The Crazy School Read online

  The second I’d passed beneath this odious load of hooey, I stomped on the gas and redlined toward Dean.

  The Porsche shifted hard and steered harder, suspension so tight that running over a fingernail paring at eighty could have you pissing blood for a week.

  I loved the damn thing, and I made it blister through every last turn.

  Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

  When I finally burst into our apartment, Dean was crashed out asleep on our sofa.

  He’d set the table with flowers and candles—now wilted and guttering, respectively.

  Linen napkins. Polished silver. A bottle of wine. The fancy yellow-rimmed dinner plates we’d received from Aunt Julie for our first anniversary—French ones with old fox-hunting scenes in the middle.

  Had he meant all this for a celebration? Maybe the interview had gone well?

  He opened his eyes and looked up at me. From the expression on his face, the answer was a resounding no—more like this finery was an effort to cushion the blow of bad news.

  “I am so sorry to be this late,” I said. “So so so so sorry.”

  “I got worried when you didn’t call.”

  “They had to take that kid Mooney to the hospital,” I said. “He punched out a window outside my classroom and cut himself all to shit, and then the faculty meeting got postponed.”

  “It’s okay.” He got up and started bringing food out from the kitchen.

  I poured us each a glass of wine. “How was your interview?”

  “Thought I had it in the bag until the very last part,” he said, putting down a platter of roasted chicken and carrots.

  I took a sip of wine, then started arranging food on our plates while he went back for the salad.

  “They said they were ready to sign me up,” said Dean, taking his seat. “Everybody was slapping me on the back and all enthused to have me aboard, then they handed me a little container for the drug test.”

  “Um,” I said. “So then—”

  “So then I told them I took that as a goddamn affront to the deeply ingrained American tradition of guaranteeing personal liberty, not to mention my rights as a citizen of this great nation. Asked ’em how the hell they got off thinking the Constitution gave anyone the go-ahead for requiring me to whip it out on command and fill some plastic Dixie cup with my Purity of Essence. That’s not why our boys died in Iwo Jima.”

  “ Please tell me you didn’t actually bring up Iwo Jima.”

  Now he was grinning at me. “Goddamn right I brought up Iwo Jima. Guadalcanal . . . Flanders Field . . .”

  I tried to just roll my eyes in response, but I had this vision of him standing up on some battle-worn desk in his suit and tie, slamming fist against palm while ranting about the Halls of Montezuma and the Shores of Tripoli to a bunch of cowering temp-agency staffers, and I couldn’t keep a straight face.

  I raised my glass to him. “You are just fucked in the head, sweet boy.”

  He shrugged.

  “Not like you would’ve passed, anyway,” I said, “ya stoner.”

  “Like that’s any of their business. Buncha damn pinkos.”

  I started cutting into my chicken. “Enough with the Semper Fi crap, already. Eat your dinner.”

  8

  The clock radio cranked up in the dark, NPR pundits chatting about the Berlin Wall’s remains getting hacked into fist-sized souvenir chunks.

  I hit the snooze button too many times, trying to catch up on all the sleep I’d missed during the night, rolling around and fretting.

  Dean’s side of the bed was empty, already cold. I pushed away the covers and got up myself.

  He had the paper spread out across our little table and a tall milky glass of Café Bustelo waiting for me on the kitchen counter, sweetened to syrup just the way I liked it.

  I croaked out my thanks before raising the sacred vessel to my lips with both hands and chugging half of it down.

  “Want dibs on the shower, Bunny?”

  I shook my head. “I’m late for work.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” I lied.

  The narrow lane before me whipped and curved through bare black woods framed stark against that just-before-dawn gray light, everything to the east brushed with a faint anticipatory pink.

  This early, mine was the sole car on the road, which in my seemingly perpetual lateness was no bad thing. I turned up the tapedeck volume: the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen.”

  Coming out of the last hairpin bend before campus, I had to downshift and brake like crazy to keep from back-ending a rusty old Volvo wagon.

  Volvos, Jesus. My nemesis.

