That's Not a Feeling

by Dan Josefson

  Tidbit crawled into a spot large enough for her to lie down, between the stems of two bushes whose branches had grown into one another overhead. She could see the Mansion’s front lawn and the valley beyond it. The sun hung over the hills, dripping heat. A brown Oldsmobile Cutlass she didn’t recognize was driving up the school’s gravel driveway, making a buzzing sound.

  It parked in the carport next to the Mansion, facing the girls. A scream escaped it as a door opened and a woman climbed out and was silenced when she swung the door shut. New Girls stopped what they were doing to look out across campus at the car. The scream erupted again as another door opened. A man exited the driver’s seat slowly, and again, like in a cartoon, the scream was gone when he closed the door. The couple climbed the front steps and, after taking one long look back, entered the Mansion. It was an intake.

  Tidbit couldn’t tell whether she heard muffled screaming still coming from inside the Cutlass. Another dazzling wave of energy was seeping through her. She stared at her hand drawing circles in the dust. Tidbit used to tell me how much she hated her hands. Except for the bloody parts where she bit them, they were completely pale, even at the end of the summer. Worse, they were so swollen that her knuckles just looked like dimples, and they trembled from the lithium. It was what it did to her hands that made Tidbit want to get off lithium. But Dr. Wahl always said maybe.

  Tidbit turned to see Carly Sibbons-Diaz crawling toward her in the narrow space between the wall of the Classroom Building and the back of the shrubs. Carly squeezed into Tidbit’s space beneath the junipers and collapsed next to her.

  “Hi, Tidbit,” she said. “Found the razor?”

  “Nope.” At home Carly had worn her hair dyed black, but no one at the school was allowed to use dye, so in the weeks since her intake her blond roots had begun to show in a thick stripe down the center of her scalp where she parted her hair. Everyone said it made her look like a skunk, but up close, Tidbit thought, it didn’t really. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Okay.”

  “Anything yet?”

  “Nah. You?”

  “My vision’s kinda messed up,” Tidbit said. “I keep seeing tiny, tiny little blackbirds hopping from branch to branch in these bushes, but when I look they’re not there.” This wasn’t exactly true, but when she said it, it felt sort of true. “You see anything like that?”

  Carly just sighed and looked where Tidbit was looking, at the brown Cutlass by the Mansion. She thought she saw a silhouette move inside it. Carly edged forward so she could see the car better. Maybe the Dexedrine was messing with her vision. “You think Bev just took the razor blade?” she asked. “Is she a cutter?”

  “Everyone’s a cutter,” Tidbit said. “Have you seen her belly?”

  “Did she do that to herself?” Carly spat in the dirt. “Shit. She didn’t do that with a razor, though—”

  Tidbit held up her hand to quiet Carly.

  She heard something from inside the car now, a distant wailing. There was a thud, then another, a banging that was getting louder and slowly gaining speed. The sunlight reflecting off the windshield trembled with each thud, and with each Tidbit could just make out the sole of a shoe hitting the inside of the glass. Then two soles, kicking the windshield together until the shatter-proof glass began to spiderweb. Finally the kicking became bicycling, one foot after the other. The girls could hear the screaming with perfect clarity as two gray-green sneakers kicked the crumpled window away.

  After a few moments, a group of staff members and Regular Kids ran out of the Mansion. They opened the front doors of the Cutlass, which I hadn’t bothered to lock, dragged me from my parents’ car, and held me down on the ground until I stopped yelling. It took five of them to hold me, though I’m not all that big. Then they led me up the Mansion steps and inside.

  “Holy shit,” Carly said. “Finally something cool happens at this fucking place.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Tidbit said.

  I was deposited, alone, in the Reception Room. I wasn’t sure where my parents were at that point, but I assumed they were on the tour I’d agreed to come up for. All I wanted was to get it over with and go home. I was anxious to know what these people were telling my parents. I’d only agreed to come in the first place because it had calmed them down.

