I waited outside at the curb and just the sight of my mom’s car in the distance made it easier to breathe.
When I climbed inside, my mother instantly said:
“First days are always hard.”
If I were the kind of person who cried, I’m sure that I would have, but that’s not in my character. I almost never cry. Instead, I just nodded and stared out the window.
I can disappear like that into myself.
Once we were home, I spent the rest of the afternoon in my garden.
I didn’t till the soil or weed the flowerbeds or try to graft a tree limb; I sat in the shade and listened to my Japanese language instruction.
That night, I found myself staring out the window at the sky and counting by 7s for what ended up being a new record.
I tried to roll with it.
But what I learned and what was being taught had no intersection.
While my teachers labored over the rigors of their chosen subject, I sat in the back, pretty much bored out of my mind. I knew the stuff, so instead I studied the other students.
I came to a few conclusions about the middle school experience:
Clothing was very important.
In my opinion, if the world were perfect, everyone would wear lab coats in educational settings, but that obviously was not happening.
The average teenager was willing to wear very uncomfortable attire.
From my observation, the older you get, the more you like the word cozy.
That’s why most of the elderly wear pants with elastic waistbands. If they wear pants at all. This may explain why grandparents are in love with buying grandkids pajamas and bathrobes.
The outfits worn by my fellow students were, in my opinion, either way too tight or way too loose.
Apparently having something that actually fits was not acceptable.
Haircuts and accessories were defining.
The color black was very popular.
Some of the students worked very hard to stand out.
Others put as much effort into blending in.
Music was some kind of religion.
It seemed to bring people together, and tear them apart. It identified a group, and apparently it prescribed ways to behave and react.
Interaction between the male species and the female species was varied and intense and highly unpredictable.
There was more touching than I thought there would be.
Some students had no inhibitions whatsoever.
No attention was paid to nutrition.
The word deodorant was not yet understood by over half of the boys.
And the word awesome was overused.
I was only 7 days into my latest educational misadventure when I walked into English class to find Mrs. Kleinsasser making an announcement:
“This morning everyone will be taking a standardized test administered to all students in the state of California. On your desk you have a booklet and a number two pencil. Do not open the booklets until I give you instructions to do so.”
Mrs. Kleinsasser signaled that she was ready and she started a clock.
And suddenly I decided to pay attention.
I took the pencil and began filling in the ovals with the answers.
In 17 minutes and 47 seconds I got up from my seat and walked to the front of the room, where I handed the answer form and the booklet to the teacher.
I slipped out the door and I thought it was possible that I heard the whole classroom whispering.
I received a perfect score.
I headed into Mrs. Kleinsasser’s class a week later and she was waiting for me. She said:
“Willow Chance. Principal Rudin needs to see you.”
My fellow middle schoolers buzzed at this news like pollen-soaked worker bees.
I went for the door, but at the last minute, I turned back.
It must have been obvious that I wanted to say something, because the room went quiet as I faced my classmates.
I found my voice and said:
“The human corpse flower has blossomed.”
I’m almost certain no one got it.
I took a seat in Principal Rudin’s office, which was much less impressive than I had hoped.
The anxious woman leaned on her desk, and her brow knitted into a strange pattern of angled, intersecting lines.
I felt certain that if I stared long enough, I would find a math theory in the woman’s forehead.
But the lines rearranged themselves before I could work out the dynamic, and the principal said:
“Willow, do you know why you’re here?”
I made the decision not to answer, hoping that might cause the skin above her eyes to again knit up.
The administrator didn’t blink as she stared right at me.
“You cheated.”
I found myself answering:
“I didn’t cheat at anything.”
Principal Rudin exhaled.
“Your file shows that you were identified several years ago as having high aptitude. Your teachers report no evidence of that. No one in the state got a perfect test score.”
I could feel my face grow warm. I said:
“Really?”
But what I wanted to do was shout out:
“Your left elbow displays the fifth form of psoriasis—an erythrodermic condition characterized by intense redness in large patches. A course of 2.5% cortisone cream application combined with regulated exposure to sunlight—without sunburn, of course—would be my recommendation for relief.”
But I didn’t.
I had very little experience with authority. And zero experience as a practicing physician.
So I didn’t defend myself.
I just clammed up.
What followed was a one-sided 47-minute-long interrogation.
The principal, unable to prove the deception, but certain that it had happened, finally let me go.
But not before she put in a formal request for me to see a behavioral counselor at the district main offices.
That’s where the real problem kids were sent.
My counselor’s name was Dell Duke.
