In the Company of Crazies

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  “Maybe not mine,” Drew said.

  I wasn’t sure if Drew was referring to his lifetime or his brain.

  I was just about to ask him, but when we got up onto the porch we could hear John screaming. Yelling angrily, urgently. His voice was so strange, high-pitched and frightening. It hardly sounded like him at all. Drew and I looked at each other, both wondering, I suppose, what John would be capable of doing if he ever lost control.

  We hurried into the mudroom. I took off my shoes without even thinking about it. I had started keeping an extra pair of socks in my coat pocket, and I slipped them on.

  We could hear Karen’s voice now. And Gretchen’s. Gretchen was telling Carl to go and find Sam. A second later, Carl brushed by us. He didn’t even grab his coat from the mudroom.

  “John’s gone crazy,” Carl said. He flew out the door. Gone crazy?

  * * *

  John had been caught cheating on his life.

  * * *

  Apparently. Karen had had her suspicions, turned over those folded-over pages marked PRIVATE in John’s writing journal, and read them.

  She discovered that John had been asking Maggie about her plans for the week’s menu not just because he was weird (which he was) but because he had been writing his daily journal entries a week in advance. The only missing piece of information (in John’s mind) that could have possibly altered the events of any given day would be what he would be eating for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Breakfast was a no-brainer since John never had anything but the oatmeal, which was always a Mountain Laurel option. Lunch and dinner, however, posed a serious problem. Cornering Maggie and getting the week’s menu seemed to be the perfect solution. Once he had this information, John could pretty much construct his entire week and get all his homework done by Monday afternoon.

  That’s exactly what John had been doing. Rather successfully. But when Karen told him he couldn’t do this anymore, he went, as Carl had aptly put it, crazy.

  “You weren’t supposed to look,” John was yelling. He was stamping his feet. His big feet.

  “That’s not the point, John,” Karen was saying.

  We were all standing in the den. Everyone had heard the yelling and wandered in. It was almost as if the level of noise made the space smaller and John look bigger.

  “What is the point, if that is not the point? That is the point,” John said. “When I turned down the page… You said that. You promised. You said that. That is the point.”

  Gretchen held on to John’s arm. I thought if he had wanted, he could have lifted his arm and taken Gretchen right along with it. He could have flung her right across the room. He was pulling away, but somehow she held on and stayed on the floor.

  “John, you are right. That is what Karen said. And Karen was wrong for what she did. But that doesn’t make what you did right. Does it?” Gretchen said.

  “Why not?” John said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.” He finally freed his arm and began pacing around the room. Everyone backed away and gave him space.

  “John,” Gretchen said firmly. “Sit down. Right now. In this chair.” She pointed. She ordered.

  John stopped pacing for a moment. He looked as if he was considering the chair, but then he started shouting again.

  “It’s not right. That’s not what she said. That’s not what she said. I didn’t do anything wrong. She did.” John pointed to Karen.

  Karen stepped forward a bit. “I’m sorry, John. You’re right. I shouldn’t have looked ahead. But I just want you to understand…”

  “No, you need to understand!” John said. His anger had a target. It probably should have been Carl or Tommy or even Billy for all the teasing and torture, but at that moment it was Karen.

  “Why is it wrong to be prepared? What is wrong with that!” John shouted.

  “What the hell is he talking about?” Tommy whispered to no one in particular.

  * * *

  Trying to do exactly the same thing every day, exactly the same way, was apparently John’s one and only goal. Something about that concept terrified me.

  Not just that someone would want to know what they were going to do every day, know exactly what to expect and be prepared for it. But the more disturbing aspect was that somehow putting it in writing, committing it to paper, writing it in a journal would make it happen. Would permanently seal your fate, so to speak. Make it unalterable. Make it real.

  “John, if you sit down, I will talk to you about it,” Gretchen said. “I will listen.”

  Maybe John would have sat down at that point. And it might have all been over. John lowered his arms and took a deep breath, but that was precisely when Carl returned, with Sam right behind him.

  “See!” Carl shouted. “There he is.”

  John felt the urgency and accusation leveled right at him. There was really nothing else for him to do but run.

  * * *

  Everyone had a direction to search. Sam and Angel went in the truck out the back road. Half an hour had passed and John had not returned. Carl, Drew, and Mr. Simone looked in the School House building. There were rooms in there that no one used where John might be hiding. Billy and Maggie had the House and the dorms. Karen and Tommy took the nursery-school building, upstairs and down. Gretchen sat in her chair and waited for reports.

  I had the barn.

  “John?” I called out as I walked inside.

  On the far end, the wall that faced the pond was so worn and old that rotten boards were half missing. You could see right outside. You could see the cliff that led down to the pond. In fact, it looked like the whole barn was teetering on the edge of a cliff. There wasn’t anything particularly safe about this barn. I didn’t think anyone trying to escape would come here. I turned to leave when I heard a thump.

  “John?” I said again.

  “What?” John answered. He was still mad.

  “Everybody is looking for you,” I said. I couldn’t see him, but it sounded like he was up in the loft.

  “I know.”

