That's Not a Feeling

by Dan Josefson

  Tidbit’s painting showed groceries in her kitchen at home, and it was pretty good. When it was her turn to explain her painting, she said she wanted it to look like the groceries had just been put on the counter. In the still life it was late afternoon. There was a paper grocery bag with some things sticking out of the top and next to it a bunch of bananas and a few cans and a bottle of club soda, which must have been the toughest part because clear things are so hard to paint. The counter was a drab green, and there were darkly stained wooden cabinets in the background. Tidbit told me later that she could see it all in her head. She wanted the painting to be dark and for it to look like the groceries were standing out from the darkness. The brighter parts would be the bananas and where the cans and soda bottle caught the light. The feeling she had chosen to express was number 5, scared.

  No one in her dorm had talked to her much since the meeting when she’d been so horrible to Bridget. An itchy nausea swept through Tidbit when she thought about it. She had no idea why she did things like that. She really was trying to be good. It was like some kind of voodoo the school did. Trying to be good there turned you into the most awful person in the world.

  Tidbit was like me, I think. Not in most ways, but in this: she had no idea what was wrong with her. Sometimes she felt that whatever it was must be so large and diffuse that she couldn’t get her head around it; other times it seemed it was some tart, nasty thing right at the center of her. Or not quite the center. Just off center enough that she was always twisted and sweating and stumbling off in the wrong direction.

  One afternoon, just a few days after I had moved down to New Boys, I watched her as she was painting. She wore brown corduroy jeans and a yellow T-shirt and was working on the cans in her picture. One was beans and one was soup and one was corn. Tidbit used a tiny brush to try to get the gradations of shadow around the curved surfaces just right. She added highlights to their tops. She looked happy with how the cans were coming out, but as soon as she took a step back she seemed to feel her mind cloud again with anger. The cans were perfect, but they didn’t rest on the counter so much as float above it. She couldn’t tell why. And the bananas were good too, but the perspective or something was wrong. It looked like they were about to pitch forward and roll off the counter into her lap.

  Ever since Bridget had brought up how Tidbit and her mom used to mess up their kitchen, Tidbit couldn’t help imagining the parts of the kitchen her painting didn’t show, where she and her mom might be smearing stuff on the walls and laughing wildly. She never should have told the dorm; it was like Tidbit had failed to follow the advice she gave me my first day: don’t tell them anything. Not just because there were people who would store it up to use against her—she still thought that was what Bridget had done, and she knew that was what she had done to Bridget. But because now the memory wasn’t just hers and her mom’s anymore; it was everyone’s.

  This was something Tidbit and I talked about a lot when we got to know each other better. It was like the opposite of a fib. Aubrey said that the problem with breaking the rules was that you kept it secret, and then the secret kept you from being close with the people around you. That’s why it was a functioning intimacy blocker. But the part they never admitted to was that the secret, for as long as you kept it, made you that much closer with the few people who knew it. And the worse the secret, the closer you were. This was the closest Tidbit had ever come to articulating something I had always felt: that getting better would be a betrayal.

  Tidbit mixed a green so dark it was almost black and tried to anchor the cans and bananas where they sat by putting in shadows. She painted the shadows darkest where they touched the objects and made them fade slightly as they stretched away. She was careful to make the shadows stretch right up to the edge of the shapes. Tidbit took her time and tried to make the shadows look smooth.

  But again, when she stepped back she felt she’d made it worse. The parts were still okay, but they were stuck in a painting that had been ruined. The shadows didn’t look like shadows. They looked like things, like dark shapes floating across the surface of her painting. They obliterated the illusion of space and barred Tidbit from the kitchen and the few things she had gotten right.

  Tidbit took her paint knife and slashed at the canvas. Just a little at first. I was engrossed with watching her do it—she had to poke the canvas a couple of times before it tore. Tidbit was holding the paint knife so tightly her hands shook. I felt proud of her as she began to tear the thing apart; I have no idea why. She grabbed the top of the canvas so the easel wouldn’t tip and cut it into ribbons thick with paint. The other students heard and were startled. They stood back, scared at first but amused when they understood what Tidbit was doing. She stabbed the canvas again and broke the frame. I’ll admit that I started to get a little frightened for Tidbit. Even more so when Brenda ran out to the hallway and screamed for help.

