by Dan Josefson
It was a paltry thing. But it was dizzying, too, and all I had. I looked down into the long, deep drawer of a filing cabinet that was open beside me. It was only when I felt a tear fall and graze my wrist that I realized I’d begun to cry. When I told myself that this was absolutely the last thing I should be doing, the sobs swept from me beyond my ability to control. The Office ladies’ lipsticky smiles faded in the flickering, aquatic light of their computer monitors.
Ellie rubbed my back and waited for me to cry myself out. I imagine she was relieved that this crying jag of mine and whatever might follow it were happening in the presence of the ladies in the Office, that it hadn’t begun when she was alone with me. When with long heaving breaths I swallowed my last sobs, she patted me gently and grabbed my book bag off of the desk.
“C’mon,” she said and led me out of the Office. I looked pleadingly over my shoulder at the secretaries who only raised their smiles, which now barely hid what seemed a profound but passing worry. I followed Ellie back into and across the Great Hall to the foot of a wide wooden staircase next to which, through bleary eyes, I saw an enormous, brightly painted rocking horse with a coarse woolly mane. I don’t know how I had missed it before.
“Keep up with me.” Ellie took my hand in hers. We climbed the staircase, which turned elegantly and then turned again. Ellie led me through doorways and around corners, and I quickly got lost in the maze of the Mansion. The higher floors were hotter and smelled of dusty wool carpeting. The walls were white, though scuffed and dirty near the floor.
At one point we walked down a corridor with doors open on both sides to small bedrooms. Each door had a page torn from a spiral notebook taped to it, on which were written three or four girls’ names. The names appeared in bubble letters, imitation graffiti, or in letters with teardrops running down their sides to suggest melting wax or dripping blood. Then the signs stopped, and the doors were blank. The hallway was narrow enough that Ellie had to walk on ahead of me.
My book bag was slung over her shoulder and swung briskly across her back with each step. Her blue T-shirt didn’t quite reach the top of her skirt, the waistband of which seesawed slightly with her hips as she walked. I slowed down to increase the distance between us, to see how far ahead she would go. When she rounded a corner and passed out of sight, I stopped, opened a door on the right, and slipped into a room. I quietly closed the door behind me.
What little light there was came through a window high on the wall, its curtain drawn. I stumbled down two wide steps that led into the room. There was a shadowed futon against one wall of the room, and opposite that there was a desk with a computer on it. I walked quietly around the room once, letting my eyes adjust. I froze upon noticing that there was someone asleep on the futon. I stepped closer. It was a heavy, middle-aged woman with dark, curly hair. She would later be introduced to me as Frances, and for my first few months at the school, she was my therapist, until for some reason I was switched. She snored softly.
I quickly returned to the door and listened. Not hearing anything, I opened the door and almost bumped right into Ellie.
“What were you doing in there?” she asked.
“I fell behind,” I said. “I thought you went in there. What’s that room for?”
“No, I went around that corner.” Ellie gave me a long, dubious glance. “That’s one of the therapy rooms. If someone had been in there you and I would both be in a heap of trouble.”
“How do you know no one was?”
I thought I saw Ellie’s mouth soften into a tiny smile. “Because,” she said, “I don’t hear any trouble. Alternative Kids aren’t allowed to walk around alone. Only Regular Kids are. Come on. You always have to be with a staff member, and when you’re with the dorm you’ll always need to be within arms’ length of the other boys.”
“Arms’ length?”
“It’s part of Aubrey’s system. The point is to develop honest relationships. That’s a big step in dealing with whatever it might be you’re dealing with.”
I nodded. I wondered what it was I was dealing with. Ellie explained some other things as well. I would be in Alternative Boys. Most new students started in Alternative Boys or Alternative Girls. Those were the middle dorms. New Boys and New Girls were lower functioning, she said. Regular Kids were higher functioning. If I got violent or tried to run away, I would be sent down to New Boys. To get into Regular Kids I had to follow the process, though Ellie was a bit vague as to what exactly this entailed. Students could only graduate from Regular Kids.
