by Dan Josefson
Our work project for that day was to decorate the Christmas tree in the Cafetorium. Tidbit and I had spent the morning in the Mansion attic finding the boxes of lights and ornaments. Zbigniew had gone out to buy tinsel. We carried the boxes and got the aluminum ladder from the upper equipment shed, but when we got to the Cafetorium we saw the teachers and the man who had come to teach restraint techniques. We put down our things and helped them move some tables out of the way.
“We’re supposed to decorate the tree,” Tidbit said. “Are we not supposed to see what you guys are doing?”
Doris looked at the restraint trainer. He was short and muscular, dressed in track pants and a T-shirt. He had neatly parted blond hair and a face that initially looked young, but at a second glance was clearly an aging man’s face, desperately preserved. He shrugged.
“We’re not doing anything secret,” Doris said. “You can go ahead.”
We set up the aluminum ladder. Tidbit climbed to the top with some ornaments and tinsel and I climbed behind her, to decorate the middle part of the tree. Mostly, though, we watched the teachers.
The trainer, whose name was Lindsay, was showing them how to hold someone down by holding their clothes rather than their arms and legs. June was playing the student, and Lindsay had Spencer help him hold her down. Lindsay bunched the cuff of June’s jeans near her ankle in one fist and did the same with the sleeve of her shirt. He had Spencer do the same and then insisted that June try to get up. Then he had everyone else take turns restraining and being restrained. Except for Doris, who said she couldn’t participate in any strenuous activity.
Tidbit told me to climb down so we could wrap the lights around the tree. Lindsay was asking Doris what she would do in a crisis situation. Tidbit held one end of the string of lights, and I walked around the tree, squeezing between ladder and tree when I got to that side.
Later, Lindsay discussed the Diamond of Don’t. He made his thumbs and forefingers into a diamond to demonstrate. It stood for “discuss options, notice the threat.” Then he told them about standing in an L. “Stand sideways to an aggressive student,” he said. He pointed at Dedrick. “You be the student.” Lindsay stood so that the line of his shoulders was perpendicular to that of Dedrick’s. He looked at Dedrick over his left shoulder. “See my feet?” The teachers looked down to see that Lindsay’s left foot was pointed toward Dedrick while his right foot was at a ninety-degree angle. “That’s the L. Standing like this gives them less of a target, and, try to hit me.” He made Dedrick try to hit him and showed a number of intricate ways to take him down. “Don’t fight them, use their momentum,” he kept saying. “Plus, from here”—he pivoted his feet—“you can turn and run.” To demonstrate the L he held up his left hand with his thumb perpendicular to the other fingers. “You can remember it if you remember me,” he said. “Lindsay.”
The training was still going on when it was time for Tidbit and me to break for lunch. Floyd had spaghetti for us.
I whispered to Tidbit, “Can you get him to put salsa on mine instead of tomato sauce?” I liked it better that way.
Tidbit asked. “Sure,” Floyd said, and gave her a wink.
We sat down with our food and watched the training session. A few minutes into lunch, Jodi showed up with my meds. She poured the contents of the envelope onto my tongue and watched me drink a glass of water to wash them down. Then she checked my mouth. For a moment she stared silently at the training with Tidbit and me, shaking her head like it was the dumbest thing she’d ever seen.
“I don’t know why they keep us on so many meds,” I said when Jodi had left. “We’re not sick, we’re just sad.”
“Speak for yourself,” Tidbit said.
The restraint training was apparently done, but Lindsay refused to let the Teachers’ Group go until Doris agreed to participate in a couple of the drills. She insisted that she couldn’t. Now he was telling her that she needed to learn to walk without a cane. To demonstrate how easy it would be for a student to take it from her, he took it from her.
“Now I could use this as a weapon,” Lindsay said.
“Could I please have that back?”
Lindsay walked over to where Tidbit and I were sitting. “Now what would you two do if you took this cane from Doris?”
“Lemme see?” Tidbit said. He handed her the cane, and she considered it for a moment before looking back up. “What’s your name again? Lisa?”