  Like I said, New Boys’ time as an unrestricted dorm was destined to be short. The end came soon after Tidbit got dragged out of Expressions, and a few days after William Kay got sent down to the dorm. Someone had told about how he’d hit Aaron with a snow shovel on Aaron’s first day, and he got more appropriately placed to New Boys for violence. I’m not sure who told or what William had done to make him mad, but it was a pretty big deal. The faculty felt that Aaron should have said something sooner. William told me the story the night he got to the Cottage. After lights out, Jodi let us plug the Christmas lights in for a few minutes and talk, and William was excited about the fact that no one had much sympathy for Aaron. “They were all like, ‘Think of what you’ve put that poor kid William through. All this time, he’s been living with that fib, and you’re the adult, and you’re blah-blah-blah.’ The whole fucking faculty,” William said, “was blaming that poor fuck for getting hit with a shovel. On his first day here. But they still more appropriately placed me.”

  Everyone took William’s arrival for an ominous sign. It was clear he was going to start a fight with someone; it was just a question of when and with whom. Jodi tried to keep things calm, but we had all basically accepted that we wouldn’t be off restriction much longer. Then one morning, for the first time since the dorm had been allowed to rejoin campus, we were late for breakfast. We had to pick up our food and bring it back to the Cottage to eat, and, as if we needed anything else to upset us, when we got to the back door of the kitchen Floyd greeted us with a big smile and said, “Well, well, well, the bitches of the campus.” And then when we were about to leave with our food, he said, “Have a good day, boys. And have lots of sex,” which he knew students weren’t allowed to do. So things were already shitty when, for some unfathomable reason, all through breakfast Ross Salazar, who’d tried to run away a couple of months ago as I’d watched from Dedrick’s class, decided to make them worse. Ross kept blaming Gary Gudzenko for making us late in the first place and just wouldn’t shut up. And he wasn’t wrong. That morning, Gary had refused to get out of bed.

  Gary could easily have passed for thirty. He was closer than anyone else at the school to being a professional criminal. That didn’t simply mean that he came to violence more easily than the rest of us, including William, although he did; it also meant that he didn’t take things personally. He’d been sent to the school for stealing cars, and he was there as a condition of his probation. He passed time at the school the way a convict might pass time in prison: he laughed easily, defended himself when he had to, and otherwise simply waited out his sentence. I liked Gary a lot. He was stupid but almost never started a fight.

  Gary hadn’t wanted to get out of bed that morning, and neither Ross Salazar’s warnings about getting put on restriction nor Han Quek’s insistence that he was hungry meant much to Gary. Ross continued to hammer away at him over breakfast, when it was clear even as Gary was sitting at the table that he would still rather be in bed. After Gary finished his waffles, he reached across the table and flicked Ross’s nose. Ross shut up immediately. Gary flicked him again
. Ross was holding back tears. Then William got up, left the kitchen, and returned carrying a closet rod from one of the wardrobes in the bedroom.

  I don’t even know if he managed to hit Gary three times before Gary got the closet rod away from him and went to work. It was upsetting. It was like William had broken some sort of code that only Gary understood, and Gary calmly went about beating the hell out of him. He might even have been smiling. I stood perfectly still, like I was paralyzed or scared that if I moved he might notice me. When I told my therapist Frances about this later, she asked, “Have you reacted that way in other stressful situations?” Which was a good question, but I hadn’t really seen anything like that before. I knew that Ross paged Roger and then called the phone in the Cafetorium. I heard him tell whoever answered to send as many people as possible.

