In the Company of Crazies (6 page)

“Quickly, everyone,” Gretchen said. “Quietly.”

It took me awhile to realize that nobody but John had chosen a seat yet. They were waiting for me, for very different reasons. But in order to do so without looking obvious, everyone was shifting around the room, which was making John very upset. Drew seemed to take this as a sign and sat down on the exact far side of the same couch where John sat. His legs bounced up and down with the precision of a piston engine. Billy, still in army fatigues, took a chair by the door. He started complaining for everyone to sit down, loudly and then under his breath.

I decided to sit on the couch right in between Drew and John. It seemed a fairly safe place to be. Considering.

“Move,” Tommy said. He was suddenly standing right in front of John.

It reminded me of the lunchroom at school, or the camp bus or the auditorium, or anywhere there are seats and people, and people picking where they are going to sit. Those on the upper end of the food chain get to pick where they will sit and the ones on the lower end are out of luck.

It's the same everywhere.

But John didn't budge. He acted as if he hadn't heard. So Tommy kicked him.

“Get up. I'm sitting here,” Tommy said.

John looked straight ahead.

“Move, blockhead.” Tommy kicked him again, this time a little harder. But John didn't budge.

“Everyone has fifteen seconds to find a seat,” Gretchen announced. I knew she could see what was going on with John and Tommy, but she didn't do anything about it. She just started counting. I thought she had picked an odd number to count to. Even in preschool they usually only give you to the count of five. Ten at the most.

John started breathing really hard. And he was big, so his chest was moving way up and down.

“I will not move,” John said. “This is my seat. I came down especially early. I always sit here on Wednesday nights. I have been here since…” John looked at his watch. It was the first movement he made. “Since seven twenty-three p.m.”

Most everyone else had found somewhere to sit the floor, a chair, or the other couch. One of the younger boys in flannel pajamas sat on the piano bench with Mr. Simone.

“Ten, eleven…”

John was frozen again, like a soldier. Tommy finally turned his glare over to Drew, and Drew slithered to the floor. Tommy took the recently vacated spot next to me.

“Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.” And everyone was sitting. Gretchen looked satisfied.

“It's Wednesday night,” she then began. “But before we can have our regular evening reading, I want to discuss behavior for tomorrow's trip.”

There was a quiet rumble of voices, but I couldn't tell if it was because this was something to look forward to or dread. Gretchen closed her mouth and waited for the quiet to return, which it promptly did.

“Mr. Simone has a list of the children he will be taking in his car. Karen has her list and Sam will be driving as well,” Gretchen went on.

The name
Sam
definitely brought out a little cheer and made me wonder who he was.

“We will be leaving right after first morning period. Maggie will pack our lunches. And remember…” Gretchen lifted her chin. She was almost swallowed up by that big chair but somehow her voice filled the room. The energy of twitching limbs and tapping and shifting, of being too still for too long, was held down while she talked.

“There will be no foul language. No hitting. No touching of any kind. No throwing. No rude noises, natural or otherwise. No loud voices during the car ride. Respect yourself and respect one another.”

I got the feeling that for every forbidden act there had been a lewd or indecent incident that everyone in this room knew about but me. Gretchen was winding down. I could tell she was tired. A long day? Old age? Or simply the expenditure of all the energy required to be a mean bitch? Gretchen rested for a minute.

But no one moved. Not yet.

“Is that understood by all?” Gretchen then finished.

All the boys nodded with varying degrees of enthusiasm or sarcasm, but Gretchen waited until everyone had shown her, one by one, that he had heard. I noticed that she allowed for a certain degree of extraneous noise during this accounting.

“And now, can we begin,” Gretchen said, because it wasn't a question. She opened the book on her lap and then, in an apparent change of mind, passed the book to Mr. Simone. I watched him take a breath, about to start. “Where are we going?” I heard my voice.

I looked around. When the attention focused on me, the room got still. Even the twitching and shifting stopped. Only John was still squeezing his rubber ball. And now that it was quiet in the room, I could actually hear the air going in and out, like a respirator.

Some of the boys giggled, and I knew Gretchen wouldn't like that. She was so serious. This was probably a trip to some government building to watch how they make postage stamps, or worse, one of those simulated pioneer villages where all the people working there act like they never saw a Game Boy before. Or one of those museums with life-size statues showing daily existence in prehistoric times, and all the boys would go nuts over the models of cavewomen without their shirts on.

“We are going bowling,” Gretchen said finally.

* * *

Night was the hardest. That night, again it felt like I was alone in the world and nothing was all right.

There was a little table lamp in my room but I couldn't reach it from the bed. If I wanted to leave it on and read or look at a magazine, I'd have to get up and walk across the freezing-cold floor when I was ready to go to sleep. I had to keep telling myself that it would be better in the morning.

That a person can tolerate anything, as long as they know it's going to end.

And this was going to end soon. A couple more days. Think of the people in this world who had it so much worse than I did. There were plane crashes, and cancer, and the Holocaust.

I thought about all that for a while until I was so frightened I couldn't move.

The moonlight came right into the room and spread across the wood floor like a luminous blanket. It made the room seem bigger and scarier and kind of lopsided. Or maybe it
was
lopsided. The floorboards were so old and rickety. I think the whole room slanted to the right.

I yanked the covers loose from the bottom of the bed so that I could sit up to look out the window and still pull the blanket up to my face.

There he was. I put my hand up to the window at the same time he did. I could barely make out his figure but I was sure it was Drew. He waved his hand back and forth and then he was gone.

