“I thought you wanted to be a soloist.”
“I do,” he said impatiently, “but being in the student orchestra is important. Real conductors come in and do concerts with the group. You learn a whole lot.”
“And they didn’t let you in?”
He sniffed and said with wounded dignity, “Into the B orchestra, yes. Not the A orchestra.”
“There are two of them?”
“Of course there are; the school has too many students for just one orchestra.”
“Well, what’s so terrible about the B orchestra?”
“B orchestra,” he snarled. “Second twelve. Not even in the first twelve chairs. Second twelve.”
“Okay,” I said, giving up, “so this terrible thing happened. How does signing yourself into a nuthouse get you into the A orchestra instead?”
He scowled. “I wanted some time alone, quiet, away from everybody. Huh. Little did I know. You’d be amazed how much crazy people can get on your nerves.”
“I can imagine,” I said, thinking of the girl sucking her thumb and the guy making a maze out of his lunch.
Somebody bumped the door from outside. Joel sat down with his back against it. “No lock,” he explained. “Not on this side, anyway. They leave it open. That way, if you’re suddenly taken with a violent need to be violent, you come in here and put some dents in the padding instead of in your roommate.”
“You have a roommate in here?” I said.
Joel nodded. “Do I ever. He hasn’t said a word to anybody in months. He hums, though. I have explained to the kind and helpful staff that I am trying to become a musician, and that either he stops humming or they get me another roommate or I kill him, one of the above, take your pick. They’re working on it. While they work on it I hang out with the TV. The soaps are brain dead, but some of the cartoons aren’t bad.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said. “Joel, what are you really doing here?”
He grinned. “Well, I’m crazy or I wouldn’t be locked up, right? I told you all about it, before New Year’s.”
There was something funny about the way he looked at me: straight, open, honest, and totally false. Like at the coffee shop on Columbus, where I’d sensed from the beginning that he was keeping something crucial about all this to himself.
I said, “You told me you were having trouble playing the violin because of your hands, but you didn’t sound particularly crazy.”
“You remember!” he said. “It’s nice to know that even as a crazy person one can make a mark on the world.”
“Are you still having the same problems?” I said.
“Fits,” he said, looking away from me again. Evasive, that was the word. And scared. Scared to tell me—what? What could it be? “Sometimes,” he said.
“Fits?” I said.
He shrugged and looked away from me. “Not really. Fits of depression, I guess you could say.”
“What do they say about your hands here?”
He shrugged. “I haven’t told them anything about that. It’s my problem, not theirs. All they know is that I can’t concentrate on my studies, as my audition failure shows, and that I’ve been driving my aunt and uncle crazy. Big deal. Breakdowns are common up here.”
I chewed that over without comment. It certainly was very silent in the padded room.
“Well?” he said. “Aren’t you going to ask me how they can cure me if I don’t tell them what’s really wrong? The answer is that if they knew what’s really bothering me they’d decide I wasn’t just a ‘high-strung adolescent’ but an honest-to-goodness loon, and they’d get to work trying to cure me, which they can’t do. I would never get out of here, and that isn’t the point at all.”
I made myself stay patient. “So what is the point?”
“I told you: peace and quiet, a kind of retreat.”
“Why didn’t you just hole up at your uncle’s place for a while?”
“Guilt,” he said. “Everybody wants to help. Aunt Matty keeps trying to fix me up with daughters of friends of hers. She thinks I’m having trouble making a ‘social adjustment’ in my new school and I need more friends. My uncle knows that’s not a problem, but then what is? So he’s also worried. The two of them make me nuts, so I’m always snapping their heads off. That’s not peace and quiet for anybody.”
“Who’s paying for this?” I said, giving the leather padding a thump. “It must be costing somebody a whole bunch of money to keep you here.”
“More guilt,” he said stonily. “Thanks. My family is paying. I intend to make it up to them as soon as I start earning a living.”
