Do You Think This Is Strange?

by Aaron Cully Drake

  He made coffee and stood at the counter while it brewed.

  I poured another bowl of Cap’n Crunch.

  “One serving only,” he said, not taking his eyes off the coffee pot.

  “I’m hungry,” I told him.

  “No, you’re not.” He poured his coffee. I dumped the cereal back into the box. As I did, I pilfered a small handful and shovelled the cereal into my mouth. He frowned at me but said nothing.

  After he sat down, he said, “You can stay home today. I have to make arrangements to get you into another school.”

  I looked past him at the scratched kitchen drawer. The handle was loose.

  “You know,” he added, “I’m losing a full day’s wage because I have to find you a new school. Why am I always coming to get you out of situations like this? Why, Freddy?”

  He waited, expecting an answer.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked.

  He slammed the table with his fist so hard that the cereal box fell over and spilled cereal everywhere. A muscle in his jaw clenched and unclenched. He stared at me, breathing heavily through his nose.

  I put my spoon down and sat, staring at the wall.

  4:32. 4:33.

  THE HAMPTON PARK ANT COLONY

  One week after I was expelled from Templeton College, Bill drove me to my new school, stopping one block away. He swept his arm in a grand gesture.

  “There you go,” he said. “Hampton Park Senior Secondary.”

  “It’s not a park,” I said, clutching my backpack to my chest.

  “Nothing escapes you, does it,” he said. “Now go.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t move.

  He knew why I was reluctant to move. “They know you’re coming. Go to the office. They’ll tell you what to do.” He smiled slightly. “I’d come with you, but I thought you might prefer not going into your new high school with your daddy holding your hand.”

  “I don’t want to hold your hand.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  I got out of the car.

  “Freddy,” he called to me. I stopped but didn’t turn around. “Try not to get expelled too quickly.”

  “Okay,” I answered and carried on.

  My new life awaited.

  Hampton Park Senior Secondary was unremarkable. It was a public school, scrupulous like a public school must be, with budgetary trade-offs like floors getting swept at the end of every second day. The neighbourhood was aging, and its children grown into teenagers. It was the closest to my home, and the quickest at which to register.

  I held no opinion about the school at which I was now enrolled. There was nothing about it on Wikipedia, and its Facebook page was no more and no less remarkable than any of the thirty representative high school Facebook pages I examined as reference points.

  There was no football team of note, so there was no face to the school. There was no central auditorium in which an arts program could flourish. There wasn’t any kind of website for the school council, probably because there wasn’t anything interesting happening at the school.

  I was going to be a new faceless person at a faceless school. Quite likely, everyone here would see me as just another ant in the colony. The school was probably ripe with cliques and friend packs, and I would be marginalized and ignored for the rest of my final school year.

  I was excited about the prospect.

  All I had to do was find corners in the school where I wouldn’t be bothered. All I had to do was find corners where the scent was lost to the rest of the ants.

  As it turned out, at least one corner included a comfortable sofa chair. Jim Worley insisted it was magic.

  THE JIM WORLEY PRACTICE

  Jim Worley was my assigned counsellor. I was his counsellee. He referred to me as his patient.

  “I’m kidding, of course,” he admitted. School counsellors are not trained doctors; they require nothing more than a bachelor of education. Anything beyond that is duck sauce.

  “Sit,” he said and motioned to the sofa chair in the corner. “Just sink into that thing.” He patted me on the arm before he realized he had just touched me. He drew back his arm quickly. Not knowing what to do with his hands, he shoved them in the pockets of his pressed jeans and stood in the middle of his office, rocking on the balls of his feet.

  As instructed, I sunk into that thing. It was not standard school-district issue. It was a chair he personally brought to his office so that students might feel more comfortable. I know this because it was one of the first things he told me. He was proud of his duck sauce sofa chair.

  “Comfortable, isn’t it?” he asked. After a few moments of silence, I inferred he was expecting a reply.

  I ran my hands over the fabric of the chair. “Did you make it yourself?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No, Frederick,” he said. “It was made by master craftsmen in China.” He raised his eyebrows and nodded, a pleased look on his face. “Do you know where China is?”

  “It’s across the South China Sea from Taiwan,” I said as I looked at the tag on the cushion. “Which is where this chair was made.”

  He was silent. After a moment, he cleared his throat, then moved behind his desk.

  Jim Worley told me he was going to be my scheduled conversation. He had to satisfy his duties as my educational assistant, and a simple check-in each day would suffice. Therefore, after lunch I was to check in.

  “Every day,” he said, “I want you to report your status.”

  “Okay,” I replied, looking for an open space on the wall to project my clock.

  He sat with a sigh as if sitting down was a great physical accomplishment. “How are things today, Frederick?”

  “Yellow.”

  He smiled. “Excuse me?”

  “I’m here against my will.”

  He nodded slowly. “I see. Let’s try and fix that.”

