by Dan Josefson
No one said anything for a long time.
Then Laurel Pfaff said, “God, Tidbit.” Bridget sat perfectly still, her cheeks pink and shining.
“Okay,” Marcy said. “I think you girls need to sit for a while with what happened here and think about it.” Marcy’s voice sounded calm and satisfied.
“I think Tidbit needs to apologize,” Carly said.
A number of girls agreed, but Marcy wanted to move on. “Now Bev,” she said, “you ready, hon?”
“Yes.” Bev blinked. She faced the dorm. “I got my furniture popped for standing on a couch and arguing. Marcy, I’m very sorry I stood on a couch and fought with you about”—Bev suddenly looked worried—“I don’t remember what we were fighting about.”
“That’s okay,” Marcy said. “Did you get your furniture popped for arguing?”
“No?”
“So what did you get it popped for?”
“Oh, for standing on the couch in my shoes! Which is taking advantage because furniture is a privilege!”
“Okay, Bev,” Marcy said. “But what are you going to do if you get upset like that again? To make sure that you don’t act out?”
“If I get upset like that again I’ll talk about being upset instead of acting out.”
“Good.” Marcy could barely help beaming at her. “And how are you feeling now?”
“I feel like I should get my furniture unpopped.”
“You’re almost there. But ‘like I should get my furniture unpopped’ isn’t a feeling. Check the poster.”
Bev turned to a sheet of oak tag taped to the wall. On it someone had written in green Magic Marker:
The seven feelings
1. Happy
2. Proud
3. Confused
4. Frustrated
5. Scared
6. Angry
7. Sad
Bev thought for a moment. “I feel proud. I feel proud that I did a good job working out my furniture. Is it unpopped?”
“It is,” Marcy said.
The girls made room on the couch. Bev sat down.
Later Marcy suggested that Aaron stay to observe bedtime. While the girls were brushing their teeth, he followed her as she walked back and forth between the kitchenette and the girls’ bedrooms, placing the appropriate number of cups of water outside each room. When all the girls were done in the bathroom, they separated into groups of roommates. Marcy gave them ten minutes to change for bed, journal, say their prayers. Whatever they needed to do, she explained to Aaron.
Aaron followed Marcy down the hall as she visited one room at a time. He stood in the darkened doorway and watched as she sat on the edge of one bed after another. First, she gave the meds. She checked each yellow envelope before administering it, making sure that the contents matched the label. Then she poured the pills onto the girl’s tongue and watched as she drank the cup of water. Then Marcy looked inside her mouth. Then they talked for a minute before Marcy moved on to the next girl. For the girls in the top bunks, the process was the same, but instead of sitting, Marcy stood. And instead of rubbing their backs and giving them a hug good night, she smoothed their hair.
When she had finished with the last room, Marcy pulled out the next morning’s med packet so she could show Aaron. “Eventually, you’ll know which pills are which,” she said, “but until then you should probably give meds along with someone who does. Because Kavita—she’s the nurse—she’s been known to make mistakes.”
Marcy dumped the contents of several envelopes out on the counter. She separated the pills with her fingers and named them for Aaron. Klonopin, Prozac, Dexedrine, Paxil. Effexor, Haldol, lithium. Trazadone, Mellaril, Ritalin, Thorazine.
Aaron said good night, and she told him how to get back to his apartment. “I haven’t even unpacked yet,” he told her. When he was gone, Marcy cleaned up around the lounge. With her hand, she collected the crumbs from the counter of the kitchenette and dumped them in the sink. She ran the water, splashing it around and waiting for the crumbs to dissolve and get washed down the drain.
8
Over the next days the early snow melted away and fall resumed its course. New Boys and the few students on Reciprocity Detail cleaned the debris from the storm, the fallen branches still flush with leaves. Autumn from that point on proceeded differently. The colors when they came seemed muted, and the drying leaves curled against their branches and clung to them longer. Husks of dead bees collected behind the Mansion’s heavy curtains; tiny white spots of mold appeared on the windfall apples in the orchard.
