That's Not a Feeling

by Dan Josefson

  New Girls were annoyed that they even had to have a candor meeting about Laurel running away, since she hadn’t really been in their dorm for weeks. Marcy assured them that it was just a formality, but she made them write fibs anyway. No one wrote anything, which was fine with Marcy. But when she asked whether anyone knew of any fibs Laurel might have had, Bev began rubbing her face with her fists.

  “Bev?” Marcy asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what?”

  Bev looked at her over her fists. “I don’t know if I know if she had fibs or not.”

  “Look,” Marcy said, “we’re not going to go through this with you again. Go stand in the corner until you figure out whether or not you know.”

  “Okay, okay,” Bev said as she got up and walked toward the corner. She paused. She opened her mouth but said nothing. Then she said, “I think Laurel cut herself. With the razor I dropped by the school building.”

  The dorm erupted in moans.

  “That was like months ago,” someone shouted. “This is ridiculous.”

  “She’s just trying to pin it on Laurel ’cause she’s gone,” Carly Sibbons-Diaz said. “She probably still has it.”

  Marcy told Bev to sit back down.

  “Are you making this up because you have the razor?” she asked.

  Bev felt it had been a mistake to say anything. She should have kept quiet like everyone else.

  “Bev, do you still have that razor?” Marcy asked.

  Now she had to answer this. The truth hadn’t worked so far, but she was sure the right thing was to say that she didn’t have it.

  “No.”

  “But you had to think about it,” Marcy said.

  Bev couldn’t tell if this was a question or not. “Yes,” she said.

  “Oh God,” someone said from the other side of the lounge.

  New Girls all had to stay where they were while Marcy called a couple of Regular Kids to come down and search Bev’s room. While they waited, they continued their meeting.

  “Why did you say that about Laurel?” Marcy asked Bev.

  “I don’t know anymore. I just miss her so much.”

  “Are you guessing or are you telling me the truth?”

  “I’m telling you the truth?”

  Marcy threw up her hands. The meeting went on like this for some time.

  Carly Sibbons-Diaz asked, “How is it that what started off as a meeting about Laurel running away is now focused on Bev?”

  “Um, maybe because she’s a needy suckbag?” someone said. “Who needs to be ghosted.”

  “No,” Bev said.

  Bridget Divola gave an impatient little jump in her seat. “You guys are being so sideways. I’m so tired of everyone being called needy, needy, needy. I never even heard that word before I came here. And now it’s all anybody can say. You can’t use ghosting as a punishment or just because you don’t want to include Bev.”

  “No,” Carly said, “but if Bev can’t get by without being the center of attention, then maybe being ghosted could teach her to be okay just in herself. It would help her to, you know, not always be needing validation.”

  The Regular Kids finished searching Bev’s room. They didn’t find anything. Marcy thanked them, and they went, but not before suggesting that there should be some sort of consequence that might keep Bev from setting situations like this up in the future.

  “I think,” Marcy told the Regular Kids, “I think she’s trying to do the right thing. I’m just not sure that she knows what that is.”

  “Well, she’s not working on following the process,” Jenna told her. “None of us would be able to think clearly if we didn’t. But she should know that there are consequences for that.”

  In the end, and against Marcy’s better judgment, the dorm decided that Bev should be ghosted. No one would be allowed to speak to her or make eye contact with her until the consequence was lifted.

  Crocodile Tears had live music on Thursdays; the teachers had often talked about going, but they had never gone. This week Doris was determined. The bar was connected to the one nice hotel in town, the Lamb & Goose. The music wasn’t much of a draw, but this was Webituck, New York, and it was something to do. More important for Doris’s purposes, it was someplace to go, someplace where the teachers could sit down like adults and order drinks among people who had no idea what a wiggle was or what “popped” meant. It was what she felt she needed. With some degree of desperation she set about getting as many of the other teachers as she could to take their weekly evening off on Thursday and join her for a drink.

