Reformed

by Justin Weinberger

  “No, you go ahead, Razan,” he says, glaring daggers at her. “Tell us a story.”

  “All right, children,” says Dr. Ginschlaugh. “Let’s get to the point. We’ll hear both your sides. Razan, please continue.”

  Razan’s grin gets twice as lopsided, but just when it looks like it’ll slide off her face, she brightens and goes on. “Basically it’s like this. There we were. Remy and me, I mean.” She points across the circle to her nemesis.

  He refuses to respond.

  “We were the best,” she says, turning to the rest of the class. “The people loved us and the competition hated us … and then Rembrandt ruined everything.”

  Rembrandt rolls his eyes. “Come on—”

  “No interruptions!” She plows onward: “There we were, the champions of the competitive dancing world. Best friends, partners, and there was nothing we couldn’t do when we were together … until he betrayed me.”

  “Oh seriously! I betrayed you? How did I—?”

  “You dropped me for another partner, Remy,” she explains calmly.

  “Your family moved to Ohio that year! What was I supposed to—?”

  “Oh, I don’t know … not abandon me for a girl who’s half a foot short of two left feet?”

  “Nice,” he says. “You’ve always been the funny one.”

  “You know what was really funny? When you soaked that kid Luke’s costume in dog pee. And when you snipped off half of Daniel’s hair so he’d be too embarrassed to get up in front of everyone looking like a—”

  “—stop it, Razan. You set me up!”

  “So you’re saying I forced you? You were just a helpless, witless idiot?” Her eyes move around the circle defiantly. “That time you replaced Whitney’s shoes with ones that were two sizes too small? I somehow tricked you?”

  Rembrandt’s fists are getting white—and then, after a moment: “What do you want, Razan? We both moved on. You want me gone for good? Dead?”

  Razan smiles. “Oh, I don’t want you dead, Rembrandt,” she says sweetly. “But you might wish you were after …”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “You know that time you messed up the routine and your mom stood up in the middle of our show and dragged you out of the hotel ballroom while you screeched like a five-year-old with tears running down your face? You might think that was your worst memory, but that will only be the start after I’ve gotten my revenge.”

  I keep waiting for Ginschlaugh to put an end to it. But he just watches like a reptile, unblinking.

  I should probably run away before my turn comes. Or before these two set fire to the room. Or if they don’t, maybe I should set fire to the room so we can all bust out?

  I turn to Ash nervously and he gives me a “calm down” look.

  Fine, I promise silently. I’ll stay.

  But in the back of my head, I’m definitely keeping the whole “setting a fire” thing as Plan B.

  The next morning when we wake up, all my uniforms are gone. We find them in the bathroom—someone dumped them in the shower and left the water running. Give you three guesses who.

  Mark lends me one of his, but it’s too big for me.

  As I walk into the dining hall, very last and looking like a clown, Cole shoots me a huge smile and thumbs-up. Alva, who’s sitting across from him, looks me over from head to toe. “Ian. Your uniform doesn’t fit.”

  “I know,” I tell her, majorly annoyed. I thought we were getting to be actual friends.

  But when I see her later that day, she’s wearing a uniform that’s about two sizes too big. “Did someone dump yours in the shower too?” I ask.

  “What’re you talking about?” she says. “I traded with Lindsay. Gave her half my breakfast for it.”

  I frown in confusion.

  “Kay,” she says. “Well …”

  “Yeah, kay … Hold on, why’d you trade?”

  She blinks. “The uniform doesn’t fit me,” she says, like that explains everything. “It’s a metaphor?”

  “Oh, cool.” I have no clue what she’s talking about.

  “Look …” she says. “Ian, you don’t have to do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Pretend like you understand when you don’t.”

  I blush.

  “Forget it, dude,” she says with a tiny smile. “Let’s start over, okay?”

  “Start over …” I say.

  “I mean, that’s what this summer is about, right?”

  “Starting over?”

  “This summer isn’t your real life, Ian.” She says it like it’s the most obvious statement in the world, but it’s actually a pretty weird thing to say.