“But if I’m new, shouldn’t I be in New Boys?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “There are some New Boys who’ve been here forever.”
Ellie directed me around the corner and through a door that led into a kitchenette. The kitchenette was attached to a good-sized lounge furnished with three large couches. These were arranged around a small square table. The thin carpeting was worn to strands in parts.
We walked through the lounge to a hallway with bedrooms on either side. The loose-leaf signs on these doors had boys’ names. Eventually I would learn that all the dorms in the Mansion had this same setup: a hallway along which were situated a number of bedrooms and one large shared bathroom. Each dorm’s hallway ended in a lounge, and off the lounge was a kitchenette. The exceptions—at Roaring Orchards there were exceptions to everything—were Regular Kids, who had more spacious rooms spread across one of the Mansion’s upper floors, and New Boys, who didn’t live in the Mansion at all but in a converted trailer called the Cottage.
Ellie walked into one of the bedrooms and tossed my book bag on the lower bunk of one of the two bunk beds in the room. “This room’ll be yours,” she said. She dropped an extra pillow from one of the other beds onto a blue plastic mattress that lay on the floor between the two bunk beds and said, “That’ll be your bed for now. We’ll get you some sheets, but I don’t think you’ll need a blanket yet. If you do there are some up in the attic to use until your parents send the rest of your stuff.”
I nodded and nodded and couldn’t think of anything to say. I didn’t really believe that I would spend the night here, let alone that this room would ever come to feel like mine. At the same time, I didn’t know what could keep that from being the case. The only color in the room came from the quilts and pillows on the four beds. I felt exhausted. “Where is everybody?” I finally asked.
“Alternative Boys are out on a Reciprocity Detail across the street, working on the Dirt Pile. We’ll head over there once we go through your things.” She sat down on the bed next to my book bag, unzipped it, and began removing things. She pulled out a CD player tangled in the wires of its headphones, a stack of jewel boxes, half a Milky Way bar still in its wrapper, a plastic alarm clock, a crumpled soft-pack of Camel Lights, a few grimy bills, a six-pack of Welch’s grape soda with two cans missing, a torn book of matches, and my black sweatshirt. She folded the sweatshirt carefully. “Well,” she said. “You can keep the sweatshirt and the alarm clock. But the rest—money, music, food, smokes—that’s all off-limits.”
“The alarm clock’s not mine.”
“What?”
“I mean it’s not mine. Why would I carry an alarm clock around in my backpack?”
“Your parents must have put it in there. When they got your bag out of the car.”
“Yeah. They must have brought it up.” I held out my palm, and Ellie handed me the clock. The black cord was wrapped around it. The clock was covered in thin sheets of plastic meant to look like wood. “Could I have one of those sodas before you get rid of them?” I asked. “You can have one, too.” That was stupid. They weren’t really mine to offer any longer.
“We should probably get over there.”
“To the Dirt Pile?”
“Yeah. I guess we could split one of these first.” She pulled a can from its plastic ring and sat back on the bed, propped up by a pillow. She pulled the tab and took a long swig.
“It’s warm,” she said, handing me the ca
n.
“It was in the car.”
We passed the can back and forth in silence. Ellie used her feet to move my things out of her way so she could stretch out her legs. On the bed she looked like a high school student herself.
“How long have you worked here?”
“Too long.” After a moment, she laughed. “It’s not that bad here. You’ll make some really good friends.” She looked at me for a while. I don’t know what she thought.
Ellie left the sweatshirt and scooped the other things up. She put the rest of the grape sodas in the refrigerator in the kitchenette, then looked around for a moment. “I don’t have the keys to the med closet,” Ellie told me, walking across the lounge to a gray metal desk, “so I’m just going to put these things in the desk. We’ll lock them up later. Don’t tell anyone this stuff is here, okay?”