“How long are you planning to stay?”
“As long as I have to.” I thought I saw a flash of panic, but he got up and turned restlessly away from me. “You’re supposed to be at school.”
“I didn’t come up just to visit,” I began, but he interrupted me, his voice rising.
“Well, I don’t give a damn why you did come because I sure did not ask you to. I am not asking you to leave, either; I’m telling you. I don’t particularly enjoy you sitting there in your cute jeans and sweater and quilted coat staring at me in my goddamn jammies and a stinking sweatshirt with food stains on it. So beat it, Val. I’m not in the mood to entertain guests.”
“No, you’re in the mood to be miserable and indulge your lousy ‘temperament,’ ” I said. “You get a lot of mileage out of being ‘high-strung,’ Joel. I’ve let you tell me your sad story. Now it’s my turn, okay?”
“What are you yelling about?” he said in an injured tone.
“I am really fed up with everybody going off in emotional flares around me all the time.” Like him and Mimi and Tamsin, and for that matter Bosanka herself. I was beginning to long for a straightforward slimy monster or rogue wizard. “Everybody else gets to be temperamental and I get to be good old solid Val who holds it all together. Well, forget it. You can save your suffering for the staff here, that’s their job. With me, you can please just shut up and listen for a minute.”
He leaned back on the padded door again, trying to look cool and bored.
I crossed my arms, steadying myself. “I told you part of it already. Then you hung up on me, remember? Bosanka Lonatz is a witchy person from someplace very, very far away, all right? But she’s in my school, and also in my face a lot of the time. She says the Comet Committee has some kind of psychic power which she wants to commandeer to contact her own people, who are here someplace but she can’t find them, not without our help. So she needs the Comet Committee. And Bosanka says the Comet Committee includes you.”
Silence. Joel waited, looking down at his grimy sneakers.
I said, “I know you think the Comet Committee is a lot of bull, but you’d better start taking it seriously. Bosanka does. She’s already turned one guy on the committee into a deer because we weren’t all together yesterday after school. And also he was acting like an ass. Now we’ve got till Saturday to get it together. I don’t know what will happen if we don’t all show up, but it won’t be fun. We need you.”
Joel said, “If they have this place bugged, you’re in deep, deep trouble.”
I said, “You were with me when this all started, Joel. We did magic together, you and me and Paavo. But this time there’s no Paavo and Gran’s maybe dying. This is too much for me, okay? I need you.”
“No, you don’t,” he said firmly. “You’ve done fine without me all along.”
I looked as hard as I could right into his eyes and I said, “Okay, forget it. I’m sorry I asked. You fooled me, that time you took on the kraken’s punks in the park. I thought you had guts.”
He had started pacing again. I followed him around the little room, talking. I was mad.
“But you hung up on me when I told you a little bit about Bosanka, and now you’re hiding here. This isn’t because of any B orchestra. It’s because of the Comet Committee. You were dying for Paavo to teach you, you moan and groan about not having any magic of your own, but you’re
hiding out from magic. You’re a coward, and Paavo would be ashamed of you. I sure am.”
Joel whirled around and punched the leather-padded wall with both fists.
“Okay,” he said.
It’s embarrassing when a smart person’s buttons are so easy to push.
11
Committed
THEY TOLD JOEL TO REQUEST his release in writing. He scribbled on a paper napkin, “Let me out of here. Joel Wechsler.”
We waited an hour, which I used to fill Joel in on the details. He listened without saying much of anything, avoiding my eyes. I still didn’t know why.
Finally a doctor sat down with us and asked who I was, and who I was did not cut it. He said he would have to talk to some other people before letting Joel out.
I said, “I thought you had to let him leave if he asked to go.”
The doctor, who had a stringy red beard and looked as if he needed somebody to fatten him up a little, said, “There are complicating factors which I think I should only discuss with the immediate family, Miss Marsh.”