Dedrick decided to give us a day off from Cooking with Butter to help decorate the Classroom Building for Thanksgiving. He took us to the atrium, which was just a wide lobby with large, potted plants, and dropped an assortment of Magic Markers onto the floor. The heat hadn’t been turned on yet, and the large cinderblock building was drafty. Dedrick gave each of us a poster to draw on. He said we should trace our hands to make turkeys and include Thanksgiving messages.
“But try to make them look as retarded as you possibly can,” he said. “Misspell things, write with your left hand if you need to. Pudding, you just write the way you always do.”
“Ha-ha,” Pudding said.
Everyone thought the project was hilarious, though I did my best to seem morose. Laurel Pfaff carefully made all her Rs face the wrong way, and she drew a big turkey, which she colored in like an American flag. Zach Strohmann drew a crow and beneath it wrote, “Yeesturday we R reeding a Turgee.” Bev covered her poster with an assortment of dark squares. When I asked her what they were, she told me they were brownies. Dedrick heard her answer. “Brilliant!” he said.
Seeing us as objects of fun let the faculty imagine we were somehow protected, I think, as comic figures are able to survive all kinds of harm. I never minded that the staff amused themselves at our expense, although I’ll resent forever the fact that I was so indifferently educated. In part that was my own fault—by the time I got to Roaring Orchards, I was pretty much a lost cause intellectually. What little I know now I’ve mostly taught myself, and it’s come complete with an autodidact’s insecurity and pedantry. Looking back I can see that the teachers had plenty of reasons of their own to be angry, and that they were occasionally funny, too. Toward the end of the period we ran around the building taping the posters to the wall.
“Are these going to stay up for Parents’ Sunday?” Pudding asked.
“God I hope so,” Dedrick said.
Walking to lunch with Spencer and June, Dedrick asked them about something that had been on his mind for a while. “What the hell is going on with these Decamerons?” They were passing the shelves in the hallway of the Classroom Building where students left their shoes while they were in class and where they left their books when they went to lunch. Among the math and history textbooks lay badly worn copies of The Decameron, their covers curled and bent. “Almost every copy I see is dog-eared and torn, the spines are broken, chunks of pages are falling out all over the place. I don’t get it. They were all brand-new about two months ago.”
June stopped to pick up a copy. There were pages that had fallen out and were now stapled together and stuffed back into the book. The spine was curled, and the pages that hadn’t fallen out radiated from it like spokes on a wheel. “Maybe these are just really cheap editions,” she said. “Where’d we get them?”
“Someone sent them, I think,” Spencer said, taking the book from June. “Maybe they knew there was something wrong with them.” He flipped through the pages only to have a clump of pages fall to the floor. Spencer picked them up, put the book back together, and placed it back on the shelf. “No, it’s probably just that our kids don’t know what to do with books.”
Pudding and I overheard this on our way out. We couldn’t help laughing, but just looked down and kept walking.
The closest any faculty members came to discovering why all the copies of The Decameron on campus were in such bad repair came during a candor meeting that
Alternative Boys held because of me in the middle of one night that fall. At two thirty in the morning, I got caught with my alarm clock going off. I’d hidden the clock beneath my pillow, hoping it would wake me and no one else. But William Kay, in the bunk across the room, heard the alarm and saw me, startled, wake and scramble to turn it off. I think he might have seen me set it and stayed up to catch me, either because he thought it would be funny or just because William was a jerk. Maybe the alarm just woke him, and he was annoyed. Whatever his reason, William began shouting that I was running away, although he knew that wasn’t what was happening.
He woke the other students, who woke Ellie, who pulled an oversize tan sweater over her pajamas and called Alternative Boys into a meeting to figure out what was going on. The boys dragged their blankets with them and curled up on the couches. I sat down angrily.
“I wasn’t running away.”
“Then why did you have your alarm wake you up at two thirty in the morning?” William was the only person who seemed entirely awake. He was bouncing slightly on the couch, his skinny arms sticking out of his T-shirt, his white-blond hair hanging in front of his eyes.