I followed Ellie around corners and through doorways. We went down a long flight of stairs in the back of the building and onto a landing then down more stairs until we ended up in a damp basement lined with washing machines and dryers. In a back part there were large wooden folding tables leaning against one wall and spiderwebs up in the corners. A short staircase led us outside and onto a wide white porch with peeling paint. I wasn’t sure where we were in relation to the part of the school I had seen. The Mansion’s layout didn’t seem to make any sense. Directly in front of us was a buckled macadam parking lot. Past that, a garden path led to a fountain.
Ellie took my hand again and led me around the porch to the front of the Mansion. We walked down the hill and cut across the lawn to the stone pillars and iron gate at the entrance to the school. There was an old weathered fence at the edge of the lawn. Some of the crossbeams had fallen from their posts and lay angled against the grass, which smelled like it had just been cut. Ellie led me across Route 294, the main road that ran past campus into Webituck. We walked toward a long, low building covered in red shingles. In front of the building was what I assumed must be the Dirt Pile.
Seven or eight boys stood on it, each holding a shovel and digging away at the dirt, tossing shovelfuls into the thin copse of trees behind it. Behind one of the boys, who was fat and drenched in sweat, a bearded man stood shouting, “That’s it, Pudding, there you go! Keep digging now!”
When the man saw Ellie approaching with me, he called to the boys to climb down off the dirt and to get into a circle. The boys did, leaving a space for us. We joined them and completed the circle.
“Boys,” Ellie said, “this is Benjamin. Benjamin, this is Alternative Boys. And this,” she said to me, “is Roger. He’s a supervisor.”
Roger reached across the circle to shake hands. “Glad to know you,” he said. His eyes were watery, and his face splotched red. “Now, boys, why don’t we go around the circle and introduce ourselves. Tell Benjamin where you’re from and what got you sent here. Who’s gonna start?”
A thin boy with a mop of platinum-blond hair began. “My name’s William. You wanna see my dick?”
“Goddamn it, William.” Roger sounded less angry than tired. “That’s not funny. He’s new. He doesn’t know you’re joking.” William was so pale I could see the blue veins in his neck.
“You think I’m joking?” William said, unfastening his belt. “I’ll really pull it—”
“Stop being an asshole and tell him why you’re here.”
William laughed and fixed his belt. “I’m from New Hampshire. I got sent here for taking a bunch of roofies when I was already on probation for beating up a kid. I ended up staring at a wall for like two days. They sent me here from the hospital.”
“William’s here as part of his probation,” Roger added, as if William had been too humble to mention it himself. He nodded to the next boy in the circle, who had thick dark hair and a nose that looked to have been smashed flat.
“I’m Eric,” the boy said. “I just got here, too. Like two weeks ago. It sucks.”
“Eric,” Roger said.
“I’m from Baltimore,” Eric said. “I skipped school a lot.”
“I’m Carlos,” said the boy next to him, who was very short and very skinny. “My parents sent me here because I wasn’t taking my meds during the day in school when I was supposed to, but most of the time I just forgot.” He looked at Roger, then back at me. “Sometimes I on purpose forgot. They sent me here so people would watch me closer.”
They continued around the circle. I couldn’t keep track of much of it. The boys were from all over, but mostly the East Coast. Someone had been sent to the school for chasing his father around the house with either a fork or a hammer, but I couldn’t remember his name. Someone’s parents were afraid that he was going to hurt his sister. There was a large boy named Zach. Could there have been two Zachs? Someone else messed up his parents’ car by either scratching it with a fork or hitting it with a hammer, whichever the boy who had chased his father around hadn’t used.
The fat boy whom Roger had called Pudding when they were shoveling dirt was still catching his breath when it was his turn to speak. He introduced himself as Andrew Pudding and said he’d found ten thousand dollars in a safe in his father’s office and had spent all of it. The boys around the circle began to smile, and one of them said, “Tell the new kid what you spent it on,” and Pudding stared at me, sighed, and said, “I took cabs a lot of places.” Alternative Boys all laughed, but Pudding kept looking at me. A boy named Han said he’d been sent to the school for not being a good-enough driver, but the words were barely out of his mouth before everyone was yelling that he was full of shit, that no one got sent there for that. Han shouted over them that parents could send kids to the school for whatever reason they wanted and that Aubrey was perfectly happy to take tuition from people whose kids had no other problem than that they couldn’t drive well, but the boys were not convinced.