  In the Reception Room, there was a table with flower vases, one a pyramid glazed light blue, the other round and yellow, both holding white flowers. There was a Persian rug on the floor, bookshelves standing against one wall, and a small fireplace. In the back corner of the room there was a baby-grand piano.

  Above the mantel hung a portrait of a man, who I soon learned was Aubrey, sitting on a horse. Either the proportions were off or the horse had unusually long legs. Aubrey wore some sort of uniform with epaulets and gold braids hanging from the shoulders. There was a curved sword hanging from his belt. Aubrey stared straight out of the painting with a blank look on his face, his eyebrows raised in a way that made him seem both a bit doubtful and as though he were inviting the viewer to be impressed. The horse, with Aubrey on its back, stood in the foreground of the painting, at the near edge of a large field. Visible in the distance, between the front and back legs of the horse, a building burned.

  I could hear the creak of floorboards and the murmuring of voices on the other side of the Reception Room doors. The doors were heavy and slid out of the walls to meet in the middle. There was a crack between them through which I could see a few of the students and faculty members who had dragged me out of the car and into the Mansion.

  They had said strange things when they were holding me down outside. “It’s all right, we’ll keep you safe,” and “Just let it all out,” like they were encouraging me. That had scared me more than the fact that they were restraining me. They seemed disappointed that I didn’t struggle more. I assumed that now they were standing guard outside to keep me from bolting, but there were windows in the Reception Room that I could have gotten out of just as easily.

  I took a closer look at the painting. The burning structure was a barn. There were more horses near it. One reared up on its hind legs; one lay in the grass to the side of the building. This second horse was black and on fire, and there were other horses sticking their heads out of the barn, their throats and faces framed by swirling brushstrokes of black smoke. The trees behind the barn were in the grip of a wind evident nowhere else in the painting. Their branches swung out and upward so that the gray-green undersides of the leaves showed against the darkening gunmetal sky. The paint itself was thick and, especially in the little scene with the burning barn, looked wet and greasy. I could see how each flame rising from the barn or from the body of a horse was laid on by the soft tip of a paintbrush.

  I turned toward the entrance when I heard the doors being dragged open. I was ready to tell my parents that I’d changed my mind about the tour, that these people were crazy and we should just go home. Aubrey walked in first, followed by one of the kids who’d held me down outside. This was clearly the man from the painting, but in front of me he seemed almost orange, his tan was so deep. Aubrey was short and had a paunch that the figure in the painting lacked. He wore a dark gray suit over a light gray shirt and around his neck a light, mint-green scarf. I stepped to the threshold to look for my parents in the Great Hall. Aubrey grabbed me tightly by the arm and led me back into the Reception Room. In his other hand he carried a small gift bag.

  “Where’s my parents?”

  Aubrey didn’t say anything, just sat down in a flower-patterned armchair and removed a fork and a plastic container from his small bag. The container held a small salad. I looked to the kid for help, but he was watching Aubrey remove a silver pepper grinder from the bag and grind pepper over his salad. Next he tucked the corner of a striped pink napkin over his scarf and into the collar of his shirt. He began eating.

  “Benjamin,” Aubrey said with his mouth full of food, “this is …” He looked up.

  “Tyler,” the kid said.
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br />   “Tyler,” he said, and swallowed. “He’s in Regular Kids and works in the dorm you’ll be joining, Alternative Boys. Your dorm parent Ellie will be here soon to take you to meet the other boys, but in the meantime I’ve asked Tyler here to look after you.”

  I felt blood rush to my face and a burst of pain behind my eyes. The fork, I thought. I should grab his fork. “I’m, I’m just here for a tour,” I said. “Where’s my parents? They said I only had to come for a tour.” My throat felt almost swollen shut. My skin itched. The true facts of the situation were slamming up against one another in my head.

  Aubrey stuffed a huge forkful of salad into his mouth, and after trying once or twice to talk through it he looked up at Tyler and gestured for him to explain.

  “Your parents decided to enroll you,” he said. “They’ll send your stuff up. Until then, you can borrow what you need from other boys in the dorm.”