“Lindsay.”
“Oh yeah. First of all, Lindsay, I wouldn’t take it from Doris, Lindsay, because I’m not an asshole.” She got up and walked over to Doris. She gave her back her cane. “And secondly, I wouldn’t act out around Doris because I only act out around assholes.” She sat back down next to me.
“You kids are lucky I don’t work here,” Lindsay said.
“Yup,” Tidbit said. “Say, Lindsay, are you such a tool because you’ve got a girl’s name or because those steroids shriveled up all your special parts?”
“Tidbit,” June said.
“You should tell your girlfriend to watch her mouth,” Lindsay said to me.
“Thanks for the suggestion,” I said. “I’ll try to take it in.”
4
The heat in the Mansion came on in late November. The thermostats didn’t work, so when the heat was turned on, it stayed on until spring. This kept the Mansion and everyone inside it warm and dry, so dry that the students and faculty members who lived there got nosebleeds. Those who had been at Roaring Orchards since the previous winter or longer took this as a matter of course, but people new to the school reacted with some alarm. Soon, though, everyone got used to the fact that anyone at any point might start bleeding from the nose for no discernible reason: a teacher asking a question, a student raising her hand, a child serving as waiter in the Cafetorium. It wasn’t unusual, late that fall and through the winter, to see people walking around campus with crimson tissues held against their noses, nodding to one another, carrying on as though there were nothing unusual about it. A layer of snow had descended that would remain through the winter, varying only in thickness. Lights came on earlier in the houses around the valley, and bare branches trembled in the wind above them.
Otherwise things proceeded apace. New faculty members came and went. Old students ran away and some were brought back. New students were enrolled and some ran away. Tidbit and I worked together on Reciprocity Detail. Despite the start of a new semester, we stayed in the same classes, as Doris was too overwhelmed with her other responsibilities to set up new ones. Dedrick added to his syllabus some more books that Spencer could reach from the couch; Spencer taught the next lessons in the math and history textbooks to those classes respectively; June came up with some more safe science projects and Brenda with some art projects. The most noticeable change that winter was that we all saw Aubrey less and less. We figured that he was busy, or visiting doctors or resting.
Imagine dinner in winter. The large glass windows of the Cafetorium give out onto the snowy lawn in the center of the campus. As they serve and eat, the students watch the blue light of evening fade to dark. Huddled shapes pass occasionally in the distance, teachers leaving the Classroom Building or students on their way to therapy in the upper reaches of the Mansion.
Student waiters ferry plastic trays of dry, salty pork chops and squash enchiladas from the kitchen to their tables. There are baskets with bags of bread. The salad is left over from some event that Floyd catered at his other job, with flowers in it that most everyone avoids, though it isn’t lost on the students that these would have been a nice touch when they were fresh.
Roger and Ellie sit quietly with a few Regular Kids at the Admin Table. Some faculty members are off for the night, and Aubrey rarely eats dinner with the students. During announcements, Jenna, one of the Regular Kids sitting at the Admin Table, says that Aubrey has given permission for us to have a dance in the spring. Anyone who wants to volunteer to help organize it should let her know.
Throughout the sh
ort Campus Community meeting after dinner, Ellie keeps thinking how bare the room looks with so few people in it. Again and again she follows the eyes of students in the meeting to the people they watch through the windows, people passing beneath lights far across campus. She feels it herself, an almost physical need to be somewhere else. In the warm, bright room she feels abandoned by the souls loosed in the dark. The distances they move through seem endless.
After dinner she and Roger walk around the grounds. The top layer of snow has frozen to a crust that cracks and sinks underfoot as they walk. Roger has his beeper clipped to the waistband of his pants in case of emergencies. Conversation drags lazily between them. They walk aimlessly, past the supply shed, by the baseball backstop on the north side of the campus. Ellie pulls off a mitten and wraps her fingers around one of the metal bars of the backstop. She thrills with cold.
