In the Company of Crazies
Mountain Laurel, the middle of nowhere and nothing.
In the Company of Crazies
By Nora Raleigh Baskin
Copyright 2016 by Nora Raleigh Baskin
Cover Copyright 2016 by Untreed Reads Publishing
Cover Design by Ginny Glass
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print, 2006.
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This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
In the Company of Crazies
Nora Raleigh Baskin
Illustrated by Henry P. Raleigh
For my dad
Part One
Mountain Laurel, the middle of nowhere and nothing.
One of the teachers here, Karen, says I am supposed to write in this journal every day. That's about all they have to do here and half of them don't even do if.
What do I have to say? And if I did, why would I want someone to read if? I have nothing to say.
All I have to say isânothing.
Going to Mountain Laurel was my choice. That's what they told me.
They.
The collective
they.
My therapist. My school counselor. The entire middle-school guidance department. My dad. And my mom, who was the one who found this place to begin with. The only one who didn't want me to go was my little sister, Cecily. But Cecily was eight and what did she know?
I
agreed
to go.
They needed to hear that.
They needed to believe that it had been my choice. But by the time everyone came to the conclusion that boarding school would be the best solution for
all
of us, it was the middle of October and most places had, at least, a year waiting list. And exactly whose fault
that
was became just another matter for a huge debate. A brawl, really. Whose fault was it that we had waited so long, hadn't read the signs, didn't seek professional help until it was nearly too late? It made for some real good fights between my mom and dad. Some real doozies. But by that time, I was used to them fighting about me. Fighting about my grades (dropping by the minute), my friends (or lack thereof), shoplifting (getting
caught
shoplifting), my skipping school (a lot).
No, by this time I was practically a war veteran. They could have paraded me through the streets on Memorial Day.
Their fighting didn't even faze me at all.
But Cecily hated it. She would hide under her bed because that's where our dog, Morgan, went as soon as he sensed someone's voice getting too loud, too angry. And that's where he stayed until it got quiet again. Dogs are funny like that. They can just feel it coming. Cecily was just following Morgan.
“Everybody knows these schools fill up way in advance.” (My mother.)
“Everybody? Who is everybody? Who is everybody?” (My father.) “And what's your goddamn point anyway? I really can't see your point.”
But Mountain Laurel hadn't filled up. They were accepting girls for the first time and the changeover had created a spot.
An opening.
I needed an opening. (And Cecily needed to come out from under her bed.) I needed an out. I needed an escape. So I went.
So I guess it was my decision after all.
* * *
Mountain Laurel was a farm, or at least it must have been at one time. When my dad first drove into the place, I thought we had made a mistake. There was a huge barn. There was a little beach and a pond, and behind that was a hill and pine trees all lined up like they had been planted that way. The house looked like an old farmhouse, white with reddish brown shutters on almost all the windows and a front porch piled with split firewood. A big white husky dog sat watching us. There were those Adirondack chairs scattered on the front lawn, lots of them in a semicircle, like people had just been sitting there a minute ago, talking.
The whole place was laid out like a mini-colonial village. Like an old-fashioned Amish community. Like something from another time. My dad and I both sat in the car for a while, just looking out, wondering if we were in the right place.
“The sign said Mountain Laurel,” I said to my dad.
“It did, didn't it?” he said, nodding. But neither one of us moved.
* * *
Mountain Laurel.
When I don't feel like writing, which is all the time, Karen says I can just draw. I can doodle something instead.
Which is what I'm going do.
* * *
If wasn't just the shoplifting that got me sent away, but funny it would turn out to be the Mountain Laurel School for Alternative Education. Because when my mother searched
Mountain Laurel
on the Internet and found out that it had once been categorized as a school for “emotionally disturbed adolescent boys” she was a little hesitant, to put it mildly.
Well, forget for a minute that I wasn't a boyâI
was
an adolescent, I'm often accused of being too emotional and my parents are completely disturbed. So put it all together and you have a perfect match. But did it really matter at that point anyway?
