In the Company of Crazies (5 page)

“It was me,” the voice said again, and this time Drew crawled out from under a table behind me. I looked around to see if anyone else noticed or thought it was strange to be sitting under a table, but apparently no one else did.

Karen was busy trying to get Tommy to stop tormenting John. She had stood up and walked over to get in between them.

“In the window,” Drew said. “Last night. I couldn't sleep. I never sleep.”

“Never?”

I checked again to see if Karen was still busy, but it wouldn't have mattered. As soon as she got up to attend to Tommy, everyone else just kind of fell apart. The noise level rose instantaneously, as if her body were a volume control. Everyone started moving and talking. I think one boy just got up and left the room, out the back door. I turned completely around in my chair. Drew took a chair at the table that, a minute ago, he had been hiding under.

“Well, I suppose I sleep, because you can't live if you don't sleep, right?”

“Right,” I said.

Drew must have been a year or two younger than me. But he was smaller than that. He had very blond hair, almost white, and eyelashes so light they were like snowflakes over his .eyes. I had never met anyone less threatening before. It was like he was even borrowing the very space he occupied with the promise to give it back.

I was still trying to fit the names and the faces together and fill in the names I hadn't yet learned. Carl was the one with the pimples. It looked like he picked at them a lot. He even had a couple of Band-Aids, trimmed down to custom size but still covering half his forehead. Tommy had freckles and a nasty grin. Frankenstein John was big and just plain weird as could be. One of the boys kept pulling his eyebrows, so much that his left eye was practically bald. I forgot his name. Another one of the boys was chubby and wore army camouflage pants. Right, that was Billy, who bit his nails.

“Okay, everyone, calm down. Back to your seats,” Karen said. She was standing by the bookshelf again. John was next to her. Tommy was slouching in his chair, smiling. The boy who had run out (I didn't know his name either) had not come back, but no one seemed to notice. Or care.

“If you have a book, take it out now,” Karen said to everyone.

I didn't have a book. I looked around. Drew reached into his backpack and took out a big paperback. He started reading, but other than him, no one else had a book either.

I raised my hand, which got a big reaction.

“We're not in kindergarten,” Billy said, laughing like it was the funniest thing he had ever seen.

I yanked my arm back down. I knew not to raise my hand again.

“Leave her alone, asswipe,” Carl said, and when Karen wasn't looking he leaned over and punched Billy in the arm. Hard. Billy started to cry.

Carl looked at me, as if to make sure I had noticed what he must have thought was chivalry. I looked away.

I saw that most everyone just reached out and grabbed the nearest thing to read. I think Carl was reading
Better Homes and Gardens Houseplants.
John got up and headed very deliberately to one bookcase and then seemed very upset when he couldn't find what he was looking for. At which point Tommy started laughing really hard.

“Give it to me.” John turned around to face Tommy. His anger had skipped some kind of preliminary stage and gone straight to fury.

“Give you what?” Tommy started.

John took his giant steps toward Tommy.

“Give it to him,” Karen warned.

“Over there,” Tommy said quickly, pointing. “Down there. Under. Under.”

I tried to figure out if he was scared of Karen or John. I couldn't tell.

John lumbered back across the room with the small, thick paperback he had fished out from under the bookcase. When he walked by me I saw he was holding
The Guinness Book of World Records.

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, uncomfortable 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.