That's Not a Feeling

by Dan Josefson

  “Well, that stuff isn’t boring to me,” I said, “not yet.” But I didn’t want to argue. I pulled off my mask and dropped it on one of the couches on the upper landing, where it rocked back and forth slightly before settling. I scrubbed at the floor with my mop. Tidbit did the same. Two days later she told me she would go with me.

  “Usually we would just sit around during cleanup and talk,” Bridget Divola explained to Claire King, who had been enrolled at the school a week before. “But today everyone’s trying to get the dorm cleaned by seven so we can go to Cartoon Brunch tomorrow.” Claire nodded. Bridget seemed satisfied. She pulled a long striped sock out of her pocket and sniffed it. “Cartoon Brunch is fun, but personally I find it insulting being manipulated like that. It’s a gift from Aubrey, but you only get to go if your dorm gets checked out of cleanup on time. I’ll do my part, but I won’t jump through hoops.”

  Bridget had moved up from New Girls to Alternative Girls two weeks ago. Her refusal to return to campus on Parents’ Sunday had been considered an attempt to run away, but Bridget claimed that she had learned a lot from that experience. It made her understand how much she needed to follow the process so that she wouldn’t be that unclear again. It made her understand how much she needed to be at the school.

  She and Claire were wiping down the long couch with wood polish. It had been upended so that Tidbit could vacuum underneath. Some other Alternative Girls had taken the cushions from the couch and were beating them with closet rods to get out the dust. Bridget and Claire polished the wooden frame, sitting in the shadow of the couch towering over them. When the square of paper towel Claire was using got dry and dusty, Bridget snatched it from her and stuffed it into the sock. She did the same with her own paper towel, took a long sniff of the sock, and stood up. She dropped the sock by the couch. “Come on,” she said.

  Claire followed Bridget to where June was sitting reading a magazine. Bridget picked up the roll of paper towels on the floor and tore off one square that she handed to Claire and another that she kept for herself. She held hers out, and June sprayed it with furniture polish, and then Claire did the same.

  “Are you girls going to need more?” June asked. “I’m going to lock this stuff up and do the pipes in the bathroom.”

  “No,” Bridget told her. “We’re almost done.”

  “Anybody else need wood polish?” June called. No one answered. “I’ll be in the bathroom, then,” she said.

  The girls walked back to where they had been working, on the side of the couch opposite June. “All this stuff with restricting our access to huffables has really gotten out of hand,” Bridget said. She stuffed her square into the sock and took a sniff. She offered it to Claire, who took a sniff as well. Bridget took Claire’s square of paper towel and began wiping the couch with it. “It’s just begging us to act out.”

  Claire sat back and looked around the lounge. In the middle of the room Tidbit was yelling over the sound of the vacuum cleaner at the girls beating the cushions. Across the room, two girls had taken the long metal top and front off of the radiator that ran along the floor. They were using Q-tips to get dust and lint out from between the hundreds of thin metal squares that were attached, parallel to one another, down the length of the radiator.

  “It’s a matter of integrity,” Bridget was saying. “Self-respect. That’s what me and Frances usually talk about. She’s my therapist. The therapists are Laura, Frances, and Simon. Who’s yours? Claire? Hey!” Bridget swung the sock at her.

  Claire turned. “What?”

  “Who’s your therapist?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Oh. Well, there’s Laura, Frances, and Simon. Frances is mine. I was just saying that what she and I are always trying to figure out about is self-respect, self-regard, self-consciousness, and self-esteem. Like, my self-esteem is really low, but I have a lot of self-regard. Frances says that I should try to have more self-esteem and maybe not so much self-regard. She thinks that each one of them should be at a specific level. But my theory that I always tell her about is that it doesn’t matter how high or low any of them are, just so long as they’re all equal. Like, if you have a lot of self-consciousness you need to have a lot of self-esteem, but if you have, like, low self-regard then you can have low self-esteem. See? My problem is that I can’t ever decide—”

  “Why isn’t she working?” Tidbit was standing over them, holding the vacuum handle in one hand.