  “Well if it’s not my real life, what is it?” I ask her, with the sort of curiosity that kills cats.

  “It’s an experiment. It’s another reality, where you don’t have to be yourself. You can be anybody you want to.” She waits, looking at me with a smile—and then she shrugs: “Or at least that’s what I think. Nobody I care about is ever gonna know about anything that goes on in here. So I’m gonna try to figure out some stuff for myself. Especially if I’m forced to hang around total jerks who don’t deserve my awesomeness.”

  And I think about this, but before I can answer, we’re interrupted.

  “Big E!” Devon bellows. “Reaaaally getting tired of this.”

  “Who’s big E?” says Alva.

  “This guy right here. Ian. Big E. And once again, we’re all waiting on him to head to stupid dance class.”

  “Sorry, Dev,” I say.

  Alva gives Devon a sideways glare. “Don’t apologize, Ian. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “He’s just being nice,” says Devon. “Like a normal person. But I forgot: You don’t know what being normal is like. Let me demonstrate. ‘I’m sorry, Alva, but who are you to butt in on our conversation, anyway?’”

  All of a sudden my stomach squeezes. I feel like I’m wearing a really tight belt, even though my uniform pants are still falling down. No, really: I can feel them slip an inch during the moment of dead silence between Devon and Alva Anonymous.

  “Well? What do you have to say about that?” Devon pushes.

  Alva holds back and just looks at him for a while. And when she does speak, all she says is, “Dude, you do know Ian starts with an I, right?”

  Devon rolls his eyes. “Come on, Hart,” he says, expecting me to follow him.

  “Hey,” I shoot back to Alva. “We’ll start over next time?”

  She gives me a look like she’s not sure what to make of me. “Yeah,” she says. “Sure.”

  “Cool,” I say. I feel a huge relief, which lasts almost the whole way through dance class. A new record.

  “Oh, come on, it isn’t so terrible,” says Ms. Fitz. “Very few of you have suffered permanent injury.”

  We all grumble as we go back and try the whole dance again.

  “Though you might take a moment to apologize, if you stepped on someone’s foot just now,” Ms. Fitz calls over her shoulder.

  Something whizzes overhead and there’s a skitter of branches and leaves.

  “Are we under attack?” I ask.

  “It’s here,” says Deadeyes in an excited hush. “It’s really here!”

  “What’s here?” I ask. “What was that?”

  “That,” says Jeremy, “was a drone, my friend.”

  “Um … like the flying robot kind?”

  But Jeremy has already darted into the bushes. He calls back to me, “Ian, if you tell the teachers about this, I swear it’ll be my mission in life to make sure you can never go on the Internet ever again.”

  “Tell the teachers about what?”

  “I’m serious, Hart!”

  “How are you going to stop me from going on the Internet?”

  “If you shut your mouth you won’t have to find out!”

  “Okay, but … how can I not tell anyone, if I don’t know what I’m not supposed to tell them?”

  “Ian, st
op saying words, okay? This is my advice to you, and I think you should try it.”

  “I just don’t under—whoaaah …”

  And then I stop saying words, because Deadeyes has come out of the bushes carrying something impossible. It shines like a diamond, but it’s even better.

  “You have a phooooone,” I say with wonder.

  “Stop staring at it. You’re getting it dirty just looking at it.”

  “Where did you—?”

  “Everything you’re thinking right now,” says Deadeyes, “stop thinking it. We gotta get back to practice before Ms. Fitz gets suspicious. And you need to work on your steps. I’m still holding out hope you won’t embarrass me out there in front of everyone.”

  “Not much hope though, right?” I ask him.

  He frowns. “We have a lot of work to do.”

  So … here’s something fun, Tom.

  It turns out my partner in dance class is a cyberbully. He’s pretty notorious, actually. Made the news and stuff—he went after people online so mercilessly that the FBI hunted him down, and because Jeremy was in Canada when they caught up with him, these crazy Canadian Mounties busted down his door and arrested him. He almost wasn’t allowed to come back to America.