  “Okay.”

  I stared at his desk. His smile remained. After a moment, it flickered. He tapped his fingers.

  “Well,” he said. “Good luck with the day.”

  “Goodbye,” I said, standing up. “I’ll see you later.”

  THEN THE SOFA AND THE BOOK

  At first, the days at Hampton Park were nondescript, as I predicted. Students were equally as reluctant to engage with me as I was with them. The school was infested with cliques, and the moats between them were wide and deep.

  I went through the motions of the day, sitting at the back of my classrooms, speaking only when asked a direct question, refraining from eye contact, an open book near me at all times so that I would appear to be occupied.

  Periodically, someone—usually a girl—would try to have a conversation with me, but I was a veteran of such affairs and could handle the occasions deftly.

  “Do you want to partner for this lab?” I was asked several times in chemistry.

  “No,” I replied each time, until my teacher, Mr. Pringle, told me to stop.

  My peers crashed on me like waves from the surf, but I kept them from breaking over me. I stayed silent. I answered shortly and sharply. I was left alone.

  Lunchtimes were particularly concerning. The school was crowded, and there were few places to be alone, few places where I could sit with my book on my lap and turn pages, staring at the clock.

  I was unable to shake the feeling of being watched. In the halls, at lunch, I had this overwhelming sense that someone was watching me. With so many students everywhere, someone probably was. It bothered me, and the threads filled up my mind quickly.

  Fortune favours the less discerning, and I quickly discovered that the lunch table beside the janitors’ lunchroom was never occupied. It was a place where I could eat my lunch without being bothered.

  But places like that were few and far between, and a lunch table was only of use at lunch. I was concerned with how awash the school was with social entropy and the inevitability of being around someone wherever I went. I knew I needed to find a way to get away from my classmates.


  That’s when I discovered Jim Worley’s sofa chair as an area of refuge.

  On Tuesday, two weeks after I arrived at Hampton Park, an incident of interest occurred.

  When I stopped by to see him each day, I usually told him my status was yellow, and he accepted it and said nothing else on the subject, turning his conversation to a more mundane topic. Before long, however, he could take no more and admitted he didn’t understand the colour system.

  “Explain it to me,” he said. “Take your time.”

  “I can do it quickly,” I told him. He waited. I stared back at him.

  “Yessss,” he began, “that’s not quickly.”

  “If my status is green,” I told him, “then there are no blocking issues. Everything is continuing as expected.”

  “And if it’s not green?” he asked.

  “Then it’s yellow or red.”

  He nodded as he spun a pencil between his fingers. “Can you give me an example of something that makes your day red?”

  “Conversations with strangers.”

  “What makes your day yellow?”

  “Conversations.”

  He frowned. “Like this one?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “What else, besides talking to people?”

  I looked around his office. Each wall had a bookcase, jammed solid with hard and soft covers. There was no bare wall, nowhere to cast my clock. It bothered me, but I didn’t want to mention it, lest we travel down a path of more questions and explanations.

  On the back of the door, though, there was a poster, ripped in places, faded, with one corner broken free of its tack. It was a picture of a kitten hanging from a branch, looking directly at the camera, with a terrified expression. The caption underneath said HANG IN THERE, BABY!

  I pointed to the poster. “When I first came to your office, I didn’t like that poster.”

  He was surprised. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “I wondered what became of the kitten.”

  “Okay, that’s good, that’s good,” he told me. “Wondering is a wonderful thing, Frederick.” He leaned toward me and said slowly, enunciating each word, “That’s why they call it wondering.”

  “I don’t wonder about it anymore.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because I found out.”

  The pencil he was spinning came loose from his grasp and fell to the floor. He bent down to pick it up. “You found out what happened to the cat in that poster?”

  “I did.”

  He sat up, holding the pencil, and pursed his lips. He looked at the poster. He looked at me. He looked at the poster. “How in the world did you do that?”

  “Wikipedia,” I said.

  He stared at me, expectantly. When I didn’t continue, he asked, “Well, what did you find out?”

  “The ‘Hang in there, Baby’ picture of the kitten is a cultural icon,” I said, “and has been in circulation since 1973 when a group of supporters presented it to Vice President Spiro Agnew.”

  Don’t say anything else, the threads advised.

  He stared at me, waiting, and the threads and I counted the seconds. Five, four, three, two—

  Jim Worley said, “But how does that tell you what happened—”

  Answer now.

  “The kitten in the picture would be, by now, a forty-year-old cat.”

  He nodded. “I guess it would.”

  “There are no documented cases of forty-year-old cats.”

  “No,” he agreed.

  Five, four, three, two—

  “What became of the kitten?”

  “It died.”

  His stapled smile ripped at the corner.

  That was fun, said the threads.

  Yes. Yes it was.

