In the Company of Crazies

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  Once you got to know him and got past all that, you liked him anyway.

  He was really just a big crybaby.

  Tuesday morning, my second week at Mountain Laurel, Billy burned himself on his electric blanket. Sam had to drive him to the local hospital. Any break in the routine at Mountain Laurel was a good reason to hang around and talk. Even the teachers thought so. We had hot chocolate and worked in our journals all morning.

  When Billy returned he was a hero, with an ugly burn on his forearm to prove it.

  “Where did you get an electric blanket, anyway?” Tommy asked him.

  “None of your business,” Billy answered. He had his sleeve pushed up to the top of his white chubby arm. His burn was uncovered, but it had a layer of something gooey over it. It was red and blistery and just gross enough for everyone to be interested in it.

  “How did it happen?” Drew wanted to know.

  “I don’t know,” Billy told us. “I didn’t even wake up, I guess.”

  We were in the living room. Maggie was in the kitchen, getting lunch ready. Gretchen was on the phone with someone at Billy’s house. She was in her office with the door shut. You could hear her voice, but you couldn’t make out what she was saying. Billy could have called home himself, but he seemed to prefer showing us his wound.

  “What a jerk you are then,” Carl said. “How could you not wake up when your arm was on fire?”

  “It wasn’t on fire,” Billy said. For this much attention, he didn’t even mind being called a jerk. “The guy at the hospital said I must have been leaning on the thermostat thingy. It’s a second-degree burn.”

  “Does it hurt?” I asked Billy. It looked like it hurt. “Ye-ah. It hurts like hell,” Billy said proudly.

  The only person who wasn’t interested in Billy’s disgusting burn was John. John seemed to have something else on his mind entirely. He kept walking into the kitchen and talking to Maggie and then coming back out, sitting down at the table and writing in his journal.

  “I’m probably going to have a scar,” Billy told everyone. He was starting to lose his audience. I decided to get up and see if I could help Maggie with anything.

  “If it starts to puss up,” Billy was saying, “I have this yellow, sticky medicine to put on it.”

  Until only Drew was still listening.

  “What are we having for dinner Thursday?” John was standing in the kitchen talking to Maggie when I walked in. “Pot roast and green beans,” she told him. “Oh, hello there, Mia.”

  John looked at me and then hurried away. He was guilty of something. I could recognize it.

  Mountain Laurel.

  Sam had dinner with us tonight and he talked about this doctor, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, who he said was really into death and dying, which sounds morbid but the way he talked about it, it wasn’t. She was trying to help people deal with stuff. Anyway, Dr. Ross said everyone went through these five stages whether they were dying or knew someone who was.

  Sam said Dr. Ross had the stages all mapped out and named. She said they were denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. So I starting thinking about that.

  Denial.

  Anger.

  Bargaining.

  Depression.

  Acceptance.

  And it’s funny. That’s just what happened to me. When I got caught shoplifting.

  Exactly.

  * * *

  The first thing I thought of when the woman in Kohl’s grabbed my arm was: This can’t be happening. This woman must think I’m someone else. Her daughter maybe. Or she thought I worked here and she was looking for the aisle where they sell throw rugs and bathroom scales.

  “You need to come to the back of the store with me,” she said. “So we can talk in private.” She had let go of my arm, and I was able to calm down enough to see who she was.

  She looked just like any woman who would be shopping that day.

  Why was this woman grabbing my arm?

  She didn’t have on a red apron with the name of the store printed across the front, like the other people who worked there. She had her coat on. She was even carrying a shopping bag from one of the other stores in the mall. And her pocketbook. If this woman worked here, she wouldn’t be carrying a pocketbook. She looked like a mom. I remembered her now; I had noticed she was looking through the bin of little-boy socks like she wanted to buy them.

  No, she couldn’t be a security woman and I couldn’t have just been caught shoplifting.

  This was my first thought—No way.

  Then I realized she must be undercover, looking like a regular shopper on purpose. Trying to blend in. That wasn’t fair. It was a setup. A trick.

  For a second that thought made me mad enough to say, “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Maybe you didn’t,” the woman said. “But we need to go in the back and work it out. You haven’t left the store yet. You can just come with me and no one will notice. We can talk there.”

  I turned around. There was a mom and her teenage daughter a couple of racks away, definitely looking my way. And there was a boy walking by with his head turned toward me.

  “What if I just put it back?” I said. I suddenly felt my heart, which had been beating so hard since I first put the gloves and belt into my bag. Now there was no stopping the pain of my heart working overtime. I couldn’t think straight. My fear was taking my breath away and I couldn’t breathe at all. I had to do something. I could fix this if I tried, couldn’t I?

  “What if I put it back right where I got it?” I tried again to bargain.

  “You don’t have to do that,” the woman said. She had a nice voice. “I can take care of that. But we still need to talk. Back here.” She was leading me again and this time I followed.

  It felt like the longest walk I had ever taken anywhere. The horrible fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. The carpet made my footsteps sound heavy. We passed all the tagged and hanging clothing and all the people innocently shopping, and I had never felt more sad in my whole life. I wanted to cry so badly. It seemed like I had done the stupidest thing in the whole world and for no reason. No reason at all.

