That's Not a Feeling

by Dan Josefson

  Aaron sighed. “I know. I know that. But I hate going through the same motions night after night. I mean, anybody can just follow the schedule, you know?”

  “Look, Aaron,” Roger said, “don’t think I haven’t had my problems with this place too. My elbows are so messed up from all the restraints I’ve held kids in that I think about suing Aubrey for workman’s compensation all the time. But it really does give the kids a sense of security to stick to the process. It’s what they want, even if they’ll never say so.”

  “I thought I was! I mean, I knew there was nothing about tofu dogs in their schedule, but I thought I was making a connection with the boys, you know? We were all getting along and laughing. I mean, isn’t that a part of the process too, relationships?” He tugged at a loose piece of rubber on the side of his sneaker, and it peeled slowly away.

  Later, when Roger and Ellie are walking back to the Paddock, Roger tells her he thought she’d been great.

  “When?”

  “It was just great, both of us helping Aaron understand the process. I know you’ve had your doubts, and I guess I used to, too, but it was really nice both being on the same page like we were.”

  “I really meant what I said. A lot of it’s bullshit. Those poor kids are trapped here, though, and it isn’t fair to them to pretend that there’s any other way out than doing what they’re told.”

  “Yeah,” he says, with an edge that might be disappointment or sarcasm or fear. He watches crystals glint in the frozen snow as he walks. “It’s like they say. Fake it till you make it.”

  Inside the Cottage, we were still talking. The Christmas lights flashed on and off in different patterns. Jodi only let us plug the lights in for a few minutes before going to sleep, but Aaron didn’t know that.

  “Do you think Aaron’s going to get into trouble?” Alberto asked.

  “Faculty can’t really get into trouble,” William said.

  “They can get probated.”

  “Yeah, but then they get unprobated in like a week,” I said. “They can hardly get anybody to stay and work here, so they’re never going to fire anyone.”

  “Remember bald Matt?” Ross said. “He used to fall asleep when he was watching us and he didn’t get fired.”

  “He was an honorary gypsy,” Gary said.

  “What?”

  “That’s what he told us, that he got made an honorary gypsy. I don’t remember how.”

  “Hey, what’d you tell Brenda tonight?” Ross asked Gary.

  “I bet you want to know, you little homo. You’re almost as bad as she is. Don’t worry, I came up with some pretty sick stuff.”

  “Come on, what was it?” Ross asked.

  “What are you guys talking about?” This was Alberto, hanging down from his top bunk.

  Ross sat up in his bed. “Gary decided he’s a sex addict. If you want to follow the process to get privileges and move up through the dorms and get out of here,” he said, “you’ve got to be dealing with some problem. It can be like alcoholism or drug abuse, or like you’re addicted to sugar or you act out sexually. So Gary decided that he’s convalescing from a sexual addiction. Brenda said she’d be his commitment holder, which means he’s got to tell her about all his sexual acting out, so he can learn not to be ashamed of it.”

  I was laughing so hard at this; I don’t even know why.

  “Except,” Gary said, “when I told her true stories, she thought I wasn’t telling her everything, so I started exaggerating. And the more I’d exaggerate, the happier she’d get about how much I trusted her. You know, that I’m telling her that kind of stuff? At least that’s what she said. I kind of think she’s just getting off on it. But anyway, the weirder the shit I come up with is, the more honest and brave she thinks I am. So I just keep making up crazier and crazier stuff to tell her I’ve done.”

  “So what’d you say?”

  “Well, you know how last week I made up that thing about jerking off our family’s mule?” He looked up at Alberto and explained, “She thinks everyone in Moscow’s got a mule in their backyard. So anyway, today I told her that I once convinced the baker’s daughter, who was semiretarded, to come over and take off her clothes and I made her jerk off the mule while I watched. Then I told her how guilty I felt about having done that, and Brenda gave me this real long hug.”

  “Brenda was always hugging people in that Expressions class I was in,” I said.

