by Dan Josefson
Aubrey turned and began to walk with Doris and Aaron, still holding on to Aaron’s arm. But he stopped almost immediately. “Doris told you how she started working here?”
“No, she hasn’t.” Aaron smiled at Doris as though she had been keeping something from him.
“Doris and I had known each other for years, from this weight-loss group and that one,” Aubrey said as they strolled. “Whatever it was, we were there, trying to slim down. I wasn’t always this size—if you think Doris is big, well, that’s nothing. I was enormous. I didn’t start losing weight until I began the process that is now the basis for how Roaring Orchards works. And when I did that, the weight just disappeared. It’s really remarkable; there are some students here on campus who’ve done the same thing, they’ll tell you.
“I hadn’t seen Doris in months. Then one afternoon I’m at the Price Chopper over in Grafflin, and there she is, in the produce section. I had lost all this weight, but it never occurred to me that Doris wouldn’t recognize me. But she didn’t. I passed by her once or twice to be sure. Not even a second glance. So I walked over quietly with my basket and stood next to her, just like anyone else at the supermarket, except that then I leaned over and looked into her shopping cart and I took something from it and put it in my basket. Doris started like she didn’t quite believe her eyes. When she turned away I did it again; I took a look at another couple of things in her cart, considering them, and put some of them in my basket. Doris finally said something, like ‘Excuse me, sir.’ I looked at her for a long moment and burst out laughing. That’s when she figured out who I was. She was so relieved. And I told her she should come here, to work with me. And it’s turned out wonderfully.”
They walked toward the Annex. On the way, Aubrey told the story of how the building Aaron would be living in had been converted from a greenhouse. Before founding Roaring Orchards, Aubrey had been working at another school but had gotten fired. And all the parents, Aubrey explained, immediately withdrew their kids from that school and gave Aubrey two years worth of tuition or whatever they could afford so that he could buy Roaring Orchards. The kids spent the first year and a half fixing up the place, and converting the old greenhouse had been one of their first projects. “Then we all moved in there so we could start fixing up the Mansion,” he said. “So don’t mess that place up—it’s got some real history.” At that, he said good-bye to Aaron, gave Doris a hug, and walked off toward the Mansion.
Me and the rest of Alternative Boys were shoveling snow outside the Greenhouse Annex, and we stopped to let Aaron and Doris enter. When they had, Spencer shouted at us to get back to work. Doris led Aaron into a large, bare room with blue carpeting and a wood-burning stove in one corner. We had cleaned it out the day before as a Reciprocity Detail. There were two unpainted wooden doors on one wall, and one on each of the others.
“This will be your apartment for now,” Doris told him. “You might have to switch when you get a permanent dorm, but we’ll try to avoid that. Your room is the one straight across. In the other two rooms here are, let’s see, well, one’s empty. It used to be Sheldon’s, who taught English. In fact, I remember he specifically asked to live here, rather than in the Paddock where most of the teachers are. So that’s the empty one, and … oh yes, Zbigniew, who is in charge of maintenance and runs our Reciprocity Detail, he’s in the other. You’ll like him. The bathroom is right there.” She pointed to a door. Where the doorknob would be, there was a hole cut in the door. Aaron walked across to his bedroom and opened the door. A large box spring with a slightly stained mattress sat on a metal frame in one corner of the room. The walls were light yellow, and there was a large window on the back wall that had a view of the trunks of pine trees behind the building. The window didn’t have any blinds or curtains. Aaron looked around, trying to imagine where his things would go, but he didn’t have much stuff, and he couldn’t really think of what it all was just then. “Let’s go meet Alternative Boys,” Doris said.
They headed back outside, to where we were shoveling. “Aaron, this is Spencer,” Doris said. “Spencer teaches math and history and works with Alternative Boys when their dorm parent Ellie isn’t around.”
“And sometimes when she is,” Spencer said.
Doris seemed a bit confused, then annoyed. “Yes, and sometimes when she is. Spencer, Aaron’s just arrived, and I’m going to leave him with your dorm, at least for the afternoon.”
Spencer shook Aaron’s hand roughly and said, “Good to meet you, Darren.”
“Aaron.”
“What’s that?”
“Aaron.”
Doris left and Spencer had us stop our shoveling to meet Aaron. “Aaron,” he said, “this is Alternative Boys. You’ll get all their names later. Guys, this is Aaron. Now you show him you can act like a group of gentlemen and not a bunch of slobbering imbeciles. Eric, that’s not funny. Wipe your chin. All right, enough. Finish shoveling while there’s still light.”
At that, William dropped his shovel. It rattled against the ground. He waited a beat, then asked Aaron, “You wanna see my dick?”
“Oh, William, cut the bullshit,” Spencer said. William laughed. His scrawny frame looked funny in his puffy down coat. “Now all of you get to work.” As the boys went back to shoveling, Spencer asked Aaron about himself and explained a little about the dorm and the school. “Some of the staff here are all right, but we get some real wackos, too. You’ll figure out which are which pretty soon.”
I noticed Aaron looking at me. I realize now that it must have been because he recognized my jacket and had seen my parents. He had been working there about fifteen minutes and already knew more about my life than I did. “Who’s that?” he asked.
