In the Company of Crazies (2 page)

My dad took my suitcase out of the trunk and started to carry it toward the house, but Gretchen stopped him.

“She can do that, Mr. Singer. It's time for you to say good-bye,” she said. “It's almost time for period two. We are already behind schedule. I will call you tonight as I told you I would.”

This time my father looked at me.
He can't do this,
I
thought.
He's not going to just leave. Just because this midget Nazi told him to.

“It will be fine, Mia. I'll talk to you soon,” my dad said. “I love you.”

He stepped toward me like he wanted to hug, but I turned away. I didn't say anything. He couldn't have it both ways. He couldn't. I could make sure he felt bad the whole way home, but as he drove away I knew I was going to feel worse than he would.

A lot worse.

Mountain Laurel.

Karen says is you don't want anyone, mainly her, to react what you've written in your journal, you just fold that page over. Which is really stupid, because as soon as you fold over the page, you're going to look like you're hiding something. So then you probably are.

* * *

The very first time I ever shoplifted, if really
was
because I wanted something. Believe it or not, it was a bottle of perfume. It was more than a year ago. I was only twelve. I didn't even
wear
perfume. I still don't wear perfume. It makes me sneeze and besides, it's not like me at all. I'm more like the Nike-wearing, ponytail-and-hooded-sweatshirt type.

I was at the mall with my best friend, Marcella. It was our first trip to the mall by ourselves. Well, by ourselves with two cell phones and explicit directions. My mother told me to call home every hour on the hour. At the top of every half hour, we had to call Marcella's mother.

I had fifty dollars in my wallet. I knew Marcella had more.

At first we just walked around, poking into stores and walking around some more. I had been to the mall millions of times with my mom, but somehow it seemed like there was more stuff there that day. There was anything I wanted. Anything within fifty dollars, that is, minus tax. Minus lunch.

“I'm hungry; are you?” Marcella said after about an hour of window-shopping and our first two phone calls.

“Not really.” But just thinking about eating made me hungry when only a second ago I wasn't. “But I'll go with you,” I said. My stomach growled.

By the time we found the food court, I was starving. I think if she had gotten Chinese food or something, I probably would have shared with her. But Marcella got a slice of pizza and a soda. I got a drink of water and, as it was, that cost me twenty-five cents for the Styrofoam cup.

“It's okay. I told you I wasn't hungry,” I insisted for the second time. I was already down to $49.75.

I saw the bottle of perfume at one of those kiosk cart things in the middle of the mall. There was just one girl sitting there on a stool, looking really bored. She had all sorts of stuff on her cart, mostly hair accessories—headbands and barrettes. There were long hair extensions in all colors, natural and unnatural, hanging from the top shelf. And on the far end, away from the girl on her stool, were bottles of perfume.

Marcella was trying on a crocheted hat and looking at herself in the little mirror that was propped up between the hair combs and the glitter powder. I wasn't about to waste my money on something junky, so I wandered around the four sides of the cart while Marcella tried to make up her mind.

The silver and blue cylinder-shaped bottle caught my eye. I had seen the advertisements for that perfume on TV lots of times. In the TV commercial this young woman, kind of an older teenage girl, is walking down the street in Paris with her hair swinging from side to side.

I don't even think I
wanted
the perfume until I saw it sitting there. Then all I could think of was the girl in the commercial, the music, and everyone looking at her thinking she was so beautiful and confident.

The price for all the perfumes in that section was masking-taped to the shelf: $24.99.

It's not like I'm so dumb. I didn't think I'd be transported to the streets of France and my hair would suddenly go from dark and wavy to blond and straight and swing from side to side behind me. There was just something that made me want that perfume.

Twenty-four ninety-nine was more than I was willing to spend, especially for something I didn't need. I knew other girls who stole things. I was in the pharmacy once, the one right in town, and I watched Chrissy Babcock drop a 3 Musketeers bar into her coat pocket.

When she got outside, all her friends circled around her, laughing and cheering.

It seemed so easy. And nobody got hurt.

Marcella must still have been looking at herself in the mirror. I could tell by her voice coming from the other side of the cart that she really liked the hat. The girl on the stool seemed to agree, although she hadn't budged off her perch. I took the silver bottle and held it in my hands.

I just wanted it. I wanted something. Something I couldn't have. So I let it slip right out of my hand and gently into my pocket, where it quietly remained for the rest of my time in the mall, all the way home in the car with Marcella's mom, and all the way up to my room. I felt excited. And scared. And sick. All at the same time.

I never opened the perfume bottle, never broke the plastic seal. I didn't dare put it out on my shelf, where it might have looked pretty at least, because someone might have seen it.

I didn't want to use it because I don't like perfume but also because then I'd use it up. I hid it in a plastic bag, in a shoe box in the back of my closet.

I still have it.

Honest.

* * *

“Everyone, I'd like you to meet Mia,” Gretchen said, like it was a big announcement, and even though I figured she would do something like that, I sunk down in my seat. We were all sitting at this really long table, in the dining room.

I had spent most of the day with Karen, who was one of the teachers at Mountain Laurel. I mean, I guess she was a teacher. She was an adult anyway. First, Karen showed me around the farmhouse, Gretchen's house. She pointed out the bathroom and Gretchen's office; both were locked. She explained that all the teachers had a key for the bathroom. She took me outside and into the long classroom building where I had first seen all the faces and then across the way to the nursery school. That's where my room was, on a renovated floor above the nursery school. When (if?) other girls joined the school, we would share this room. It was big enough. There were three empty beds.