  Bridget paused to look at her, then turned back to Claire. “I was saying, I can’t—”

  “I asked you why she isn’t working,” Tidbit said.

  Bridget looked at her. “Yes. And you interrupted me and asked with a very obnoxious attitude.”

  “Thank you for the confrontation,” Tidbit said. “I’ll try to take it in.”

  “Well, you know her name. Why are you asking me?”

  Tidbit looked at Claire. “Well? Claire?”

  “My paper towel got used up. I’d get more, but June put the polish away. Anyway, we’re almost done.”

  “But thanks for keeping an eye on us, Tidbit,” Bridget added. “It makes me feel safe.”

  Tidbit sighed and walked away. She was trying to control her panic, and she knew she wasn’t doing it well. Tidbit needed them to get the dorm clean so that she could see me. I only learned of this much later, but she had thought of a problem with our plan to run away, and Cartoon Brunch would be her only chance to tell me.

  We had planned to meet in the woods first thing Monday morning, when we were supposed to be in Zbigniew’s office. We figured that the earlier we left, the fewer things could go wrong. But Tidbit worried that we’d be missed immediately, since Zbigniew was one of the more competent adults at the school; someone would probably call the police before we had even gotten off campus. We’d have a better head start if we left around lunchtime. But she had no way to tell me unless both our dorms got checked out of cleanup by seven and were allowed to go to Cartoon Brunch. As far as New Boys went, she could only hope, but Tidbit wanted to make sure that Alternative Girls finished on time.

  “Hey, Claire,” she called, “you wanna vacuum so I can do the windows?”

  Claire looked nervously to Bridget, then agreed. Bridget was the only girl in the dorm who’d been at all nice to her since she’d arrived. Claire was so scared of the school and the students that she’d been doing what she could to seem tougher than she was. When she introduced herself to the dorm, she told Alternative Girls that the reason she got sent to Roaring Orchards was that she got caught smoking acid.

  “Wow,” Tidbit had asked, “how much acid did you smoke?”

  Now, as she took hold of the vacuum cleaner, Claire wanted to know what Tidbit had done to get sent to the school.

  Tidbit smiled and patted Claire on the back. “Let’s just say if you’re ever stuck in a town as small as my hometown? Don’t get caught having sex with the sheriff’s daughter.” Tidbit reached down and turned on the vacuum cleaner. She left it in Claire’s hands and walked across the room to start on the windows. If they got checked out of cleanup on time, Tidbit thought, she’d start being nicer to Claire tomorrow.

  June propped the bathroom door open and sat cross-legged beneath the sink. The bathroom held a hint of bleach and the sharp citrus smell of the cleaner the girls had used in cleaning the showers. Soon, though, the smell of the Brasso enveloped her completely. She squeezed a dollop of the white cream onto a sponge with which she began scrubbing the pipes that ran from the several sinks into the wall. The gray on the pipes turned darker in streaks as June began scrubbing, then became a chalky green that got thinner and thinner as she continued to work at it. The green finally melted away to reveal a bright color somewhere between gold and pink. June had cleaned about two inches of pipe. She bent to see where the pipes connected to the bottom of the sinks. She would be working at this a while.

  And what color were the pipes, anyway? She squeezed some more Brasso onto the sponge. They were like a
color you’d see on a dragonfly, she thought. A sunset at the North Pole. What was it about the North Pole? That the sun never set there? She coughed from the Brasso fumes. Did that mean the South Pole never saw the sun? She couldn’t remember, and she couldn’t think how to work it out. One moment it was like the pipes were made of white gold, the next they were the pinkish-tan feathers that covered a pigeon’s throat.

  June uncrossed her legs, pressed her sneakers against the wall in front of her, and pushed herself away from under the sink. She slid back across the tiles. Whoooo, she thought. She should get some fresh air; the fumes were getting to her. June stood up and shook her head. She leaned over a sink, threw some water on her face, and then headed around the corner of the bathroom into the open area where the showers were. She opened the small window high on the wall. That’ll do it, she thought, still dizzy. The feel of the cool, wet weather outside was a relief. She would have to be careful not to be overwhelmed by the Brasso. What had she been thinking of? She had no idea and got back to work.

