by Trish Cook
I nodded. “Sure, I guess so. Hypothetically.”
“Great!” Tina exclaimed. “Consider it done!”
I wasn’t sure if she was for real or what, but if she was, I was golden. Reduced food meant I’d only need one person to clear the excess on my plate, not five. I didn’t like asking for help or being in the hole any favors. Mohammed had told us a million times how back in Sierra Leone, they were always starving and he would probably never feel full because of that, so there would be no indebtedness when he was my only garbage disposal. He wanted my food and I wanted it gone. It would be a mutual favor.
“Now let’s move on to escape plans,” Tina said, focusing her attention on Diana. “What would make a student dislike Heartland so much that they’d try to run away and put their lives at risk, not to mention the level they’ve achieved here?”
This was such a silly question, we all had to laugh. There were a million and one reasons to hate Assland.
“No Wi-Fi on our computers!” Justin called out. Chip high-fived him, and it was official: My crush on Justin, which had been hanging on by a thread since he’d turned kind of surly, was officially over. I’d had it up to here with guys who only cared about naked pictures of girls but not the girls in the pictures.
“No hookups allowed!” Chip shouted.
“No family here,” Mohammed piped in.
“Not enough bacon and pork chops!” Diana said, cackling and oinking away, leaving Jenny looking more pained than usual.
“Nothing to do,” I added quietly. “Nothing fun, I mean.” The most fun thing I’d done since I got here was go off campus to 7-Eleven with Brittany to celebrate my being up for level two. The change hadn’t been approved yet because my Contemporary American Family teacher said I hadn’t been sharing enough. I had until the end of next week to show I trusted everyone enough to participate more in class. If I did, I’d be moving up, and the best thing about that would be getting to talk to Joss.
As promised, she’d e-mailed me little dispatches from home every day, keeping me in the loop about all the gossip at school. I wrote her back old-fashioned letters almost as regularly, which the staff then scanned into the office computer and e-mailed back to her. Joss obviously wasn’t getting any of the dirt about Assland since what I wrote was reviewed for inappropriate content. I couldn’t wait to tell her the real scoop.
“The rules around Internet access and relationships aren’t something I have control over,” Tina said. “But family, food, and fun? I might be able to do something about those. Let’s get even more specific, okay?”
“I need to be able to talk to my family more often,” Mohammed said. “Make sure the ones I have left aren’t getting killed or anything.”
Tina nodded. “Well, we have Family Weekend coming up at the end of the month, where you’ll all get to spend quality time with your loved ones. And though I really doubt your family has been killed”—she nodded at Mohammed—“I’ll talk to your individual therapist about having more contact with your mom and dad until then. How’s that?”
Mohammed didn’t look happy at about it all. In fact, he looked like he was about to go postal.
Justin was squinting at Mohammed. “Dude, I thought you said you watched your dad die when you were four!”
Mohammed roared back. “Don’t you ever mention my father again!”
“You mean the fake dead one or the real alive one?” Chip asked calmly.
“Boys!” Tina yelled, standing up. “Let’s get back to the subject at hand. Can you think of a wholesome activity you’d like to do together as a group?”
We all sat there and stared at our fingernails, our feet, the wall. Wholesome was not what any of us wanted. It was Diana who finally broke the silence.
“I want to go here,” she said, shoving the crumpled-up state fair brochure at Tina. It was covered with pictures of cows and funnel cakes and Ferris wheels.
Tina read it and smiled. “I think we can make this happen. I’ll even chaperone. If everyone stays off academic probation and has no angry outbursts this week, that is. So let’s say Friday, shall we?”
“Yesssssss!” Diana said.
“This was quite a group today, kids,” Tina said, nodding at each of us. “I’ll keep my part of the deal if you keep yours. Work together as a team, okay? I’m really looking forward to our field trip.”
“Me too,” Diana agreed.
“Why you so hopped up about a cheesy fair anyhow, Diana?” Chip asked.
“Because Joey Chestnut is gonna be there!” she said.