Joel, keeping his cool with superhuman effort, said, “Val, don’t waste your time, go home. I’ll get this straightened out and come to New York as soon as I can.”
So I dragged myself back home and fell on my bed, exhausted. To keep from going crazy, I worked on an old story I’d done in last year’s creative writing class about waking up to find yourself in a loony bin. I ended up throwing the whole story out, it was so hopeless.
Joel called very late. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said in a strained voice. “When you commit yourself around here, you are really committed.”
Doom, doom, doom, my heart drummed. “What?” I said.
“It turns out that if they have reason to believe that you might be dangerous to yourself or anybody else, they can hold you here while they set up a sanity hearing before a couple of doctors who get to decide whether it’s safe to let you out or not.”
“That’s nuts!” I yelled into the phone.
“Very funny, Val,” Joel said sarcastically.
“What kind of a danger can you be?”
“They’re super cautious around here,” he said.
“So when is this hearing?”
“Not till next week at least,” he answered. “Judges and doctors don’t like to give up their weekend golf.”
“Oh, no,” I said.
“I’m sorry.” Now he sounded miserable. “It’s my own fault. Remember when I called you up and blew off about the state of the world? I talked pretty much the same way here the other night, trying to get through to my silent roommate. I got through, all right. He suddenly started talking, and he began by passing on my remarks to somebody on the staff here, thus thrilling them all with their success in breaking his silence. Meantime, the shrinks are afraid that I’m so depressed if they let me out I’ll lie down in front of a train, and then my parents will sue them.”
“God, Joel!”
“I probably should go lie down in front of a train,” he added gloomily. “When my parents hear that I’ve got to have a sanity hearing to get out of here, they will kill me anyway.”
“Don’t talk like that,” I said. “If someone overhears you, it’ll make things worse!”
He chortled without humor. “If? I’m calling from the patients’ pay phone, and there’s actually a member of the staff keeping an eye on me in case I try to strangle myself with the phone wire. Gak, gak.”
“Listen, Joel. If you’re stuck, you’re stuck. I’ll explain to—everybody. Don’t do anything to get yourself locked up there forever, all right? We’ll just have to manage without you.”
“Not this time!” he said harshly and hung up.
So Joel still hadn’t gotten over missing the climax of the kraken affair. Now he would probably try something desperate and get himself locked away for years, and there was no way I could stop him.
There was no way I could produce him at Bosanka’s Comet Committee meeting on Saturday, either.
I didn’t call Lennie or anybody about my failure to get Joel out. I punished myself instead by doing a load of assigned reading about the Civil War, which seemed about as connected to my life as the canals on Mars and took enough light-years to plow through that I felt like I’d traveled to Mars and back by the time I finished.
The next morning, Friday, Bosanka sat on the other side of our homeroom, ignoring me. It did not seem like a good time to insist on conversation, not with what I had to tell her. So I waited.
We spent the day avoiding each other, but sooner or later I was going to have to face her with the bad news. Sooner or later might be my last moments at the Thomas Jefferson School, or anywhere.
Lennie was in the language lab at lunchtime, listening to tapes of whales and dolphins for his “Spaceship Earth” project. “Hey, Val,” he said excitedly, “did I tell you my dad is trying to fix up a place for me in a research lab in Hawaii in the spring? Working with dolphins!”
“Terrific,” I said with attempted enthusiasm. I hated to bring him down, but if I didn’t get somebody else down there with me, I was going to go crazy all by myself in the pits. I squeezed into the little lab cubby with him.
“Bad news,” I said. “Joel put himself into a nut-hatch in Boston and they won’t let him out.”
Lennie closed his eyes. “Oh boy,” he said. “Well, here’s my bad news: Mimi’s gone.”
“Gone!” I said. “Gone where?”
“I don’t know.” He fiddled anxiously with the lab headset, which was making faint booms, squeaks, and whistling noises. “Her sister says she’s run away.”