“Don’t be a dick, William,” someone said groggily. “You know why.”
“None of us know why until Benjamin tells us,” William said, “and you have to admit it looks really suspicious.” He smiled. “So, why were you getting up when everyone else was asleep?”
Ellie leaned back in her chair. “William, just lay off, all right? Benjamin, you set your alarm for the middle of the night?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I just looked at the carpet.
Pudding sat up and wrapped his blanket around his shoulders. “Oh God, will you just tell her so we can all go back to sleep? We’ve got to wake up in a few hours.”
“Pudding, what are you talking about?” Ellie was uncomfortable being the only one not to know what was going on. She tugged on the sleeves of her sweater and crossed her arms.
“Do you want to tell her or should I?” Pudding asked me.
“Shut up,” I said.
“Pudding, will you just answer my question?”
“He was going to whack off!” Pudding said. “You think any of us want to do it as soon as we get into bed, when everyone can hear? You were just waiting for everyone to be asleep, weren’t you? So you could do it in peace?”
“No.” I was, but wouldn’t say so.
“I don’t know why you set your alarm clock instead of just staying up like a normal person,” Pudding said, “but we all know what you were doing, so you might as well just say it.”
“Yeah,” William said, “because, personally, if that’s not why you were getting up, I’d assume you were going to run away, which means you can’t stay in this dorm.”
“I’m just saying that I wasn’t going to run. I swear, Ellie. You can go check my room—I didn’t pack anything. How could I be planning to run without at least setting aside clothes to change into? Go ahead and see if you don’t believe me.”
Ellie sat up. “It’s the middle of the night. You don’t get to choose what you feel like being honest about and what you don’t. Now, is what they’re saying true? You were getting up to masturbate?”
“I wasn’t going to run.”
Ellie let out a cry of frustration and stomped her feet against the carpet. She stood up. “You guys figure out what the fuck is going on with him. I’m going to go pay for that f-word and search his room.”
From that point on, I refused to talk. Whether the other boys tried to convince me that there was nothing wrong with masturbating, or tried to goad or threaten me into talking, they didn’t get me to say a word. It’s embarrassing to remember now. I don’t know why I wouldn’t talk. I’d like to think I was bored with the dorm and that was just my way of getting sent to New Boys. Or that I just didn’t want to take back what I had initially said.
Ellie returned to the lounge and stood talking quietly to Roger, who had emerged from her bedroom. It was the first time we realized, with some shock and disappointment, that they were sleeping together. When she rejoined our meeting, Ellie said it didn’t look like I had been preparing to run, but she wasn’t satisfied. “If your dorm mates and I have reasonable questions about what you were up to, and you can’t tell me or aren’t willing to talk about it, then you can’t be trusted to stay in this dorm. Do you have anything you want to say?”
I glared at her.
“Then it’s my consensus that Benjamin be more appropriately placed to New Boys.”
“Agreed.”
“Agreed.”
“Benjamin, this is stupid. You should say something.”
I didn’t.
“Agreed.”
“Agreed.”
“Agreed.”
“Agreed.”
“Agreed.”
“Agreed.”
“Agreed.”
“Agreed.”
Ellie helped me throw my things into two garbage bags and that same night escorted me to the Cottage where New Boys lived. Along with the clothes and toiletries my parents had sent, I packed my blanket, bedsheets, and pillow. Hidden in the last of these were my two favorite novellas from The Decameron: one told by Fiammetta on the third day of the book, In which Catella dotes on Filippello Sighinolfo, and consequently finds herself in a dark room at the public baths. Here she addresses herself to the wrong party, one Ricciardo Minutolo, with unpredicted results, and a second, shorter tale in which, At Pietro’s request, his friend Don Gianni sets about transforming his wife into a mare; but when Don Gianni comes to the hard part, Pietro ruins the spell, which was the last story told on the ninth day, by Dioneo. I’d torn these stories from my copy of the book and folded them into fourths when no faculty members were watching. They had been the inspiration for my furtive assignations with myself over the past few weeks. Previously, I had simply stayed awake until the boys in my room were asleep. But that night I’d been tired, so I tried to get some sleep and wake up using the alarm.