  And it occurred to me right then that that had been the point all along, hadn’t it? If you take things you don’t really want, don’t even care about, then nothing matters. It doesn’t matter if you get it, it doesn’t matter if you don’t. Not caring is a very powerful thing.

  But I did care, didn’t I? Because I was suddenly overcome with sadness.

  The rest of that whole memory is pretty much an awful blur. The woman took me into an office that had nothing but a metal desk and a chair. There was a phone and some papers. If I close my eyes, I can see that green belt lying across that desk, curled like a snake. The fuzzy purple gloves right next to the belt. They were the only things with color in that whole room.

  * * *

  “Shoplifting is a very serious thing,” the Kohl’s lady told me. We were still waiting for my mother to come and get me. “It’s a crime. If I report this to the police, it will go on your permanent record.”

  I think she wanted me to respond to this, or show more gratitude, but really I had no idea what my permanent record was.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said. I thought I was going to be sick.

  “I know you are,” she said. Her voice softened. “I can tell that you understand. You know, we catch teenagers in here all the time. Some kids act like they don’t care.”

  I wasn’t sure I knew what she was talking about, but the one thing I clearly understood was that this woman was being nice to me. I clung to that. I accepted her kindness, and I swore to myself I would never, never ever, ever again steal anything.

  I never have.

  * * *

  My mother and the woman from Kohl’s talked for a few minutes. God, they even hugged each other good-bye like they were old friends. Maybe the Kohl’s lady had a totally messed-up teenage daughter too. Maybe they were comparing notes. How lucky. My mother loves
to commiserate.

  I guess, in retrospect, I could have been penitent, should have been humble and grateful and sorry. Maybe I would have been, too, if it weren’t for the first thing my mother said to me when we got into the car. Before we even got out of the Kohl’s parking lot.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” she said. “Why?”

  Part Two

  I had been at Mountain Laurel three weeks. I thought my parents should ask for their money back since I was probably the only kid here who wasn’t state funded. From what I could tell, Tommy’s dad (who showed up Sunday evenings in a rusted-out Honda and threw his son and his cigarette butt out of the car with approximately the same amount of concern) wasn’t paying the big bucks for Mountain Laurel’s fine education that my parents were.

  Carl got picked up and dropped off always in a different car, none of which looked like it was being driven by a grown-up. Carl said they were his cousins, and I swear when he got dropped off last time I saw something lying on the backseat.

  “Was that a shotgun?” I asked him later.

  “Yeah, so?” Carl said by way of an explanation.

  I never got to see Billy’s dad. I watched from my room, where I could see the barn and the garage and the driveway below. Sam would go to pick up Billy at the bus station in town. Billy brought his clothes from home in a big green trash bag. Sam was carrying it from the car and talking with Billy. There was just something in the way he held it that made you think Sam wouldn’t have noticed if your stuff was in Gucci leather or Glad plastic. I could understand why everyone liked Sam.

  When John came back it was a big production. I would have guessed they were John’s mom and dad, even if John hadn’t gotten out of the same car. First his mom popped out from one side and then his dad. Both of them were tall and big-boned. His mom wasn’t ugly, but if I said she was the female version of John, it was true. And if you had never seen John before, you’d just think she was one of those women they called handsome in the old movies. (My grandmother still says that. She calls a woman handsome.)

  John’s mother had dark hair and a thick scarf around her neck. She was wearing a pleated skirt and thick tights and boots. John’s dad was wearing a long black coat. And from the minute John stepped out from the backseat, both his parents had their arms around him. They snuggled up close. As stiff as John marched and as straight as his face remained, his parents laughed and kissed him and walked him all the way up to the House. Each of them had a little suitcase in one hand and John’s arm in the other.

  Drew was always the last one to come back to Mountain Laurel. I watched out the window as a white Volvo station wagon with a DEFEAT BUSH sticker on the back bumper pulled into the driveway. A man got out. He was all white—white jacket, white shirt, white pants. Stark white hair standing up on all ends. He got out of the car and walked over to the passenger side. I could see Drew inside, crying. The man opened the door and gently urged Drew out. When Drew was standing but not moving, the man bent onto one knee and said something. Even from upstairs, behind the window, I could see Drew slowly begin to smile. Then the man wrapped his arms around Drew and hugged him, until Drew disappeared within the man’s white clothing.

  As soon as he let go, Drew went running up toward the House.

  Mountain Laurel.

  Where else? Nowhere. Nowhere. I was just watching everyone coming back, even though they didn’t know I was watching therm. Marcella once told me that her mother said God can see you anywhere you are—which is why you should never do anything bad, Marcella said, even when you think you can get away with it. You shouldn’t cheat or lie or pick your nose. Because God can see you.

  So I said, even when you’re in the bathroom?

  Marcella died laughing.

  * * *

  In second grade, I was Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.

