How to Behave in a Crowd Page 23

  “I found an apartment in Chicago,” she said.

  “That’s great news,” I said. I felt like the projectionist had skipped a reel, like a whole scene was missing from between the last time I’d sat on the couch that morning and this one.

  “I’ll have to have roommates, though,” Berenice said. “There was no way around it.”

  I knew how much the idea of sharing space with strangers made Berenice uncomfortable. “Maybe they’ll be nice,” I said.

  “Well, at the very least, they should be smart. That’s no small feat in this world.”

  “Are they all PhDs?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  Berenice picked up the book she’d laid open on her chest and started reading again.

  “Do you mind if I watch TV?” I said.

  “Of course I do. I’m reading.”

  “Maybe you could stop?”

  “To watch daytime television?”

  “We could go rent a movie or something. I’m sure we could find one that’s set in Chicago. To get you in the mood. Or one where the hero has roommates.”

  “Why don’t you go find yourself a book and sit here with me instead? We can have a reading workshop.”

  “I don’t like reading,” I said.

  “You’re too old to say things like that. It’s not cute. Go get the book I got you for your birthday.”

  “It sounds a bit boring,” I admitted, picturing all the shades of brown on the Buddenbrooks dust jacket.

  “It’s your fault for being into German culture,” Berenice said. “I would’ve gotten you something less taxing otherwise.”

  It became clear to me at that point that I was about to cry. There was this pressure right behind my eyes. It burned, almost, while the rest of my body suddenly filled with a waft of cold air. I didn’t understand how Berenice couldn’t feel it. I always felt it when someone next to me was sad.

  “Are you going to eat that?” Berenice was pointing at the chocolate bar in my hand.

  I shook my head no and she grabbed the bar and bit through it like a normal person would.

  “By the way,” she said, her mouth full of peanuts and caramel and maybe some of Denise’s saliva from two hours before. “There was a letter for you in the mail.”

  It wasn’t really a letter. Juliette had just sent an autographed picture, the one I’d requested, of her in a baby-blue dress standing in a field of sunflowers, on which she’d written, “For Denise Galet, With all my ♥♥♥ Juliette Corso.” No note, no answers to my questions about the charity campaign. I wasn’t even sure Juliette had read my letter, or if she had assistants who opened her mail for her and only made lists of the pictures she would have to sign and of the names that should go on them. I put the picture back in the reinforced envelope it had come in, so it wouldn’t bend. There was a tiny chance, I thought, that Denise would be back in school in a day or two.

  When school resumed, we were told a psychological support unit had been set up, for those who needed to talk about what had happened to Denise. No one went, and so the day after, the principal made it mandatory for all eighth graders to go talk to the social workers, so they wouldn’t have come all the way there for nothing. We would be called in alphabetical order throughout the next couple of days, the principal said. At recess, I heard two girls, Steph and Jess, go to Sara Catalano to inquire about her meeting with the counselors.

  “What did they ask you?” Jess said, like it was all a big school test and Sara could help them score better results.

  “They asked how I was dealing with all of it,” Sara said, visibly proud to have had the psychological support unit experience a couple of hours ahead of most people. “They asked if I felt guilty.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “What did you say?”

  “I think I’m not supposed to tell,” Sara said. “There’s professional confidentiality.”

  “Well that’s just for them,” Jess said. “You’re not a professional.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Sara said. “Anyway. I told them I wished I could’ve done something to help Sunshine out but—”

  “Wait, you actually told them Denise’s nickname was Sunshine?”

  “No, of course I didn’t,” Sara said.

  “Did they know about it, though?”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t refer to her as Sunshine.”

  They all went quiet for a few seconds, as if they were about to understand something.

  “So,” Sara resumed, “I told them I’d tried to reach out to Sunshine in the past, like, I’d tried to show her that life wasn’t all about being miserable and all, so I felt like I had done whatever I could and I didn’t think I was guilty.”

  “I didn’t know you’d tried to be friends with her.”

  “I didn’t try to be friends, just, you know, see what her deal was.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. Couple years ago. Like, after she took all those pills. She came to my mother’s practice for cavities. I saw her come out of the building and I was like, ‘Why did you do that with your mother’s pills?’ like, I really wanted to understand what had gone on, but she told me to mind my own business so I was like, ‘Okay, fine, I tried,’ you know? But then I thought maybe she was being defensive because she didn’t trust me or something and so I told her that if she needed to talk to someone, I was available. Like, not at school, but after school, if she wanted. We live on the same block. She didn’t like that either.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She told me to go to hell and to take my condensation with me.”

  Jess whistled, to signify how harsh she thought Denise’s response had been.

  “My mother said her teeth were all fucked up anyway,” Sara added.

  “Well they sure are now,” Jess said. “They say her jaw blew to pieces.”

  They paused again.

  “Did you tell them all that? That she’d turned you down?”