When it got around to me, I said, “I’m Benjamin. My parents just left me.”
“That’s what they did to me, too!” Pudding shouted from across the circle. “I hate that! They tell them it’ll be easier that way but it isn’t true, and then they tell them everything you’re going to say before you say it so they won’t believe you!”
“Yeah,” someone added. “And as soon as they’re gone Aubrey’ll call all the other parents and tell them to call your parents to tell them how happy they are that they sent their kids here and about how well we’re all doing.”
“Yeah,” said Pudding, waving his shovel. “And look at us!”
Roger stopped things there. He told us to get to work. The boys climbed back up onto the pile of dirt and began scraping and shoveling, all except for me and Pudding, who waited next to Roger. “Go on ahead and get to work without me,” Roger told him. “I’ve got to talk to Ellie for a minute. Don’t let me catch you slacking.”
Pudding wandered around to the side of the Dirt Pile where Roger couldn’t see him and sat down with his back to the rest of the dorm. I followed him, since I didn’t have a shovel. Pudding was pulling something out of his pockets and stuffing it into his mouth. I sat down next to him. “What’s that?” I asked him.
“Pancakes. Don’t tell.”
Pudding didn’t offer me any, he just kept pulling pieces of pancake from his pocket and eating them. The boys on the Dirt Pile above us were throwing shovelfuls of dirt in the direction of the woods with a slow, regular rhythm. Some of the dirt they tossed made it to the trees, the rest landing back on the pile or somewhere in between. Roger called out that he was leaving and that we should listen to Ellie. Soon after that, Pudding turned to face the boys up on the Pile.
“Hey, could you please watch where you’re throwing that dirt?”
“Okay,” someone called. Clumps of dirt rained down directly onto Pudding and me. One shovelful hit me in the back of the neck, getting dirt down my collar. A small rock clipped me in the temple. Pudding stood up and started yelling, and when another shovelful got him in the face, he ran at the pile and grabbed for someone’s ankle. I took a step back and lo
oked up to see that it was William’s ankle Pudding had hold of, and despite his hitting Pudding in the shoulder with his shovel, Pudding wouldn’t let go. Then William’s green eyes flashed in his gaunt face, not with anger but with glee, as he wound up and swung the shovel like a golf club, hitting the side of Pudding’s head so hard that I almost fell over. More amazing than that strike was the fact that Pudding seemed unfazed. He dragged William off the pile and fell on him.
The other boys ran down from the top of the Dirt Pile and circled Pudding and William until Ellie got there, at which point they pulled the two boys apart. Pudding picked up his glasses and began cleaning the lenses on his shirt. William was smiling, some blood running from his nose. He pointed at Pudding’s waist and said, “Hey, what’s that?”
A piece of pancake was sticking out of Pudding’s pocket. “Nothing,” Pudding said, stuffing it back in.
“Bullshit, nothing,” William said. “That’s a pancake. You’ve got goddamn pancakes in your pockets again.” The rest of Alternative Boys were crowding closer to get a better look.
“Empty your pockets, Pudding,” Ellie said.
“This is ridiculous,” Pudding said, taking a step toward Ellie. “William starts a fight and throws dirt and belts me in the head with a shovel, and it turns into a debate about pancakes. This is why our dorm is always getting put on restriction, Ellie, because you let people distract you from focusing on the central issues.”
Ellie’s gray eyes darkened a touch. “So you’re saying you did take pancakes from breakfast and stuff them in your pockets?”
“No, what I’m saying is that if someone gets violent with a shovel, that should get dealt with and not ignored to discuss pancakes. And if I did, it wouldn’t be against the rules anyway.”