  Then the phone rang. Jim Worley said, “Excuse me” and answered the phone. As he talked, I sat in the chair and stared at the haphazard red clock my mind painted across his bookcase. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a book, an oversized book, poking out from the top shelf. I stood up and walked to it.

  The Twentieth Century in Review.

  I took it down from the shelf. Opening the cover, my fingertips ran over its smooth pages. The book had been rarely opened and the coolness of the pages drifted up like a meadow’s scent. I turned a page.

  I turned another page. I turned it back.

  Things happen for a reason.

  No they don’t.

  Then why not leave?

  In a bit.

  I fell backward into the sofa chair and turned the pages. Two forward, one back. I did it again. Then again, and the threads in my mind chattered among themselves and resolved themselves, and I began to listen to the humming of the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling.

  When I looked up, Jim Worley was sitting in his chair, leaning forward, watching me, a small smile on his face.

  “You’ve been doing that for twelve minutes,” he said.

  “Yes,” I acknowledged.

  “How do you feel?”

  “My status is green.”

  He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Because it was yellow when you came in.”

  “I like this book,” I said.

  “You can have it if you want.”

  I shook my head. “I have one at home.”

  Jim Worley was quiet.

  “You know you can come here any time you want to read that book.”

  “Okay.” I stood up. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “But you have to talk to me first. No more of this one-word answer baloney you’ve been feeding me. After that, you can stay as long as you want, Freddy, except you can’t miss a class.”

  I put the book back, then let my fingers run down its spine.

  “And I’ll leave you alone when you read it,” he added.

  “Okay,” I said and sat back down. I put my hands flat on the comfy sofa chair and looked it. “This is the most comfortable chair in the world,” I said and hoped he would agree with me and that would be the end of it. Perhaps this chair could find a place on my list of Favourite Things.

  THE NEW SANCTUARY

  I have sanctuaries—places in my life where I can feel silence. Where, for a few moments at least, the threads are pacified. Sedated.

  My bed in the morning is a safe zone. As long as the quilt covers my feet, everything is paused. As long as I sit still in the morning, and let the birds argue in the backyard, everything is fine.

  Jim Worley’s office was another one of these places. After sinking into his special chair, he would bid me close the door and our session would began.

  Session. His word. Not mine.

  But it afforded me a break from the school day, which was good enough for me. He could call it anything he wanted, as long as I could sit and not spend much effort answering difficult questions.

  Lately, I had taken to not even knocking. I opened the door and walked in.

  “How has your day been?” he asked me as I sat down.

  He barely looked up from his work anymore. I called it work simply because it made it easy to describe what he was doing when I walked in. Sometimes he was reading a book. Sometimes he was typing furiously. Sometimes he was leaning over a drawing pad, his arm hiding it from any prying eyes in his empty office, laboriously drawing something out. On those times, when I walked in, he looked up at me with a startled expression on his face. I suppose he looked chagrined. I didn’t know why, and wasn’t even a little curious. After all, I lived in a glass house. Maybe even a glass mansion. There was no logic in me calling attention to his curious habit of making covert sketches and diagrams, not when I think about going home, sitting in bed, and putting The Twentieth Century in Review in my lap.

  One man’s favourite thing, and all that.

  “My day is yellow,” I said after finding a comfortable position on his chair, after sinking down into it like a corpse into a bog.

  He made some flourishes with his pencil, regarded what he had just completed, folded
the paper, and put it in his top desk drawer. Looking up, he pondered me. “Yellow,” he said. “It was yellow yesterday, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the day before that.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the day—”

  “Yes.”

  We regarded each other.

  “How are classes going?”

  “Good.”

  “Yellow?”

  “Okay.”

  He leaned back and put his hands behind his head. Kicking his feet up on the desk, he said, “You want to know what I think about this yellow thing, Frederick?”

  “It’s Freddy.”

  “It’s Freddy to everyone else,” he chided. “But we have a different relationship. You are—”

  “—your client.”

  He frowned at me. “I was going to say friend.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you think of me as a friend?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You have none of the characteristics.”

  His eyebrows raised. “What would those characteristics be?”

  “We don’t laugh together.”

  He nodded. “When was the last time you laughed?”

  “Nine years, eight months, seven days ago.”

  “That’s pretty specific.”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess you haven’t had any friends since then?”

  I didn’t answer.

  He cocked his head. “Oh?” he mused. “Have you had friends?”

  I was silent. My eyes fell on a scattering of muffin crumbs on the side of his desktop, and I wondered, If I were to sweep the crumbs to the floor, how long would they remain there before a janitor swept them up?

  “Freddy,” he said softly. “Who has been your friend?”

  “I’ve had three friends and one of them wasn’t my friend.”

  “Which one?”

  “Oscar Tolstoy was my friend. He wasn’t my friend.”

  “Why not?”

  “He annoyed me.”

  “Friends can do that.” He smiled. “Who was your second friend?”

  “Jack Sweat.”

  He shook his head. “Who is Jack Sweat?”