by Dan Josefson
Everyone laughed. When he had let him go and Zbigniew had closed the door behind him, Aubrey said, “Now he can write home, and in a week his whole village will be crowded around his letter about how horrible his American boss is.” Aubrey cut this round of laughter short. “You shouldn’t dismiss country people. They possess a great wisdom.”
The room waited while Aubrey removed a plastic container of frozen yogurt and then a bottle of vanilla extract from a small pink gift bag with yellow polka dots. He balanced the plastic container on his knees as he shook a few drops of vanilla onto the yogurt. After screwing the top back on and replacing the vanilla, he fished around in the bag for a moment before sending one of the Regular Kids back into the Cafetorium to get him a spoon.
Starting at his immediate left and going around the circle Aubrey asked each Regular Kid and faculty member if he or she had anything to share. They gave news about their dorms, who had been moved up or down, or mentioned personal things like how many days it had been since they had had a drink or smoked a cigarette. Or they simply said good morning and let him pass on to the next person.
When he got around to Roger, who was sitting next to Ellie, Roger reported to Aubrey and everyone else what had happened with Han Quek.
“At this evening’s meeting we’ll probably more appropriately place him down into New Boys.”
“Mmm,” Aubrey said. “And why’s that?”
Roger looked around the room and laughed as though it might have been a trick question. When he realized that it wasn’t he explained, “Because he broke one of the bottom lines of the dorm. He ran away.”
Aubrey nodded and moved on.
“And Ellie, how are you this morning?”
“All right,” she said.
“Ellie had a rough day yesterday,” he said.
Aubrey asked her about reports he had heard from some Alternative Boys that the police had been a little rougher with them than necessary.
“I don’t know about that,” Ellie said. “They questioned me in a different room.”
“Well, try to remember.” Aubrey ate a spoonful of yogurt and said to Alternative Boys sitting on the floor, “Any of you boys who saw or experienced something like that should sit down with me at lunch and we’ll discuss it.” Then Aubrey handed his breakfast to one of the Regular Kids next to him, stood, and walked to the green chalkboard behind him. He searched for a suitable piece of chalk. He drew a big circle. “This is the campus,” he said. “Three sides are fenced. The fourth is bordered by woods. Now. No faculty member is to chase a student past the boundaries of the campus. Is that understood?” He turned around. “Questions? Good.”
Aubrey returned to his seat and took back his food. He resumed calling on people around the circle. Some he asked questions, to some said good morning. Aubrey was now up to Spencer, who was sitting next to Marcy.
“Good morning, Spencer.”
“Morning.”
“You have anything for us?”
“Nothing.” Spencer smiled.
“Marcy’s totally going to get it,” Pudding whispered in my ear.
Aubrey placed the top onto the plastic container that had held his breakfast. He crossed his right knee over his left, exposing a long expanse of shin, and said, “You know, I had a funny conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Ormsbee over the weekend.” He leaned down to put the plastic container of yogurt back in the pink gift bag. “Nancy’s parents?” There was a lilt to his voice as though he were looking forward to relating this anecdote. He removed a cotton napkin, sat up, wiped his mouth.
“They had already been told that Nancy had run away, again, but I felt that I should call to express my apologies. Again. But I couldn’t because they were so busy apologizing to me over and over and over, I could barely get a word in. I was hearing how embarrassed they were at what a problem their daughter was, how much trouble she had put us through, how understanding we all were, and so on. Can you imagine?” He shook his head and chuckled. I looked at Marcy as everyone laughed, and she looked relieved.
“I had to stop them,” Aubrey said. “I had to ask them to stop a few times. I mean, I was calling to explain myself, to discuss the fact that we had lost their poor daughter twice in three days. And they were so enmeshed that they were apologizing to me. I had to explain to them, very slowly”—he looked at the Regular Kids sitting on either side of him, who were cracking up—“I had to explain to them that they should be angry, not sorry. That I was the one who should be sorry. ‘Oh, but Aubrey,’ ” Aubrey said in a high voice, “ ‘she promised after the first time. She promised that she wouldn’t run again and you were so kind to believe her.’ I didn’t believe her, I said. I don’t believe any of these kids. They’re a bunch of goddamn liars. Even if on occasion one of you tells the truth by mistake, it isn’t anything I can count on.” Aubrey winked at Alternative Girls sitting on the floor. There was general relief around the room that Aubrey was taking this so well, and the students’ spirits rose on the breath of his laughter.
