The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place (5 page)

Glaring at me, Kaitlin said, “I'll go get Gloria.”

Gloria arrived, went into the bathroom, and a minute later came out and said, “Who did this?”

The girls shrugged. Alicia said, “When we came back, we all saw that one of the showers wasn't working, so we doubled up and used the other one.”

Stacey added, “Ashley was last. We forgot to tell her the one on the right was stopped up.”

Kaitlin said, “On the left.”

Stacey blushed. “I meant the one on the left.” She quickly added, “It was working last night. Something must have happened this afternoon when the rest of us were on our nature walk.”

—friendly guidance

Glaring at me, Gloria said, “I'll get Jake to fix it.”

W
e were miles past the camp when I asked Uncle Alex, “Do you think that Mrs. Kaplan has a narcissistic personality disorder?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Well, for one thing, a person who suffers from narcissistic personality disorder has a huge sense of self-importance, and Mrs. Kaplan must think she is so important that she is plural. She always says
we
for
I.
She does it all the time. There is no one else in the room, but it's
‘we
ask,'
‘we
require,'
‘we
do not allow,' and
‘we
want.' An awful lot of
‘we
want.'”

Uncle chuckled. “I don't know about personality disorders, Margitkám. I only know about three kinds of
we.”
He settled himself deeper into the car seat and inched himself around so that we better faced each other. “First,” he said, “there is the real
we
—the plural—that means I plus others. Then there is the editorial
we.
News anchors say
we
a lot. They are speaking for themselves and others—their bosses at the station, I guess. And finally, there is the royal
we.
A queen will say,
‘We are not amused.' That is Mrs. Kaplan. The woman thinks she is a queen, and you, my dear, are her loyal subject.”

“Wasn't,”
I insisted. “I wasn't loyal, and I wasn't her subject. I wasn't her predicate, either.” Uncle laughed. He had a plump laugh—round and big-bellied. “I wasn't exactly obedient, but I wasn't exactly
dis
obedient, either. Not really. Like if someone does not agree with you, they
dis
agree with you. I was something in between being obedient and disobedient. If someone doesn't agree or disagree, what is she?”

“You were what I would call neutral. Like shifting gears in a car. When you put it in neutral, you can't go one way or the other—forward or backward. If you're in neutral, you stand still.”

Uncle seemed to know more about driving cars than people who actually do. Even though I was familiar with the term
shifting gears
and knew what it meant, I had never actually seen anyone do it. I didn't know how Uncle knew about shifting gears, but I was not about to question him. I simply loved knowing that he understood. I said, “
That's
what I was. Standing still. Neither obeying nor disobeying.”

“I think the word for what you were is
anobedient,
which would mean without obedience—which is not the same thing as
dis
obedience. I would say that
anobedience
is related to words like
anesthetic,
which means without feeling.”

“Or
anonymous,
which means without a name.”

“Or
anorexia,
without an appetite or
anemia,
without blood.”

“Or Anne Boleyn, without a head.”

Uncle laughed out loud.

I noticed Jake watching from the rearview mirror. I thought I caught him smiling, but I couldn't be sure because from where I sat, the mirror showed only half his face.

On the Sunday we were scheduled to go tubing on the lake, Gloria did a quick head count on the bus and realized that she was one camper short. She charged off the bus and headed for Meadowlark cabin, where she found me fully dressed, lying on my bunk, my head propped up by pillows, leaning against the wall, reading. Gloria told me that if I didn't hurry, the bus would leave without me, and I said that that was fine with me because I preferred not to go.

She took a deep breath. “You should have told me.”

“I did. Last night when you were doing paperwork.”

“I didn't hear.”

“Or weren't listening.”

Gloria reported me to Mrs. Kaplan, which led to some more

—friendly guidance

About an hour after the bus left, Mrs. Kaplan came into Meadowlark. She was carrying a plate of cookies and a container of milk.