  By the time Alternative Girls finished cleaning the lounge and kitchenette, June was well done with the pipes. The dorm regrouped and headed back down the hallway to clean the toilets and mop the bathroom floor. They left the toilets for last in case someone had to use them during the day. Outside the sun had not yet set, and no one said anything about the bathroom feeling particularly cold. When the bathroom was done, Alternative Girls all returned to the lounge where they sat down and discussed briefly whether they were finished.

  “It is my consensus that the dorm is superclean,” Bridget finally said.

  “Agreed.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Agreed,” the girls repeated around the circle.

  June paged Roger to come and check. Usually it was Aubrey who inspected the dorms, but he was doing fewer and fewer things around campus. They tried to find things to talk about until Roger arrived. About forty-five minutes later he showed up, wearing a scarf wrapped around the bottom of his face.

  “You’re sure you’re done?” he asked, tossing his scarf onto June’s desk. “Everyone consented?”

  June wasn’t sure if he was asking her or the girls. “Well, girls?” she prompted. They all nodded.

  “Then that’s each of your commitment to me that this dorm is superclean. Let’s see.” He dug deep in one of the pockets of his coat and pulled out one white glove. This was exactly what Aubrey would have done. He put on the glove and tossed his coat onto June’s desk. Roger looked at the girls with a grin and then pulled open the door between the lounge and hallway so that it was perpendicular to the wall. He stood on his tiptoes and ran one gloved finger across the top of the door. He looked at the finger and then showed it to the girls. Clean. He took the chair from June’s desk and climbed up to run a finger across the top of the door frame and hopped down to show the girls again. This time his finger was black with dust.

  “You girls aren’t serious about this,” Roger said, pulling off the glove and sticking it in the back pocket of his jeans. He grabbed his coat and hefted it under one arm. “Don’t call again until the dorm’s clean.” He took his time wrapping himself in his scarf, then hustled out of the dorm.

  “Goddamnit,” Tidbit said when he was gone. “Who was supposed to dust that?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” someone said. “I’m sure it’s not the only place we missed.”

  “Really, Tidbit,” Bridget added, “if you want to follow the process and you think that’s going to make you better, fine. But this talking down to everyone really isn’t going to help you develop your relationships in this dorm.”

  Tidbit’s knee was bouncing up and down. “But if everyone would just—”

  “He checked two places, and half of them were dirty,” someone else said. “I mean, if you extrapolated that—”

  “Oh, fuck it. Let’s just finish cleaning.”

  June spoke up. “Well, now we can’t until you pay for that f-word. What’s going on with you, Tidbit?”

  Tidbit fought back tears. “I don’t want to have a whole meeting. Could you just take a dollar from my allowance?”

  June looked at her. “All right,” she said.

  Tidbit didn’t want to seem too anxious about getting to Cartoon Brunch, lest anyone became suspicious of why it was so important to her. She had hoped that simply doing her share and organizing things would get them checked out in time, but time was running out. It was already dark outside, and the girls had maybe half an hour.

  “Here,” Bridget said, holding up a roll of paper towels. “I have an idea. Everyone take a couple in each hand.” She tossed the Formula 409 spray to Claire. “You spray them all. We’ll make an assembly line. Everyone line up.” The girls filed by, filling each fist with towels that Claire sprayed. The girls then dispersed to the various corners of the lounge to wipe down every exposed surface they could find.

  “Come on, run,” Bridget shouted when she had two handfuls of paper towels. She jogged in a circle around the lounge with her arms stretched out straight, canting like an airplane. She was trying to get the rest of the dorm to run in circles with her, but most of the girls just laughed and dusted where they were.

  When everyone seemed to get tired of that, Bridget announced, “I’m running into the hallway in two seconds so anyone who doesn’t want to get us hand-held better finish up and come with me.” She circled the room once more and ran into the hall with the rest of Alternative Girls following, running up and down the corridor jumping to dust the top of the door frames. One girl handed out fresh squares of paper towel. Girls bumped into one another; girls fell down laughing.