“ ‘Oh, but Aubrey,’ her dad said, ‘she was so ungrateful when you were the only school willing to accept her.’ You paid me to accept her, I told him. That’s how it works. It’s my job. It was almost impossible for me to convince the Ormsbees that this was our fault, not Nancy’s and not theirs. And by our fault, of course I mean it was Marcy’s fault.”
There was a pause and then an uncomfortable shift in the room as Marcy, red faced, moved to respond. But Aubrey continued, “Andrew looks like he has a question.”
Surprised to be called on, Pudding swallowed a few times. I felt nervous myself having Aubrey look in my direction. I could almost feel Pudding thinking carefully beside me. “Well … if you’re saying it’s not Nancy’s fault that she ran away,” he said, “how come when someone runs they have to be cornered?”
“Because sitting in the corner isn’t a punishment,” Aubrey said. “Look at Han Quek. He felt he needed for whatever reason to get away from his dorm. So he ran. But the road isn’t safe, and we’re responsible for his safety, which Ellie understood, so she brought him back. But at the same time we respect what Han is telling us by running, that what he needs right now is to be alone, to not be a part of the school. So we create an off-campus place for him, where he can have what he’s telling us he needs. And we feed him and we give him a bed to sleep in and so on. And when he decides that he wants to come back onto campus, he calls me, and we talk about it. In his case, Han’s run away what, six or seven times now? So he’ll really need to convince me that he wants to come back, and that might take some time.”
Aubrey arranged his scarf over his shoulders. “Now, Marcy, what are you doing about this? Why should I trust that there’ll be any girls left in your dorm when I wake up tomorrow morning?”
Marcy ran her hands over her thighs and looked as though she were about to recite something she had prepared. “Well,” she said, “I probated myself yesterday afternoon with all the other dorm parents. I have a plan of things that I need to work on before—”
“That doesn’t tell me anything about why I should allow students to be supervised by you tonight.”
“Well, I’m going to—”
“You were at this meeting?” he asked, turning to Roger.
“Yes.”
Aubrey slammed his hand down on the armrest of his chair and jumped up. “I don’t understand how you can sit here and tell me that I should entrust students to this woman! Because that’s what you’re telling me.” He looked around the circle. “You’re all supposed to be holding each other accountable, but you’d rather massage each other’s egos than do your job taking care of these children. You’re all supposed to be teaching the students to value themselves above all things, and you’re showing them exactly how little you think they’re worth. Somebody loses one of them, and there aren’t any consequences. Ellie’s courageous enough to put herself in legal jeopardy to protect one of her students, and Marcy can’t be bothered to wake up to check on a girl we
all know is in crisis! How on earth can you leave Marcy alone with a dorm right now? She can’t control them. Twice now she’s lost a girl who couldn’t even have stolen ice cream from the kitchen. Do you realize that? Why not?” He looked fiercely around the room. “Who’s going to tell me why Nancy Ormsbee was so harmless that she couldn’t even have so much as stolen a scoop of goddamned ice cream from the school?”
He looked around at the bewildered faces.
“Who’ll tell me? Why couldn’t she steal ice cream?” Aubrey had quieted some now, his voice scratchy from shouting. He looked slowly back and forth across the room but seemed poised to jump again.
Tyler, from Regular Kids, said, “She didn’t know where the freezer was.”