  “At first I thought it would be unfair to Sunshine to talk about how she didn’t want my help, but then I figured, what the hell, the more I talk, the more these shrinks feel like their job is important, and the more French class I get to miss.”

  “You’re so lucky they called you during French class,” Steph said. “With my luck, I’ll probably just miss civics, which is basically, like, not a class anyway.”

  “Can you actually make it last as long as you want?” Jess inquired. “Like, if I start crying or something by the end of the thirty minutes, they’ll have to keep me, right?”

  My turn came the following morning. The psych support unit had been set up in the auditorium’s dressing rooms, behind the stage, at the end of a narrow, tilted hallway. I’d never been there before. I’d never even auditioned for a school play. The social workers, a man and a woman wearing jackets in different shades of corduroy, had laid their files on the long table attached to a wall of mirrors where I assumed tissues and palettes of cheap makeup usually went. For a second I thought the mirrors were two-way and that Denise hadn’t really jumped, but that this was in fact a criminal investigation. Only the male social worker talked. I wondered if the woman took care of the girls. She just stared at me the whole time and didn’t say anything.

  “Are you close to Denise?” the man asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure what close means.”

  “I heard people say she was your girlfriend.”

  “I heard people say strawberry was the best flavor of ice cream,” I said.

  “Hmm.”

  He wrote something down in his notebook and underlined it decisively.

  “And what do you think is the best flavor of ice cream, Isidore?” he asked. He waited to be done with his question to look back up at me.

  “Is this a new school of psychology?” I said. “Ice-cream preference based?”

  He wrote down something else.

  “Would you define yourself as skeptical? Do you beli
eve people generally have hidden intentions? That their questions cannot be genuine?”

  “Denise told me once that I took things too literally,” I said. “I think she meant I was dumb.”

  “Did that hurt your feelings?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Where were you when Denise had her accident?”

  “German class.”

  “Do you like German?”

  “It has a few good words,” I said.

  “Were you aware Denise was suicidal?”

  “Yes. I mean, everybody is. Aware of it, I mean.”

  “Would you say you understood what suicide meant before she jumped?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “Would you care to expand?”

  “I don’t feel guilty, if that’s what you want to know,” I said. “Denise doesn’t like life. Not just her own. In general. It pains her. It has nothing to do with me. Not specifically.”

  “Who said anything about guilt? Do you think you’re expected to feel guilty?”

  “I think it would be pretentious to feel guilty. It would mean there was something I could’ve done to change her whole worldview and I didn’t care to do it, or just forgot to pull it out of my sleeve. But I had nothing. I still have nothing.”

  The social worker nodded.

  He asked about a few more things, my health, what kind of lifestyle I led, if I liked team sports. I didn’t understand how that related to anything, but I answered as best I could. When he ran out of random questions, I got up to leave the way I’d come, but the woman social worker stopped me and shook her head no. Her colleague explained the next kid was waiting and we were not supposed to cross paths.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “That’s just how it works,” he said, and he pointed at a small door at the other end of the room. “You can exit through here. It’s the artists’ exit.”

  I pushed the door open and found myself at the top of the staircase Denise and I had spent two years’ worth of recesses in.

  Back home I fixed myself a bowl of ice cream with all the flavors we had in the basement freezer. Some pints had been there for too long and their insides were covered with that thin layer of ice crystals that tells you the ice cream will taste exactly like the cardboard around it, but I scooped some out of those anyway. Our freezer was big enough that we didn’t really ever need to organize it or get rid of anything, even the things we didn’t like. I ended up with thirteen different flavors, cherry, candied chestnut, chocolate chip, coffee, lavender, blueberry, pineapple, rum raisin, nougat, pistachio, speculoos, coconut, and licorice. All the flavors that sounded weird had been bought by the father and were therefore at the very least two years and a couple of months old. I went back up to the living room and turned the TV on. A reality show was playing, introducing people who wanted to be famous for nothing in particular, like Simone but not as smart. One of them was eating ice cream too, out of a pint that had been covered with black duct tape to hide the brand.

  “Who do you think will be eliminated next week?” the ice-cream-eating guy asked another guy.

  “Geez, I hope Cynthia goes home,” the second guy said. “She gets on my nerves so bad, you know? She’s so negative.”

  “Totally, it’s like she doesn’t even want to be here,” the first guy said, “like she can’t see how lucky she is to even be here.”

  I thought the audience would be shown a scene with Cynthia next, so they could make up their mind about her, whether she should go home or not, but the two guys remained on-screen and talked some more about how lucky they were to be there, what a great opportunity it was, to be there, to just be, really, and to get all that love from the fans by just being there, being themselves. I started laughing because I couldn’t really believe how much they were using the verb to be. I must have laughed very loud because Simone came rushing down the stairs to see what was up, and in the process of laughing I had spilled some ice cream on the couch, and I thought that was the reason why she was staring at me judgmentally, but then when I looked at the spilled ice cream and invoked laughing as an excuse for it, Simone just said that I had scared her, laughing like a maniac, and who the hell laughed when they were alone anyway? Then she walked back up to our room. The thirteen ice creams in my bowl had started to melt and now swirled together in one of those tie-dye-T-shirt patterns. I considered slurping the whole thing but then I thought it was too pretty to destroy.