  I blew by it on the straightaway. Double yellow, but I didn’t want to do a turn-in for showing up after the faculty meeting had gotten under way.

  I raced between Santangelo’s stone gateposts at 6:27 a.m., hoping I’d luck out and discover someone had committed a grosser transgression than lateness in the last nine hours.

  My right eyelid twitched from lack of sleep. I wasn’t in the goddamn mood to ape contrition, saying that my being late all the time was just totally fueled by passive-aggressive shit and I was so grateful to the community for helping me get committed to tackling the real work on my issues around punctuality.

  I’d had my fill of seventies neuro-hooey from Dad. It wasn’t until I’d washed up at Santangelo that I realized he’d armed me with native-speaker fluency—like, slap a set of headphones on me and I could’ve snagged a simultaneous-translation gig at the UN, psychobabble to English.

  Why didn’t I have the balls to stand up and say that I drove fast because I damn well felt like it, and so fucking what?

  Because part of me still wanted to believe there was some point to this therapy crap.

  Wiesner was right, after all. I was here for more than the paycheck. I wanted absolution.

  Could be worse.

  Could be Syracuse.

  I cranked the Porsche’s wheel toward the dining hall and parked in the second-to-last spot.

  Opening the faculty-lounge door precipitated an extended hush of annoyance from the forty people already ensconced therein.

  I dropped my gaze to the ratty carpet, slinking crouched toward a spot at Lulu’s feet.

  There were a dozen kids on the floor around me, most of them holding hands with the teachers seated behind them.

  These were the responsible students. At another school, they might have been proctors or prefects. Here they were more like prison “trusties.” Future Mindys. Future Geralds.

  I drew my knees to my chest, penitent and hot-faced under the room’s weight of disapproval. Someone coughed, and chairs creaked under their occupants’ shifting weight.

  I didn’t look up until I’d sensed that all eyes had shifted back to the blackboard, just left of the doorway.

  Dr. Santangelo glared at me from the center of the board’s dusty expanse, his arms crossed.

  His attendance at these meetings was exceedingly rare.

  Bad bad day to be the last vulnerable arrival.

  At least he’d left the cape at home this time.

  “Nice of you to drop by,” he said, staring me down as he stroked the beard that didn’t quite hide his double chin.

  I mumbled an apology, practically tugging my forelock.

  He turned a half-step and pointed a chubby finger at Tim. “I believe you had a question?”

  Tim nodded, a faint tinge of red rising to his cheeks. “I just . . . last night in the dorm . . . ?”

  Santangelo smiled encouragement.

  “I was on duty,” Tim continued, “with Simon and Cammy? So during bed check, we found graffiti in the upstairs hallway, and we felt pretty sure we knew who’d done it, but I’m not real comfortable with how that was handled, you know?” He coughed and put his hand on his chest. Sookie’s remedy gesture.

  “What made you uncomfortable?” asked Santangelo.

  “Well, even though it
seemed pretty clear-cut that it was Forchetti, he didn’t do a turn-in right when we first asked him about it, so we got him back out of bed and brought him downstairs to the living room.”

  Santangelo tilted his head to the side, listening, nodding.

  “It was already pretty late,” said Tim. “And he wouldn’t own up to . . . wouldn’t own doing it at all, so after about an hour, Cammy told him to kneel on the floor with his hands behind his back. This is in North, you know? It’s a stone floor? Like slate or something . . . so then it was after midnight, but we made him stay like that. On and on.”

  “How long?” asked Santangelo.

  “Three hours.” Tim’s eyes brimmed. “He was, you know, crying. Shaking. Legs all cramped. I should have said something, but Cammy and Simon have been here so much longer.”

  Santangelo shot that chubby finger back out fast, straight at Tim. “How dare you!”

  Everyone flinched at the bellowed words, and I don’t think I was alone in expecting him to jump down Tim’s throat for having allowed Forchetti to suffer.

  “You little piece of shit!” Santangelo stomped around in a small circle, screaming. “How dare you question what we do here?”

  Tim bowed his head.