“I don't know,” my mother said. “It was a
boys'
school.”
“So what?” I remember telling my mother.
I remember telling her that but not thinking about it. It was almost an instinct by then. I had developed a bunch of phrases, all more or less guaranteed to end any conversation.
I don't care.
Shut up.
You're annoying me.
So what?
Eventually, my mother convinced herself that it was their old website and the school wasn't like that anymore. After all, they were accepting girls now. They had changed their name. Their brochure claimed superior education (she latched on to that one big-time) and they had an immediate opening. Besides, like I said, it wasn't just the shoplifting. I think ultimately it was that phone message I left on the attendance secretary's answering machine.
I used to be real good at deepening my voice just a bit and very seriously saying something like, “Mia Singer, grade seven, will be absent today. She has an orthodontist appointment.”
Or a sore throat.
Or a family emergency.
But that day, for some reason, I said something completely different. I said, “Mia Singer won't be able to come to school today because she's dead.”
The shoplifting was just the icing on the cake.
* * *
“It doesn't look like a school,” my dad said.
I looked out the window. “I think that's the point.”
We were far enough north to notice that the trees here had already begun to transform. The late-morning sun filtered down through the big red leaves onto the tops of the buildings and set them on fire. We were late. We were supposed to have gotten here first thing in the morning. Eight a.m. Breakfast and cleanup would be done and the first class began at 8:15, my dad had been told. But it had been more than an hour's drive and had taken a little longer to leave the house than we had planned. It took my mother a long time to say good-bye and, when it came right down to it, she couldn't. Cecily was under the bed again.
To the right of the farmhouse was a long, flat rectangle building, one story, with windows all along the side and two big black doors. The path through the grass from the house to the two black doors was worn down to dirt.
And then suddenly someone came out of the rectangle building. A little someone.
“You're here!”
My dad must have recognized the woman. He opened his car door without saying anything to me.
“Yes, we're here. Sorry we're late,” he began.
I didn't like this woman right away and I changed my mind immediately about coming here. In fact, this didn't seem like a good idea at all. I thought I'd be much better off at my regular school. I'd go back. I'd stay there. I'd buckle down and get serious. After all, that was the guidance counselor's original suggestion. When did I agree to this? I certainly hadn't. Not this.
What was I thinking? I wasn't thinking.
I felt the tears burning inside my face. I felt that really sharp, deep pain that sticks you right in your throat.
I heard the word
no
shouting inside my brain, but nothing came out.
My dad walked around and opened my door. He never opens the door for me, but when he did I got out of the car, because I didn't know what else to do.
“This is Mia,” he said to the woman.
I couldn't look up. I knew I would cry.
“Hello, Mia. It's nice to meet you,” she said. “I am Gretchen.”
The woman had a foreign accent, German or Russian or French or something, and it made me feel even farther from home. She was shorter than me. I decided I was never going to like anything about her.
“At Mountain Laurel, when someone speaks to you, it's polite to respond,” she said.
No, I would always hate everything about her.
I turned to my dad, but he wasn't looking at me. There are those certain times when doing what you're told seems like your only choice, and this seemed like one of those times.
“Hello,” I mumbled.
I started listening to what she was saying about schedules, phone calls, and getting picked up, but I noticed faces at the window behind her. Boys, about five or six of them, all pushed up to the glass, watching. One face was long, with pimples and light-colored hair on top. Next to him was a dark-haired boy with a round face. And there was a big boy with nearly a man's face, but there was something odd about his expression, alert but confused. Next to him was a skinny face, his eyes darting around, his lips talking. There was a boy with a baby face and blond, blond hair.
There were more faces that moved to and from the window so quickly, I couldn't see them all.
“Those are the boys. The other students here,” Gretchen said when she noticed me watching. “You'll meet them soon enough. Come. Let's get your things.”