Order in the Court (13 page)

I FELT
like I was going to an AA meeting, not a support group for survivors of violent crime. The flyer had been deceptively welcoming; I remembered the softness of Dr. Wagner’s voice when she told me about it, gently insinuating that going to a group is a viable substitute for medication—I’d be able to talk about my experiences with people who
understood
, she said. It was a good
intermediary
, she said. I’d be able to share more often than at the few meetings I’d been able to schedule with her.

My mother was a huge supporter of the idea from the moment she saw the flyer. I went along with it to appease her.

The activity room of the retirement home smelled musty, that cloying smell of dead skin, sickness, and lotion that clings to the elderly. It was the space rented out for AA meetings and NA meetings and anything else with “anonymous” in the acronym. It was a den of anonymity, with the occasional resident staring blankly with rheumy eyes as they passed the doorway, left open for any stragglers. Nurses kept their distance. Sometimes a confused Alzheimer’s sufferer would join in, the coordinator told me quietly. Sometimes their stories were the best of the night.

I was early, the first to arrive, and had to sit next to the coordinator to not seem rude. I sipped at burned coffee from a Styrofoam cup while she explained to me how this usually went. Her name was Beatrice, and she’d been mugged ten years ago in a Walmart parking lot. She had developed agoraphobia after the incident, scared to step foot out her door, until her over-the-phone psychiatrist convinced her to come to a meeting—and she’d been hooked.

“I’ve been a volunteer for almost five years now,” she told me proudly after telling me her story. “We usually get five or six people on Thursdays, but sometimes as many as a dozen.”

A timid man entered the room, pushing his sleeves up to his elbows and rubbing the insides of his wrists as he approached us. His glasses were sliding down his long nose, but he seemed not to notice. “Oh, hello, Liam!” Beatrice boomed. I winced; so much for anonymity.

“Neal,” the man corrected, and from his voice I surmised it wasn’t the first time the mistake had been made. He didn’t push up his glasses, but instead removed them and gave them a quick polish on his sleeve.

“Right, of course.” Beatrice turned to me, all white teeth and dimpled cheeks. “Liam, this is Corey.” I was surprised she’d gotten my name right.

“Nice to meet you, Neal,” I said, offering my hand for him to shake, as I’d done for Beatrice. He declined the handshake but seemed pleased I said his name correctly. He took a seat on Beatrice’s other side. There were four empty chairs, completing an intimate circle.

I quietly sipped my coffee while others filtered in. Within minutes there were three more of us: a girl with black hair down to her waist and a cast on her wrist, a man who walked with a limp but refused to be helped to his seat, and a woman with a bad blonde dye job who kept picking at her fingernails.

The man with the limp sat next to me, and I anxiously tugged down my skirt—a dark tweed one borrowed from my mother that still felt too short, even with nylons on. I felt like a child playing dress-up, but she had insisted I looked nice. Everyone else was wearing jeans, except Beatrice.

After another woman took the last place in the circle, Beatrice seemed to decide that it was time to start. We went around the circle and said our names. “Hi I’m Corey” was met with a chorus of “Welcome, Corey” and so it went. Beatrice asked how everyone was feeling, and again we went in a circle: “I’m doing okay” and “Just gettin’ by” type answers from everyone.

I watched the clock as everyone took turns talking about their days, sometimes mentioning the event that they’d survived but sometimes not. The girl with the cast, Paige, was probably a little younger than me and talked quietly about being assaulted at a high school party; she was the target of bullying, had been for a while, and it had finally escalated to physical violence.

“I can’t see an invite to an event on Facebook without thinking about it,” she said, rubbing her cast. “I keep thinking about—about being tied to the tree and—and I get these panic attacks, y’know?”

“We’ve all been there,” Beatrice said, and there was a murmur of agreement.

“I just keep thinking that I’m still tied up, that I was never found, and I feel claustrophobic, like my lungs are closing up, and I’m still trapped,” Paige continued, wiping at her eyes, and I felt a wave of sympathy for her. “I just keep thinking that I’m never going to feel safe again, not with them still out there.”

“They weren’t arrested?” I asked, and Paige shook her head.

