Thinking Straight

by Robin Reardon

  But—holy shit! This was totally weird.

  I stared out at all those kids, desperate for some sign about how to tell the real ones from the fakes. Knowing some of them were devils inside, I looked for red. Anything red. Red…red…red…Jesus Fucking Christ, nothing out there was red! It had been forbidden; it must have. Otherwise somebody would have had something red on! But not even a hair scrunchie on one of the girls was red. Not one blouse, not one belt, nothing. Which meant that by its very absence it was present. It was pervasive.

  I stood up, breathing hard, hanging on to the edge of the desk to keep from shouting, “Is nobody out there human?”

  Down, Taylor. Down, boy. Down. Sit down.

  I sat.

  Now, calm. Deep breaths. Close your eyes.

  But I couldn’t close my eyes. I felt like I had to know if one of them got too close. If one of them did something really freaky out there, I had to know. What I would have done is anybody’s guess, but I had to know.

  Get a hold of yourself! Chill! Knock it off!

  I managed to close my eyes, just for a few seconds. But I couldn’t bring myself to turn my back to all of them out there.

  I was still standing there when some kid I’d never seen before showed up. He looked for Sean, waved at him, and came into the office.

  “You Taylor Adams? Nod or shake.”

  Nod.

  “I’m Jeffrey. I’m to bring you to Mrs. Harnett.” He turned to leave but waited at the door for me to go out first. I looked down toward Sean, who had suddenly stopped being a potential devil and had started to look like a lifeboat. I shot a pleading look at him: did I have to go? He just looked at me sadly and turned away.

  Mrs. Harnett wanted to see me. It had to be about my speaking. And Sean had said he’d had to report me. All I could do was stand firm and brazen it out. I was ready to run, though.

  She didn’t give me that warm smile this time. “Shut the door please, Taylor.”

  Jesus, save me. If she kills my body, protect my soul.

  She didn’t invite me to sit, so I stood.

  “I understand you violated SafeZone this afternoon. Do you understand how significant a transgression that was?”

  Did I? Not yet, maybe; that would depend on what happened as a result. But I nodded.

  “Sean tells me you plan to write about it in your MI for today. Is that correct?”

  Nod.

  “When I read your MI, which I’ll do later tonight, I’ll determine what the consequences will be. I’ll let you know tomorrow morning. Come to my office after breakfast. For now, you should assume this will mean full punishment, which would mean an extra day of SafeZone. This is to help with your resolution, Taylor. To help you feel the effects as deeply as possible in order to bring about a truer repentance. Do you know what repentance is, Taylor?”

  Shrug. I was feeling a little less panicky, and I was getting irritated. What had I done that was so terrible?

  She answered for me. “It means to change your path. It means you will not repeat the transgression you are repenting.”

  Okay, this was getting to me. It wasn’t like I’d committed some heinous sin. I hadn’t even sworn, for God’s sake. If anyone was at fault, it was Nate for tempting me. I lunged toward her desk to grab a pad of paper. Her hand shot out and held it down.

  “Taylor, I’m afraid that you’ve been abusing the rule about writing during SafeZone. It’s intended to be done only in emergencies, and I understand you’ve been doing a lot of it even though you’ve had no emergencies. Now I’m going to ask Jeffrey to walk you back to your room, where you will begin your Contemplation time early. By all means, write; but write your confessions, your repentance. Write to God and convince him you understand what he wants from you.”

  Repent what? I wanted to ask. What did I do wrong?

  So I sat at my desk to write my second MI, furious, resentful, wanting to hit something. It was a little after two o’clock and I was stuck in here until six. On the one hand, I wanted to get this thing over with, write the fucking MI, and seal it in its tidy little envelope. On the other hand, if I wrote anything right now, it would just get me into more trouble than I was already in. So I hit something.

  I went over to my bed and picked up my pillow. I grasped it with one hand and hit it with the other. Over and over again. I wanted to shout. Hell, I needed to scream! So the pillow changed from a punching bag to a muffling device, and I screamed into it. I screamed until I was hoarse.