I had no clue who he was. “Who?”
“Joey Chestnut! The hot dog eating champ!” she explained.
“Why in hell would you care about him?” Justin wanted to know.
“Because he’s hot. And because if I can’t get any in here, at least I can eat a ton of wieners at the fair. Like, get really porked, you know?”
Diana kept laughing until Jenny handed her a note. Diana read it out loud: “ ‘It’s okay to use some variation of the word pig as sexual innuendo. Pigs are very passionate, you know.’ ”
SO IT HAD COME TO THIS. I WAS ON MY BEST BEHAVIOR SO I COULD go to a fair. Carnies, fried food, and livestock. Oh yeah, and a hot dog eating contest. Awesome.
The worst part was that I was actually kind of excited about it. Which I recognized made it the first thing I’d been excited about in a long time. Which meant that as a therapeutic technique, it was kind of working. Which pissed me off.
Not that I was happy or anything. It was more like I was walking around and everything was gray, and the idea of the stupid fair was the one spot of color.
“So what conclusions can you draw from this?” Max asked me in my one-on-one.
“I guess that if you bore the crap out of people for long enough, then anything, no matter how crappy, will seem like a relief.”
Max smiled. “You are a stubborn kid, you know that?”
“I have been told this in the past, yes. But why do you say that now?”
“Because you are so determined to be pissed off that you can’t even enjoy a victory. You were in a bad place, a really low place, and you might not be out of it yet, but it has gotten marginally better. And you can’t even enjoy it or even admit that it happened. You think it’s a trick, but it’s not. I mean, this is pretty much what we have to offer people with your diagnosis. Not that you’re never going to have low patches, but just that you can hang on to the knowledge that they won’t last forever. Isn’t that good?”
I thought about this for a minute. “I guess. I don’t know. I think it would be better if I never had to feel so awful.”
“And it would be better if I didn’t have to test my blood every day and inject insulin,” Max said. “Type one diabetes. But that’s not the hand I got dealt. I got the hand with a lot of needles in it. And you got the depressive hand.”
“Well, this hand sucks.”
“No question. But nobody’s life is perfect. Why do you think it’s so hard for you to accept the imperfections in yours?”
I thought about this for a minute. “Because,” I said. Not much of an answer, but it was all I had.
Max tapped his iPad. “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” he said. “We’re gonna do some work figuring out your core issue.”
“Awesome,” I said in a flat voice. “What’s that?”
“It’s a deep-seated belief you have that is messing up how you see the world.”
“Great. Something else to look forward to,” I said.
The prospect of digging into my deep-seated beliefs made the idea of having one night of relief at the fair that much more enticing. I was just about beside myself with excitement about an event I would have mocked mercilessly six months ago. Okay, six days ago.
And though I really wanted the fair, I wanted it less than Diana. Who had just decided she was the general of our little army of freaks. So Tuesday at dinner, I got this from her:
“Justin. History test tomorrow. Have you
studied?”
“Have you heard of anhedonia?” I shot back.
“Is that a vocabulary word for your history test?”
“No, it’s something that those of us with depression experience, and it’s—”
“If it’s not on the test, I don’t give a shit right now. You need to get a C to stay off probation, and—Emmy. Nobody buys that ‘spit the chewed food into the napkin while pretending to wipe your mouth’ gag. Cut it out. Just eat. You’re a freaking skeleton already, and I’m pretty sure if you blow away in one of these high prairie winds, I’m not gonna get to see Joey Chestnut. So eat up.”
Mohammed gave a heavy sigh.
“You got something to say, Sri Lanka?”
Mohammed put down his fork. “Sierra Leone, idiot.”
“Whatever. I’m never going to either place.”
Mohammed gave Diana a serious look. The kind that, for a guy, would have a serious beating at the end of it. “I just … you know. The whole idea of an eating contest. It’s obscene. In my country there are people starving, and here you’ve got so much abundance—”
“I know, right?” Diana said. “Like you, for example, have an extra parent we’ve never heard about before! So wasteful!”