  I bolted through the open doors and into the Great Hall but stopped when three students who’d been leaning against the furniture stepped in front of me. I shouted over their heads into the office adjacent to the Great Hall. “Mom! Dad!” I turned back to Aubrey. “This is fucking stupid. Where are they?”

  Aubrey put his bowl of salad down on the floor next to him and stood up. He pulled a wad of money out of his pocket and pulled a few dollar bills from the silver money clip. He handed them to Tyler. “We don’t use that word here. It’s a violent word.” Then he sat back down and picked up his salad.

  “Your ’rents left already,” Tyler said.

  ’Rents? I just looked at him.

  “They thought it’d be better to avoid a scene. You can call them this weekend and see them next Parents’ Sunday.”

  Aubrey nodded to the people who had been standing guard, and they all left. Then he gestured with his fork for Tyler to take me away, absently waving in the air the endive and chunk of radish he had just speared.

  As Tyler led me into the Great Hall, I felt the need for some drastic action but had no idea what to do or what the repercussions might be. If my parents were really gone, it wouldn’t do any good anyway. But what if I were being lied to again? What if my parents were hidden somewhere? There was a chill in the enormous room and the smell of furniture polish. A tall, narrow dinner table with spindly legs and an inlaid top slid by as I followed Tyler past it. From a cavernous stone fireplace I caught the smell of cold ashes.

  Tyler stopped next to an enormous couch. “We’ll wait here for Ellie,” he said. He gestured for me to sit down, and he dropped into an armchair. After a while, presumably done with his salad, Aubrey walked from the Reception Room to the Office. “Behave yourself,” he called to me. Tyler picked up a magazine.

  Outside, Marcy was yelling at New Girls to all come out from the bushes right away. Tidbit felt a diffuse foreboding, and as she emerged from the junipers she finally remembered what her worry had been. Marcy was holding Tidbit’s glasses by the end of one earpiece and swinging them around in a circle. Her posture suggested a cool disappointment in her dorm’s behavior, not at all unanticipated. But when Marcy spoke, a bare wire of fear shook in her voice.

  “I don’t think you girls realize what a serious situation you’re all in,” she said. “Last night you let a girl who you should have been taking care of run away for the second time with all your money and meds. And now I have no choice but to assume that this razor blade isn’t missing but that one of you has it, and you’re hiding it, and God knows what you’re—.” Marcy pointed the glasses at Tidbit. “How the hell do you think you’re going to find a razor blade lost in the dirt without your glasses? Tell me exactly, Tidbit. I’d really like to know.”

  “Well, I just—”

  “You know what, don’t even bother. I’m just so sick of all of you right now. Really, physically sick of you.” Marcy’s head bobbed when she was angry, so that the cluster of keys she wore on a string around her long neck rattled. “You know where I found these?” she asked, stabbing Tidbit’s glasses in the air in front of the girls’ faces. “Tidbit, where would you guess I found your glasses?”

  “Bridget had them?”

  “That’s right, Bridget had them. And why don’t you tell everyone what Bridget was doing with your glasses when I saw her.”

  “Burning ants?”

  “Yes, Bridget was using them to burn ants. So that’s at least two people not looking for the razor. Plus, really cruel. I just can’t believe you, Tidbit. For a week all you’ve talked about every meeting is how you’ve decided that you’re going to be good, that you want to get out of here and you’re going to follow the pro—”

  “But there’s a huge anthill right next to the wall of the Classroom Building!” Bridget Divola interrupted. She was hopping up and down. “If we don’t do anything, I think they’re going to invade the building.” New Girls stared at Bridget. At twelve she was younger than the rest of the girls. She was pudgy and had a bowl haircut that made her face look like a doorknob with eyes. In the silence that followed, Bridget pinched a large black ant off of her thick elbow. Folding Tidbit’s glasses shut, Marcy looked as though she might cry.