  “So come down,” I said. I stepped into the center of the barn and looked up. I still couldn’t see him.

  “No.”

  For a moment I didn’t know what to do. If I went to get help, John might run away again. Maybe farther. Maybe toward the pond or the pine forest. I knew there were hundreds of acres of land back there. John didn’t seem like the type who would survive out in the woods for more than a minute or two.

  Neither was I, for that matter.

  If I called out for help, John might freak out again. And nobody would hear me from here anyway. If I stood long enough, I could probably signal to Mr. Simone when I saw him coming out. He’d have to walk by this way.

  “Who’s there?” John’s voice came out of the corner shadow in the loft.

  “Me.”

  “Who’s ‘me’?”

  I looked out to the School House building, but I didn’t see anyone around to help. There was just me. “Mia,” I answered.

  “Mia?”

  “Yeah.”

  I could hear John starting to move. His weight made the barn creak loudly.

  “Come down. Everybody is worried,” I tried again.

  “No. Karen was wrong and I was right. She never said you couldn’t write ahead in your journal. She never said you couldn’t do that.”

  That was true.

  “You’re right,” I said.

  “She said she would never read something if you turned the page down. She lied,” John said. He really was angry. “If someone says something, they should mean it.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “That sucks.”

  I could see his foot, his huge foot sticking out. He was edging toward the ladder like he had more to say and wanted me to listen.

  “What’s wrong with what I did?” John asked me. “What’s wrong? I didn’t hurt anybody.”

  “No, of course not,” I said. “You know teachers. They just get like that.”

  I thought I could just t
ake his side, whatever he said. Then he’d trust me and come down. It was cold in the barn. I wanted to go already.

  “Like what?” John said. “What do you mean? They get like what?”

  I realized I had said the wrong thing. I was making it worse.

  “Well, I mean…” But I didn’t know what I meant. I had to choose my words more carefully. I had to think about what I was saying.

  “Karen was wrong and I was right,” John said. I heard him moving around up there. He wasn’t exactly light-footed.

  “Well, wait a minute, John. Think about it.”

  “What?”

  “Well, if you write everything down before it really happens, then you can’t change anything,” I said. “You don’t have any choices.”

  “I don’t want any choices. I know what I want to do. Every day. I just want people to let me alone so I can do it.”

  I could hear tears behind his rough voice.

  “I know. I know. I mean, so do I. Everybody does. Everybody wants to be left alone, but what if? What if there was something that you didn’t know you wanted to do yet? What if there was something to do that might be really good? Good for you, something you’d really like but you wouldn’t even try because it wasn’t written in your journal?”

  “Like what?”

  Now, this was hard. I shrugged to buy time, even though John couldn’t see me. Like what?

  “Like maybe a new edition of The Guinness Book of World Records comes out and—“

  John interrupted me. “The next edition won’t be published until next September eighth.”

  Oh.

  “But there might be something, John. Something. Just because you wrote it down doesn’t mean you won’t change your mind. I mean…I mean, wouldn’t it be worse if you had to go back and erase?”

  I stopped. I couldn’t think of anything more to say because there were certainly some things you could never go back and erase. But I didn’t think John would be able to handle that.

  I used to think I couldn’t either.

  Sometimes lately, I think maybe I can.

  * * *

  “Yeah, that really would be worse,’ John said as we were walking together back to the House. He was completely calm, as if nothing had happened at all. His voice sounded normal again, although I use the word normal very loosely. It’s all relative, I guess.

  “I hate erasing,” John told me.

  “Me too,” I said.

  * * *

  In a way it was funny, with everything that happened with John and how upset everyone had gotten and how well it had all turned out, that it was Drew who fell out the window that night.

  Of course, there was nothing funny about it.

  Sam had found Drew, half naked and totally unconscious, lying in the bushes outside the House. His pajama bottoms were left behind (so to speak), hooked onto one of the young birch trees that Gretchen recently had planted around her house to block some of the cold winds that blew down from the pine-covered mountain. The birch tree bent, caught Drew, and ever so gently dropped him nearly to the ground, but not quite. Not until the pajama bottoms tore and Drew fell the rest of the way and passed out. But he was fine.

  Only then was it funny.

  Hilarious.

  At least the boys at Mountain Laurel thought so.

  * * *

  Mountain Laurel, if seems, has had more than its share of accidents, and they were all hilarious. Two years ago, according to Tommy, there was a kid here who shot a neighbor with a BB gun.

  “Right in the ass,” Tommy told me when he could stop laughing long enough to speak.

  “What happened to him?” I asked. We were in the dining room, all early for some reason. Technically, right before lunch was our free time, but no one seemed to want to be alone. Hearing Maggie working in the kitchen was comforting. Drew’s seat was empty.

  “What happened to who? The kid or the guy walking down the road?”

  “Both.”

  Tommy was enjoying the spotlight, the holder of memory. “Well, the guy walking his dog down the road, the guy who got nailed in the ass”—Tommy paused for the giggles—“he was fine. He didn’t even press charges. But the kid who did it got kicked out.”

  “That very day,” Carl added.

