In the Company of Crazies

  “Really?” I had to strain my neck to look up at him and smile. The other boys teased him constantly, and I always thought if only John knew his own size it would all be over in a matter of seconds. He could probably have squeezed the life out of either Tommy or Carl without breaking a sweat.

  “My birthday is September twenty-first.” John then proceeded to list famous people who shared his birthday. “Stephen King, the author of Carrie and The Shining. Faith Hill and Ricki Lake. Bill Murray, comedian and star of such films as Ghostbusters, Strives, Groundhog Day. H. G. Wells, the author of The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds, was born on September twenty-first. And Chuck Jones, who you may not have heard of, but he was the creator of Bugs Bunny.”

  I was just speechless.

  “You know who Bugs Bunny is, don’t you?”

  I nodded, and that’s when I understood what the other boys at Mountain Laurel had figured out and why, despite his size, no one was afraid of him. John was harmless. He was just a little boy. Sure, a weird little boy. In a big huge body.

  * * *

  “He’s doing it again, Mr. Simone,” Tommy was shouting.

  Four boys were sitting at a table in the corner. John was one of them. Drew was another, and one of the younger boys, Sebastian. Tommy was the fourth. Carl had already been told to stay away from Tommy, so he was sitting at a table near Mr. Simone, playing with blocks. Angel hadn’t come at all. There was one other boy who always seemed to be there at the beginning of class but never at the end. I never found out his name.

  Everyone came back Sunday. It was total bedlam for the next few hours, through dinner and the rest of the evening. But by Monday morning everything was pretty much back to normal, Mountain Laurel style. Math Experience was scheduled.

  Drew, Tommy, Sebastian, and John were supposed to be playing cards—poker, in fact, which I suppose is how they were experiencing math. I actually had a math workbook and I was drawing pictures in it.

  “Just ignore him, Tommy,” Mr. Simone responded from the other side of the room, where Carl was clearly upset about something. I think Mr. Simone went to the Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell School of Education, where I think I can say most all of my teachers from second grade on had been trained.

  “God, John, what’s your freakin’ problem?” Tommy was saying loudly. Mr. Simone didn’t even look up.

  But I did.

  John was sitting straight in his chair, then all of a sudden just leaned over, kind of stuck his nose under the table, and took a deep breath. It was an odd and completely obvious gesture, but John didn’t seem to understand that other people could see him and were, at this point, watching him closely. For a few minutes it was more or less peaceful, and then John repeated the same duck-and-sniff action.

  This time, Tommy jumped up from the table. “Jesus! He did it again. He’s smelling his farts. Goddammit, I’m outta here.”

  And that was that.

  Class was over. Mr. Simone had lost all hope of regaining the control he never had.

  * * *

  Marcella Campbell had been my best friend since preschool. My parents and her parents were also friends, especially her mom and my mom. When we were little, that worked out great. We spent practically every day together.

  I knew that Marcella’s mom and my mom talked during the day when we were at school, or when we were playing or in our rooms, but somehow it never occurred to me that they talked about us. But as we got older and ended up in different classes and with different teachers and then finally in different levels of math and English, it became abundantly clear what they were talking about.

  And it became clear, at least to me, that they were competing. At first Mom and I were the clear winners. I was cocaptain of the middle-school track team. I was president of my sixth-grade class. I was in pre-algebra, while Marcella was only in M6. And twice a week, I was pulled out for Junior Great Books. Marcella was not.

  I always had this feeling that in a way my mom was secretly gloating, that in her mind my “higher” achievements made up for the fact that Marcella’s family had more money than we did. We didn’t even have the “kind” of money that Marcella’s family had, whatever that meant.

  Then Marcella won the sixth-grade geography bee and she qualified for the schoolwide finals. If she won, she would go on to the states. Either way, win or lose, her name went on a plaque by the front office.

  “I just guessed,” Marcella told me. She was at my house after school. The finals were in two days.

  “You what?”