  I can’t say it helped, but at least it tired me out. I fell onto the bed, curled into a ball, hugged the pillow tight, and willed myself not to start blubbering. And then I heard myself say, “Jesus, help me.”

  “Taylor!”

  Someone was calling my name. Where are they? Who is it?

  “Taylor, wake up. You’re supposed to be contemplating, not sleeping.”

  It was Jeffrey. I looked at my watch: nearly four o’clock. At least sleep had gotten me through a couple of hours. I nodded to Jeffrey and got off the bed, running a hand through my hair. He gave me a look like he had his doubts, but he left.

  Was I calmer now? Was I still going to see devils everywhere? Did I hate Nate or Mrs. Harnett more?

  But hate wasn’t something I wanted. Hate just ends up turning back onto you, hurting you. Maybe even hurting your soul. So I dragged myself over to my desk and sat with a pen in my hand, staring at the paper that would become my second MI.

  How had she known? How had she known that I was writing things? Are other people, people like Charles and Sean, under some kind of orders to save the papers and give them to Mrs. Harnett? Is that why Sean had kept my question about Nate? But he’d torn it off and crumpled it. Was he trying to help me by hiding it?

  Okay, now I was starting to feel weird again. I walked around the room, searching corners for hidden cameras. Under the desk? On the back of the bureau? I looked all over. They’d have to have been those little Minicams or I’d have found them. But then, a camera would have caught Sean putting that paper into his pocket. No cameras, then. So, how? It must be that Charles had been turning over the papers. And Sean, too, except maybe for the one he’d crumpled.

  I sat there tapping the pen on the pad, trying to think whether I’d ever seen any pages I’d written on after I’d written on them. I looked in my desk drawers. Then I checked Charles’s. I looked under mattresses and in wastebaskets—which was futile, since they got magically emptied every day. Must be the job of some lucky resident to do that. So—was that how they got turned in? Someone went through the trash?

  Note to self: see if you can volunteer for trash duty once you’re out of SafeZone.

  If I ever get out of SafeZone.

  But I had to know whether Charles had done that to me. It would be just like him to think it was for my own good. But had he done it deliberately, or had he thrown the papers into the trash? And had he ever done trash duty? If so, he’d have known what would happen to them.

  Wait! He’d found my wet tissues yesterday. Did that mean he really was going through my trash? And what had he done with them? Had he turned those in, too? Was he, after all, not the honorable man of the proverbs, as he’d led me to believe at Prayer Meeting last night? Or had he flushed them down the toilet to keep anyone from knowing because he’d felt guilty interrupting my Contemplation? Maybe someday I’d be able to ask him; until then, I wasn’t going to figure this one out on my own unless Harnett confronted me with it.

  I was beginning to feel decidedly penned-in. And it wasn’t like I hadn’t been feeling that way already; it was just getting worse. A lot worse.

  Okay, so writing was no guarantee of privacy. At least I knew that much. But my thoughts, as far as I could tell, were still my own.

  Will. I thought about Will. I sat in my chair and leaned back, eyes closed, and thought about Will. You know how a lot of people ask, What would Jesus do? Well, here’s what I asked: What would Will do? What would Will say?

  What would Will s
ay about what had happened today? I pictured his face, his lopsided grin, the twinkle in his eyes as he raised one teasing eyebrow and dropped it a few times. And I heard him laugh. He opened that sweet mouth wide, and he laughed, and I heard it. All through the room.

  I knew what he was laughing at. It was all these people taking themselves so fucking seriously, thinking they had some corner on Soul, on Good, on God. I smiled.

  And then I felt his arms resting on my shoulders and his forehead leaning against mine. And here’s what Will had to say: “Ty, my boy, here’s what you tell them. Say it quietly, and sincerely, and like it’s the most important thing anyone ever uttered. Tell them, ‘Jesus loves you. But I’m his favorite.’”

  And he was gone. But behind my closed eyelids, his grin hung, like the Cheshire cat’s. It disappeared slowly, and as it did, the layers of what he’d just said started to peel back, revealing the nasty things underneath.