I groaned. “How can we fight Bosanka if we can’t even hold the stupid committee together? What about this ‘team’ you said we had here?”
He hung his head. “Hey, come on, calm down, Val. I thought we were okay. I guess I was wrong. Look, Bosanka’s going to be at the drama club rehearsal today, a kid in the club told me. I’ll meet you there. We’ll tell her together.”
“Hey, Lennie.” I said. “Thanks. Really.”
He blushed and put his headset back on.
I had one free period to kill until drama club so I wandered the halls, noting the little details as if it were my last day on earth (which it might well be): one long blue sock lying outside 10B’s homeroom; some seniors having a raisin fight in the east side stairwell. Funny to think that after so many years of school and all my hard work, there was a chance I might not survive to graduate.
The place erupted, as usual, at the period break. A tall kid with earphones on (strictly against school rules) bopped backward down the hall. People greeted each other with shouts and whoops: “Dominic! Wait up!” “Julie!” “Hi, dude!” “What’s Wayne doing over there?”
Two girls pushed past, heads close together. “Come on, tell me who it was,” one of them said, elbowing the other one in the ribs.
“No, I can’t.”
“Well, don’t tell me her name, then, just give me a hint.”
In the girls’ room, some sophomores were at the mirrors over the sinks. I hid in one of the booths, the Phantom of the High School.
“I hate my nose.”
“I hate my nose.”
“Your nose is okay, it’s cute.”
“What kind of eyeliner is that? Let me try it?”
I could hear them jostling and giggling.
“My sister hates her nose.”
“Why? It’s not so bad.”
“Shhh. You’re not supposed to say anything about it or she gets real upset.”
How come they get to compare noses and I get to tackle an ice princess from another planet?
The bell rang and the halls emptied out again. Wandering around, I found Barb on the third floor putting up her photographs. She was going great guns in the school photography club this term, using the classic Leica she’d been given for Christmas. She’d been asked to put up the best prints from her stay in Barbados with her aunt, who was a doctor down there.
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“Nice pictures,” I said, admiring shots of a muscular kid clowning on a beat-up-looking boat. “Who’s he?”
“Cousin,” she said through a mouthful of pushpins.
“You know what?” I said. “You were right. My foreign guest is bad, bad news.”
Barb considered this while she went on placing pictures. When I tried to help she snapped at me, insisting that I only touch the white edges so I wouldn’t get any fingerprints on the photographic prints. Some of these pictures didn’t even have white edges.
“Bad, bad news, huh? Like what?” she said finally.
My best friend should at least have some idea of why I didn’t make it to graduation. I told her all while she finished arranging her prints.
“Peter Weiss?” she crowed. “Into a deer? I’ve got some people this girl has just got to meet!”
“Seriously,” I said, “that dork Peter is running around on all fours in Central Park with hooves, horns, and a flippy little tail.”
Barb said, ‘How come she didn’t turn him into one of these leaf-taker things, like the store clerk?”
“I have a theory about that,” I said. “I think the longer she’s away from her own home the shakier her memory gets. That thing isn’t a ‘leaf-taker.’ It has a name in Bosanka’s own language, but she couldn’t remember it. Maybe everything’s fading, which is why she’s so frantic to get to her people before it all goes.”
Barb studied the arrangement of her photos. “Maybe that’s why she’s drawing pictures of her native animals in Central Park, trying to keep it all alive for herself as long as she can. And I’ve noticed some other funny things in the park lately—lines of little stones, twigs stuck in the ground to make patterns. I know people who would take one look and say it was magic.”
“Magic?” I said, stunned. “Barb, are you saying you believe me?”
“Valentine, you may be a stuck-up fool sometimes, but you’ve never been a liar—not to me, anyway.” Barb looked up and down the corridor; we were alone. “That time you came bombing into my mom’s shop with Ushah the Awful after you?”
“I remember,” I said. “If you hadn’t helped me, I never would have escaped in one piece.”