  I guessed that Tommy and Carl had been going to Mountain Laurel for a while.

  “Well, that doesn’t really sound like an accident,” I said. I could practically see the whole scene: gun, ass, running, Gretchen. It was easy to imagine.

  “It was,” Tommy insisted. “He wasn’t aiming at that guy. It was an accident.”

  “How did he get that BB gun here?” Billy wanted to know. “How did he get it past Gretchen?”

  “Shut up, faggot” was Carl’s answer.

  Maggie banged a pot in the kitchen. It was an “appropriate language” warning. Who knew she was listening?

  “And remember last year? That kid Red?” Tommy was saying.

  “Reed, you jerk-off,” Carl gently corrected him. “Yeah, Reed. Remember him?”

  Most of the boys at the table did. Even John was nodding his head. I noticed only Angel wasn’t participating in the Mountain Laurel revelry.

  “Remember when Reed cut his head open?” Tommy went on.

  “Yeah, there was blood everywhere,” Billy jumped in. “That’s because the head bleeds a lot, you know. But that was a fight, and a fight’s not an accident either. But my arm was an accident, remember? Mine was…”

  Billy looked like he was all geared to go on, to describe Reed’s wound or maybe his own, but suddenly Angel said something. I think it was the first time I’d heard him talk since my first night when Gretchen made everyone say hello.

  “Drew’s wasn’t an accident,” Angel said. He had a lyrical Puerto Rican accent. He spoke slowly and softly. “He was trying to kill himself.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. I stood up.

  And for some reason John, who now saw himself as my defender, stood up as well. He towered over Angel.

  “He was not,” John said, although I doubt he understood.

  But Angel didn’t flinch. “You think Drew just got up at four-thirty in the morning, walked over to the window in the hall when it’s thirty-five degrees out, opened it up, and oops. Fell?”

  “Maybe he was trying to run away,” Carl said.

  “Then why wouldn’t you just walk down the stairs and out the front door? There are no alarms here. Everybody knows that. And what…who is going to chase you…Gretchen?”

  It figured that Angel would have all the details. The time. The exact window. He’d probably heard it while hanging out with Sam. Besides, people who talk the least hear the most.

  “Well, she does have that big dog,” Billy said. He started laughing…

  Until Tommy, who was sitting next to Billy, whacked him on the shoulder, not too hard. Just enough to make Billy’s eyes tear up. Billy didn’t say anything. He didn’t even rub his arm up and down like he would usually do.

  “You don’t know it, though. Not for sure. You don’t know anything,” I said to Angel.

  “He left a note,” Angel said.

  No one said anything after that.

  * * *

  I wasn’t surprised at all when Billy came to me with his head down and his hand out. He was certainly always one for the dramatic. He handed me Drew’s picture.

  “He said you could have it, remember?” Billy told me. “I thought you’d want it now.”

  “Billy. He’s not dead.”

  “Yeah, but still. I found it in his room.” Billy held it out to me. “He wanted you to have it, remember? Take it.”

  And I took it.

  It’s hard to say exactly what I now found disturbing about Drew’s picture. Something about the face; it seemed to change every time you looked at it. Suddenly it looked more like Drew.

  It wasn’t one of those really realistic drawings where you can see every facial line and every hair follicle. But it wasn’t abstr
act, either, with a square head and two eyes on one side of the face. It was something else entirely, almost like it was more about the sad expression on the face than the face itself. It was more about what was inside the person’s mind than outside. So in a way it could have been anyone.

  Mountain Laurel.

  Where else?

  Gretchen let everyone stay up later than usual. Even though they kept telling us Drew was going to be all right. He was in the hospital. He didn’t even have one broken bone. They never said he did it on purpose, but they never said he didn’t.

  I know Drew didn’t want to die. It’s not that high a window. He didn’t want to die, but he wanted something. He just didn’t know what if was. Maybe he went looking for it. I can understand that.

  That is certainly a reasonable thing to do. In a way.

  * * *

  The office was easy to break into. I figured if Billy could do it, I could certainly do it. It was just like in the movies where the guy takes an unbent paper clip and wriggles it around in the lock for a couple of seconds. It worked. The office door clicked open.

  I walked into the darkroom. The shades on all three windows were pulled down. I had been in here only once before. Almost four weeks ago, when I first got here and Karen was showing me around.

  Four weeks? How could so much have happened in four weeks? And so little? Four weeks back home and I’d probably have taken seven or eight quizzes, at least two tests. A social studies project. Probably science, too. Four Current Events. Six or seven volleyball games—even more practices. A book report or two.

  My head was spinning with two worlds that didn’t make any sense. And now I found myself standing in Gretchen’s office, in front of her file cabinet. If there was a place where two worlds met, it would be in those files.

  The file cabinet wasn’t even locked, as it turned out. The manila folders were just squished in, one behind the other, with a little tab sticking up. I pulled out the drawer.

  They were in alphabetical order, by last name. Lots of names I hadn’t heard of, maybe students long gone. It took me awhile to find a name I recognized.

  John.

  Katzenbaum, John.