  “Eww,” Ross said. “She’s like thirty.”

  “Yeah, but she’s got a nice rack,” Han Quek said. “Speaking of which, Benjamin, are you gonna get any off of Tidbit? She’s still on Reciprocity Detail, isn’t she?”

  “Just make sure you don’t get bit,” William said.

  Ross laughed. “Yeah, that’s no joke. Don’t get bit.”

  “What are you guys talking about?”

  “You don’t know? That’s what she got sent here for.”

  “She told me she got sent here for taking meth and getting into fights.”

  William bounced on his back and kicked the bunk above him. “Ha, sucker. She got sent here for biting people,” he said. “When she was totally sober.”

  “And she’s done it like twice since she’s been here,” Ross said, “so that’s got to be true.”

  “What do you mean, biting people?” I asked.

  “Like she gets into fights and totally loses her shit and bites people. On the arm or shoulder or whatever. And doesn’t let go.”

  “Shit,” I said. The boys were quiet for a while, watching the Christmas lights blink slowly, one bulb glowing brighter as the one beside it faded, my roommates’ faces and quilts changing color along with them. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed when I heard Ross ask, “Hey, Gary, is that true? About the baker’s daughter?”

  “There’s no baker. We got our bread from a supermarket, you dipshit.”

  Ken’s eyes and bald head shone as he leaned forward and listened intently to Aubrey. Their waitress had just brought him a mug of hot tea, and Ken wrapped his hands around it gladly as if to demonstrate his appreciation for all simple things. He was a tall, athletic man in his fifties with a fringe of bright white hair and a neatly trimmed white beard.

  “I think of the school,” Aubrey was saying, “as an enormous psychic mending workshop. There are any number of mother and father figures for the students’ transference, and though they don’t explicitly enroll and disenroll people the way they do in your sessions, I think it’s something that goes on all the time, beneath the surface, unspoken. There are so many different relationships changing form spontaneously, there’s no way to control it, but it works. If you trust the system, the whole thing works.”

  Ken nodded as he stirred sugar into his tea, watching the spoon go round. It was clear to him that Aubrey had something more serious than this to discuss with him, and Ken felt he knew what it was. It was also clear to him that Aubrey wouldn’t get to it until he had said whatever it was he needed to say. If that meant his condescending to Ken, Ken was happy to wait through it. He felt he held all the cards.

  “Although,” Aubrey allowed, “I suppose there’s no reason why we couldn’t make things more explicit, the way you do. There’s a great deal of opportunity in a position like mine. Did I ever tell you about founding Roaring Orchards? It really wasn’t anything I had planned to do.”

  They made room on the table as their waitress arrived with their lunch. Patti’s Pantry wasn’t the sort of place where Aubrey had imagined having this sort of conversation, but then his life seemed to have become a series of disappointing compromises. Ken certainly wasn’t who he had thought of leaving in charge of the school he had built, but Ken was who there was. Aubrey had hoped that Doris might grow into her role, but he had since given up on her. At least Ken understood the process. If he was a bit rigid, the day-to-day vagaries of running the school would cure him of that. If Ken was a bit calculating, Aubrey hoped that would subside as he understood that he didn’t need to wrest the s
chool from Aubrey’s control.

  “I was a Latinist, working at a small school in Pennsylvania,” Aubrey said. He fiddled with his French fries. “I was just out of school and hadn’t been there long, but through a number of strange occurrences that I don’t even really remember the particulars of, I ended up as the assistant headmaster. Mostly, I’m sure, because no one else wanted the job.” Ken laughed at this, looking up from his soup. Aubrey smiled.

  “And there was an incident with a few students, seniors, who had brought their girlfriends onto campus. I can still see the look on those boys’ faces as they were standing in my little office. And it just didn’t make any sense to me to expel them, which would have been the penalty. I realized that that’s what all these schools do. Their job is to teach the students, but instead of teaching them they just toss out anyone who has something to learn. All of a sudden it seemed absolutely crazy to me. So I said we aren’t going to expel these students, and we aren’t going to expel students for anything, ever. We would discipline them, we would teach them, we would help them heal, but we’d never kick anyone out. And as soon as I made that decision, everyone went nuts.”