  “On every single question. I just guessed. You know, I don’t know anything about geography. I don’t even know the United States. Remember, in fourth grade? Remember that test when you have to fill in all the states?”

  I nodded. It seemed like so long ago. Even then, I had stayed up in bed filling in blank map after map. The teacher had given us all one practice map but my mother had gone to the library to use the copy machine. She made me ten blank maps and I filled in every one. I got 100.

  Marcella got an 85.

  “I remember,” I said.

  “Well. So?” Marcella said. We were both lying on the rug on my floor, looking up.

  “Well, so, what?”

  “Well, so, I didn’t just turn into some world geography wiz in the last two years. I guessed. On every single one. I swear to God. I didn’t know one single answer.” Marcella sat up.

  I sat up too. I thought a minute and then said, “Well, that’s even better. It’s great. You won for the sixth grade and you get your name on the wall. Forever.”

  “It’s not great. I have to take the schoolwide. It was just luck. It won’t happen again. I’ll get a terrible grade. I’ll look like an idiot.”

  “No one will know,” I said.

  “My parents are so proud of me,” Marcella said. She had long, silky black hair and big dark eyes. She had thick eyebrows, too. My mother used to say Marcella was exotic looking and one day she was going to be a beautiful woman. But in middle school she was just kind of different, and that never went over too well.

  Right now, she looked like she was going to cry. “They never expect a sixth grader to win,” I tried. “It’s always an eighth grader.”

  “Marc Weinroth was in seventh,” Marcella said. “You’re in sixth.”

  “It’s a bee, you know. It’s oral. It’s out loud or whatever. Everybody will be watching. And I won’t answer one single question.”

  “You could study?” I tried some more.

  Marcella looked at me. “I can’t study the whole world.”

  We both lay back down to rest our backs and our brains. We were quiet. I didn’t envy Marcella. In fact, I was glad it wasn’t me. I was so glad.

  “You could be sick,” I said after a few minutes. “What?” Marcella sat up again.

  “You could be sick in two days.”

  “Or I could try to study a little,” she said quietly. “Or you could be sick.”

  “Maybe I could just try the Unites States and South America. At least, just that.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You could.”

  * * *

  Marcella studied a lot, I think. Her father came home early from work two nights in a row and helped her. Her mother went out and bought Marcella a computer game where you are a detective going around the world, from country to country, trying to catch some cartoon thief.

  And then Friday, she got sick and missed the school-wide geography bee anyway. The sixth-grade runner-up, Max Pachman, took Marcella’s place at the last minute.

  You really can’t study the whole world.

  * * *

  I heard my mother on the phone with Marcella’s mother that evening after the geography bee. She was so sorry and she was so certain Marcella would have done great. And don’t worry, there’s another geography bee next year. Think how much better Marcella will do when she’s in seventh grade.

  But I couldn’t help feeling my mother was relieved. She was relieved it
wasn’t me who had disappointed her in front of the whole world. I could just hear it in her voice.

  And I couldn’t help imagining that when I went to Mountain Laurel that Marcella’s mother was at home thinking to herself: That would never be my daughter.

  I imagined Mrs. Campbell silently shaking her head in disbelief while consoling my mother and saying it was all going to work out. Walking around her cherrywood and granite kitchen with its subzero appliances, saying, “Everything is going to be fine.”

  All the while, she would be just so glad it wasn’t Marcella.

  * * *

  Carl and Tommy got caught smoking. Mr. Simone brought them into the House, where I was supposed to be reading with Karen. It was my language arts time. I was reading, and so was Karen. She was sitting on the couch by the fireplace with her feet up, shoes off, of course, and I was stretched out on the floor by the rug.

  Then Carl and Tommy burst in and the cold air from outside clung to them. For a long while the chill seemed to lift from their hair and their clothing and fill the air. Gretchen made her way into the living room and sat down slowly in her armchair. Karen didn’t even stop reading.