  It was a most coveted part. I mean, for some kid who liked stuff like that. Mrs. Rifkin didn’t make a big deal about it. Thinking about it, Mrs. Rifkin didn’t make a big deal about anything. She wasn’t the kind of teacher who gushed all over you when you made a picture of a leopard and spent forty-five minutes drawing every single black spot. She didn’t get all excited if your book report was five pages long instead of one. In a funny way, Mrs. Rifkin kind of reminded me of Gretchen, or the other way around.

  I’m not sure if Mrs. Rifkin is even still alive. She was pretty old even back then. I know she’s not teaching anymore. She retired after that year. We were her last second-grade class.

  But Mrs. Roosevelt was the biggest part in the play. Bigger than being Mr. President Roosevelt, even. I had no idea Mrs. Rifkin was going to pick me. There was no talk about it. It wasn’t a real play. It was just a scene from our reading books that Mrs. Rifkin thought would be fun to act out. No programs were going to be printed or refreshments planned, and no parents with video cameras were invited to take off from work and watch.

  It was just for us.

  And I was Mrs. Roosevelt. I think one important reason I got the part was because I was big. In second grade, I was one of the tallest girls. By fifth grade I was medium tall, and now I’m barely medium. I could also read easily, and in second grade that was still a fairly major and not entirely common achievement.

  So for the sake of time constraints and smooth-going, I got the biggest part.

  We did the play in the library, I remember. Mrs. Rifkin and Mrs. Dodge, the librarian, moved some chairs around and cleared out an area. We didn’t have much room. The library aides were still walking around putting books back on the shelves. We stood with our books in our hands and read our lines.

  “This will be a very difficult time,” President Roosevelt (aka Josh Brogdan) said. Josh was wearing a tie over his T-shirt. Actually it was clipped to the collar of his T-shirt, weighing it down to expose the top of his skinny chest.

  I was wearing a hat, I remember, a big hat with a feather that Mrs. Rifkin had brought from home. She said it was real. It had belonged to her great aunt Selma, but under that hat I became Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.

  I looked down at my reading book and answered my husband, the president of the United States, circa 1941. “I know,” I said.

  There were about four parts in the scene and it lasted about twenty-five minutes. It would have been shorter except that right in the middle of the play, Hunter Cole had to go to the bathroom. When he got back we resumed. I don’t remember very much. I can sort of see myself standing by one of the chairs that had been pushed aside. I remember feeling the weight of that big hat so that when I tipped my head the hat shifted but never fell off. I remember Josh because he was shorter than me. I remember it was fun. I remember feeling kind of important. No, I felt competent. Part of something that had gone well.

  When we were done all the other kids clapped for a few polite seconds and then they made a fast break for the library doors (we had lunch the next period) until Mrs. Rifkin called everyone back to help set the room back up “the way we found it.” One of the library aides was sitting in one of the seats. She had watched the whole play, apparently. She was standing in the back of the room where all the grown-ups usually stand.

  “That was wonderful,” she said, still clapping, looking straight ahead. “Wasn’t it too bad the parents couldn’t be here. It would have been really great if the parents had seen this. Don’t you think?”

  That’s when the library aide lady turned to see who she had been talking to this whole time. She looked really surprised when she saw it was only me, like she had just given up some adult secret—that nothing counts unless a grown-up sees it or hears it, approves or disapproves.

  Was that true? I remember thinking.

  Or was it just a load of crap?

  * * *

  I didn’t realize I was so used to seeing Drew at his window at night until he wasn’t there. I was sitting up, looking out at the cold lawn and the empty chairs, and the black pond and the army of pine trees. Waiting. The sight of him, of his shadow by the window, had somehow be
come comforting to me. Weird, I know, but it’s so easy to get used to something, anything maybe.

  Except not wearing shoes.

  But his light didn’t come on.

  I lay down in my bed and I sat up again. I pressed my hand to the cold glass but he still wasn’t there.

  When I asked him about it the next morning, he looked at me like he didn’t know what I was talking about. Like he didn’t know who I was.

  “You know,” I said. It was journal-writing time. Again. At Mountain Laurel it’s either journal-writing, obeying-Gretchen, or eating time.

  “You know, when you put your hand up on the window. Like you did when I first got here,” I tried. “You know.”

  Drew was writing. He didn’t say anything. I never saw what he wrote but he wrote pages of it. His handwriting was really tiny and very neat. He had no paragraphs, no punctuation, or spaces of any kind. Just word after word after word.

  He looked up at me.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Drew, c’mon. You’re scaring me.” I laughed.

  There was something strange about his face. As if it had changed. As if he was challenging me: Don’t think you know who I am.

  I didn’t say anything more. The next night he was there again, at the window. I wasn’t going to look. I wasn’t going to wave back, but I did.

  So some nights he was there and some he wasn’t.

  * * *

  Monday we had a special art class at Mountain Laurel with a special guest teacher. I think she was an artist or something I hope so for her sake, because she was a really lousy teacher. She called herself Ms. Dee and I got the feeling that was short for something she thought none of us would be able to pronounce.

  First she gave a short lecture about self-portraits and meaning and the importance of true self-exploration. Then we saw some famous pictures in a book she held up. Van Gogh, with and without ear, Dürer and Rembrandt, looking very serious. All self-portraits. Then she handed out little mirrors for everyone.