  “I can imagine,” Ken said.

  “It was so interesting. I didn’t understand at the time why that would upset everyone so much. But within a week, the school’s executive board had met and not only relieved me of my administrative responsibilities, they fired me as a teacher. And I spent two nights sleeping on the floor of my therapist’s apartment because I really had nowhere else to go. But do you know who immediately understood what I was up to?”

  “Who?”

  “The parents,” Aubrey continued. “About a third of them withdrew their kids from the school and came up here with me, and we bought Roaring Orchards. There was a lot of work to do on the Mansion and Classroom Building, but we all worked on it together. And I guess we still are.” He took a bite of his tuna melt.

  Ken wondered how much longer this would go on. He told Aubrey a little about what he had been up to. He had been traveling a good deal, doing workshops. And they still did the twice-yearly sessions at the complex in Pownal.

  “At the old dog track?”

  “Yes, the old dog track.”

  “But you think you might be interested in being in one place for an extended period,” Aubrey said.

  “I’m beginning to understand what the pleasures of a life like that might be.”

  Aubrey nodded. “You know, the truth is I’ve never really thought of myself primarily as a headmaster. I tend to think of what I do as essentially the work of a political theorist.”

  Ken crushed a cracker in his fist and dropped it into his soup. “Go on,” he said.

  5

  Laurel paced around her room a little bit before sitting down on the lower bunk. Marcy still insisted on waking her up at the same time as everyone else, even though she couldn’t use the bathroom until the other girls had left for breakfast. She was tired and had to pee. She walked across the hall to get clean underwear and sweatpants to change into later, tossed them on her bed, and sat down. The sound of the girls in the showers only made her have to pee worse. It had been a long time since Laurel had anything else to do but look out the window and think.

  The scent of mixed shampoos drifted down the hall on the steam from the showers. The fruity smells tickled the back of her throat. Laurel walked over to the window and imagined her unicorn. Her window had a view of the small back parking lot and the stand of pines behind it. The pines surrounded a small above-ground swimming pool covered by a blue tarp. The unicorn Laurel imagined stood by one of the pine trees chewing on grass. He looked up at her. His coat was white but had yellowed. It was an effort for her to remember to imagine his horn.

  When Marcy took her books away Laurel thought she could entertain herself easily by making up stories. She had been so excited about it that she began right away. Laurel thought about it now, that first day with nothing to do. She had imagined the campus full of all these beautiful horses with colorful manes and iridescent horns; she thought about what they all might be up to. But by the time Marcy came by with her lunch that day, Laurel had run out of ideas. And the whole thing began to seem juvenile, clichéd and cartoony. She was embarrassed just thinking of it.

  But this one old-looking unicorn, who never did anything but chew grass and stare at her, had stuck in her head. Laurel tried to think up adventures for him. She pictured him lifting the tarp off the pool with his horn. She imagined him bursting into Aubrey’s rooms and chasing him out of the Mansion. She couldn’t even come up with a name for him. Her unicorn kept her company, in a way, but he was always a disappointment. Her imagination was this dismal thing, a top-heavy flower always flopping over whenever she tried to grab it.

  As soon as New Girls left the dorm Laurel went to use the bathroom. She took her time. There were plenty of disadvantages to her rooming, but at least she could go to the bathroom without a dozen other girls within arms’ distance. In general Laurel tried not to take advantage of being alone in the dorm but there wasn’t any reason to hurry back to the room she would be sitting in all day. She stood under the shower until the hot water ran out.

  Laurel dried herself roughly and got dressed. She spun a handful of toilet paper off a roll and took it with her when she left the bathroom. Back in her room Laurel hung her towel on its hook behind the door. From her dresser she took a pair of white socks and the razor blade she kept hidden in a gap where the bottom and side of the drawer were loosely joined.

