That's Not a Feeling

by Dan Josefson

  “I feel very, very, very angry.”

  “Okay.” Marcy nodded to the girls to ease up. They let Bev roll onto her back and then held her again, more gently now. There was a deep blankness to Bev’s expression at times like this, when she was struggling to make sense of something that had just happened or was happening. Her dark eyes were vacant and her cheeks slack, like a large damp flower past its bloom. Damp wisps of hair stuck to her head. Her chin was pebbled with red abrasions.

  “What are you angry about?” Marcy asked her.

  “Everyone thinks I stole a razor.”

  “Have you checked that out? Or are you a mind reader?”

  Bev wasn’t sure whether she was meant to laugh at this. She smiled at Marcy, but getting no smile back she stopped.

  “Well? Do you want to check out whether they think you have the razor, or do you want to stay angry?”

  Bev looked up at the girls standing in a circle looking down at her. “Do you guys think I have it?”

  There was a mix of shrugs and nods and shaking heads.

  “See?” Marcy said. “Not everyone thinks that.”

  New Girls’ attention was drawn away by the sounds of footsteps rounding the corner of the Classroom Building. Four of the school’s five teachers were on their way into the Classroom Building to plan classes for the coming semester and to finish grading papers and tests from the last one. Only Spencer, a tall, balding blond whose belly pressed against his T-shirt, stopped to see if he could help.

  “Well, ladies, what’s going on here?”

  Marcy didn’t much want his help but was in no position to say so. “Bev got violent. We’re trying to work it out.”

  “In a wiggle, huh?” Spencer leaned forward, his hands on his knees. Sunburned skin was peeling from the tops of his ears. “Bev,” he called down at her in what he imagined was playful mock anger. “What are you doing down there? You got your nice purple dress all dusty.”

  “Hi,” she said.

  He stood up straight and turned to Marcy, squinting in the sunlight. “Anything I can do?”

  “She’s going to need to sit in a corner when she gets up. Could you get a chair?”

  “Sure.” He looked around. He noticed that Doris, the supervisor of the Teachers’ Group, was leaning on her cane at the entrance to the Classroom Building, waiting for him. “I’ll be right back with it.” Spencer nodded to the rest of the New Girls. “Girls,” he said.

  Before he could go inside, Doris asked him what was going on. Doris was obese. She had a handkerchief she used to wipe the sweat from her face. When he explained about getting a chair, she reminded him that the teachers had a day off to schedule classes and weren’t supposed to be working in the dorms. She looked over to where Bev lay on the ground. “Just be quick,” she said.

  New Girls were still talking about Bev’s feelings when Spencer brought out a chipped green plastic chair with a white desk attached. The metal legs shone in the sunlight. The girls’ discussion came to an end with a point that Carly Sibbons-Diaz made.

  “At first I thought maybe Bev did have the razor,” Carly said, “but then I realized: if she was hiding it anywhere on her body, she’d be all cut up by now. But she isn’t.”

  This sounded absolutely crazy to Tidbit, and she felt a rush of fear, thinking that Marcy would figure out that Carly was on drugs and they would both be caught. But everyone else seemed convinced. Marcy let Bev up; Bev dusted off her dress and went to sit in the chair, facing the corner of the Classroom Building. Marcy sent the rest of the girls back into the bushes.

  As time passed, the few New Girls still looking for the razor blade gave up and waited for Marcy to lead them back to the Mansion to be searched. They sat talking to one another quietly or drew elaborate pictures in the dust. By the time Marcy said it was time to go, many of the girls had fallen asleep beneath the bushes. Those still awake crawled around and woke the rest.

  2

  The Classroom Building was a cinder-block structure in moderate disrepair. Thin wool carpeting and dingy linoleum covered the floors, and the whole building somehow seemed much larger than it was. Doris, Spencer, Dedrick, and June sat in the Teachers’ Lounge. Over the large window on the east wall, a torn and twisted set of bamboo blinds were lowered to keep the sunlight out. But the string that held the left side of the bamboo slats together had gotten tangled in the pulley at the top, leaving the blinds hanging at an angle. They cast a yellow shadow across the room.