  “So what is this?” Gretchen asked. She held a half-burned cigarette in her fingers. She held it in the air briefly, inspecting it as if she really didn’t know what it was, and then let her arm down.

  “I don’t know,” Carl started.

  “It’s not ours,” Tommy said. They both stood before her. Tommy, thin and tall, had his arms crossed in front of him. Carl had on a beanie hat, pulled down nearly to his eyes. He shifted his weight back and forth, from one leg to the other. Tommy had some unusual facial tics that seemed to act up under stress.

  “Mr. Simone says he saw you two smoking behind the barn and when you ran away he found this where you were standing,” Gretchen said. “It was still glowing when he picked it up.”

  Her accent was so clear and deliberate when she spoke slowly. She would have been a good interrogator, I thought. She is mean enough. In fact, she reminded me of those war movies where the enemy officer tries to get the captured resistance fighter to betray his friends.

  Maybe beat the soles of their feet or force slivers of wood up their fingernails. I sat up and leaned back against the couch where Karen was still reading.

  “Well, it’s not mine,” Tommy repeated. I thought he was going to need something a lot better than that.

  “Mr. Simone saw smoke coming out of your mouths. He saw you smoking. He found your cigarette,” Gretchen listed. Mr. Simone nodded.

  “Smoke coming out of our mouths?” Tommy said. “Yes, Tommy. That is correct,” Gretchen said.

  I shook my head. She won’t even need slivers of wood, I thought.

  It was quiet and then Carl said suddenly, “It’s the cold.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s cold out. Everybody has smoke coming out of their mouths.” And with that, Carl just darted right out of the living room and we all heard the front door bang shut. Karen put down her book. Carl must have run around the side of the house. He popped up by the living-room window. He rapped on the glass and then started puffing. And pointing. And puffing and pointing. Tommy finally caught on.

  “It’s the cold,” Tommy said suddenly. “See the smoke?” He looked at Mr. Simone for a response and then everyone turned to Gretchen. Carl came running back inside; another rush of cold followed him.

  “So you are telling me that you were not smoking,” Gretchen continued, seemingly unimpressed.

  Both of the boys nodded.

  “That it was the natural moisture in your warm breath forming condensation in the cold air, which Mr. Simone mistakenly confused as smoking?” Gretchen said. The boys nodded happily.

  Mr. Simone stepped forward as if he had something to say about that, but Gretchen raised her hand like a traffic cop.

  Tommy and Carl looked at each other and then smiled. “Yup,” they both said.

  The fireplace crackled. Gretchen leaned forward in her chair, which was really so much bigger than she was. She lowered her voice.

  “Do you think it is really very important to me that you were smoking a cigarette?” she asked. “Do you think you are the first or will be the last teenage boys to think smoking a cigarette is a cool thing to do?”

  Tommy and Carl looked confused about how exactly to answer that. In normal circumstances it would be advisable not to answer, but this was Gretchen, and not answering was not an option.

  “No,” Tommy started slowly.

  “Uh, no,” Carl agreed.

  Gretchen leaned back again. She pulled her sweater around her. She closed her eyes a moment, but everyone knew she wasn’t done. When she opened them again, she began. “But to throw a lit cigarette into a ravine of dry leaves. Next to a barn.” She took a breath. She shook her head as if she was thinking of the possibilities. “Next to my barn.”

  Carl and Tommy both dropped their eyes. They knew they were finished.

  “My husband built that barn,” Gretchen went on. “Many years ago.”

  I had never heard Gretchen or anyone speak about a husband. I hadn’t seen anyone who might be a husband. The only men at Mountain Laurel were Sam and Mr. Simone. It was hard to imagine Gretchen as someone who had ever been young, let alone married and in love. Harder to imagine someone in love with her. But I guess she was, and I guess whoever had built this whole place and even planted those pine trees up on the hill had done it with love. Gretchen and her husband had probably dreamed of watching the saplings grow into a forest. Maybe they dreamed of growing old together and sitting in this living room, just the two of them, with the fire keeping them warm.