  Laurel pulled on her socks. She didn’t like using the razor on herself when her skin still had the poached, rubbery feel from the hot water. She lay down on the bottom bunk and swung her right leg up, resting her foot against the bottom of the bunk above her. She looked up at her foot in its sock. What Laurel hated most about her rooming was that no one was watching her. It was insulting. Everyone was so sure that she wouldn’t run away, it was like they were daring her to. She reached up and pulled the right leg of her sweats up to expose her calf and knee. She passed her hand over the thin white scars that ran along her calf parallel to her shin.

  She had others, too, nests of irregular lines left on her hip, her thigh, above her elbow. It was because of these that she couldn’t rejoin the dorm. If she did she would have to start showering with the girls again. They would see that she’d been cutting, and they would find out that she’d had the razor blade since Beverly dropped it in the bushes. There would be no end of trouble. Laurel ran her hand over the scars. Faculty looked at her like she was crazy when she insisted that she still couldn’t remember that stupid conversation with Aubrey. They never considered she might have another reason for staying roomed, never thought there was ever anything going on that they didn’t know about. No matter how many times things blew up in their faces.

  Laurel picked up the razor blade and sat up. She leaned over her leg. She pressed one corner of the blade into her calf and slowly pulled it up toward the inside of her knee. Everything slowly went dim except the gray thing dragging through her. The gravelly sting pressed her edges and cleansed her steady breath. Tense, she lifted the blade. Tiny beads of blood appeared along the line she had made. The beads grew but didn’t move, though her leg trembled. Her blood looked greasy and bright.

  When she went to dab the blood with the toilet paper, Laurel noticed she was still clutching the razor blade between her thumb and index and middle fingers, the top knuckles bent backward and gone white. She put it down on the bed and pressed the paper against her leg. The paper absorbed the blood in splotches. She pulled it back to watch blood seep again from the cut, this time into a thinner line of dots and dashes.

  When the cut had stopped bleeding Laurel made another one parallel to it. The pain was less focused now. The first cut still throbbed some. The reason she thought cutting wasn’t working was that she didn’t really believe in it anymore. Even as she did it she wondered whether she really had a good-enough reason to be cutting herself. The other g
irls all had such strange, awful stories about why they were the way they were. But Laurel didn’t have much wrong with her. She pressed the toilet paper against the second cut and left it there while she absently rocked the blade back and forth against her shin, making tiny diagonal slashes. When she thought of what made her do it, nothing much came to mind. She thought of the sickly color of the thick wall-to-wall carpeting they had at home. It was gray with a touch of purple to it. Their dinner table had a glass top that her dad’s watch knocked against every time he forked something off his plate, over and over again, all through dinner.

  Laurel used the razor to trim the nail of her big toe. It was like the cuts were supposed to be arrows pointing to the thing that made you upset enough to make them. But with her, there was nothing where the arrows were pointing, just a blank. If New Girls saw the scars she had left all over herself and asked her why she’d done it, she wouldn’t have any reason to give them. It was just something she did, but never too deep. It was something anyone could do.

  She imagined slashing herself all over, but she could only bring herself to make cuts deliberately, where they wouldn’t be easily seen. If she cut herself badly enough no one would say she was just being needy. But with the delicate scars she had etched into herself they would say she was doing it for attention, which for all she knew might be true. The only way she could tell was to see if she let herself get caught. As long as she kept her cutting secret she couldn’t be doing it for attention. Which was why she knew she had to run away.

  Laurel put the razor back in its hiding place in her drawer. Her hands still trembled, and the thrill of fear she always got from cutting made her a bit dizzy. When she went to the bathroom a little later to flush the bloody toilet paper, she looked around to find the room where Marcy had stored her things. She found them in garbage bags in an open room. When Laurel finally did run away, she took the razor with her. No one but she and Beverly knew what she’d been doing.