“That’s Benjamin,” Spencer said. “He’s pretty quiet as long as you don’t let him get overly emotional. Not a wiseass, is the point. Listen, there are a couple of phone calls I need to make about something. Would you watch these guys while I go inside for a second? I’ll be right back.”
Aaron stammered, trying to find a way to refuse, but Spencer saw his hesitation and said, “Don’t worry. Kids in this dorm aren’t allowed to get violent or run away.” He walked up the hill toward the Mansion.
Aaron put his hands in his pockets and turned to face us. We kept working at clearing the path to the road that ran around campus but traded quick looks as people decided what to do. Aaron noticed but must have hoped he was imagining it. Not a minute passed before William marched up to Aaron, held out his shovel, and said, “Well, get to work.”
Aaron looked at him and nodded, laughed through his nose. But William just waited, looking up at him. Aaron rocked back on his heels. William held his shovel out to Aaron again. He was almost trembling with excitement. I kept my head down.
“Get to work, I said. Come on.” William swung his snow shovel and hit Aaron in the shin, hard, with the edge of its metal face. Aaron hopped backward. It must have hurt a lot. He was trying not to wince.
“What do you mean?” he asked William, and looked from him to the rest of us, who kept shoveling, some laughing, most pretending to be unaware of what was going on.
“What do I mean? Take a shovel and get to work. You think we’re the only ones who should shovel snow? Get to work, get to work, get to work!” With each of the last of these, William swung the shovel again, catching Aaron in the shins all three times. Aaron held out his arms to try to push William back, but the shovel was long enough to reach him.
William turned around and went back to shoveling snow. The pain in Aaron’s legs made him hop up and down on his toes. He bent down to rub his shins and check if they were bleeding into his new pants and saw that the bottom of his right pant leg was torn. But there was only a little blood.
We finished shoveling the walk quietly, and by the time we were done it had begun to get dark. Aaron followed us back to the Mansion basement, where we left the shovels, and then up to our dorm, where Spencer was sitting at a desk in the hallway talking on the phone. He wave
d thanks to Aaron, and when he didn’t ask how things had gone outside, Aaron didn’t tell him.
For dinner Aubrey decided to allow everyone back into the Cafetorium, though he was not there. Ellie had returned, and Aaron sat with us, too. He was happy to meet her, but she seemed distracted; she asked him his name twice, and he was still pretty sure she hadn’t gotten it. Other than that, his first dinner at Roaring Orchards went relatively well. It was fried chicken, everybody’s favorite, and since I was waiter I had to get up half a dozen times to get more from the kitchen. The only incident occurred when Pudding stuck his knife into the edge of the lazy Susan in the middle of the table. The next time someone turned the lazy Susan, the knife revolved with it and knocked over a few plastic glasses of water. Ellie hardly seemed to notice.
After dinner Doris asked if anyone had any announcements. Kids who were following the program raised their hands and when they were called on stood and announced things like “It’s been twenty-three days since I got violent” or “I haven’t eaten sugar for four days.” Aaron joined in the light applause after each announcement. In the Campus Community meeting after dinner Aaron was briefly introduced. Afterward, Doris sent him with New Girls for the evening. She said she wanted him to move around between dorms as much as possible the first few days so he could meet people and get to know how the school worked.
That evening, Aaron sat with Marcy and watched her girls do their homework in the lounge. They sat on couches or on the floor around the low table in the middle of the room. Bev stood by a bookcase. The girls worked diligently, and when they spoke they spoke in whispers. Aaron was impressed.
When the girls had been working for a while, Marcy got up and motioned for Aaron to come along. In the kitchenette, she began filling little paper cups with water. “These are for their nighttime meds,” she said. She showed Aaron the med packet and the notebook where he would have to check off each dose administered when he came to be in charge of a dorm. “We’ll give these once they’re in bed, but I like to start getting things ready beforehand.”
He looked back into the lounge where the girls were still working. Aaron watched one girl slide off a couch and sit next to another by the table to ask her something about a page of homework. They both leaned over the page and made marks as they discussed it quietly. “That girl over by the bookcase,” Aaron asked Marcy. “The, uh, bald girl in the dress? Is there something going on with her that I should know about?”
A strange, delighted smile appeared on Marcy’s face. “That’s Beverly Hess. She’s so funny. They’ve been lowering her meds and it’s like she’s coming out of a fog, for the very first time. She’s actually very sweet, but she also has episodes now that she’s not so heavily medicated. She’s standing because she and I got in this argument. It was so stupid—I think it was about whether Grand Forks or Bismarck was the capital of North Dakota, I don’t even remember who was arguing which. It was for someone’s homework, and it turned out Bev was right. She knows all sorts of obscure things, actually. But she got really heated and climbed up on the couch so she could yell in my face, so I popped her furniture.”
“Popped it.”
Marcy herself seemed to come out of a reverie. She laughed. “It means something’s forbidden. If your furniture’s popped, you’re not allowed to use furniture.”
“Is there a handbook or glossary or something I’ll get?”