  I looked around the room. But it sure didn’t turn out that way, did it?

  “Never,” Gretchen said suddenly. “Never again will you be so thoughtless and selfish as to jeopardize this land or this house or anything or anyone here. If you want to smoke, smoke. I can’t stop you, either of you. Nobody can stop you if you want to continue such a dirty, foolish habit. It will be your choice. But not here. Not in my house.”

  Gretchen stood up. She looked tired. As soon as she left the room, Carl and Tommy took off. Mr. Simone let out a deep breath. He nodded to Karen, who simply nodded back, and then he left as well.

  * * *

  “Did Gretchen’s husband die?”

  Karen and I were peeling carrots. Gretchen said everyone at Mountain Laurel was expected to contribute by way of regular chores and duties, but I had a feeling she had just made that up on the spot. Gretchen was real good at coming up with longtime rules and procedures whenever anyone looked like they were wandering, even for a second.

  I suppose I had been wandering. The next thing I knew I was peeling carrots with Karen. Maggie had left a list of predinner preparations.

  “Yes,” Karen answered. “Just a couple of years ago. They were married forty-nine years and were still in love. It was very sad.”

  It was hard for me to feel anything right then. I couldn’t get the image of a bossy, cranky old woman out of my mind. Maybe his death had changed her. Maybe she had once been more lovable.

  “He was the complete opposite of Gretchen,” Karen went on. “He was silly and easygoing. He was always making jokes that made Gretchen laugh when she didn’t want to.”

  Guess not.

  “I cared for him very deeply. After I got divorced, Gretchen and Peter became family to me. They offered me a job and a place to live. I’ve been teaching here ever since.

  “When was that?” I asked.

  Karen stopped what she was doing to answer me. She put down her knife. So I stopped to listen.

  “Seventeen years ago,” Karen said after a while, as if she had just calculated the years and suddenly felt the passing of every one of them. “It’s been seventeen years.”

  I wondered if she was happy or miserable. Why hadn’t she married again? Did she have any children? I had this funny sense that Karen hadn’t planned on staying here this lo
ng, that maybe it was like waking up from a dream only to find you’re still dreaming.

  Mountain Laurel.

  Sometimes I try to imagine where I will be in seventeen years, or twenty years, or five years, or shit, next year.

  And I wonder. It scares me. I just wonder.

  * * *

  After she died, I still had to pass Debbie Sanders’s house every day coming home from school. I had to imagine her family inside. And I’d imagine her room, even though I had never been in it. I imagined it empty but everything left just the way it was. Maybe her clothes still lying on the floor and her notebooks open on her desk.

  I don’t know why. I really didn’t know anything about her. I knew she had an older brother and a sister in college; that’s all. I’m sure they never imagined anything like this. Or even if they imagined it, they never thought it could really happen. I didn’t think I had any right to be sad or to cry when I saw her house and thought about her family inside.

  But that didn’t stop some other kids.

  There were kids in school who thought nothing of writing something at the top of their test when they hadn’t studied, like “Need a re-test. Too upset…” And then in little letters underneath “…about Debbie Sanders.”

  Or when they didn’t have their report done or their project completed.

  “Can’t concentrate since the funeral.”

  Girls hung out, putting on makeup in the bathrooms, and when they were late for class they’d say, “We just started talking…about Debbie.”

  Sometimes, they’d cry.

  I knew for a fact that those two girls in the bathroom wouldn’t have been able to pick Debbie’s picture out of the yearbook.

  I had talked to Debbie before. She rode my bus. We were both on the volleyball team.

  And still I hadn’t cried at all.

  * * *

  Billy wasn’t so bad once you got to know him a little. Once you got past the fact that he wore some article of army clothing every day, whether it was army fatigue pants or a camouflage jacket or a camouflage T-shirt. Once you stopped noticing how he bit his nails and when his nails were too short he started in on the skin of his palms until they were red and scabby.