  At some point I revived enough to run to the opposite side of the couch from where William and Gary were. From that point on, I kept the couch between me and them, circling slowly as they moved and then as Jodi and the rest of the dorm struggled to get Gary onto the carpet. Roger arrived and helped take Gary down. Then through the window I saw Aaron and a number of boys from Regular Kids sprinting from the Cafetorium. A few of the boys tripped and fell at a dip in the lawn, but Aaron kept his feet. He seemed elated, surprised to suddenly be at the head of the pack, running across the grass still wet with dew.

  Roger and Jodi, with the help of Han Quek, held Gary down on the floor. Aaron slammed into the front door of the Cottage before opening it and coming in. He leaned over, hands on his knees, and tried to catch his breath as the Regular Kids entered and kneeled on either side of Gary, who was now calmly lying there, looking at the ceiling. Jodi went to the med closet and came back with two bottles that she placed on the floor.

  William was jumping up and down, shouting. “Make him take it,” he said, “he has to. You’ve got to make him.” William’s face was scraped and bruised. He was bleeding badly from a cut over one eyebrow, and part of his mouth was swollen. But he seemed happy, shouting and smiling, occasionally wiping blood out of his eye or off his lips. His bright blond hair was damp and stuck to his forehead. I was amazed to see him jumping up and down after the job Gary had done on him. William was holding his side. He showed me the bruises later. His T-shirt was stretched out of shape, one sleeve torn off at the shoulder.

  Jodi saw Aaron and said, “Could you go get a couple of med cups from the kitchen and fill one of them with water.”

  Aaron nodded. “One with water.”

  “Yeah.”

  Aaron stood up straight. He found the sleeve of little paper cups on the kitchen counter. He took two, filled one with water from the sink, and then put them down next to Jodi.

  “You can’t give me anything,” Gary said. “I’m completely calm.”

  “Are you going to stay calm?” Jodi asked.

  “No, I’m going to pound the shit out of that little shit.”

  “Then we can give you your Thorazine. And if you don’t take it, we’ll force it.”

  “You can’t force meds on a perfectly calm person,” Gary said.

  “If you take the pills, we won’t have to.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Jodi shrugged. Resting upside down on top of one of the bottles she had brought from the med closet was a plastic measuring cup. She measured out a dose of liquid Thorazine and poured it into the empty cup Aaron had placed beside her. She pinched Gary’s nose shut. Gary grunted and tried to twist out of the restraint. He was almost able to turn onto his side before the boys pushed him back down.

  “You’re going to take Thorazine one way or another,” Roger told him. “Either calm down and take the pills or Jodi’s going to pour that down your throat. And you know how awful it tastes. It’s your choice.”

  Gary said through clenched teeth, “Fuck you. I was perfectly calm before you brought that stuff out here. And I was perfectly calm before that skinny little faggot attacked me with a fucking closet rod. And I swear to fucking god that I will kill you if you force that shit on me. I need to request it if—.” In the middle of his speech, Jodi tried to pour the Thorazine into Gary’s mouth, but most of it spilled across his cheek. Gary winced and spat over and over.

  “Ha-ha, you stupid fucker,” William shouted, leaning on Aaron’s shoulder. “How’s that taste, you dumb motherfucker?”

  Jodi twisted to look up at Aaron. She looked exhausted. “Could you pour another dose in this cup? And get William out of here.”

  Aaron picked up the bottle and poured some more Thorazine into the cup, but by that point, Gary had agreed to take the pills. Aaron put the cup down by Roger and led William to the corner of the room.

  He sat him down in a plastic chair and asked what had happened. William told him about taking the closet rod out of his wardrobe. “He’s so much bigger, it was my only chance,” William said. “He actually started it. He flicked Ross. Twice.” The adrenaline had worn off and he looked a little frightened. There was blood in his teeth.

  Roger sat on the floor with Gary until the Thorazine kicked in. Then he led him to a chair in another corner, across the room from William. He told New Boys to clean up the dorm. Aaron noticed that Jodi had the closet rod sticking out of her back pocket. The Regular Kids left to go to class.

  “So William just went at him?” Aaron asked Jodi, not knowing what to say.