Marcy shook her head. “Aubrey doesn’t allow anything like that. It’s important to him that Roaring Orchards remain a flexible place and that it’s able to adapt to the needs of the students. Sometimes he says that there aren’t any rules here at all, just the school’s philosophy. And that if you understand that and if you’re honest about your motivations, you can do whatever you think is right.”
“What is, like, the school’s philosophy?”
“It’s hard to put it all into a sentence. I mean, it has a lot to do with the kids learning to make themselves the most important person, you know? In their lives? Because they can’t be good to others until they’re good to themselves. And there’s a lot about responsibility, about taking responsibility for everything in your life. Personally, I’m not really at a stage yet where I entirely understand it. Aubrey actually believes that before you’re born you choose who your parents are going to be, so you’re even responsible for that.”
“Really?”
“It’s like, if they do bad things, you shouldn’t complain because you’re the one who chose them. So you can take responsibility even then, for the things you choose to let happen to you.”
“Oh,” Aaron said.
He followed Marcy back into the lounge, where she told the girls to put their work away. They closed their books and collected their papers. They placed them neatly on the bookshelf. Then the girls all sat down on the couches, except for Bev, who stood. Closer to her now, Aaron could see that Bev wasn’t entirely bald. A few wisps of blond hair swirled against her temples like down.
“All right,” Marcy said, “I know Bev wants to work out her furniture, and I have something to bring up. Anything else?” No one said anything, so Marcy began.
The thing she wanted to discuss was an issue from that morning, when they had breakfast in the dorm. Marcy said that after breakfast she had found three empty envelopes of juice mix in the trash, but she only remembered the girls making one pitcher of juice. “Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I don’t think so. Did you guys drink three pitchers of juice this morning or just one?”
New Girls said nothing. “Well, if it was just one,” Marcy said, “I’d like to know who made it.”
After a pause Tidbit said that she’d made it. “But I know what you’re going to say,” she said, “and it wasn’t a yummy. Yummies have a lot more mix than that.”
“My understanding,” Marcy said, “is that a yummy is when you use more juice mix than you’re supposed to use. You’re supposed to use one packet per pitcher. You’re telling me you used three?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t make it a yummy.” As she spoke, Tidbit repeatedly swept her dark hair out of her face and pushed her red glasses up the bridge of her nose. The argument went on for some time. Aaron gathered that yummies were popped. They were popped because students had used them to self-medicate, altering their moods with excess amounts of sugar. Most of the dorm members agreed with Tidbit that a pitcher of juice was only a yummy if it contained the absolute maximum amount of juice mix that would dissolve in it. They claimed that this would take about seven envelopes if you used hot water.
“The point here,” Marcy said, backing up, “isn’t so much whether you’ve broken a limit, Tidbit. I’m not interested in getting you into trouble. But limits exist for a reason, not just to keep you from doing certain harmful things. They are also so we can all see what’s going on inside you by how you behave. I don’t understand you, Tidbit. You’ve been talking such a big game about wanting to be good and follow the process, and then you always somehow find a way to undermine whatever progress you might have made. And with stupid things like this. Why do you think you’re doing that?”
Tidbit hugged her knees. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” she said. “How was I undermining myself if I thought using three envelopes of mix was okay?”
“Let’s move away from exactly how many juice packets you did or did not use. That’s not really what this is about. You know you’d be safer using just one. Why didn’t you?”
“But I don’t think I knew that,” Tidbit said. “Juice just tastes better with more mix. I didn’t think I was breaking any rules.”
“Girls?” Marcy said, turning to the dorm. “What do you all think about this?”
“Whatever,” Tidbit said.
“Well, to tell the truth, I feel set up,” Bridget Divola said. “I had no idea that the juice was a yummy when I drank it, and I feel like Tidbit made me act out even though I didn’t want to.” Bridget was chubby and had a bowl haircut. Aaron thought she was adorable.
“I’m not kidding. You all know I’m addicted to sugar, and even if you’re not interested in following the process, there are some of us who are.” Tidbit just glared at her, so Bridget continued. “You know what this reminds me of? Remember that one meeting where you told us about how when you and your mom were feeling really stressed and crazy she would take stuff out of the refrigerator and you guys would paint all over the kitchen walls with peanut butter and ketchup and toothpaste and stuff? Like you’d both just laugh hysterically and go crazy, making a mess? To deal with the stress?”
“That has nothing to do with this,” Tidbit said. “And I said that in a meeting, so it’s confidential.”
“Well, this meeting is confidential, too.” Bridget looked briefly at Aaron. “And I think it does have to do with it. Because you’re acting out in the kitchen. With condiments. It’s like, maybe if that’s how you bonded with your mom, then maybe you—”
“This is why people don’t talk in meetings. And you’re not addicted to sugar, Bridget. You’re just fat.” Tidbit pulled on her hair so that it hung down in front of her face. “God, this is such bullshit. Stupid shit.”
“Tidbit,” Carly Sibbons-Diaz said, “I really don’t think that’s—”
“How come you’re getting nasty if it isn’t true?” Bridget said. “I don’t think you’d—”
“I’m getting nasty because you’re a bitch. This is why your sister killed herself. She couldn’t stand listening to another word out of your fat mouth.”