  “Jesus loves you.” Okay, that’s obvious. We hear it all the time. And when you hear it, it sets you up, gets you into that holy mood, that soulful head. Yes, Jesus loves me, you think when you hear it. Jesus loves me.

  Then you hear, “But I’m his favorite.”

  Wham! It slams you right back down to earth. It’s like, “Daddy loves me best!” coming from the mouth of the younger brother who makes your life miserable, who’s always getting you into trouble and lying because he can get away with it, because Mom and Dad will believe him and not you.

  It’s like, “Can Jesus have favorites?”

  But most of all, it’s like, “But I thought I was his favorite!”

  I heard the sound of my own laughter before I knew I was laughing. It was different from when I laughed with Sheldon in the laundry room. That had been silly, a kind of release, slapstick. This was real. It put this whole fucking place in its place, you know? Everything. And I laughed. I saw Mrs. Harnett’s stern face alternating with her fake smile; I saw Sean panicking and scrabbling at things he didn’t want to deal with, afraid for his life. I saw Shorty standing there trying to make me feel like I’d done something wrong when I hadn’t, just so he could be seen as doing something that was supposed to be righteous. They were all so pathetic!

  There was a knock at the open door. It was Jeffrey. He looked scared and determined at the same time.

  “Um, you’re making noise.”

  At first I was going to pick up the pad and write this: “But I wasn’t speaking, even though you must have been spying.” And then I realized that would be taking this thing too seriously. So I just smiled at him. It was a beatific smile, not a so-what smile. It had all the fake love in it that I could muster.

  “You need to stop.”

  I wanted to write, “Are you going to report me?” But instead I just lowered my head like some kind of humble martyr. When I looked up again he was still standing there, embarrassed, uncomfortable, not knowing what my response was, really, and probably knowing he’d have to report something. I knew he wanted me to nod and let him know I’d understood and had agreed to behave myself, but I just smiled gently. Finally he left, and I sat down to do my second MI for real.

  Yesterday I masturbated. During Contemplation. It was after I’d sealed my MI, so I’m putting it into today’s instead.

  Today I shouted at Nate. Sheldon and I had been folding sheets, and we’d been doing it for so long that we got into a flow. But then one of us [I opted against having this fall on Sheldon] dropped a corner and the whole thing fell apart and landed on the floor, and it was funny. We laughed so hard we fell on the floor, too. Sean came over, and then Nate, and Nate told us how much waste we’d caused. This may sound like I’m criticizing Nate, but he shouldn’t have done that. He didn’t understand how the sheet had fallen or that it was already on the floor by accident. He judged us, and I don’t think he should have. Sean already knew what had happened, and if he felt it was a reportable incident, he would report it. We didn’t need Nate telling us how sinful we were. And that made me angry, and so as he was walking away all I did was shout “Hey” at him. That’s all. So I admit I spoke, and I know I shouldn’t have. But I don’t think it’s fair that Nate was allowed to make me so angry when he knows I’m in SafeZone. [If Nate wanted to take this place so seriously, then he could be held to its rules, too. Besides, I was kind of hoping that if I could spread the blame around a little, maybe I could avoid getting another day of SafeZone piled onto my sentence, which I really didn’t want despite the advantage I’d considered in Sean’s office.]

  I’ve been abusing the emergency writing rule. It’s supposed to be when something really important needs to be communicated by someone in SafeZone. But I have to say that at the times I did it, the times I wrote something, it felt pretty important to me. Now I see that it wasn’t. [I didn’t put why; I didn’t put that I’d been taking everything seriously and that now I was going to stop doing that.]

  I probably could have dug up some more stuff, but these were the highlights of the last twenty-four hours or so. And they were big enough: masturbation, talking in SafeZone, abuse of rules. Nothing had been said about my having to put in here why these things were wrong, or how I promised on somebody’s grave never to do it again, so I didn’t go there. I just signed my name and put the thing into its envelope. I didn’t even read it over first.

  Chapter 5

  The words of the wicked are about lying in wait for blood, but the speech of the upright rescues them.