“Yes, yes, yes!” Aubrey said, hopping up and down though his feet didn’t leave the floor. His scarf floated gently around him. “That’s exactly right! The students are the only people in this room who’ll tell the truth! She couldn’t steal ice cream because she was only here two days and didn’t know where the fucking freezer was!” Aubrey took his money clip from his pocket and threw some dollar bills on the floor. “And now this poor girl, who was entrusted to you, this girl who couldn’t so much as steal ice cream, she’s now stalking through God knows where with pockets full of drugs, money, and a goddamn fucking tire jack!” He dropped some more bills on the floor and sat down. “Tonight New Girls all sleep in their lounge, and the dorm staff will wake-shift them. Roger will draw up the schedule.”
More quickly now, Aubrey went through the rest of the circle. A girl from Regular Kids picked up the dollar bills he had dropped. No one had much to say. It was stuffy, with too many people together in the room for too long. And there was a comfortable exhaustion in the feeling that the worst had passed. We felt we had survived it, and we students were surprised and flattered that Aubrey saw us as innocent. We shifted against one another at our dorm parents’ feet in sugary somnolence.
Aubrey didn’t pause to chat with anyone until he got to Doris, who was fidgeting nervously.
“Good morning, Doris.”
“Good morning.”
“How is planning for the semester going?”
“Everyone’s been doing a very nice job, Aubrey. We had a little interruption yesterday, but we’ll be ready to start classes on Wednesday.”
“Doris, you are an enormous woman,” Aubrey said.
All the drowsiness went out of the room. I already knew that Aubrey could be cruel, but I didn’t see what he had to gain from picking on someone as theatrically vulnerable as Doris.
“You’re an enormous woman, Doris,” he repeated, “with very tiny feet.”
Everyone looked down. Her feet were crossed at the ankles and tucked beneath her chair in what seemed to be black ballet slippers. Even Doris leaned over to look at them. It was true. They were tiny.
6
Aubrey’s new dictum that faculty couldn’t chase students off campus had an unintended but easily foreseeable consequence. Over the course of the autumn there were an increasing number of footraces to be seen between faculty and students. These began at various points on campus and terminated with the student and faculty member on opposite sides of the fence by Route 294 if the student won or in a heap somewhere before that if the faculty member did. No one could think of a way to prevent it. As the season progressed, dorm parents and teachers escorting their students across campus took to walking slightly to one side, between their dorm and the nearest fence, to give themselves a head start.
This gave students sitting in their classes in the Classroom Building something new to think about. I rarely thought about anything other than getting home, but even those who had reconciled themselves to being at the school were never more than half devoted to whatever was going on in front of them. So if anyone spotted a chase across the front lawn, the whole class would run to a window to watch. In this case it was Ross Salazar running. Pudding was the first to spot him, and he wasn’t even sitting near the window. But he was up in an instant, and everyone else was close behind. I stayed in my seat for a moment but eventually joined the others. I hadn’t met Ross, but even from the second-story classroom where Dedrick was teaching our English elective, Cooking with Butter, I could tell he was small and not very fast. But New Boys’ dorm parent Jodi was even slower. Jodi was tough, and she never spoke more than was absolutely necessary. She always wore a baseball cap with her short blond ponytail sticking out the back of it, and she was running so slowly that it stayed on her head. We watched Ross pulling away little by little, and we moaned collectively as he tumbled where the lawn dipped down toward the road. This allowed Jodi to catch up. She collapsed on top of him, and then the rest of New Boys arrived and helped her put Ross into a wiggle.
I had been at the school for a couple of weeks at this point, and things had only gotten more difficult. Even on the rare occasions when something did amuse me, I made sure not to let it show lest anyone realize that maybe I wasn’t as miserable as I claimed to be. I don’t know what I hoped to gain by this—it was plain by that time that no one would show me any mercy on account of my being unhappy. It wasn’t even clear that anyone had noticed.
Dedrick walked to the window. He peered over our heads. “They’re on restriction,” he said. “You’re not supposed to look at them.”
“We couldn’t tell they were from a restricted dorm until we saw Jodi,” Zach Strohmann said. “Who was that, Ross Salazar?”