  By the time they all piled into one of the vans and left campus, the teachers felt less like normal people going to get a drink than like parents anxiously leaving their children for a few short hours. The dorm parents had wanted to know why everyone was taking the same night off. They wondered, not necessarily to themselves, why the teachers got to do something like that when the dorm parents never did. These were questions the teachers couldn’t quite answer, other than to say that it seemed important to Doris. But things were arranged; people traded their scheduled nights off, and the teachers, except for Brenda, were accommodated. They were excited to all be getting off campus together, but even the tinge of giddiness they felt was simultaneously a defeat: they were relatively sure that normal people didn’t get this excited about drinks at Crocodile Tears.

  As she drove them into town, Doris thought about how to tell everyone that she was leaving. Hopefully, once they got settled at the bar someone would ask why she had wanted them all to go out together, and then she could explain. But if they didn’t ask she wasn’t sure how she would bring it up. She had to tell them tonight because tomorrow she would start packing up. She planned to be gone by the end of the weekend. Aubrey had asked her to please leave in the least disruptive way possible. At Roaring Orchards, this generally meant simply disappearing. In the rearview mirror, Doris could see that June was leaning her head against the rattling window and watching the landscape sail past. She reminded Doris of a child on a school bus. Spencer cried out that he thought he saw a big bird in a tree, and they all began speculating as to what it might have been.

  Doris parked in the large lot behind the Lamb & Goose, the farthest reaches of which hadn’t been cleared of snow. The teachers got out and waited for Doris, who walked slowly with her cane, watching out for patches of ice. They had moved on from joking about the bird Spencer saw to talking about run-ins with large birds generally. Dedrick was telling them that once, on a fishing trip, he’d been quietly stalked for hours by a peahen. Nervous about what an odd group they must seem, they laughed too loudly in the cold.

  The teachers entered through the main doors of the Lamb & Goose and headed downstairs to the bar. As she carefully negotiated the stairs, Doris was upset to hear how loud it was. When they entered Crocodile Tears, they saw a pudgy, bearded man on a small stage playing acoustic guitar and singing into a microphone. People were shouting to be heard over the music. The teachers found two small tables that they pushed together. Doris sat down and draped her wool coat over the back of her chair. While Spencer went to get a pitcher and some glasses, the rest of the teachers smiled at one another and looked around the bar.

  Doris noticed that other than the people sitting at the bar, everyone seemed to have come in groups of four or five people. Some were tourists, she imagined, or people up for the skiing at Holiday Hill. But mostly, she guessed, these were everyday people from around here, regular people with jobs. She wondered what they all did. She would have liked to guess with June and the other teachers, but it seemed childish. It was strange to think that she’d soon be joining them in the world, the world outside of Roaring Orchards.

  Spencer returned with a pitcher in one hand and his other arm draped over Zbigniew’s shoulder. “Look who I found!” he cried.

  “Hi, Zbyszek,” June and Dedrick said. Doris waved. As Zbigniew placed two stacks of pint glasses on the table, she noticed a
tired-looking woman with yellow hair following behind him. She looked to Doris like she had a serious job, maybe lawyer or real estate agent.

  They pulled up a couple of extra chairs, and Spencer poured beers for everyone, then went to get another pitcher. Zbigniew introduced his friend Della to everyone. He was friendly, but antsy—it was clear he hadn’t been expecting to run into people from school at Crocodile Tears. Doris wondered how often he came here. Being in charge of maintenance and Reciprocity Detail, he didn’t have a dorm to cover. It seemed odd to Doris, it seemed a failing, that she had never given any thought to what Zbyszek did in the evenings.

  Spencer returned with two more pitchers, and after a couple of beers, things around the table were more comfortable. It turned out that Doris hadn’t been too far off about Della. She was a receptionist at a real estate office. After a while, they were joined by her friend Anne. Anne was a brunette with high cheekbones and short bangs. Doris didn’t catch what it was that she did.

  By now, Doris had given up on having the conversation she wanted to have. Maybe she would get a chance later to talk to everyone about leaving; maybe she wouldn’t. But this was her last night with her friends, even if they didn’t know it, and she decided to try to enjoy herself. Faculty who left the school on bad terms, as Doris was about to do, were not allowed to visit campus or have any contact with students. The teachers and dorm parents could see her on their nights off, but Doris knew how difficult that would be.

