tommy said.
John looked straight ahead.
“Move, blockhead.” Tommy kicked him again, this time a little harder. But John didn’t budge.
“Everyone has fifteen seconds to find a seat,” Gretchen announced. I knew she could see what was going on with John and Tommy, but she didn’t do anything about it. She just started counting. I thought she had picked an odd number to count to. Even in preschool they usually only give you to the count of five. Ten at the most.
John started breathing really hard. And he was big, so his chest was moving way up and down.
“I will not move,” John said. “This is my seat. I came down especially early. I always sit here on Wednesday nights. I have been here since…” John looked at his watch. It was the first movement he made. “Since seven twenty-three p.m.”
Most everyone else had found somewhere to sit the floor, a chair, or the other couch. One of the younger boys in flannel pajamas sat on the piano bench with Mr. Simone.
“Ten, eleven…”
John was frozen again, like a soldier. Tommy finally turned his glare over to Drew, and Drew slithered to the floor. Tommy took the recently vacated spot next to me.
“Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.” And everyone was sitting. Gretchen looked satisfied.
“It’s Wednesday night,” she then began. “But before we can have our regular evening reading, I want to discuss behavior for tomorrow’s trip.”
There was a quiet rumble of voices, but I couldn’t tell if it was because this was something to look forward to or dread. Gretchen closed her mouth and waited for the quiet to return, which it promptly did.
“Mr. Simone has a list of the children he will be taking in his car. Karen has her list and Sam will be driving as well,” Gretchen went on.
The name Sam definitely brought out a little cheer and made me wonder who he was.
“We will be leaving right after first morning period. Maggie will pack our lunches. And remember…” Gretchen lifted her chin. She was almost swallowed up by that big chair but somehow her voice filled the room. The energy of twitching limbs and tapping and shifting, of being too still for too long, was held down while she talked.
“There will be no foul language. No hitting. No touching of any kind. No throwing. No rude noises, natural or otherwise. No loud voices during the car ride. Respect yourself and respect one another.”
I got the feeling that for every forbidden act there had been a lewd or indecent incident that everyone in this room knew about but me. Gretchen was winding down. I could tell she was tired. A long day? Old age? Or simply the expenditure of all the energy required to be a mean bitch? Gretchen rested for a minute.
But no one moved. Not yet.
“Is that understood by all?” Gretchen then finished.
All the boys nodded with varying degrees of enthusiasm or sarcasm, but Gretchen waited until everyone had shown her, one by one, that he had heard. I noticed that she allowed for a certain degree of extraneous noise during this accounting.
“And now, can we begin,” Gretchen said, because it wasn’t a question. She opened the book on her lap and then, in an apparent change of mind, passed the book to Mr. Simone. I watched him take a breath, about to start. “Where are we going?” I heard my voice.
I looked around. When the attention focused on me, the room got still. Even the twitching and shifting stopped. Only John was still squeezing his rubber ball. And now that it was quiet in the room, I could actually hear the air going in and out, like a respirator.
Some of the boys giggled, and I knew Gretchen wouldn’t like that. She was so serious. This was probably a trip to some government building to watch how they make postage stamps, or worse, one of those simulated pioneer villages where all the people working there act like they never saw a Game Boy before. Or one of those museums with life-size statues showing daily existence in prehistoric times, and all the boys would go nuts over the models of cavewomen without their shirts on.
“We are going bowling,” Gretchen said finally.
* * *
Night was the hardest. That night, again it felt like I was alone in the world and nothing was all right.
There was a little table lamp in my room but I couldn’t reach it from the bed. If I wanted to leave it on and read or look at a magazine, I’d have to get up and walk across the freezing-cold floor when I was ready to go to sleep. I had to keep telling myself that it would be better in the morning.
That a person can tolerate anything, as long as they know it’s going to end.
And this was going to end soon. A couple more days. Think of the people in this world who had it so much worse than I did. There were plane crashes, and cancer, and the Holocaust.
I thought about all that for a while until I was so frightened I couldn’t move.
The moonlight came right into the room and spread across the wood floor like a luminous blanket. It made the room seem bigger and scarier and kind of lopsided. Or maybe it was lopsided. The floorboards were so old and rickety. I think the whole room slanted to the right.
I yanked the covers loose from the bottom of the bed so that I could sit up to look out the window and still pull the blanket up to my face.
There he was. I put my hand up to the window at the same time he did. I could barely make out his figure but I was sure it was Drew. He waved his hand back and forth and then he was gone.
* * *
I dreamed that night that I was dreaming. In my dream I woke up and thought I was home, but I wasn’t. It was like a cruel trick my mind had played on me. It was part feeling, part sound, part sight, part words. Partly real. Partly not.
A dream like a nightmare.
Like a Mountain Laurel field trip.
* * *
Billy, if turned out, was an excellent bowler, which was a good thing because he kept telling us how awesome he was th
e whole ride over in Sam’s pickup. Sam was the Mountain Laurel handyman, I learned. Billy told me Sam did pretty much everything. He was also the one who worked all day with Angel no matter what he was doing, which explained why Angel was never in class. So whether Sam was fixing one of Gretchen’s cars or building a greenhouse or putting up deer fencing, Angel was doing it too.
Except bowling, apparently. Angel was in Karen’s car with Carl and Drew and two other boys. Mr. Simone got one more, plus Tommy and John.
I’m guessing Mr. Simone didn’t have kids. Or he didn’t have boys. Or he just hadn’t been teaching very long because even I knew it was a big mistake when he directed Tommy over to the lanes to plug everyone’s name into the bowling-computer-console thing while Mr. Simone stood in line for shoes. We had two lanes. We were supposed to have one with bumpers, but it didn’t work out that way.
Karen was talking to the manager about that.
Sam was in the bathroom running cold water over Drew’s fingers. Drew had already smashed his hand between two balls when he was trying to pick one from the rack. Tommy sat at the console typing furiously and laughing.
“That’s stupid,” I said to Tommy. I was sitting in one of the molded plastic seats around the scorekeeper’s station, or whatever it’s called.
“What?” Tommy answered as if “what” were an answer.
We both looked up at the wide screen, where an interesting X-rated version of everyone’s name was lit up in green.
“Putting those kinds of words up there,” I said. “They’re just going to reset the whole thing and you won’t get to play. So why do it?”
Tommy looked at me like I was some kind of an idiot.
Carl thought it was hilarious, though. So did Billy. But not Mr. Simone, who had lost all his sense of humor—he had very little to begin with—at the bowling-shoe counter. He didn’t appreciate having to go back to the counter and ask the guy with the seventy bazillion tattoos to reset the computer. Tommy had to sit out the first round of bowling.