She found me lying on my bunk, my arms under my head, my foot beating time to Michael Jackson's
Thriller
on my Walkman. I sat up as soon as she came in. She patted the edge of the lower bunk. “Come, Margaret,” she said. “Come sit here so that we can have a little chat.” She placed the plate of cookies between us. “Help yourself,” she said.

I took a cookie and said thank you. The little chat went downhill from there.

Mrs. Kaplan seemed to take issue with everything I said until I said the one thing that made her so mad that she put an abrupt end to the little chat, and her smile dropped so fast, it almost made a sound. Her nostrils dilated, and she seemed to vacuum in half the air in the room. Huffing out the syllables of my name, she said, “Margaret Kane.” She took a deep breath, this time sucking the air back in through her clenched teeth. “Margaret Kane, we want you to think about the cruel thing you have just said. We want you to think about that very hard.
Very
hard. And then we want you to think about what you can do to apologize.”

She sprang up from the bed as if from a trampoline.
The paper plate fell, and the remaining cookie broke into a hundred pieces.

I sat on Heather's bunk, bouncing ever so slightly from the recoil of the mattress. Mrs. Kaplan looked down upon me and the scattered cookie with equal contempt. She said, “You may sweep that up.” She paused just a second and added, “Now!” She watched as I got the broom and started sweeping. “When you've finished here, we would like you to report to the infirmary and see Ms. Starr. And we don't want to hear that you prefer not to.”

Ms. Starr was Nurse Louise. I did not like her at all. Except for the fact that she dyed her hair and wore a lab coat, she was just like Mrs. Kaplan. I truly would have preferred not to go there again.

As soon as Mrs. Kaplan left, I began to sing:

“God save our gracious Queen
Long live our noble Queen
God save the Queen!”

I sang as I swept and by the time I had finished the fifth verse and had sung the second verse (my favorite) twice, I had swept the entire cabin from wall to wall, paying special attention to the four corners. When I was finished, I decided that “sweep that up” did not
also mean “pick it up,” so I left the mound of crumbs, dust bunnies, and sand in a neat pile at the entrance, propped the broom in a corner by the door, and left for the infirmary.

W
e were now on a part of the highway that is officially scenic. We were passing markers that explained—in paragraphs that were too long and lettering that was too small—what we should be appreciating. A person would have to be an extremely rapid reader or be in an extremely slow vehicle to be able to make out what they said. I didn't even try.

Tartufo sat on the floor, resting his head on the seat between Uncle and me. I stared out the window, thinking that everyone at Talequa had a name for me but none of them knew me. Even if I would never get a prize for being Miss Congeniality, I didn't deserve
incorrigible.

“Nurse called me incorrigible, Uncle,” I said.

Uncle lifted my hand and kissed my fingertips. It was an Old World thing he did when he approved of me—which was often. “I know,” he said. “I read the report.”

“I didn't know she wrote it, too.”

By the time I got back to the cabin after seeing Nurse Louise, all the Meadowlarks had returned from tubing.
The first thing I noticed was that the mound of crumbs and dust balls at the threshold was gone, scattered back over the floor of the cabin. The second thing I noticed was that Ashley and Alicia looked incandescent. Then I saw that everyone had a neon glow. Even Blair Patayani, whose skin was a shade of coffee ice cream and who had bragged that she never burned, did. I made my way into the room. Everyone was oddly quiet. When I got to my bunk, I saw why.

One foot of my bunk ladder was sitting in an ugly pool of vomit. Heather Featherstone, who had the bunk beneath me, was lying on her side with her back to the room. Her back was a luminous shade of raspberry. She was clutching her Fringie to her stomach. I asked, “What happened?”

Berkeley Sims stepped forward and said, “Maybe you can tell us.”

“What do you mean?”

Ashley exchanged a knowing smile with Berkeley before saying, “That mess was not here when we left, and you were the only one in the cabin.”