Chapter 5
dell duke
An ignoramus shoots at the wrong thing, and hits it.
Dell Duke could not believe that he had ended up in the sprawling agricultural community.
He had daydreamed bigger than this.
Delwood was his mother’s last name and he’d been saddled with it as a first name at birth. But thankfully, no one had ever called him Delwood.
He was Dell from the start.
While Dell hated his first name, he took some measure of pride in Duke.
Only a few relatives knew that two generations before, the name had been Doufinakas, but his Greek ancestor George, as far as Dell was concerned, had done the right thing.
Dell hinted to anyone who would listen that his family had something to do with starting a university. And they had at one point worn a crown.
Early on, Dell Duke had wanted to be a doctor because he liked TV shows with heroic people who saved lives every week while showing off perfect teeth and great haircuts.
Plus Dr. Dell Duke sounded good. It had three D’s. Which sounded better than two.
And so Dell studied biology in college, which didn’t go well because he couldn’t store facts.
They shifted and then moved and quickly evaporated from his conscious mind.
And if they were buried somewhere in his unconscious, he had no access to that area of thought.
So by his second semester, he’d changed his major for the fourth time, moving from the hard sciences to the soft sciences.
Dell finally graduated, on the six-and-a-half-year plan, with a degree in psychology.
From there, after a lot of searching, he got a job at an assisted-living center, where he was the activities director.
Dell was let go after only three months.
The elderly didn’t like him. He lacked true compassion and he had no stomach for their health problems. On more than one occasion he was seen running from the activities room in a full-blown panic.
Dell was too afraid to work with prison inmates and so he set his sights on the public school system.
Dell went to night classes and after three more years got a certification for adolescent counseling, and that put him on the path to work in education.
But no one was hiring.
Dell sent out literally hundreds of résumés, and after three years working as a bar-back, carrying tubs of used glasses to the surly dishwashers, he finally added some bogus counseling work experience to his résumé and got a bite.
Bakersfield.
On paper, it looked incredible.
The map showed that he would be in Southern California. He imagined a life of surfboards with groups of tanned people eating medium-spiced corn chips on his seaside balcony.
But the Central Valley had entire months where the temperature hit 100 degrees every single day. It was flat and dry and land-locked.
Bakersfield was no Malibu.
It wasn’t even Fresno.
Dell accepted the position, packed up his barely drivable Ford, and headed south.
He didn’t have a going away party when he left Walla Walla, Washington, because no one cared that he was leaving.
As a counselor for the Bakersfield City school district, Dell’s job was to handle the difficult cases.
And by that, the district meant the middle school students who got into trouble, almost exclusively for behavioral issues. These were the kids who caused enough trouble to be dealt with off site.
A typical day for Dell consisted of reviewing dozens of e-mails filed weekly from principals.
Some of the students were reported because they had turned physically violent. They were kids who targeted other kids. This meant an automatic suspension if the incident was on school grounds.
You could beat up someone, but you had to make sure it wasn’t in the school cafeteria or the parking lot.
The sidewalk was a perfectly fine place.
Other cases involved truancy.
It struck Dell as ironic that there were kids who didn’t go to school, and they would be punished for not attending with the threat of being kicked out altogether.
In addition to the violent students and the no-shows, there were the kids who did drugs and the ones who stole things.
But these cases never made it in to see Dell. The system took care of the young criminals on its own. (Dell resented that he didn’t get face time with the real bullies. They had a lot of personality, and could be quite entertaining.)
It was the rest of the screwups who were left to counseling.
There were three educational therapists who handled all the cases. Dell was the fresh hire after Dickie Winkle-man, who had served for forty-two years, retired. (Dell never met Dickie Winkleman, but from what he heard, the guy was a broken man when he finally walked out the door.)
As the new guy on the block, Dell was given the kids who the other two counselors didn’t want.
The way Dell saw it: He got the losers of the losers.
But Dell was okay with that because it wasn’t like the students he saw would run and tell someone what a crummy job he was doing. They had already turned against the system before they arrived.
Score!
Dell was now in his mid-thirties, and while he wasn’t insightful or even thoughtful, he knew that this counseling job in Bakersfield would make or break him.
But Dell had always had an issue with organization. He couldn’t throw things away because he had trouble figuring out what had value and what didn’t.
Plus he liked the comfort of possessions. If he couldn’t belong to something, at least something belonged to him.
Looking through Dickie Winkleman’s old files before the whole system had gone electronic, Dell found that Dickie had put kids in categories.