“Three days’ suspension,” she said, then laughed. “I get a broken wrist, and they get a fucking vacation.” No one told her to watch her language. Everyone just nodded, understanding her frustration. It was rather refreshing.

Paige dug through her purse for a tissue and then blew her nose loudly. Beatrice took that as an opening to address me.

“There’s no pressure, Corey, for you to tell us what brought you here today,” she started, and I immediately felt the opposite. Everyone’s eyes were on me, the newcomer. “But this is a safe space, and the first step on the road to recovery is to share what happened to you. So, if you’re comfortable, why don’t you tell us a little about yourself, and see if maybe we can work up to that.”

I put down my Styrofoam cup and tucked it behind the leg of my orange plastic chair so that I wouldn’t crush it if I got angry again. “My name is Corey,” I said and then stopped, flushing with embarrassment. The group did the automatic reply of “Welcome, Corey,” although we’d already done introductions. “And I’m a freshman at McMinn. I skipped a grade,” I added when some of the adults looked surprised.

I lowered my eyes, examining everybody’s shoes. Neal wore white tennis shoes, polished clean. Paige had on a pair of black ballet flats. Dawn, the mother of two with the badly dyed hair, and Beatrice both sported black, heeled boots at the end of their legs, crossed at the ankles. The other woman, Lillian, wore Doc Martens, and the limping man, Dan, wore muddy cowboy boots.

How could I describe what brought me to this place that smelled of dying people and mashed potatoes? I closed my eyes and considered it. What I decided on was: “I witnessed a multiple homicide… the murder of my girlfriend, our two best friends, and a bystander,” a sentence that seemed to convey the severity of my experience without getting into details. I heard someone gasp a little, probably Paige. She blew her nose again as I continued. “They were shot by my girlfriend’s brother, and I have to testify at the trial.”

When I opened my eyes, a pair of gladiator sandals had joined the circle. Pink toenails, delicate ankles, bare feet despite the nip in the air. Who wears sandals in November? I hadn’t heard her come in, but I kept my eyes down, pretending not to notice as she dragged a chair into the circle. “So, um, that’s why I’m here. I have nightmares about—about checking my girlfriend’s pulse afterward, and being covered in their blood. I was hiding in the bathroom when it happened, so I guess I have survivor’s guilt.”

Gladiator sandals inserted herself between Neal and Paige. I looked up and locked eyes with her—familiar, startled green eyes in a round, pink face framed by a dark bob of brown hair. A spark of panic ignited under my collarbone, a little point of fire between my lungs.

“That’s awful,” Paige said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.” The rest of the group parroted the sentiment. Gladiator sandals murmured the words “Sorry for your loss,” her eyes wider than usual, the shock of recognition reflected in her delicate features.

“Valerie, welcome,” Beatrice said. “As always, better late than never.” She turned to me with the soft eyes of a mother and touched my shoulder delicately. I glanced between Beatrice and Valerie, the girl with the gladiator sandals.

“Valerie, welcome,” I said, feeling like an idiot. She nodded in acknowledgment of the mutual recognition.
I know you and you know me
, I thought.
So much for anonymity.

THE LOBBY
was stuffy and hot, and everyone pulled at their sweaty costumes ineffectually as we were divided into groups and assigned neighborhoods. It was a good turnout—plenty of Spider-Man costumes and witches, a female Ghostbuster flirting with a sexy nurse, a few bunnies and pirates, and a werewolf who kept pulling his rubber mask off to gulp in a few precious mouthfuls of oxygen. Abby and I had raided a thrift store for our go-go outfits, and Sasha flounced confidently around in a Frank N. Furter costume consisting of a corset, feather boa, and fishnet stockings.

The Pride group at the university had a pretty large member base, even with its limited resources and support from the administration. It was still surprising to see so many of “us” in one place, even though it was my third such meeting. My high school GSA of twelve students and sometimes their friends was a joke in comparison, and this wasn’t even a large chapter, according to some of the members who had been a part of larger ones.

“Group Five: Corey Nguyen,” I winced at the hard N-G combo but turned obediently toward Michaela, the group’s vice president, as she called out my group. “Aleksander Bobrik, Abby Ingram, Valerie Mason, and Layla Turner, you’re taking Front Street to Bay.” She handed Abby the card, since she was closest. On it was a miniscule map with our domain helpfully highlighted and a short script of what to say on the back.