  “Yeah.” Jodi shook her head. “That kid loves getting himself beat up.”

  Aaron laughed. “Maybe we should put him on a structure where if he does what he’s supposed to, he gets a punch in the gut. You hear that, William?” he called. “If you keep acting out, no more punches.” Suddenly unsure whether that was an appropriate thing to say, he smiled vaguely at Jodi. Aaron had developed a strategy for dealing with all the inscrutable issues that came up over the course of a day. There were so many rules and concepts, and everyone had strong opinions about everything. So Aaron maintained a persistent amusement. A haze of fun permeated his reactions to everything he heard and colored everything he said. This way, if he misunderstood or said something wrong, misused a term or offended someone, there was nothing he couldn’t easily qualify, treat as a joke, and backpedal away from.

  There was a white blur in the back of the room, and when I turned I saw that William had bolted from his corner and was raining punches down on Gary. Gary was trying to bat him away, but the Thorazine made him too slow. It was kind of amazing. It took Aaron, Roger, and Jodi to pull William off of Gary. Aaron held him around the stomach and lifted while Jodi and Roger pried open William’s hands, which were grabbing at Gary’s hair and face. As they finally dragged him off, William got a good kick at the back of Gary’s head.

  Aaron tossed William back into his chair, and Jodi told him to stay there. Aaron wiped off some of William’s blood, which had gotten on his neck.

  “Eww, what the—,” someone said from behind them.

  We all turned to see Han looking down at a paper cup in his hand. He looked up at Aaron and Jodi.

  “Han, don’t you goddamn tell me you just took Gary’s dose of Thorazine,” Jodi said.

  Han kept working his tongue in and out of his mouth. “I thought it was a cup of water for his pills,” he said.

  “Bullshit you did, you little liar,” Roger said. “Shit.” He stared at Han for a long while. “It’s not even worth arguing with you about it now. Go lie down someplace. But you’re in a truckload of trouble once that stuff wears off.”

  Han Quek sat down on the floor where he was. When Aaron and Roger left, he was lying on his back on the torn wool carpet, his knees raised to his chest. He rolled from side to side, waving his hands slowly in front of his face and watching the traces.

  Aaron wasn’t sure just where to go when he left the Cottage. He wandered into the Classroom Building’s atrium, where he heard the teachers in their lounge. Aaron peered in. They were all looking out the window in the back of the room. He walked over to where they were standing and tried to see, over
their shoulders, what they were looking at.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Dedrick turned and told him, “An owl. Up there, on the electrical wires.”

  “There must be something wrong with it,” Brenda said, “to be out during the day.”

  Aaron leaned down and looked up to try to see the owl, but he couldn’t. He left the Teachers’ Lounge and the Classroom Building, stepped outside, and with his hands thrust deep in his pockets walked around to the back of the building. As he rounded the corner he saw the owl sitting perfectly still on the black wires. Aaron took a few steps closer and looked up at it. It was light brown with a white, heart-shaped face.

  Aaron must have been aware that the teachers were somewhere behind him, watching him look up at the owl, but after what he had seen this morning in New Boys he felt he had the right to stand here, singled out. The teachers didn’t know about the fight yet, but they would hear about it later, and they would understand why Aaron had needed to take a step outside. He thought they might be impressed that he hadn’t felt the need to tell them about it immediately. He thought they might notice that he seemed different.

  Aaron took a step closer. The bird stirred. It flew to a spot on the wires a little farther from him. Aaron followed deliberately, away from the Classroom Building and the teachers. He tried to think about the owl, about whether it was sick or if it felt confused to be out in the daylight. But his thoughts kept turning to himself and to us boys. There was something primitive about what we had been doing to ourselves and one another. Each one of us, Aaron thought, was doing the very first thing that came into his head. He looked over his shoulder, back at the Classroom Building, which was a way behind him now. Then the owl took off again and flew farther than Aaron could follow it, and when he got tired of standing out there he turned and went inside.