  I went to the kitchen to get a bucket of soapy water and a sponge to clean the ice cream I’d spilled on the couch before it would dry. While I was at it, I tried getting rid of the old stain, even though I’d tried and failed many times before. I thought maybe old stains could be like people and decide to give up one day, without a reason, to just disappear. This one didn’t. The couch was just big enough for four of us. It had often been a source of conflict, who got to sit on the couch, who took the chair, who had to sit on cushions on the floor. But Berenice was packing to move to Chicago, Simone couldn’t wait to start school in Paris, and the father was dead. Occasions to plead for a spot on the couch had gotten scarce and would only grow scarcer with time, I thought. Yet the repeated fights over who got to sit on the couch had been the best arguments in favor of getting a new, bigger one. From now on, no one but me would ever see the need to get rid of it. I scraped the old stain until it became a hole. Maybe a hole would make my family see that it was time for a change. Probably they wouldn’t notice. When the hole got big enough, I started pulling the wadding out of the cushion. By the time I emptied the cushion entirely, my ice creams had all melted together in a light brown puddle.

  The V-Effekt

  Only Denise’s family was allowed to visit her while she was in the coma. “Denise’s family” meant her parents. She got transferred from the ICU to neurology a few days before the end of the school year. The doctors had no idea when she’d wake up, but they suspected that when she did, her main problems would be for the neurologists to solve. When Denise’s parents told me this, I asked them if that meant Denise was going to be paralyzed, because I thought that people in wheelchairs were all that neurologists dealt with, but they both shook their heads silently like no one had told them anything and they were afraid to ask.

  Since Denise had jumped, it seemed her parents had been trying to morph into one single person. You saw them walking on the street side by side, each one enveloping the other at the waist with an arm, the two other arms intertwined and clasped at the elbows in front of them. Simone joked that you could put your groceries in the crib that their arms formed, that they had become a human basket, and I couldn’t help but visualize fruits and vegetables and bread in their arms whenever I saw them.

  I wanted to like Denise’s parents, because they were going through something horrible, but I was uncomfortable around them. They always insisted on talking about something other than Denise—the weather, my sisters—and I always had to answer their questions politely and wait until we were done going over the subjects they pretended to be interested in before I could ask how Denise was.

  “Oh, it is so sweet of you to ask,” they’d say, like they hadn’t seen it coming.

  I saw them one day on my way back from school, and I contemplated pretending I hadn’t. I always felt lousy reverting to that trick. I believed that the second you decided to pretend not to see someone, they could feel it, and that there was no winning because the person would either stop and chat with you knowing you didn’t want to, just to make you uneasy, or pass you and be hurt by your attitude, which I didn’t think Denise’s parents deserved. I crossed the street to go up to them.

  Denise’s mother smiled when she saw me and said they had great news.

  “Has Denise woken up?” I said, and Denise’s mother’s smile disappeared when she admitted that no, she hadn’t. “But we saw Daphné Marlotte getting some sun in her wheelchair in the hospital yard earlier, and her nurse said they were releasing her tomorrow. Isn’t that wonderful?”

&nb
sp; I glanced at Denise’s father to see how wonderful he thought that was before I would decide what to say.

  “Wonderful,” he said. He pulled his wife even closer to his chest. “If she can make a full recovery, at her age, boy, there’s hope for our little girl.”

  I wondered if they’d been told that Denise’s fall had been an intentional one. They seemed to believe all problems would be solved once her body was fixed.

  “I wasn’t aware Mrs. Marlotte had fully recovered,” I said.

  “Well…she’s not exactly fully there.”

  “Apparently, she lost the ability to speak,” Denise’s father explained.

  “To speak French, at least.”

  “But her German seems to be accurate, so they set her up with a bilingual nurse, for the home visits.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, even though I thought I did. “Daphné forgot how to speak French entirely? I thought this only happened in movies.”

  “Movies are often based on truth,” Denise’s father said.

  “Yes. The Notebook was a true story, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know about that one, honey, we’ll have to check.”

  “Either way, it’s a beautiful story, on the theme of memory.”

  “I haven’t seen that movie,” I said. I was sure Denise hadn’t liked The Notebook, since her parents had, and I felt sad for her that they were the only ones allowed to visit her.

  “The brain is such a mysterious muscle,” said her father.

  I wanted to give them Juliette’s picture. I’d had it framed and always carried it in my bag. I thought it would make Denise happy to see it on her nightstand when she woke up, if they gave you such a thing as a nightstand when you were in a coma. Maybe she would think Juliette had been there in her room to encourage her to live longer. I could never get myself to hand her parents the picture though. They would’ve had to break the lock of their arms to take it.