  The bar quieted some. The bearded man had stopped playing guitar and was now setting up a small drum kit on the stage. The teachers were trying to explain to Della and Anne what it was like working at the school. Spencer began to tell them about Bald Matt and Crybaby Matt, and they all leaned over their beers to listen.

  “Wait,” Anne interrupted as soon as he’d started, “you’ve all got nicknames for each other?”

  “No, no,” Spencer said. “They worked at the school at different times, so when they were there, we just called them each Matt. But since they left, we needed a way to know which one we were talking about. So now they’re Bald Matt and Crybaby Matt.

  Spencer tried to pour himself another beer, but the little left in the pitcher only filled his glass halfway. “So Bald Matt got his name because he was bald. But he was such a freak. When he was watching the kids in the evening, you’d go down there to help with homework or whatever, and he’d be walking around in his underpants. And he would tell the kids these nutso stories about his life before he started working at the school. Like he said he’d been part owner of a brothel someplace, and he’d somehow been made an honorary gypsy. I don’t remember how that happened—we didn’t find out a lot of this until after he left. Because as soon as he was gone, the kids played up how awful he was to them and all that, but while he was there they loved him because he had these crazy stories and he’d let them get away with anything.”

  “Like what?” Della asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I just remember he used to end each meeting by making them hold hands and say the mystic sound of om.”

  “What did he finally get fired for?” June asked.

  Spencer looked around the table. “You know,” he said, “I have no idea.” Everyone cracked up at that. Spencer got up to get another pitcher and said, “Dedrick, you tell them about Crybaby Matt. That story breaks my heart every time.”

  Dedrick raised his glass to Spencer, he wasn’t sure why. When Spencer had left, he asked Doris, “Do you remember why Bald Matt got fired?”

  Doris had been listening so long, she was surprised to be addressed. “Yes,” she said, “but I won’t say.”

  Dedrick laughed again. “Fair enough. You guys really want to hear about Crybaby Matt?” He looked at Della and Anne, who were nodding. “All right. So this is how he got his name. We were all really happy when we hired this guy, ’cause he seemed normal enough, and as you can probably tell by now, normal is at a premium where we work. And I guess he was pretty normal; he just wasn’t cut out for Roaring Orchards. He’d been at the school for—I don’t know—maybe a week, and I ran into him on campus and asked him what’s up. It turns out that he had that night off, and so did I, so I said, ‘Well, we should do something.’ I said I’d come by his room when I got done with classes.

  “So I go up to his room, which is on one of the upper floors of the Mansion. The door’s not quite closed, and I can hear him inside. But he doesn’t answer when I knock. So I open the door and peer in, and Matt’s there, sprawled out on his bed just bawling his eyes out. Which is awkward. There aren’t even any sheets on the bed. I feel for the guy, plus I’m hoping he’ll stay, so I tried to be supportive, and I asked him, ‘Matt, man, how’re you doing?’ ”

  Dedrick leaned his head on his fist for a second, laughing. “And then Matt looks up at me, his eyes all red and his hair all crazy, and he screams at me through his tears, ‘How does it look like I’m doing?’ ”

  When the teachers stopped laughing, Della asked, “Wait, but why was he crying?”

  Dedrick was annoyed to have to explain. “Because he’d just moved to this place and found out it was totally nuts, or because he realized he’d have like no free time and be surrounded by lunatics and be totally cut off from the outside world.” Dedrick swirled his beer in his glass, then smirked. “The real question,” he said, “is why aren’t the rest of us crying all the time. Anyway, then for Halloween, Crybaby Matt decided to dress up as our headmaster Aubrey. Aubrey lent him one of his suits, and when Matt inevitably bolted, he took it with him. Aubrey still yells at us about it sometimes.”