I opened my mouth to answer, but I couldn't speak. I hopped over the lowest rung of the ladder and made my way up to my bunk, holding on to both rails of the ladder so that they could not see me shaking.

Looking like two low-wattage infrared bulbs, Alicia
and Blair came over. Stacey and Kaitlin joined them, and then, as if on some unspoken signal, the six of them formed a semicircle and stood shoulder to shoulder at the foot of the bed, giving as wide a berth to the pool of vomit as the space between the beds allowed. I don't know who said “Clean it up” first. Maybe it was Kaitlin, but it could have been Ashley. I looked around from face to face. They returned my stare, and in that brief exchange of looks, I saw it happen. I saw them change from nasty to vicious. Right before my eyes they closed in, silently at first. Then they linked arms at their shoulders, and with the precision of a line of Radio City Rockettes, they started chanting, “Clean it up, clean it up, clean it up.”

I was no longer shaking. I was frozen in place. My blind inner self must have told me that they were beyond reason, beyond logic. Anything I could have said—had I been able to speak—would not convince them otherwise. I sat up there on my bed and watched them invent their rage. They had become a warrior gang. They needed a victim. Me.

They picked up a rhythm. “Clean it up, clean it up, clean it up, up, up.”

In a groupthink pause between chants, Gloria came in.

They shut up and quickly dropped arms.

Gloria assumed the girls were gathered around my bunk out of concern for Heather. “How is she?” she asked. The girls broke up to let Gloria through. She sidestepped the base of the ladder and sat down on the edge of Heather's bed, just where Mrs. Kaplan had sat earlier. She said, “Jake's over in the mess hall. Why don't one of you go tell him what happened. He'll know what to do.”

Ashley volunteered to go, but not before exchanging a vile smile with Kaitlin and Alicia.

That evening when Gloria came back to the cabin, I sat up in my bunk and sang “God Save the Queen.” I sang all five verses all the way through and then sang them all the way through again.

I was looking out the window, but I was seeing nothing. I was thinking about the three kinds of
we:
The plural
we,
the editorial
we,
and the royal
we.
I could thank my id, the part of my psyche that is totally unconscious, for knowing that Mrs. Kaplan thought she was a queen. My subconscious knew even before I did that the woman thinks she is a royal
we.
It was my id that instinctively chose “God Save the Queen” as the song I should sing. I started to hum it.

Uncle asked, “What are you singing, Margitkám?”

“The same song that I sang yesterday.”

“What song was that?”

“The British national anthem. I started singing it yesterday afternoon. Later, I sang it sitting up in my bunk.”

“Always the same song?”

“Always ‘God Save the Queen.'” In a weak tremolo I began:

“God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen!
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us;
God save the Queen!”

“Where did you learn that?”

“Sixth grade. My language arts teacher was an Anglophile. She made us learn five verses. She said there was a sixth, but she didn't like it, so we only learned five. Listen to the second verse. It's my favorite.”

“O Lord our God arise,
Scatter her enemies
And make them fall,
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all!”

Uncle laughed. “Very good,” he said. “And very appropriate.”

I sang the second verse again, and soon Uncle started humming. By the time I got to the top again, he was singing along. Neither of us had any singing voice to speak of, and Tartufo reacted by lifting his head and howling.

Uncle asked, “What happened when you sang, Margitkám?”

“Nothing. The Meadowlarks paid no attention at all. I think it's called ‘shunning.' All of them except Gloria, my counselor.”

“What did Gloria do?”

“At first she tried to ignore me, but after I had sung it straight through for a second time, she asked me to please stop.
'Please, Margaret, please stop singing that song,'
she said.”

“And what did you do?”

“I stopped singing, and I started to hum. I hummed. I hummed and hummed until I came to
Frustrate their knavish tricks.
I sang those words, and then I
la, la, la, la, laed,
until I came to
God save us all!
I sang those words,
and then I started humming again. Do you think I was being incorrigible?”