“I—” Mohammed began.
“He’s right, though,” Emmy chimed in as she sawed a cherry tomato into eight identical pieces. “Look at all the obesity in our country.”
Mohammed nodded. “Right. And you’ve got so much that you’re willing to make a game out of it, and I’m supposed to behave so you can go watch this obscene spectacle that, frankly, makes me sick.”
Chip put his burger down. “That is it! That is just it. Shut the hell up, Tracy.”
Everybody looked at Chip like he was insane. Well, I mean, more insane than we’d previously thought.
And I guess I should say, everybody but me looked at Chip that way. I shot him a look that attempted to communicate this: “Shut up. We agreed we were going to save this ill-gotten information for a time when it was really necessary, and I’m pretty sure it’s not necessary right now, and by the way I have to share a room with this dude.”
“Who’s Tracy?” Diana asked.
Chip put on a sports announcer voice and gestured at Mohammed. “Tracy Jefferson, ladies and gentlemen! Hailing from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, he’s the son of two physicians, and until recently attended prestigious Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts, the alma mater of former US Senators Robert and Ted Kennedy!”
There was a moment of silence. Everyone just stared at Mohammed/Tracy, who was doing his deep breathing, trying-not-to-snap thing. And then Diana started to laugh. It began as these kinds of snorts coming out of her nose, and then it erupted into what I can only describe as guffaws.
“Tracy! I was scared of a … a boy named Tracy!”
Emmy snorted, too, and this set me off. Pretty soon everybody was laughing, and even though I was looking at Mohammed—sorry, Tracy—and seeing that he was about to do something that was totally going to wreck our chances of going to the fair and I really should have stopped and tried to hustle him away from the table, I couldn’t move. I was laughing too hard. And it felt great. I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed until my stomach hurt, and right then it was killing me.
And then Tracy’s rage face suddenly broke, and he was laughing, too. “Man, I got you bitches good!” he said between laughs. “The civil war in Sierra Leone ended … in 2002.”
This caused another round of hysterical laughter, and when Tracy came up for air he said, “So easy to scare you bitches … my mom wouldn’t let me try out for lacrosse because it’s … too violent! You racist assholes are scared of anybody black!”
I was now actually crying from laughing so hard. I mean, yeah, I’d known that my supposedly African roommate was actually a rich kid from Michigan since Chip hacked into the school records on his netbook, but still, knowing that scary, rage-filled Mohammed from Sierra Leone was actually a mama’s boy who wasn’t allowed to play lacrosse and who’d just been messing with us for weeks was just really funny. I mean, he got us. He totally got us.
“So,” I said. “How long has this been going on?”
“Just since this group started. I was Didier Mogumba, soccer prodigy from Paris, in the group I was in before this.”
Diana wiped tears away from her eyes and extended a hand across the table. “Well played, my friend. Well played,” she said, and Tracy shook her hand.
Later, as we were lying in the rule-mandated darkness of our room at 10:30 p.m., I asked Tracy, “So, were you just, like, sick of being you? Is that what the whole thing was about?” Because that was kind of appealing to me—the idea that you could just throw off your entire screwed-up self and substitute somebody else with different problems. And if you were as good at it as Tracy is, that person would actually become kind of real. I mean, if you convinced five people that someone existed, doesn’t that make them kind of real?
There was a long silence that made me wonder if Tracy was asleep. “Naaah,” he said. “I just like fucking with people. I mean, really, I don’t hate being Tracy Jefferson. I just like being Tracy Jefferson who gets people to believe a bunch of stupid crap more.”
“So who’s the girl? I mean, the one you talk to when you’re supposedly talking to your mom? The one you were all uptight to get extra time on the phone with?”
“Which one?” he said, and laughed. “I mean, that’s why I always need extra time on the phone, you know?”
I laughed, though, of course, I didn’t know. But I could imagine.
“Who do these girls think they’re talking to?”