  Santangelo slammed a fist against the chalkboard, his legs apart. “ Look at me.”

  Tim peeked up, tears gathering at the corners of his eyes.

  “What’s your name?”

  Tim mumbled.

  Santangelo cupped a hand to his ear. “Louder.”

  “Tim?”

  Santangelo swept an arm around the room, his sleeve flapping. “If I was one of these kids, Tim, I’d shove your goddamn head right through this chalkboard.”

  Tim sobbed, a bubble of snot expanding at one nostril.

  The good doctor sighed. “You’re disgusting,” he said. “You make me want to puke. You make all of us want to puke.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Santangelo.”

  “Doesn’t he make us want to puke?” Santangelo looked at random people around the room—Cammy, Mindy, New Guy Pete—his eyes boring into them one by one until they blushed and nodded.

  Tim absorbed each betrayal, caving into himself by degrees.

  Santangelo turned back to him. “Stand up.”

  The accused rose to his feet, shivering.

  Santangelo smiled. “I think we all agree that you should fire yourself, Tim.”

  “Yes, sir. I’d like to fire myself.”

  “I think we all agree that you’re lucky to have found a community that cares enough about you to let you keep your job after such an appalling lapse in judgment.”

  Tim looked up at him, broken.

  Santangelo nodded to himself. “Any other school, doing the important work we do here . . . well, you’d be packing your bags, Tim. Out on the street.”

  “Yes, sir, Dr. Santangelo.”

  “You’re a lucky man, Tim.”

  Tim nodded.

  “You’re a lucky man because we believe in forgiveness here at the Santangelo Academy. We believe in love, and we love you, Tim. All of us in this room, unconditionally. No holds barred.”

  The good doctor glanced around the room again, waiting for everyone to nod.

  Tim pulled a cuff down over one hand, used it to wipe the ropes of snot from his upper lip. “Thank you,” he said. “That means a lot to me.”

  Santangelo spread his arms wide, palms toward the ceiling, then flickered his fingers at the crowd until someone started to clap. He stood there like some storefront preacher as the applause caught and spread around the room.

  He brought his hands closer together, directed at Tim. “Come here, son,” he said. “Something tells me you could use a hug.”

  Under cover of the still-burgeoning ovation, Lulu leaned down until her chin grazed my shoulder.

  “Get me the fuck out of here,” she whispered, “before I really do puke.”

  “We’ve got half an hour before first period,” said Lulu. “Want some real coffee?”

  “I would worship you forever,” I replied.

  The two of us set off for her apartment at a caffeine-hungry trot.

  Teachers lived across the road in a defunct motor court. Its Laundromat-Colonial façade sported tissue-thin brick face and a tilted horse ’n’ carriage weather vane.

  Lulu scraped her front door inward across a mauled arc of shag carpet. Santangelo had bought the place complete with fixtures and furniture: The toilet ran constantly, and you could still see where they’d unbolted the coin-op Magic Fingers unit from her Formica-swathed headboard.

  “There’s hazelnut or vanilla-raspberry,” she said.

  “The Harlequin Romance Line of caffeinated beverages.”

  “Don’t be a whiny-hiney,” she said, shaking a finger at me.

  I collapsed into a splayfooted Jetson-esque armchair. “Hazelnut, please.”

  Lulu skipped around behind the kitchenette’s jutting counter to fill her Mr. Coffee carafe at the sink, then dumped three scoops of perfumed grounds into the fluted sheaf of a paper filter.

  “That Santangelo,” she said. “I just can’t stand it.”

  I sighed agreement.

  “I mean, really, Madeline. I just sat there watching that man, thinking I could be back at the front desk of the Econo Lodge, joking around with decent people.”

  She reassembled Mr. Coffee and set him brewing.

  “Makes me miss the old commercials for these things,” she said.

  She patted the top of the unit, then startled me by singing, “‘Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?’” in her clear, heartstring-plucking soprano. The notes lingered, sweetening the room.

  “Don’t stop,” I said.

  “‘Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.’” Spoken, not sung.