In the absence of pornography, The Decameron had been a welcome discovery for the students in Dedrick’s Cooking with Butter class. Word quickly spread to the rest of the students on campus, and we were soon slipping copies back and forth, dog-earing our favorite stories or tearing them out to keep. Passages were copied by hand into journals and into notes that were folded, a name carefully printed on the outside, and passed from hand to hand. If faculty members had known to look, they might have found pages from The Decameron smuggled into restricted dorms, stuffed under mattresses, or hidden at the bottoms of drawers full of T-shirts or underwear. As the season wore on, boys and girls who ran away took their favorite parts with them, so that the box of books that had arrived at the beginning of the school year was slowly dispersed, piece by piece, to distant corners of the campus and around upstate New York.
9
My first night in New Boys I didn’t sleep. It was after three in the morning when Ellie brought me down to the Cottage. She had called Jodi, who let me in and tossed the garbage bags with my things onto one of the couches in the large living room. Jodi was wearing gray sweats and a Pittsburgh Penguins ball cap and didn’t say a single word to Ellie, to me, or to the other boys, who began cursing impressively when she turned on the light in the Cottage’s only bedroom so that I could make my bed. They held their pillows over their heads and complained to Jodi as if I weren’t there. By the time they turned their attention to me and started threatening what they would do to me if I didn’t finish making my bed and turn off the goddamn light, I was done. A line of Christmas lights was hung around the perimeter of the room near the ceiling but wasn’t plugged in.
I knew the boys in that dorm only by reputation, and it was in part those reputations that kept me awake my first night there. But I was also kept from sleep by an awareness of a long-held confusion slowly disappearing. I lay at the back of my bunk, my back pressed against the cheap fiberglass wall, and tried to pay attention to
this unworking of my mind. For as long as I could remember, I had suffered under the delusion that if I were only good enough, or quiet enough, I would somehow be allowed to return to a time in my life when things were all right. All right with myself, and all right with my family, and I would be able to proceed from that moment on. But that night I understood that an iron gate had been shut behind me, that each passing day was another gate slamming shut, and that there was no way back and never would be.
New Boys were off restriction when I was sent down. This was a dorm with no bottom line, where you could do whatever you wanted and wouldn’t get kicked out. Yet somehow they had all been good enough long enough that they were allowed to be part of campus. I could feel the tension it caused. My new dorm mates, especially the ones who had been in New Boys for a while, knew something catastrophic would happen before long to ruin it, and there was a sense that the sooner it did, the sooner they could stop worrying and things could get back to normal, which wasn’t too bad. New Boys were watched more closely and had fewer privileges than other dorms, but the boys mostly did what they were supposed to and otherwise left one another alone. There was always the potential for an eruption of violence, but there wasn’t the pettiness and dishonesty I’d grown used to in Alternative Boys.
For the time being, I was glad I could still go to classes. In Expressions, we had finished our masks and lined them up on a shelf, and we were now working on still lifes. The assignment was to paint an assortment of inanimate objects in a way that conveyed one of the seven feelings. Brenda had also decided that to make the classroom a special place, she would give us a password each day that we would need to remember to get into class the next day. It was dumb, but I didn’t mind lining up and having to whisper the new word into her ear each day. Her dark, messy hair smelled like apples and mint.
We didn’t have many of the objects that we wanted to paint so most of us were painting from memory. There had been a number of requests to do still lifes that portrayed other feelings than the seven included on the posters in each dorm’s lobby. Brenda felt that these had resulted in some useful discussions but had said no. I was painting a vase and seashells that were supposed to demonstrate that I felt proud. When Brenda asked what I was proud of, I told her that if I could get the things in my painting to look right, I’d be very proud of that. She tried to explain that our paintings were supposed to express something we felt, not something we hoped to feel, but the other students pointed out that there was no way anyone could possibly feel the same thing every day we worked on our paintings and that my project sounded fine to them.