Valerie was the aforementioned sexy nurse. She had short brown hair that curled around her ears in a classic bob, and big green eyes that made her look perpetually startled. Her face was flushed as she waved good-bye to the Ghostbuster, who was assigned to a different group. Layla joined us shortly after, wearing a
Star Trek
uniform.

“Hi?” Layla said shyly, tugging ineffectually at the hem of her dress. It was nearly short enough to expose her underwear. “I’m Layla?” Everything that came out of her mouth sounded like a question, a higher pitch at the end than at the beginning. It was endearing.

“Come on, we’ve got to get down to Front Street before the big kids come out,” Valerie said impatiently, taking charge of our group. “If we can get most of our area covered before the teenagers start making their rounds, people won’t lock their doors when they see us coming.”

Despite her bossy nature and perpetually startled eyes, Valerie was an instantly likeable person. She walked with an easy confidence I envied, and was not shy to say exactly what was on her mind. She made clever decisions, like commandeering a lost shopping cart from a ditch to put our donations in. She walked down the center of the street while we paired off—Abby with me and Sasha leading tentative Layla—and covered both sides of Front Street.

It was surprisingly fun to go trick-or-treating again. I hadn’t gone since I’d started high school, when it suddenly became uncool to ask for candy from strangers. Instead everyone had gone to parties, like the disaster of a party my senior year when I’d nearly been forced out of the closet—or into it, rather, with Lisa Zimmerman, in a game of seven minutes in heaven.

Abby and I took turns giving the little spiel on the back of the card; “Trick or treat! We’re students from McMinn University and we’re collecting donations of nonperishable food items for the food bank in lieu of candy tonight.”

Between bouts of kindergartners and toddlers out for the first time, our timing was indeed perfect. We managed to get caught behind one such group, a couple of adorable three- and four-year-olds with harried-looking parents, and each house we hit was happy to give us whatever was in their pantry. In no time our plastic pumpkins were full of canned beans, Campbell’s soup, boxes of Kraft Dinner, and packets of ramen noodles. Some of them also insisted on giving us candy as well, as a reward for our hard work.

People were generous after looking into the excited upturned faces of tiny superheroes and princesses. Every three houses or so I’d make a run to Valerie, who was walking along the street with the cart, to empty one of the pumpkins.

“You guys are doing much better than Q&A over there,” she told me on my fifth or sixth deposit, nodding toward Sasha and Layla across the street. I didn’t ask what she meant; she was making fun of Layla’s voice.

“Let’s reconvene at the end of the block,” I said and hurried up the next driveway to meet Abby at the door. “Trick or treat! We’re students from McMinn….”

At the end of the street we switched partners, and the distributions of donations evened out. We’d lost our welcome wagon of preschoolers when we turned the corner, and so we were the first faces of the night for many people. With the street change so too did the demographic, and suddenly we were out of grandmother territory and into the run-down rental properties of bachelors and university students. Still, we managed to convince the occupants to fork over their boxes of Kraft Dinner, their cans of tuna, their untouched bags of dry pasta. Guilt is a powerful motivator.

When it was Layla’s turn to speak, she read her lines from the card in her shaking hands, “Trick or treat? We’re students from McMinn University? And we’re collecting donations of nonperishable food items for the food bank in lieu of candy tonight?”

“Let’s cut McMinn out of it,” I suggested to a terrified Layla three houses into our new partnership. “We both look young enough to be high school students. We can work with that.”

And I was right. We got more donations than ever when we started saying instead, “We’re students collecting donations of nonperishable food items,” shortening the spiel by a third.

Layla grew more confident with every house. “Would you like to help our cause?” slipped out unbidden at one house, impromptu rather than scripted. She beamed for the next three houses.

By the end of the street, Layla and I had collected more food than Sasha and Abby. I mean, it wasn’t a competition. But we totally won.

We took turns pushing the heavy shopping cart back to our starting point, the lobby of the university library. It was much fuller than I expected. Valerie was singing and whooping as we passed curious third- and fourth-graders coming out for the second shift of trick-or-treating.