Surfacing (14 page)

“Look, don’t say anything about my parents, OK?”

“I would never do that,” Julie said.

Luckily, there was an assembly first period. Maggie felt drained and tired. She hadn’t slept well. She’d texted Nathan late, telling him she was home and that they had won the meet, but she didn’t say anything about her parents.

“Just promise,” Maggie said to her friend. “Not even to Nathan.”

“Promise.”

They walked down the hall. It felt empty, with most of the seniors blowing off the assembly.

“Wait for me.” Nathan sprang up behind them. He grabbed Maggie by the waist.

“So what’s this assembly about, anyway?” Julie’s voice sounded funny, but Nathan didn’t notice. She always had a hard time keeping a secret.

“Character building,” Nathan told her. “He’s supposed to be funny. That’s all I heard.”

As they neared the auditorium, they could hear the crowd jostling and settling inside. The teachers were directing everyone where to sit and to be quiet, waving their arms and looking generally annoyed. The phys ed teacher was telling kids to put away their soda bottles. No food allowed in the auditorium. The vice principal was already escorting two boys out the far-left doors. The back and side seats were pretty much taken.

“C’mon.” Julie took Maggie’s hand. Nathan followed in a chain. “Let’s go up front.”

It was the last week before midwinter vacation, and there was already a buzz in the air. Not much work left to be done. No one wanted work over the break. There was a percentage of the student body that had already left, taking the extra two days, against school policy and despite repeated warnings that had come home in flyers and e-mails to parents.

Nathan, Maggie, and Julie shifted in their seats, three rows from stage center, just as the principal, Mr. Walker, walked across and stood before the microphone. There was the usual tech malfunction before a loud screech and then Mr. Walker’s voice: “We’d like to welcome Hans Butcher to our school this morning.” He lifted his hand toward stage right.

Mr. Walker was still talking, but the audience seemed to think they were being cued to clap.

When it was quiet again, the principal continued. “Hans is engaging, entertaining, and affecting. He will challenge us all to take responsibility for ourselves and our actions.”

Mr. Walker took a piece of folded paper from his pocket and finished up by reading. “As a youth, Hans struggled with both a learning disability and a complete lack of direction. After struggling to graduate from high school, Hans spent the next few years with no ambition. His life changed when he finally understood that it wasn’t his learning disabilities, or any other outside factor, holding him back in life. It was only his self-limiting beliefs and the labels he had placed on himself and allowed others to place on him.”

The rest of the speech went on to describe Hans’s great achievements and how he would unlock the hidden potential within us all. Three kids were already fast asleep, but they woke up briefly when the clapping began again and Hans Butcher appeared on the stage and took the microphone.

He
was
funny. He was loud and energetic. He moved back and forth, using the entire space. Hans told his life story and did magic tricks in between, while making rapid-fire jokes. Still, four kids near the back were now asleep.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen,” Hans announced, standing with his arms at his sides, palms out, as if in complete surrender, “comes the hypnotism portion of the show. I am going to prove that every one of you here, sitting in this audience, is a liar. And that only I can compel you to tell the truth.”

Maggie felt her whole body tense, on alert. Her heart quickened, and when she looked over at Julie, she could see that her friend was having a similar reaction.

“What does he mean?” Julie said, leaning over.

Maggie whispered, “I don’t know.”

“Do I have any volunteers?” Hans Butcher said.

About two dozen hands went up, but Hans ignored them. “I am looking for someone specific,” he said, “someone with a secret.”

Hands continued to wave around in the air, as well as jeers about particular football players, cheerleaders, and a few teachers. In the anonymity of the auditorium, all was fair.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Pierson — we already know you’re gay.”

“C’mon, Stewart, get up there and tell them about you and your mama.”

“Don’t worry, Melissa — he’s not talking about last night.”

Then, as if he were expecting things to get out of control exactly as they did, Hans Butcher calmed his audience by doing nothing more than speaking more softly and raising his hand as if he were about to pick someone. “The person I am looking for is mostly quiet and shy, a loner, in fact, although by choice. If provoked, this person will make things happen precisely as they need them to.”

Nathan clucked his tongue. “He’s using contradictory descriptions that can fit everyone. He’s a con man.”

But Maggie couldn’t take her eyes off the stage and the man who was parading around, calling out words, accusing and seducing. She felt cold, and her spine involuntarily compressed then released in a shudder.

Hans said, “How about you, young man?”

One of the jeering football players stood up. “Sure.”

New hands shot up.

“And how about you? And this pretty girl?” Hans proceeded to pick three more students and one teacher — a “good sport”— from their seats. Meanwhile, someone had walked onstage and set up five metal folding chairs. Without being told, the volunteers took their seats, facing forward, all in a row.

Hans Butcher went through a series of relaxation exercises. He waved his hands a lot. He talked fast. He talked slowly, and sure enough, one by one, each of the five began to lower their eyelids and then nod their heads until they all appeared to be sleeping.

“No one really tells the truth. Not to themselves in particular,” Hans Butcher said, his subjects all resting comfortably, or as comfortably as one could be sitting up onstage in a metal folding chair. “On any given day, the average person tells seven to ten minor lies.” He paused dramatically. “And one to two major ones.”