  When they were done with the hall the girls entered the bathroom and set at once to wiping down the counters and the top edges of the stalls. “God, it’s freezing in here,” someone said. “Why’s it so cold?”

  “Did someone open the windows back here?” Claire walked around to the showers and the girls heard her scream.

  Alternative Girls rounded the corner to see the white tile walls covered with moths, beetles, and caddis flies. More hovered near the fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling. Tidbit pushed by to see what was going on. What she saw made her sick. It was like the shower walls were breathing. She focused on one moth resting against the wall of the shower room, its gray wings folded back. It had bright orange markings near its head, and its abdomen was heaving as though the moth were out of breath. A bottle of shampoo sailed past Tidbit’s ear and bounced against the shower wall, where it missed the bugs but sent some into flight toward the ceiling. But mostly the moths were still. Then Bridget pushed past holding the mop overhead, dripping dirty water as she swung it at the lights, shouting, “Kill them, kill them, we’ve got to get checked out.”

  Girls began pounding at the walls with balled-up paper towels, sponges, and plastic bottles. Tidbit watched dark stains blossom on the tiles, iridescent bits of wings and feelers stick to the bottom of a bottle of grapefruit hair conditioner, and all of it would have to be cleaned up. “Toward the window,” someone shouted. “Push them toward the window.”

  Most of the bugs were flying now. Girls were running, laughing, and screaming as moths caught themselves in their hair and fluttered across their pursed lips. Tidbit yelled at everyone to stop. She told them to turn off the lights, they should just turn off the lights and let the bugs fly away, but Bridget was slapping the mop against the plastic light fixture above, streaking it gray, and no one could hear anything over all the shrieking.

  Tidbit leaned against the wall beneath the window and slid to the floor. There was no way they could clean this up in time. They wouldn’t go to Cartoon Brunch, and she and I would get caught and brought back to campus by Monday afternoon. She’d be cornered for a week, and all the work she’d done over the past months would be wasted. Tidbit pulled her hair in front of her face. She wouldn’t let that happen. She would have to let me end up alone in the woods on Monday morning, where I’d assume she’d changed her mind again. Girls were scream
ing, bumping into her and stepping on her. Tidbit cried. She rested her elbows on her knees, letting snot get into her hair. Girls were running into one another, running into her. She could drown out all of it except the stepping on her feet.

  Tidbit ran her hands over her wet face and kept saying, “Stop stepping on my feet, stop stepping on my feet,” but they kept stepping on her, laughing. Tidbit had no idea if she was saying it loud enough for anyone to hear or if she was screaming it. She grabbed the last girl to step on her and bit her leg below the knee. Tidbit didn’t unclamp her teeth until the girl, whoever she was, had crumpled and fallen to the ground. Then Tidbit was on top of her, throwing punches. Blood splattered the tiles. No one was laughing now; they were all trying to pull Tidbit off of Claire. When they did, Claire was left writhing on the floor, holding her leg.

  The rest of the night they let Tidbit sit on a couch in the lounge and shout and cry as loud as she wanted. No one listened to a word. June called Roger to help figure out what to do. When he saw her he didn’t even bother yelling. He just let her bawl until bedtime. They let her use the bathroom after the rest of the dorm was done with it. Then they told her to sleep by herself in the room closest to the lounge.

  Tidbit climbed to the top bunk of the one bunk bed in the room. At the far end of the bed was a window that looked out on the woods behind the Mansion. Tidbit crawled to it and slammed her head against the window, over and over. She felt the glass bend beneath her forehead and slammed harder. June was screaming somewhere far away. Then there was a rough hand around her ankle that yanked her at once away from the window and off the side of the bed. Tidbit fell through the air face-first, flat off the top bunk until the frame of the bottom bunk caught her square across the cheekbone below her right eye. At first, it was the sound that surprised her, like a green fruit being split. The pain came after. Everyone scared her by crowding around until she told them that it just stung a little and that she would go to sleep. It felt strange to hear herself talk. They discussed whether or not it was a good idea to let her sleep. Tidbit felt this had nothing to do with her. She was finally calm, having gotten what she felt she deserved.