“Of course they were from a restricted dorm,” Dedrick said. “Otherwise they’d be in class, not out there. Don’t be an idiot.” Zach laughed and Dedrick sat back down at his desk. “This is just what I was talking about. Boccaccio’s intr—do you all think you can find your way back to your seats? Bev, you can sit back down on the floor.” We slowly turned from the window and sat down. Identical paperback copies of The Decameron lay on the half-desks attached to each of our chairs. “Hey, why are all your books so beaten up? They’re brand new.”
We looked down at the curled covers of our books and said nothing. Finally Bev Hess, sitting on the floor in her long dress, said, “Maybe we were trying to roll them up and smoke them.”
“Bev?” Dedrick said. “I can’t tell if you’re serious. Did you try to smoke your book?”
“No, it’s just something my friends at home would probably say.”
“Aren’t you like eleven?”
“I’m thirteen. No, fourteen. No, wait, yeah, I’m thirteen.”
“What did you do to get your furniture popped anyway?” Dedrick asked her.
Bev looked surprised. “I don’t know,” she said.
“She knows,” Carly Sibbons-Diaz said. “She was arguing with Marcy and stood on a couch with her shoes on.”
“What are you, trying to get every limit set on you at once?” Dedrick smiled at her and counted off on his fingers: “You’re skirted, your furniture’s popped, are you going to get cornered next? Or roomed?”
Bev smiled at him.
“Can you be sheeted and skirted at the same time?” someone asked.
“Hey, Zach,” Pudding said, “remember when you got logged?” He turned to the room to explain. “Zach hit someone with a log but said it had just slipped, so Roger made him carry a log around all the time so he’d learn how to hold it without it slipping and hitting someone.”
Zach smiled. “Yeah. I even had to carry it to my court date.”
“Remember?” Pudding said. “And Roger said, ‘Don’t take the log into your own hands, you take it to court.’ ”
“Bev, do you have to sleep on the floor?” Dedrick asked.
“I pull my mattress off the bed. Marcy said the mattress isn’t furniture.”
Dedrick nodded and stared out the window. “Where were we? Oh yes!” He slapped a hand on his desk. “I was just saying that Boccaccio’s introduction, his description of the plague in Florence, even though it’s a short bit at the beginning, is in a way the center of his whole project. I mean, this perfect ten-by-ten grid of
stories—this book is all about trying to impose a kind of insanely paranoid order on all the external and internal forces of chaos.” He glanced over our heads at the clock on the opposite wall. “And just as I’m making that point you all run to the window to check out the latest bit of chaos going on outside. Proving, among other things, that the age of irony is truly dead, at least here at the Roaring Orchards School for Troubled Teens. As if we needed reminding. Anyway. You’d all be right at home in fourteenth-century Florence.”
The other students laughed at this. Dedrick was considered very funny. “What are you guys laughing about?” Dedrick asked with a smile. “I just called you a bunch of panic-driven medieval nincompoops.” They laughed harder. They laughed at most of the things he said. “Hey, Pudding,” Dedrick said.
Andrew Pudding giggled with anticipation. “What?”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
Pudding burst out laughing and doubled over. The students cracked up. Even Bev said, “Huh-huh-huh.” All except for me.
“Okay,” Dedrick said, “what I want you all to try and do now is to make an outline of Boccaccio’s introduction. Summarize what he’s talking about paragraph by paragraph. Then we’ll see whether we can espy”—he drew this word out—“any pattern.”
“Does this have to be in complete sentences?”
“Who asked that? Pudding, was that you?”
“No,” Pudding said. Then he asked, “Does spelling count?”
“Pudding, why don’t you just drool on the page instead of writing? Really. I mean it.”
The laughter died down, and we got to work. When the bell rang the students crowded around Dedrick’s desk holding out small squares of paper. As he took and initialed them he told us to finish the summaries for homework. When their first-period check sheets were signed, everyone else left for their second-period classes. I waited.
I stood across from Dedrick, staring down at his desk. I tugged my sleeves down over my wrists. I scratched nervously at his desk, and Dedrick stared at my hand. “Could I ask you a question, Dedrick?” I was almost whispering.