  “Now this is the deal,” Marcy finally said. “Lunch is in three hours, and I’m not allowed to make you skip lunch. But I can’t take you into the Cafetorium when one of you might be hiding a razor blade. So if you haven’t found it in two hours, we’re going to go back to the dorm, and you’re all going to be strip-searched before we go to lunch. Do you all understand?”

  A dull flame of rage flickered through the dorm and was smothered. After waiting for someone else to take the lead, Laurel Pfaff said, “You can’t do that. It’s punitive. You’re not allowed to punish us all just because a few people aren’t looking.”

  “It’s not a punishment,” Marcy said, more confident of herself as the girls got more upset. “It’s a consequence. It’s the only way I can make sure that all of you and everyone else on campus are safe. If you have a better idea, I’d be glad to hear it.”

  The girls knew nothing would come of arguing. At the school one thing followed from the last like the logic of a bad dream, the drawer you don’t want to open even as you watch your hand reach toward it. Only Laurel persisted.

  “But what if none of us has it?” she said. “What if the razor’s just lost in the bushes? Then you’re humiliating all of us because Bev and Bridget and Tidbit can’t manage to do a single thing right.”

  “I don’t have any razors!” Bev shouted. Despite the heat, she wore a maroon velour dress that bore at least a half-dozen food stains, which were dull against the general glinting of sun off the velour. She was almost bald, having the habit of pulling out her hair.

  Tidbit wasn’t really following. She clenched her teeth and endured another surge as more drugs spilled into her brain. The whole thing made her sleepy. She stared at a young Japanese maple tree past the far corner of the Classroom Building, vaguely aware that a fight was starting among the girls. The maple had a thin trunk and perfectly smooth branches. Tidbit watched the branches of the tree stay still as the purple leaves swayed in the heat. Bridget had been so happy when Tidbit had given her her glasses.

  There was a time when I thought that I was in love with Tidbit, but I realize now it was more than that. Tidbit was my friend when no one else would be. I don’t mean for that to sound sentimental; I’m writing all this down so I can forget about her, so I can stop thinking about the school. All I want is to lay something down between myself and the things that happened there, even if it’s nothing but a screen of words. There’s an insect I read about called the western spittlebug, Clastoptera juniperina, whose nymphs protect themselves by chewing up juniper stems and spitting out little bubbles until they’ve covered themselves in foam. The foam keeps the bugs from being dried up and burned by the sun. That’s really all I’m doing by writing this.

  Tidbit turned and watched her dorm mates. They seemed so far away. Bev lunged at Laurel, who looked terrified. Marcy got hold of one of Bev’s arm
s and as she was twisting it back accidentally stepped on the hem of Bev’s dress. Bev tumbled hard onto her side, Marcy falling on top of her. “Girls, some help here,” Marcy called. As New Girls hurried forward to help restrain Bev, Marcy saw Laurel. “Not you,” she said to her. “You stay away.” Tidbit slowly walked closer.

  The girls held Bev facedown, one of them sitting on her ankles. Bev was reduced to yelling and spitting. After some time she quieted, her breathing interrupted only occasionally by a loud grunt.

  Marcy leaned her face closer to Bev’s.

  “What’s going on with you, Bev? What are you feeling right now?”

  “Can I roll over?”

  “Not as long as you still need to be restrained.”

  “Please? It hurts!” Bev struggled against the girls holding her down but soon gave up.

  “You can turn over when I can trust that you’ve calmed down, sweetie.”

  Bev tried to turn her head, but her chin scraped against the pavement. “I’m calm. I promise.”

  “I’ll believe that when you show me you’re honest enough to talk about how you’re feeling.”

  Bev huffed loudly. Tears and snot glistened on her cheek. “I feel like a piece of shit,” she said.

  “That’s not a feeling,” Marcy said, sounding bored. “You’re not a piece of shit, and you certainly can’t feel like one. We’ve been over this before.”

  “Ugghh! I feel like killing someone.”

  “You might kill someone, you might not. But you can’t feel like killing someone. Think of the list of feelings.”

  Bev was quiet for a moment.