“Let’s see. Latasja thinks she’s talking to Rakim, Elizabeth thinks she’s talking to Shane, and Tracy thinks she’s talking to C-Dogg.”
“Tracy? Like, really, you’re dating a girl with your same name?”
“No. C-Dogg is dating a girl with my same name. It’s a weird world, Justin.”
Well, that was certainly true. I lay in silence for a minute or two before asking one more question.
“One g or two?”
“What?”
“C-Dogg. One g or two?”
“Two, of course. Don’t wake me up to ask me stupid questions.” Okay, then.
The next morning at breakfast, everybody—except Jenny, of course—made a big show of saying “Good morning … Tracy,” and smiling.
We were about halfway through breakfast when Tracy turned to Chip, who was sitting next to him, and said, “Okay, Chip. As far as I can tell, we now know everybody’s real name except yours—”
“It’s Chip!”
“Bullshit,” Tracy said, “Nobody puts Chip on a birth certificate. I’m from Grosse Pointe, remember? I know me some Chips. And nobody named Chip is really named Chip.”
“Okay, okay. It’s—”
“Wait. I’m not done. We’re all pretty clear on why everybody else is here—Skeletor over there is kind of obvious, and so’s Mopey”—he gestured at me with his fork—“Psycho”—that’s Diana—“Silent”—Jenny—“and”—he pointed a thumb at his chest—“the compulsive liar. And then there’s Chip.”
“Chesterton,” Chip said.
“Chesterton?” Diana asks. “As in The Molesterton?”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Chip said. “And yeah, that’s the name on my birth certificate. It’s a family name. And if you don’t mind, I’d really rather go by Chip.”
“Whatever, Chesterton,” Diana said.
“And it’s a crack addiction.” Everybody stared. “World of Warcrack, that is,” Chip said, and smiled.
“Wait,” Tracy said. “They locked you up for a video game addiction?”
“They locked you up for lying?” Chip shot back.
Tracy took a breath. “Well. I may have, um … run a bit of a grift on my fellow students at Milton Academy. There may have been five figures of restitution my parents had to make. But we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about y
ou.”
“I wanna hear about the grift!” Diana yelled.
“Long con. Basically a Ponzi scheme. I got a bunch of classmates to invest in my nonexistent drug business. Front me cash to make a buy, I’ll move the product, and double your money. But there’s no product and no buy. Just more suckers putting up money for drugs I never bought.”
We all stared at him for a minute.
“You, sir, are an artist,” I said.
“Unless he’s lying now about lying then,” Diana said.
“Whatever,” Tracy harrumphed. “Can we get back to Chip’s video game addiction?”
“I used to play for days. Days. I bought diapers so I wouldn’t have to get out of my chair to pee, okay?”
“Really? I mean, really, or is this like a Tracy thing where you’re making up something outrageous and seeing how much you can get us to believe?” I asked.
“Swear to God.”
“What’s it like? Peeing in a diaper, I mean.”
“Warm. At first. It gets clammy later. Poo, of course, is much worse.”
And that pretty much did it for everyone’s appetite. Everyone, strangely, but Emmy, who continued her normal food dissection. Everybody stared at her. “What?” she said.
Finally, it was Friday afternoon. Classes? Over. Homework? Done. Dinner? Eaten. Chores? Everything was clean as a freaking whistle. Finally, we were allowed to leave. It turned out that Assland had one of those extra-long vans that seated about fifteen people. The staff guy who wasn’t Tiny (or tiny) was on driving duty. He said something like, “Don’t know how I got talked into this one,” and shut the plastic window that separated the driver’s seat from the rest of us.
“Alright! Who’s ready for the fair!” Tina chirped as she ushered us into our seats.
“Yyyyyyyeahhhhhh!” Diana screamed, and everybody else just kind of looked at her.
I found myself next to Emmy. “You know, if you time it just right, you can eat a ton of food and then puke it up from the rides,” I offered.
Something was different about the way she looked at me. “If you time it right, you can throw yourself out of a roller coaster car and kill yourself,” she replied.