  “‘Hey hey hey,’” I answered, disappointed.

  “Maybe we should follow suit,” she said, spanking her hands together. “I could load my car right now and be at Mother’s farmhouse in half a day. Get back my old job at the Econo Lodge. They liked me there. I liked them.”

  “You’d have to leave the kids,” I said. “Abandon them to the predations of Mindy and Santangelo.”

  “And Tim, that abject pitiful worm.”

  She started rubbing her knuckles across her hair in frustration. “Please give me a goddamn cigarette.”

  I did.

  “Those tiny little minds, Madeline. Colorless, narrow, and utterly lacking in joy.” Lulu started to pace, trailing Bette Davis wreaths of smoke. Fuming, literally. “I am not willing to admit defeat. Someone has to stand up for joy.”

  “You do,” I said. “You are.”

  The room had begun to smell like hot, sweet air freshener. When the drizzle of coffee slowed, she pulled flowered mugs from a high cupboard.

  “That first week we were here,” I said, “when they were breaking us in—”

  “All those meetings!”

  Lulu handed over my mug, and I consumed a candied swallow.

  “I had hope for Santangelo,” I said. “He seemed to have a spark. He said some intriguing things.”

  “We both wanted to believe him. Believe in him.”

  I savored another drag of Camel, another sip of coffee.

  During one of those early meetings, Santangelo had explained why he’d banned both vices on campus. “We used to let the kids smoke,” he’d said, “if they were of age and had their parents’ permission. Not in their dorm rooms, just in a couple of designated areas outdoors.”

  It had been hot that day. Late summer.

  He walked along a row of French doors in the Mansion’s library, all of them open to let in any longed-for afternoon breeze.

  “The thing is,” he said, “whenever these kids run away, they go looking for a means of defiance—first thing, every time. A lot of them are here because they’d become addicts. Kid hits the road, right away he’ll go score.”

  Santangelo paused to lean back against a column between doors. “We lost a b
oy who’d been with us for three months—took off and hitchhiked home to Boston. Six hours after he left campus, he OD’d on heroin. The police found him dead in a park.”

  We were all leaning forward, perched on the edge of our chairs and sofas.

  He crossed his arms, pausing to gaze deep into the eyes of one person after another, around the room. “Another boy broke into an old shed in Stockbridge. His thing was huffing, anything with fumes enough to get him off and dull the pain he was in. He found a quart of paint thinner and some rags—sucked down the vapors until he passed out, holding a lit cigarette. The shed caught fire, but they got him out in time.”

  Santangelo turned to look out over the broad expanse of lawn. Everything shimmered in the summer heat.

  “The thing is,” he said, “what we’re asking these kids to do, the kind of work this place is about—well, it’s damn hard. We force them to confront the most painful experiences they’ve ever had: molestation, beatings, rape . . . instances of cruelty that will break your heart and spirit, just hearing about them after the fact.”

  Old hands around the room nodded at this.

  “It’s no wonder the kids want to run away,” he continued, “when we’re pushing them to feel the impact of those horrors honestly. The damage . . .”

  He shook his head sadly, then turned to face us again. “I can tell when a kid is ready to bolt. It’s always when our work here first starts to become truly meaningful. They want to shut down, to escape from having to relive the worst of it, and from having to see themselves honestly, without the comforting filter of denial.”

  Santangelo started sauntering along the row of windows again, backlit, with his hands clasped at the small of his back. “Perfectly natural response. One we in fact expect, even strive for. We just don’t want to lose the child in the process of trying to save him.”

  Someone coughed behind me.

  “I realized,” Santangelo continued, “that the best way to protect them was to set the boundaries close—give them avenues for rebellion that could satisfy their appetite for defiance but wouldn’t kill them.”

  Tim raised his hand. “Can you tell us what those were?”

  “Caffeine and nicotine,” said Santangelo. “I made those the forbidden fruit. Kid hits the road now, I guarantee you his first impulse won’t be to score smack. He’ll feel compelled to get his hands on a pack of smokes and a black coffee.”