  In addition to Doris being supervisor of the Teachers’ Group, Aubrey had recently made her the assistant director of the school as well. In her short time as an administrator, Doris had learned that the fewer decisions she made, the less she would be held responsible for. But avoiding making decisions as the teachers’ supervisor meant that she had to get the other teachers to do things themselves. This she found extremely difficult, especially with Spencer and Dedrick. She had always been baffled by clever young men, which is what she thought they were. There seemed to be some tacit understanding that underlay their banter. Doris had no idea what this was, but it didn’t seem to involve helping her get things done.

  She could see Dedrick was about to start. The flip side of Aubrey’s belief that faculty members should be role models for the students was, Doris thought, that they themselves weren’t all that different from the students.

  “Spencer,” Dedrick said, “what’s going on with your dorm?”

  “They’re not really my dorm until classes start,” Spencer said. He was looking out the window. “I’m still with New Boys, at least until they’re done with Building Bridges.” He sat down on the couch under the large window.

  “Building Bridges. How’s that going?”

  “The bridge is done. All they have left to do is the sign.”

  “No, I mean the emotional bridges between the boys. How’s that going?”

  “Fuck you,” Spencer said and laughed.

  “Where’s Brenda?” Doris asked. “How is it that she’s late again? Having a day like this is a favor Aubrey does for us. It’s an insult to him.”

  Doris wasn’t the best person Aubrey could have chosen to be his assistant director. Some people thought he wanted someone who would defer to him, but I think he was trying to teach us something. Not anything about fairness or about giving an unpromising candidate a chance, but something about power. If Aubrey had picked someone competent, it would have rendered his power invisible. The person who deserved the job would have gotten it; events would have been following their own logic. Only by choosing someone inept, by being arbitrary, could Aubrey remind us that he answered to no one.

  “There’s plenty of stuff we can do until she gets here,” Spencer said. He tore open a bag of pretzels with his teeth and placed it on the coffee table in the middle of the room.

  “That’s not the point,” Doris said, “but you’re right. We’ll have you do the beginners math class again. But we need a new name for it.”

  “We just gave it a new name this semester.”

  “Yes. We have to come up with a new name every semester. If the students’ educational consultants look at their transcripts and see that we have them in the same class twice, they think we’re not following the individual educational plans. So what did we call it last semester?”

  “God, I don’t remember.”

  Dedrick laughed and let some pretzel dust spray from his mouth. “You don’t remember the name of the class you taught?”

  “I think,” June said, “it was something about humble beginnings.”

  “That’s right,” Spencer said. “Humble Starts and New Beginnings.” He turned to Dedrick. “See.”

  “So,” Doris asked, “any ideas?” She had a yellow legal pad in her lap.

  Spencer thought for a moment. “How about Mathlab?”

  “I don’t know. We had a Mathlab once but the students started calling it Methlab.”

  “Math on the Run,” Dedrick suggested.

  “No.”
r />   “How about Make Mine Math?”

  “Fun with Numbers.”

  “Guys,” Doris said.

  “Counting Without Fingers.”

  “Don’t Step on the Math, Man.”

  “Gentlemen, this isn’t helping.”

  “What?” Spencer said. “I thought that last one was pretty good.”

  There was a knock on the open door. “Good,” Doris said, “now we can get started.” But she grabbed hold of her armrest and turned herself around to see that it was not Brenda but Ellie in the doorway.

  “Hi, teachers,” Ellie said, “can I crash your party?”

  “Sure,” Dedrick said. “How come you’re not with your boys?”

  Doris excused herself. She was going to call around and try to find Brenda. She pushed past Ellie on her way out.

  “Huh? Oh, they’re working on the Dirt Pile with Roger,” Ellie said, looking after Doris as she went.

  Ellie walked across the room and climbed onto the arm of the couch that sat beneath the window. She untangled the string from the slats but was too short to reach the pulley mechanism at the top. She wore a long, narrow black skirt and a small blue T-shirt. “What are you guys doing?” she asked as she tugged at the string to even the blinds.