They watch TV in his apartment in the Paddock and eat Ritz crackers. His beeper starts going off around ten, when the dorm parents on duty have gotten their kids to sleep. Ellie says she’ll go along to keep him company, to say hello to people on campus. She likes the walk across Route 294 and around the campus at night, she says. None of these reasons are false. But it would be just as true to say that she feels panicky in his apartment alone. She can never concentrate on anything there, other than listening for the sounds of his return. Alone she always ends up pacing around the apartment, opening and closing the darkly stained cabinets.
At the Mansion, everything seems to be in order. Laurel Pfaff went up to a meeting in Alternative Girls to ask what she had to do to get them all to consent to her being more appropriately placed into their dorm. Since she is still restricted to her room, it isn’t clear whether she would actually become a part of their dorm or just move into a room in Alternative Girls. Alternative Boys had a good meeting, Spencer says. Eric and Pudding discussed their relationship and why they are always bickering. Ellie is sorry she missed that. They sound all right, her boys.
In one dorm after another, Ellie sits beside Roger in the various lounges and listens to the dorm parents report on the evening’s events. Or she sits behind them on the stairs, her knees tucked under her chin. She sticks the tip of her tongue out of the corner of her mouth as she flips through a magazine or bites the side of a fingernail, waiting for them to finish. She feels very much like a student tonight. A privileged student who gets to travel from dorm to dorm with Roger and hear all the gossip.
Ellie likes that Roger isn’t nervous when she watches him. He’s usually an uncomfortable person, with a loud defensive laugh like the last bit of bathwater washing down the drain. But somehow his life has swallowed her up and he is no more aware of her than he is of himself when he’s alone. She picks up her coat and follows him out of the Mansion.
The last dorm to check on is mine. Roger says it’s the quietest dorm on campus because of Jodi. Roger attributes her ability to command New Boys’ respect to the fact that she is over it.
“Over what?” Ellie asks.
“Everything. Whatever it is, Jodi’s over it.”
But that night Jodi was off, and Aaron was covering the dorm. He had watched us a couple of times since the ax incident on Parents’ Sunday, and he just got worse and worse. He was wary of me, but for some reason assumed he could trust the rest of the dorm. So we’d had a lot of fun with him, especially about Alberto, a new intake from Mexico City who’d been placed in our dorm because he’d tried to run when his parents enrolled him.
When Roger came in, we were all still running around in our underwear, getting ready for bed. I headed into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I saw William Kay walk briskly into the kitchen, looking over his shoulder and stuffing the last bit of a tofu dog into his mouth.
“We’re running a little late,” Aaron told Roger, “but it’s my fault.” The microwave hummed loudly behind him and emitted four discreet beeps. Aaron headed toward the kitchen.
“Aaron, why are they all in different rooms? They’re supposed to be grouped,” Roger said.
Aaron didn’t answer him; he just told William to get out of the kitchen and go use the bathroom. I was now listening by the bathroom door and heard Aaron open the microwave.
“What’s that?” Roger asked.
“Tofu dogs. The boys were still hungry after dinner.”
Ellie turned and went to the living room. She took a magazine off the bookshelf in the back of the room and sat down on the couch. Roger walked across the living room and leaned into the bathroom. “Into bed, guys. Now.”
“But we just—,” Han Quek began saying, but Roger cut him off.
“Now.”
We rushed giggling to bed. Roger stayed with Aaron as he arranged the nighttime meds and filled cups of water. They both came into our bedroom, and Roger watched as Aaron gave us our meds. Aaron didn’t seem at all bothered. Then Roger said that he wanted to speak with us and sent Aaron out of the room. He chewed us out for taking advantage. He told us how much this job meant to Aaron, and how hard he was working at trying to do well. And he said that if we felt let down that Aaron was doing such a poor job taking care of us, acting out was a dishonest way of dealing with it. In the living room, Aaron and Ellie were talking.
“So how’s everything going?” Aaron asked.
“Okay. Good. It’s my night off.”