The audience had gotten very quiet. It seemed to Maggie the lights had been lowered.

“Now, when I snap my fingers, any one of you”— he addressed the five —“who is holding a minor secret, something benign, something you wouldn’t be afraid to tell two hundred of your closest friends”— the audience laughed nervously —“please feel free to tell us now.”

One girl, center stage, number three in the middle seat, stood up immediately. Lots of heads swiveled around, then turned back to the stage. The girl was a senior. Her name, when Hans prompted her to speak, was Louisa.

“Louisa,” Hans began, “I don’t want you to tell us anything you will regret later on. Are you sure you want to tell us?”

Louisa nodded in a kind of drunken stupor.

Louisa began to speak, her eyes still half closed. “I was at a party last night —”

Hans interrupted her again. “Please do not name any other names, understood?”

Onstage, Louisa nodded again. “Everyone was drinking.”

“Wow, some secret that is,” a male voice shouted from the darkened house seats, but Hans paid no attention and no one else on the stage even seemed to hear.

“No parents were home.” The audience groaned. “So no one was really paying attention to the house — just to each other. The boys all wanted to find someone to have sex with, and the girls pretended not to care if no one wanted to have sex with them.”

“This is a setup,” Nathan whispered. There were other uncomfortable comments floating around the audience.

“And this house was really rich. I mean, the people who live there are really rich. Like rock-star rich. I started to hate them.” Louisa still spoke in a monotone, seeming not to know where she was or to whom she was talking.

“And why did you hate these people? They weren’t even home, am I correct?” Hans prompted her.

Louisa nodded. “I didn’t hate them. I hated that they had what I didn’t have.”

“Which was what?”

“Nice things,” Louisa said, her voice more animated now. “Stuff. So I wanted to take something. Something no one would miss.”

Hans suddenly snapped his fingers, and Louisa’s eyes flew open. She seemed to have no idea what had just transpired. She looked to the other four subjects and then out to the audience with a bewildered expression on her face.

“There is the voice we all have in our heads,” Hans went on, “the voice that perpetuates the narrative of our lives. It talks and talks, noticing the world, deciding what we will do or won’t do. Expressing our anger and our sadness and our frustrations. Noticing that pretty girl. That hot guy. It knows the answers to the test. Or not.”

More laughter.

“But there is another voice we don’t often listen to. It’s quieter,” Hans said. “You can’t hear it while the other voice is talking.”

Hans went on to do the same hypnotic act with the remaining volunteers, stopping each before he or she had gone too far. Each time, Hans used the confession as an opportunity to talk about taking responsibility. Being a better person. Tolerance. He was earning his PTO check at his subjects’ expense.

“
He
stole your mojo,” Julie said as they filed out with the crowd toward the rows of double doors.

The light in the lobby was stark. It felt like hours had gone by.

“Well, at least I know where it went,” Maggie said. She forced a laugh.

Nathan reached back and held out his hand, but Maggie pulled away, subtly enough that it seemed accidental. A motion so deft that even Maggie would look back and wonder if it had happened or not. She would wonder if everything that happened before and everything that happened after had ever been in her control at all.

Sometimes when I’m sleeping, Maggie comes over to my bed and watches me. I know she does this, even though I keep my eyes shut tight, and I am very good at not moving. I don’t move an inch. If I am perfectly still, I think she will go away, go back to her own bed. Sometimes Maggie can’t sleep at night and wants to come into bed with me
.

She knows as much as I do that she could just go into Mom and Dad’s room. They would grunt sleepily and shift over and let her right under their covers, but she wants me. She wants to see if I’m awake, too, because she doesn’t want me to be mad at her for bothering me
. “Don’t bother me. You always bother me,”
I’d say. And I know that hurts her feelings, and I also know she doesn’t care. She knows she isn’t really bothering me. I mean, she is, but I’m used to it
.

But tonight I will roll over and I will make room for Maggie to climb into bed right next to me. She needs me now
.

There would be an easy practice tomorrow, right before the finals, but today would be brutal. No letting up on anyone.

“Do people really say you don’t sweat in the water?” Maggie said. She held on to the side of the pool and tried to calm her chest heaving.

Julie held on beside her. “Is my face as red as it feels?”

“Redder. You look like a cherry. You match your cap.”

Coach Mac was standing on the bulkhead, leaning in, gesturing in all sorts of wild ways. The 200-meter relay needed to work on their turning technique. Any second the assistant coach was going to stroll over and give the girls their next set of drills.

“I’m not feeling so good, Jules,” Maggie said. “Can you cover for me?”

“Cover for you? How?”

“Jules, I can’t breathe. I can’t catch my breath.”

The assistant coach was still filling in papers on a clipboard while Coach Mac was repeating his flip-turn pantomime, over and over.

“OK, just go,” Julie said.

Maggie put her hands on the deck and hoisted her body out of the water. It never stopped amazing her how light her body felt in the water. If she could be that weightless on dry land, she would fly.

She wanted to fly.

Maggie sat down on a bench in the locker room. She put her hand to her heart to calm its beating and relieve the tightness constricting the flow of air. She counted to ten, then fifteen, and slowly the burning lessened, and then slowly it stopped altogether. Back on the pool deck, she moved along the wall, trying to blend in with the grayness and slip back into the water.