  “We need a new name for beginner’s math.” Spencer watched her stretch to reach the top of the blinds. “Any ideas?”

  “I always sucked at math,” she said.

  “Sort of long for a class name,” Spencer said.

  “I don’t know,” Dedrick said. “We should ask Doris.”

  “Oh!” Ellie cried as the blinds crashed to the floor behind the couch. A thick ray of dirty light flooded the Teachers’ Lounge. The whole room seemed suddenly airless and tight, brimming with dust motes. Ellie jumped down off the arm and collapsed onto the couch next to Spencer. “I hate this fucking place.”

  Ellie was blond, with eyebrows so pale they were barely visible. Her nose was round, and her eyes were a light, light gray. Every boy she knew fell in love with her at least a little. She waited for some response to what she had said, but the teachers had retreated into themselves. They all hated working there, and they all stayed for what they believed were bad reasons. They made fun of the kids, and they made fun of the place, but they rarely said more about it than that.

  Dedrick asked, “You thinking about leaving?”

  “Every day. And then I think maybe it’s just that I haven’t had a weekend off since July.” She laughed indifferently. “All the new staff showing up and then quitting. That guy in the overalls last week, he didn’t even stay a full day.”

  Spencer picked up the folder of papers next to him on the couch and began reading through them. The other teachers found things to work on, too. Ellie picked up a Styrofoam cup and filled it with pretzels. She leaned back on the couch and put her feet up on the lime-green table. It occurred to her that all the furniture in the lounge was upholstered or painted various shades of green.

  “Hey, you want to hear something funny?” Spencer asked. “For the final essay for my social studies class last semester, I had them write an analysis of some piece of advertising. Listen to this: ‘Cereal boxes use colorful characters to try and convince parents to be their children’s breakfast.’ ”

  “Nice,” Dedrick said.

  “Whose is that?” June asked.

  Spencer flipped the page over. “William Kay.”

  “I’d believe,” Dedrick said, “that his parents became his breakfast. They might yet.”

  “Is he one of your serial killers?” June asked.

  “I’m not sure. He’s probably on the list,” Spencer said. “Do you remember?” he asked Dedrick.

  Dedrick shook his head. “Check,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Ellie asked.

  Dedrick explained as Spencer got up and grabbed a green spiral-bound notebook off a shelf: “We found this list of attributes that most serial killers share. Awkwardness around the opposite sex, intelligence, bedwetting, starting fires, some others. We’ve been keeping a tally as we find stuff out about the kids.”

  Spencer flipped to the middle of the notebook. “We have William down for cruelty to animals, but that’s it. He’s probably not smart enough to be much of a serial killer anyway.”

  Spencer put the green notebook back on the shelf, between Bridge to Terabithia and Tristes Tropiques, which is exactly where I found it fifteen years later. This was only a few months ago, when I had returned to wander the campus for no reason I understood. The school had been closed down for some time and was abandoned. In the Classroom Building, the walls were cracked, and tiles had fallen from the ceiling. I roamed the rooms and hallways, and browsing the stacks in the Teachers’ Lounge I saw the notebook on the shelf.

  The pages were stiff and had yellowed. In them I saw names I hadn’t thought of for years, and some names that I’d thought of every day since the one I’ve been describing, when I first arrived at the school. It didn’t even occur to me to look for my own name until I had read through the notebook and hadn’t seen it. There were short essay assignments stuffed between the pages as well, maybe the papers the teachers were grading that day. Putting down the notebook, I found that I was sitting on the floor and that outside the light had begun to fade. In my mind’s eye I saw the teachers, sitting around the room the way they must have once, and I suddenly understood exactly what it must have been like. I found a pencil, and right there, on the floor of the Teachers’ Lounge, I began to write this book.

  I looked up Dedrick soon after and wrote him a letter to tell him about the project I had begun and to ask him a number of questions about his experience at the school. I was surprised when he wrote back at how happy he was to hear from me—surprised that he remembered me at all. Dedrick told me all sorts of things about what his life was like now, but neither answered my questions nor said anything at all about his time at Roaring Orchards.

