In the Company of Crazies (8 page)

John stayed that weekend, but I got the feeling he didn't always stay. He kept asking Gretchen questions about what was expected of him on weekends. What time would dinner be? What time was bedtime? Where could he go? What would he do? Where did Sam live? Where did Maggie go? Where did Mr. Simone go? Did Mr. Simone watch
20/20,
because he said he did.

Then Saturday morning, John asked me when my birthday was.

I answered, “May eighteenth.”

There didn't seem any harm in answering, although I couldn't think of a reason why he would ask me that. I kept looking toward the door, hoping someone else would walk in. I didn't want to be alone in the room with him. We were both standing on the same side of the long table. I wished I was nearer to the door.

“May eighteenth,” John repeated. He straightened his back and his eyes kind of shifted back and forth. He never looked directly at you.

“Perry Como. Czar Nicholas the Second. Margot Fonteyn. Frank Capra. That's all I can think of.”

“What?” I asked.

“They were also born on May eighteenth. And Reggie Jackson.”

I didn't know who Perry Como was or Frank Capra or Margot whatever, but I had heard of Nicholas II of Russia from social studies. And Reggie Jackson was a baseball player, I think.

“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.