  The teachers all headed back to campus together. Spencer made a clumsy attempt to stay at the bar with Zbyszek, Della, and Anne and was a bit too drunk to pick up on their hints that he go. But Dedrick convinced him, and they all rode home in silence. They decided to go back to Dedrick’s apartment to watch a movie. Doris parked the van in the lot by the Paddock.

  Spencer found a bottle of wine that he tried to open while Dedrick and June looked through the tapes for something to watch. The cork in the wine bottle squeaked as Spencer turned it. It wasn’t coming out, though he kept trying.

  Doris imagined telling them she was going. She feared they would try to convince her to stay, and she was afraid she would let them succeed. But she knew that wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t—Aubrey had asked her to leave so that Ken could begin taking over. Maybe it was just a fantasy, that they would beg her to stay and convince Aubrey to let her.

  Doris didn’t want to go, she realized. These were some of the nicest people she knew. It was true that there was something strange about people who stayed at Roaring Orchards, something dependent and passive, but there was also something genuinely sweet about them. You couldn’t stay at the school long if you were judgmental. You couldn’t stay there long if you were selfish. Doris had never felt as accepted as she did there. She knew every inch of the campus, every uneven hallway and irregular corner in the Mansion, every preposterous sign on the grounds. She knew all the rules and the logic behind all the rules. Doris thought of her small apartment, of the room where she’d fallen asleep and woken up thousands of times.

  She felt a tickle across her lips and heard June shout, “Doris, you’re bleeding!”

  Doris brushed her hand across her mouth and saw a bright string of blood dangle from her hand as more dripped down her face.

  June was on her feet. “I’ll get some towels.”

  “But what—”

  “It’s just a nosebleed, don’t worry.”

  Doris pinched her nose and leaned forward, trying to catch the blood in her palms. She could hear the squeaking of the wine bottle resume as Spencer tried again to twist out the cork. June came and led Doris to the bathroom. She helped clean her up. When her nose had stopped bleeding and the shock had passed, Doris sat down on the edge of the tub and began to cry. No one understood why until she returned to Dedrick’s living room and told her friends that she was leaving.

  6


  Tidbit and I were working behind the Cafetorium, flattening boxes. There was a shed where Floyd put all the cardboard boxes that food for the kitchen came in, and these had to be flattened and taken to the recycling Dumpster by the Farm. We tore the boxes at the corners or pulled off the packing tape and piled the flattened cardboard in a wheelbarrow.

  “D’you hear about Laurel The Pfaff?” Tidbit asked.

  “I don’t hear about anything that you don’t tell me. I’m in a restricted dorm. It’s a fib to tell me anything.”

  “Well, she ran the other day.”

  “Which one was she again?”

  “She’d been here forever. She was roomed.”

  “No one was watching her?”

  Tidbit shrugged. “I guess Marcy didn’t think she’d run. She’d been here forever.”

  I was struggling to collapse a box that had been wrapped in plastic tape. “What did you call her?”

  “Laurel The Pfaff. That was her nickname that Aubrey popped, but I guess it’s unpopped now. This is funny. She got it because she’d been at the school so long that one day a letter came saying that she had jury duty. And the computer that sends the letters includes your middle name, but just the first three letters. Her middle name is Theresa, so the envelope read ‘Laurel The Pfaff.’ ”

  I didn’t really get it.

  “I mean, it was really funny because she was so embarrassed that she was still here when she was old enough to be on jury duty. And everyone knew that Aubrey would never let her go. So we were joking about the police coming to get her. Sheldon, this guy who used to work here, could do really good helicopter sound effects, and he was like ft-ft-ft-ft-ft-ft and then said, like through a loudspeaker, ‘Surrender The Pfaff immediately, we know The Pfaff is in there.’ I think that’s when she wrote Aubrey a letter and he popped the nickname.”

  I placed the last few boxes we’d flattened on the wheelbarrow. “We should take these to the Dumpster.” I pushed the wheelbarrow toward the Farm, but it tottered and lurched over every bit of uneven ground, and it was impossible to keep the cardboard from slipping off the top of the pile. Finally, Tidbit held the pile steady as I carefully guided the wheelbarrow along.