  Doris returned from her phone calls. “Someone’s gone to look for her,” she said. “Apparently Brenda’s spending some time with the girls in Zen Gardening, dragging logs out of the woods to chop for firewood. In the meantime, let’s talk about electives. Dedrick, we need an English elective.”

  “Didn’t I just do one like two semesters ago?”

  “Yes, but several of our pupils completed the state requirements since then.”

  Spencer folded one of his exams into a paper airplane and threw it toward the open door. It veered left, crashed into the wall, and fell. He said to Ellie, “Dedrick taught this class about unreliable narrators, and it was a disaster.”

  “The kids were always on so much medication that, well, it wasn’t a very high-functioning situation. Bev Hess drooled on her desk all through Diary of a Madman.”

  “Is she on your serial killer list?” Ellie asked.

  “All the theorists are,” Dedrick said.

  “So,” Doris said, “for this semester?”

  “You should teach a class called Books Spencer Can Reach from the Couch,” Spencer said. He reached up and without looking knocked a number of books from the shelf beside him. They tumbled down, some landing in his lap, some bouncing off the arms of the couch and landing on the floor.

  “Guys, we really need to get this done today.”

  “Doris, we’ll change the name,” Spencer said.

  “What’ve you got?” Dedrick asked.

  Spencer began reading off titles and tossing the books one at a time across the room to Dedrick. “Aristophanes’s The Birds, Famous Monologues from TV Teleplays, Kropotkin’s Fugitive Writings … Walden, The Long Goodbye, New Science.”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Dedrick said, struggling to catch or dodge the flying paperbacks. “That’s enough.”

  “You really think this will make an okay elective?” Doris asked.

  “I definitely do,” Dedrick said.

  “Because the Alexander Academy just gave us a box of brand-new books. Maybe you could use those?”

  “Can Sp
encer reach them from the couch?” Dedrick asked.

  “Oh, well—”

  “I’m just kidding, Doris. Sure we’ll use them. What did they send?”

  “It was a big box, but I think the only book was The Decameron.”

  “They sent us a big box with one book in it? What, like a joke?”

  “No, there were about two dozen copies.”

  “Well, fine,” Dedrick said. “I’ll add it to the syllabus.”

  “So what should we call it?” Doris asked.

  “Cooking with Butter.”

  The phone rang in the atrium. “That better be Brenda,” Doris said. She waited to see if anyone else would go to answer it. When no one did, she got up out of her chair and went.

  “What’s up with her?” Dedrick asked.

  “With Doris?” June said.

  “No, with Brenda.”

  “I think she just got really close with those girls over the summer,” June said. “She had them put on one of her plays as an activity.”

  “Sucker,” Dedrick said.

  “I think it’s sweet.”

  Doris returned. “Ellie, they need you in the Mansion. You’ve got an intake.”

  “Oh, great.” She struggled up out of the couch and said, “Sorry about the blinds. Am I a part of this meeting or can I just go?”

  “I think we need to consent,” Doris said.

  “This is my consensus to leave the meeting.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Agreed.”

  3

  I don’t know how long I’d been sitting in the Great Hall by the time Ellie arrived to collect me. I had worked myself into such an intense state of sadness and anger that she had to shake me to get my attention. I didn’t understand how my parents could have left me, and I didn’t know what to do. Tyler got up, dropped his magazine on the chair, and wished Ellie good luck.

  “You ready?” Ellie asked, and without waiting for an answer took my hand and led me to the Office.

  The secretaries all turned and smiled brightly at me. On one of their desks I saw my book bag sitting dejectedly, half collapsed over itself. They must have gone out and come back in again, I thought. I had left the bag in the car. My parents had found it there when they went to leave and brought it back in before leaving again. It was a stupid thought. The image of my mother running back into the Mansion, shaky on the steps, while my father waited impatiently in the car behind the crumpled windshield, and then her stealing out again. But they must have.