  “Also, you know … jail?” Ash reminds me.

  He’s being super quiet because we’re in my bunk and it’s after lights-out.

  “Yeah, but Canada!” I whisper. “Stuck there forever—isn’t that sort of cruel and unusual punishment?”

  Before he can answer, I go on. “By the way? Don’t mess with Deadeyes. He possesses some sort of black magic.”

  I tilt my head from where we are, lying low in my bunk like spies, to where Jeremy huddles under the covers in his top corner bunk. He’s trying to hide the blue glow of an LCD screen from the rest of the dorm.

  “Wait,” says Ash. “He’s got Internet? How’d he get … ?”

  “That’s what I’m saying, Ash.”

  Black magic’s the only logical explanation, Tom. How else could he summon up a shiny new cell phone in this gulag where you have to get special permission to have an electric toothbrush? He’s probably chasing down all of our online footprints right now, digging up dirt on us like a starving raccoon spelunking in our garbage.

  I seriously hope he doesn’t find that potty-training video my mom posted online when I was too little to stop her. You know, the one with the chocolate bar …

  After Ash climbs down out of the bunk, I carve a single line in the rubbery white paint that’s slathered over the cinder-block wall next to my bed. One more day closer to freedom.

  To going back to the way things used to be.

  The rest of the week goes by pretty much like that, Tom.

  Oatmeal, then dance, then group therapy … it all swirls together, like the bottom of a bowl of ice cream.

  Every morning, my body is like a rag doll held together with tape and staples and the superstrength snot that comes from a two-year-old having a meltdown. And every morning, I feel like I’m gonna be sick. That’s probably why the uniforms are this color: so your enemies can’t tell when you puke.

  And so I find myself at dinner alone one day, thinking about what Alva said about this not being my real life. The more I think about it, the surer I am that she’s right: This is not the same world I was in before I came here. It’s a different one. A parallel universe that looks almost like my own … but under the surface there are huge changes.

  And I close my eyes, and I sit there—and press my fingers into them pretty hard, trying to rub this new idiocy away. Trying to make the world stop spinning. But it doesn’t listen.

  “Are you okay, Ian?” someone asks.

  I know that voice, I think … and when I open my eyes and look up to see who it is, my left brain and my right brain lurch with surprise, and trade places, and smash together again.

  And I just sort of stare back at him, as if he’s some sort of mythological creature. A person from a whole different world.

  “Mr. Dunford?”

  Mr. Dunford stands over me with a dinner tray in his hand.

  “Hey there, buddy. Seems like you’re having a tough one. You getting the hang of the place all right?”

  “Mr. Dunford, what’re you doing here?”

  He looks around the room and then back at me. “I’m on vacation,” he says.

  “Really?” I ask.

  He stands there.

  “Oh, I get it,” I tell him.

  “Never had any doubts! But can I give you a piece of advice? Around here, think a little bit about whatever people tell you—all right?”

  “Okay, Mr. Dunford,” I say.

  “Think for yourself, don’t just say okay.” He pops a piece of food into his mouth as he speaks. “Mm-mmm! Sweet-potato tots get better every year …”

  “You come here every year?”

  “Sure,” he says. “I vacation here every summer.”

  “Oh.”

  “And by ‘vacation’ I mean ‘teach,’ Ian.”

  “Right.”

  He claps me on the shoulder and starts away. “M-mm! Hey, don’t snooze too long on these tantalizing tubers, guppies!” he advises Miranda’s table. “You’ll miss out if you wait.”

  The girls all look at him like he’s speaking a language that went extinct because everyone who spoke it kept going insane.

  “See you later for second rotation,” he tells them.

  “What’s second rotation?” one of the clones asks.

  But Dunford doesn’t hear her, because he’s singing a made-up theme song called “An Ode to Sweet-Potato Tots.”