It seemed that the counselor had organized the students in terms of three things:
Activity level
Patience
Ability to pay attention
Counselor Winkleman had elaborate notes and wrote up painstakingly detailed reports where he made an effort to quantify his students’ abilities and deficiencies.
Dell was impressed, and horrified.
There was no way he was going to try to imitate what Winkleman had done. It looked like way too much work.
Dell would have to come up with his own way of sorting through the weeds of messed-up students.
It only took him three months on the job to get the Dell Duke Counseling System in shape.
He placed all of the kids he saw into four groups of THE STRANGE.
First, there were the MISFITS.
Then the ODDBALLS.
Next were the LONE WOLVES.
And finally, the WEIRDOS.
Of course, Dell wasn’t supposed to give the kids any kind of classifications, but what good is an organizing system without methods of separation?
Labels were important. And they were very effective. It was just too crazy to think of these kids on an individual basis.
The way the Dell Duke Counseling System broke it down, the Misfits were the kooky kids who just couldn’t help but dress different and act like fish out of water.
The Misfits had no power dynamic. And some of them may have been dropped as babies. The Misfits, in all likelihood, were trying to fit in, but just couldn’t.
His next group, the Oddballs, were different from the Misfits because the Oddballs were more original and usually somehow ahead of the curve.
They liked being odd. The Oddballs contained the artists and musicians. They had a tendency to be show-offs and eat spicy food. They were usually late, often wore the color orange, and weren’t good with finances.
And then there were the Lone Wolves.
This group had the mavericks. They thought of themselves as protestors or rebels.
The Lone Wolf was often an angry wolf, whereas a Misfit was often calm and contented. And the Oddballs were just out to a lunch where they made their own sandwiches.
Finally, in Dell’s classification of the Strange, there were the Weirdos.
The Weirdos included the Zombies, those kids who stared straight ahead and gave back nothing no matter how hard someone tried to pry emotion out of them.
The Weirdos could be counted on to chew bits of their own stringy hair and fixate, non-blinking, on a dirt spot on the carpeting while a fire blazed right behind them.
Weirdos were fingernail-biters and liked to scratch themselves. They had secrets and were probably late to be toilet trained. The bottom line was that Weirdos were just plain weird because of their unpredictability. And in Dell’s opinion, they could be dangerous. It was always best to simply let a Weirdo be.
Game.
Set.
Match.
Because Dell’s files could end up in the hands of people in higher places than his windowless room in one-half of a converted trailer on the property of the school district administration offices, he made a code for his unique system, which he thought of as FGS, which stood for:
THE FOUR GROUPS OF THE STRANGE.
FGS broke down to:
1 = MISFITS
2 = ODDBALLS
3 = LONE WOLVES
4 = WEIRDOS
He also, after much thought, color coded his unique system.
MISFITS were yellow.
ODDBALLS were purple.
LONE WOLVES were green.
WE
IRDOS were red.
Dell then changed the font color on his personal files in his computer to correspond with his categorization.
This allowed him at a glance to know what he was dealing with.
The name Eddie Von Snodgrass appeared onscreen and before the jumpy kid in the oversized jacket had even slid into his seat, Dell knew that he could secretly surf his computer for forty-two minutes and nod his head every once in a while.
Lone Wolves didn’t need much feedback because they liked to rant and rave.
And so, while Eddie V. went off on the chemical taste of soda in plastic bottles, Dell checked out a website that sold bobble-head baseball player dolls at very affordable prices.
And Dell didn’t even like sports memorabilia!
But the Duke Counseling System was up and working, even if Dell was not.
Because once a kid had been evaluated, Dell could complete the district’s form in a flash, giving everyone in a specific category the same rating.
Months passed. Dell kept the kids moving in and out. The trains full of the Strange ran on time.
And then on the afternoon that Willow Chance came to see him, all of his categorization ground to a halt, like a fork thrown into the gears of outdated machinery.
Chapter 6
I sat in the airless office/trailer and stared at Mr. Dell
Duke.
His head was very round. Most human heads are not round. Very, very few, in fact, have any real spherical quality.
But this chubby, bearded man with bushy eyebrows, and sneaky eyes, was the exception.
He had thick, curly hair and ruddy skin and it looked to me as if he was at least of partial Mediterranean origin.
I was very interested in the diet of these countries.
The combination of olive oil, hearty vegetables, and cheese that comes from goat’s milk, mixed with decent servings of fish and meat, had been shown in numerous studies to promote longevity.
But Mr. Dell Duke did not look so healthy.
In my opinion, he wasn’t getting enough exercise. I saw that he had a substantial belly under his loose-fitting shirt.
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