  —Proverbs 12:6

  So, here it is, the end of the second day. And only forty more to go. And here I am contemplating Expulsion like it’s some kind of option. Which it isn’t. I’m here for the duration, but not a second longer. I’m gonna have to just toe the line. And think of Will.

  Charles comes to get me for dinner. He doesn’t speak, he doesn’t check the wastebasket, he just stands there. I nearly forget to bring my MI, but he picks it up and hands it to me, and we take a detour past Harnett’s office so I can drop it off.

  This time we sit at a table with two guys, neither of them with yellow stickers. I don’t remember seeing them before. They’re not in our prayer group. Charles says, “Rick Caruso, John McAndrews, meet Taylor Adams. Taylor is my roommate, and as you can see he’s still in SafeZone.”

  Rick nods and smiles and goes back to his dinner. John, who seems like he’s a few years older than me, looks right at me. He’s smiling, but his eyes are so intense it’s like they’re in someone else’s face, or coming from some other world. In a voice that sounds unusually deep and rich, he says, “So this is the brave young man who shouted at brother Nate today.”

  Well, now, this is weird. How the hell does he know that? And what does he mean by calling me brave when everyone else has been falling over each other to chastise me? Damn, but I want out of SafeZone. I try to let my eyes speak for me, to ask those questions.

  John laughs. At first I think he’s laughing at me, but the way he looks at me makes me smile, too. “Are you puzzled?”

  Nod.

  John chuckles. “I won’t criticize Nate. He means well, I’m sure. But sometimes I think he takes an awful lot onto himself. And tell me this: if he hadn’t spoken to you the way he did, would you have said anything at all?”

  Negative shake.

  He just smiles, like he knows he doesn’t need to add, “He tempted you.” Instead, he says, “Taylor, Rick here and I have decided not to ask companions to this Friday’s barbeque dinner. Now, I know Charles will be with Danielle, so I’m wondering if you’d be willing to come with us. What do you think?”

  I’m thinking two things. One is whether Charles had already set up this little meeting with John before he brought me here. The other is that I’d been waiting until I could speak so I could ask Dawn to go with me; I’m sure I’m not supposed to ask a boy. But this is my first week, and it might not do to stick my neck out. Maybe it would be better if I go with these guys, with John, who at least seems to understand what happened to me today. So I nod.

&
nbsp; “Great! You’ll be out of SafeZone by then and we can talk. I’m looking forward to that.” His smile lingers on me for a few seconds before he turns it to Charles. “And you, brother, I heard about what happened in your Prayer Meeting last night. My heart went out to you.”

  “Thank you, brother.” Charles looks like he wants to smile.

  John is watching his face. “As we all know, I can’t speak for God. But I feel sure that if he hasn’t rewarded you yet, he will. He knows the courage it took, and it’s obvious how much you love his Word.” We all eat in silence for a few minutes, and then John says, “Charles, you look troubled. Are you still holding onto last night’s pain?”

  Charles shakes his head. “No. I’ll be all right, really.”

  Chewing thoughtfully, John watches him, and I can almost see thoughts flash behind his eyes. “You know I wouldn’t push you, brother. But when I see you so unhappy I can’t help but want to change that. And you do seem to be holding on to something that hurts you. Why do that, when we’re right here to help? When you can release that burden to Jesus through us?”

  I steal a glance at Charles. Is he in pain? He’s been awfully quiet since last night, it’s true. And he hasn’t said a word to me about my little exchange in the laundry room this afternoon. Hey, maybe that’s it; he’s holding back from saying anything so he won’t tempt me to—

  “It’s tonight.” Charles’s voice is sharp, like he was trying to keep it inside but it got out through some tiny crack, and coming out through that narrow space makes it pointed. “It’s Leland. He’s going to read his Public Apology tonight.” He looks like there’s more to say, but he clamps down on the words, gets them safely back inside again. He pushes the overcooked green beans around on his plate without eating anything.

  “Charles.” John waits. Charles takes some time before he finally looks up. John says, “Let it go, brother. Stop playing tug-of-war with Jesus. He will take this burden from you, but you must allow it. If it would help, you know we can talk about it. Why don’t we see how things go tonight.”