  “Second rotation!” says Mr. Dunford the next afternoon in the classroom where Dr. Ginschlaugh usually tortures us. “It’s time to turn the page now. So, whatever you’ve done to land yourself in this place, it’s in the past—and now we will focus on what’s ahead of you, okay? Swimming, and surrounding yourself with other people who … you know—”

  He waves away his words like a cloud of smoke, in a way that’s very familiar to me and my friends.

  “New things!” he booms on. “Adventures and unexpected experiences and all that. Blah blah blah.”

  It’s nice to have Dunford back.

  “So what’s next, you ask?” he says. “Well! Let’s talk about getting a job …”

  Okay I take it back, Dunford. I didn’t miss you at all.

  He’s up at the whiteboard writing a list or something. Amid the squeak of dry-erase marker, he continues:

  “This class is all about understanding your role in the community. Learning to have a positive impact on what’s going on in your world. So. Up on the board you’ll see several community-service assignments.”

  He arcs a thumb toward the six available assignments listed on the board, each with a limited number of spaces beneath them. “You will all choose one of these, and it will be your job for the rest of your time here. I know it’s a big decision, so go ahead and look at these packets, and take a moment to discuss among yourselves.”

  Immediately the class erupts into panicked whispers.

  “One more thing to keep in mind!” Dunford offers. “All choices are final.”

  “Okay, okay,” says Mark, pulling us into a huddle. “What’s our plan here?”

  “We should go in for the state park cleanup crew,” says Ash. “Reasons? Being outside. Also, the possibility of jumping in a creek. Also, being outside.”

  “Sounds fun,” I say. “But it’s gonna be popular—we might not all get to stay together.”

  “What about volunteering at the county courthouse?” says Mark. I can see the gleam in his eye.

  “That’s our Mark,” says Devon. “Always keeping an eye on the future.”

  “What do you think we should do, Dev?”

  “They all suck,” he says. “Do whatever you want. Go make a difference in the world or whatever.”

  Mark’s eyes fall to the floor in embarrassment. “We should stick together, I think.”
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  “Yeah,” says Ash.

  “We just have to pick a crappy one nobody wants,” I suggest.

  “Well,” says Mark. “I guess a crappy job wouldn’t suck so bad, as long as we’re all doing it.”

  “It’ll still suck too bad to even consider,” Devon says.

  “All right, everyone. Time’s up! Make your way to the front,” instructs Dunford.

  We all exchange a look and walk to the front of the room.

  “You guys sure about this?” says Mark. “We can’t take it back.”

  Nobody says anything: We just shrug and nod.

  “Then it’s decided,” says Mark. “We’re volunteering at the children’s hospital.”

  The next day a bus pulls up in front of the school to take a load of bleary-eyed bullies to their new jobs.

  Devon and Mark are whispering in the seat way in the back; Alva and Cole are fighting in the middle; and these three girls who are part of Miranda’s clone army but didn’t get to tag along with her on her assignment at the state park are grumbling about it, way in the front. I look at Ash expectantly as he quietly pulls out his dad’s book—

  And the whole mess around us disappears.

  Ash and I have been making a game out of reading it when nobody’s looking, Tom. We’ve been trading who gets to carry it each day, and it’s probably the best surprise about the whole summer, me and exploring that crazy story with Ash.

  We don’t say a word the whole bus ride—just duck low in our seat and turn the pages, laughing at all the same places.

  And then, when we get to the children’s hospital, another surprise: They don’t make us wear our salmon uniforms.

  “Well now! That’s easier to look at,” says the nurse who is in charge of us. He exhales in relief at how we look in our new papery, green, poncho-looking hospital uniforms.

  “It’s less nuclear,” Cole agrees—both approving and suspicious.

  “What next, Nurse Norse?” says Alva.

  Okay. His name isn’t really Nurse Norse, but Vikings are called Norsemen, and he’s kind of a giant awesome Viking guy, from the way he looks.

  As he shows us the ropes, it becomes clear that we’re not supposed to do anything, or touch anything, or even ask questions. Basically, we’re allowed to deliver mail and take meals to the patients. And we’re allowed to breathe—though there have been a few angry looks about us taking liberties with that last thing.