“Nice,” Aaron said. “Jodi’s too.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s cold out.”
“Yeah, very.”
When Roger finished his lecture to us, he left us to sleep or eavesdrop and went into the living room. He looked at Ellie and rolled his eyes before sitting down next to Aaron. “So,” he said, “we’ll get to the tofu dogs, but first tell me about what kind of night you guys had.”
“It was a good night. After dinner, they cleaned up and then did their homework. Brenda came by to talk to Gary about working his process, turning over his sexual fibs. Ross was just reading this one enormous book and not writing anything, but he said it was for a class, and the other guys said that was the truth, so I figured it was okay. I can show you the book if you—”
“No, that’s fine,” Roger said. “I think I’ve heard about that.”
“Yeah, so homework was good. And in the meeting, Benjamin checked in, and Adalberto was talking about this book his father sent him—”
“You mean Alberto?”
“Who?”
“Who did you say was talking in the meeting?”
“Adalberto?”
“Yeah, there’s no Adalberto in this dorm. There’s an Alberto.”
Aaron looked over his shoulder at the closed door of our bedroom. “The kid with really short dark hair?”
“And the accent. The new kid.”
“Yeah, his name’s not Adalberto?”
“No, it’s Alberto.”
“Oh. I’m sure he told me that was his name. I’ve been calling him that all night.”
“Maybe you just heard him wrong,” Roger said.
“No, ’cause first I called him Alberto, and they corrected me.”
“Uh-huh. So he was talking about a book?”
“Yeah, he was talking about this book his father sent him. It was about being, you know, like a ninja of the spirit, he said, a sort of peaceful warrior? He said it had really been helping him. The other guys were making fun of it and, well, he, Alberto, he got pretty upset, but otherwise things went fine. They all seemed okay later. We finished a little before you came in.”
Roger nodded. “Okay. And the deal with the tofu dogs?”
“Oh, well, when we were done with the meeting the boys said they were still hungry and was there anything else to eat because they didn’t like the pork chops or the enchiladas. Plus, by the time we bring food back here from the kitchen, it really is sort of cold.”
“Well, Aaron, if they want warm food they should get their shit together and move up to a dorm that’s not always on restriction,” Roger said. Aaron must have looked hurt or confused, but Rog
er was intent not to let him make this his fault. “I know it sounds harsh, but they’re the ones manipulating you. Don’t look at me.”
“Is there some rule against tofu dogs?” Aaron asked. “I didn’t think it’d be such a big problem.”
“There’s no specific rule against tofu dogs, Aaron, but you know the schedule by now, don’t you? Dinner, cleanup, homework, meeting, bed. I don’t understand why you’d decide not to follow that.”
As the two men talked Ellie watched Aaron play with the band of his watch, slipping the end of it in and out of the loop it went through after passing through the buckle.
“I just thought that it would be good to get them to enjoy something healthy,” Aaron said. “They didn’t ask for the tofu dogs, they were sure they wouldn’t even like them. So I told them to just try one. And they did like them. It was like they learned that you have to try things. If anything, it was me manipulating them.”
“Yeah, but Aaron, kids don’t get sent to New Boys to learn to try new foods. This is the lowest-functioning dorm on campus. It’s not a slumber party. These are dangerous kids. You saw what Gary did to William Kay with that closet rod, didn’t you? And what William would’ve done back if we’d let him. The only lesson they need to learn is to not get violent and not run away, to follow the rules. And here you’re helping them break the rules.”
“So I should have sent them to bed hungry?”
“No, they should learn to eat the food that’s provided for them and to be grateful for it.”
Aaron nodded, thinking. “Well, what if one of them kept kosher?”
“Kosher? Aaron, who in this dorm is kosher? Adalberto?”
The wind outside whipped through the bare branches.
Then Ellie said, “Aaron, I know you were just trying to take good care of them, but really the best thing you can do is to help them follow the process here. It’s probably the most difficult thing you can do for them. Even if you disagree with how the school does things, and I do all the time, the kids can’t really choose to reject it.”