Karen had the room across the hall from mine. There was a bathroom (unlocked) and shower between us. The stairs leading up actually passed right through the nursery school. I could see the little kids busy playing and coloring and building with blocks. I almost walked right by. I didn't notice it right away, but something out of the corner of my eye told me this scene was not quite right.

On our way back out, I made it a point to look more closely. These kids all had problems, real problems—the kind of problems you can see and hear if you listen. Some clearly had Down's syndrome, and I wondered how I could have missed that on my way in. A couple of the kids were wearing helmets. One boy was in a wheelchair.

By now it was five o'clock, time to come into Gretchen's house for dinner.

It wasn't until I was inside, finally left alone to think a minute, that I realized this wasn't a school that looked like someone's house; rather, it was someone's house that looked very little like a school, which was infinitely worse. And it only remotely looked like a school because there was more of everything. The table had a lot more chairs around it. The kitchen had more stacks of plates and more cups. The stove had more burners. The mud-room had a long row of hooks, coats and jackets. On the floor were scattered lots and lots of ratty shoes.

Which was another awful thing.

You had to take off your shoes when you came into the house. Nobody wore shoes in Gretchen's house except Gretchen. She had a pair of shoes that looked like little worn-out Chinese slippers.

I hate not having my shoes on.

I don't know what it is or when it started. I'm sure I went barefoot when I was a baby, just like every other baby. But somewhere along the line I came to hate bare feet. Even in the summer, I wear shoes. I don't even like sandals. I like socks. With shoes on top of them.

But not in Gretchen's house.

Mountain Laurel.

Everybody here is crazy.

Maybe I'll fit right in.

* * *

So the reason everyone got upset about my phone call to the attendance secretary wasn't just because I, obviously, wasn't dead and therefore should have been in school. The reason everyone got really upset with me was because on that day one year before, there
was
someone who had died in my school.

Debbie Sanders.

I didn't know Debbie very well. Hardly at all. She was in the grade above me. We lived on the same street so she rode my bus. Or I rode
her
bus. And we were both on the middle-school volleyball team. Debbie died in a “freak” car accident. That's what they call it when somebody dies when nobody should have. As if there could be a kind of car accident where somebody
should
die. But you know when there's an accident and everybody is so relieved because they say, if the car had been just one fraction of an inch to the left or the right, or if it had happened a second earlier or a second later or whatever, they would have hit that tree and died?

Well, Debbie's accident
was
that one fraction of an inch and that single second. And she died.

A freak accident.

Nobody knew it until the next morning, though. She was one of about fifteen of us who were supposed to show up at the VFW that night for the fund-raising ziti dinner. She was actually one of two kids who didn't come.

Joanne Murphy and her mom weren't there either.

Everyone on the girls' volleyball team had sold tickets to the dinner, ten dollars a plate. Then all the parents donated the food and the players cooked and served it that night. Each of us got a big round table to wait on, and even though there was only one choice ziti—it was still kind of fun. Like playing restaurant. There were more girls than tables, so when Debbie Sanders and Joanne Murphy didn't show up, it actually worked out better. Every girl got to wait on her own table.

There was a ton of work to do and we had to do it really fast. The dinner started at 6:30. The moms were cooking pasta like crazy, and most of us were setting up the tables. We had to drag the heavy chairs from where they were stacked up against the wall. Twelve place settings at every table. Plastic utensils wrapped in a paper napkin. A tall plastic cup and one glass Parmesan cheese dispenser. (The VFW let us use theirs.) Then, when the people started showing up, it got even more hectic. Every girl was running around, filling up glasses of lemonade and plates of ziti. It was advertised as “all you can eat,” which I had never really understood until that night. Some people really like to take advantage of that.

Nobody had time to call Debbie or Joanne.

It turned out that Joanne Murphy was doing her homework and she just forgot all about it.

“It was last night?” she said the next day in school. “I can't believe it. I had my tennis lesson. Then my math tutor. I just completely forgot!”

“Yeah, right,” Marcella said. “The whole team is really furious with you.”

Which was true for a few minutes that morning, until we found out what happened to Debbie Sanders. Then nobody cared that Joanne Murphy had crapped out on the all-you-can-eat ziti dinner.

* * *

“Stand up, Mia,” Gretchen said. She raised her hands in the air and gestured up and down like she thought she could move things with just her will.

“Come now. Stand up.” It was an order apparently. I think everything Gretchen said was an order. And I noticed already that everyone obeyed. Even the grown-ups.

I stood up.

It was pretty dark in the dining room. There were a few lights in the living room, but only one table lamp was on, and only one dim light hung from the ceiling above the dining table. It was definitely one of those houses where they are always worrying about money and trying to save energy because it was cold, like the heat was down. Way down. My feet were freezing.

Still, I could see all the faces looking right at me. The same faces I saw through the window in the rectangle building. They called that the School House. The main building, what I first thought was a farmhouse, Gretchen's house, where the boys' rooms were upstairs, where we were now sitting down to eat dinner, was simply called the House. As if there were no other house in the world.

The House.

“I want everyone to meet Mia,” Gretchen said.