* * *

I dreamed that night that I was dreaming. In my dream I woke up and thought I was home, but I wasn't. It was like a cruel trick my mind had played on me. It was part feeling, part sound, part sight, part words. Partly real. Partly not.

A dream like a nightmare.

Like a Mountain Laurel field trip.

* * *

Billy, if turned out, was an excellent bowler, which was a good thing because he kept telling us how awesome he was the whole ride over in Sam's pickup. Sam was the Mountain Laurel handyman, I learned. Billy told me Sam did pretty much everything. He was also the one who worked all day with Angel no matter what he was doing, which explained why Angel was never in class. So whether Sam was fixing one of Gretchen's cars or building a greenhouse or putting up deer fencing, Angel was doing it too.

Except bowling, apparently. Angel was in Karen's car with Carl and Drew and two other boys. Mr. Simone got one more, plus Tommy and John.

I'm guessing Mr. Simone didn't have kids. Or he didn't have boys. Or he just hadn't been teaching very long because even I knew it was a big mistake when he directed Tommy over to the lanes to plug everyone's name into the bowling-computer-console thing while Mr. Simone stood in line for shoes. We had two lanes. We were supposed to have one with bumpers, but it didn't work out that way.

Karen was talking to the manager about that.

Sam was in the bathroom running cold water over Drew's fingers. Drew had already smashed his hand between two balls when he was trying to pick one from the rack. Tommy sat at the console typing furiously and laughing.

“That's stupid,” I said to Tommy. I was sitting in one of the molded plastic seats around the scorekeeper's station, or whatever it's called.

“What?” Tommy answered as if “what” were an answer.

We both looked up at the wide screen, where an interesting X-rated version of everyone's name was lit up in green.

“Putting those kinds of words up there,” I said. “They're just going to reset the whole thing and you won't get to play. So why do it?”

Tommy looked at me like I was some kind of an idiot.

Carl thought it was hilarious, though. So did Billy. But not Mr. Simone, who had lost all his sense of humor—he had very little to begin with—at the bowling-shoe counter. He didn't appreciate having to go back to the counter and ask the guy with the seventy bazillion tattoos to reset the computer. Tommy had to sit out the first round of bowling.

But it wasn't until the boy who unstuck stuck balls from the gutter came over to our lane for the fifth time that I started to wonder how this must all look to an outsider. He was a skinny kid with the butt of his blue jeans nearing the back of his knees. That was mostly all I got to see of him as he walked down the raised rim between the lanes and gave the ball a little push. This sent the ball straight into the black hole of the unknown where it would somehow pop back up into the console thingy where, of course, Mr. Simone now sat in control.

“Aw, give me another chance,” Billy called out to the boy with the baggy jeans.

The boy turned and looked up at Billy. “Huh?”

“Can you roll it back this way instead?” Billy said. “I don't want a gutter ball.”

“Nobody does,” the kid said, but he lifted the purple marbleized ball out of the gutter and gave it a push toward Billy.

“Thanks,” Billy said, waving.

The boy hiked up his jeans and started walking back. Maybe he didn't notice anything. It was just another night at the bowling alley and we were just another bunch of bad bowlers.

Billy bowled a 145. Tommy got an 80, mostly because he kept spinning around like Fred Flintstone and shouting “Yabba dabba doo” and then losing his ball in the next person's lane. I got a 95, because I really stink. Drew bowled a 40 because he could barely lift the smallest ball we could find for him, even after his fingers felt better.

Carl refused to finish after he sat on a hot dog and spent the last hour with his back to the wall, hiding the mustard stain on his ass.

John didn't play at all, because the little vent on the side of the ball return that blows air wasn't working and he couldn't dry his hands and Karen wouldn't let him switch to the other lane.

No, nobody wants a gutter ball.

* * *

I didn't make my bed Friday morning because I was leaving. I had one knee on my bed and I was looking out the window. I had my coat and hat on. I knew that upstairs in the House all the boys were stripping their beds and washing up. Getting ready to leave for the weekend.

I could watch for my mother's car and watch what was going on with everyone else at the same time. My mom would come, I figured, because my dad had brought me. I was entertaining myself with thoughts of how distant I would act when she got here. I let the time pass with various daydreams of how I would get her to feel guilty. I was so deeply involved in my different scenarios, I let my eyes lock into a blurry stare until I could no longer see outside the window to the chairs and the ground and the house below, but I saw myself in the window's reflection.

I look like my father. And Cecily looks like our mom. Someone once told us that the first child always looks like the father on the outside but is more like the mother on the inside. And the second child is the opposite. It's some kind of bioenergetic theory. But it seems to hold true with us Singers since I have my dad's dark hair and tall body while Cecily is lighter in color and more
petite,
as my mom likes to say. It was sort of our family joke or family teasing—whenever one of us was a little too emotional or excitable or didn't think before they said something, that was our mom's trait. That was me.

And if someone was a little too critical or withdrawn, that was more like Cecily and our dad.

So for the longest time I remember thinking I didn't have a choice. I have straight, dark hair. I was born that way. I have long toes, with the second toe stretching out past my big toe. So does my dad. I was born that way. And I was always the too-sensitive one.

Cecily was the rational one, the one you want next to you in battle. She was only eight but Cecily was the one who made the obligatory call to Grandma because she knew it was the right thing to do. I was the one who stomped off when we decided to go to the Outback instead of the Olive Garden. (God, what was the matter with me?) I was too dramatic. Overwrought. I was born that way. I was the crazy one.