So, you sit there and you are supposed to be stupid, so they don’t expect you to better yourself. You’re not allowed to talk, because they don’t think what you say to each other could be useful, even to their mission, as they pretend it to be (that we are bettering ourselves). I suppose they just think we will make trouble if we talk, which is true. But, the trouble we will make is unavoidable.
Let’s talk about DAY ONE, DAY TWO, DAY THREE, DAY FOUR, and DAY FIVE because those are all the detentions I serve that week, and nothing else that happens at school is interesting. In my classes I have my hood up and I sit and write in my notebook. At lunch I sit by myself. I have zero interactions and people have decided to leave me alone, which is partly due to a photograph someone got from someone else—I guess they know people at Parkson. The photograph was pretty funny. I don’t have a phone, so I couldn’t get the picture for myself, but I would have liked to have it.
It seems like somebody took a picture of me when I didn’t notice. Then they stuck cat eyes on my face and claws on my hands and put in a thought bubble, and in the thought bubble they put a picture of Joe Schott’s actual neck with the cuts from the pencil. So, I guess that other picture had been making the rounds at Parkson, and some genius here decided to be even funnier. Well, I liked it—that much I’ll say. I wish I could have showed it to my aunt or my dad.
DAY ONE
I sat and read The Theatre and Its Double by Artaud. At first I thought it was just about theater, but then I realized Artaud probably hated theater. Or he hated other people’s theater. He wanted to rescue theater from the philistines, which is everyone. So, I sat and read that. I ate licorice. I saw that one of the guys I had seen talking that time, he was sitting next to me. We can sit wherever we want, but we can’t talk and we can’t move once we sit down. Janine Pezaro, for instance, sits at the front. She doesn’t care if people sit behind her because she is a brick shithouse and can beat up half the guys in the school. Probably more than half. She is in here for beating up two girls at the same time. I am sort of in love with her for that. But, she is definitely deluded.
The guy had mentioned the Sonar Club, and now he was sitting near me. I left the book All Russia Is Burning out on the desk next to the Artaud, and asked if I could go to the bathroom. They gave me a five-minute pass (that’s really only enough time to get to the bathroom and back). When I returned to my seat, I saw that he had taken the book from the desk and was reading it.
Give me that back.
He handed it over. Sorry, it looked interesting.
Ms. Kennison yelled at us for talking, so we shut up. A seed sown. There was still the question of if they let girls in the Arson Club. I could imagine some bullshit misogynist nonsense governing this also. My aunt was always telling me—never accept any privileges that are for girls, because it is only half the coin.
DAY TWO
Fatty wasn’t there, so I just read. This time it was some Alfred Jarry that I found in a church bin. Apparently he would carry a revolver around and threaten to use it on people.
DAY THREE
Not a good day. I spat on Lisette at lunch, and got detention for that, because, as it turns out, her mom is the guidance counselor and she has some kind of pull. So, when I show up for detention as usual, Kennison does a little chuckle, and says, I guess you’ll be a regular here for a while, like we have some joke in common. I’m not one to divide myself off from the rest of humanity, I mean, I would like to help them, but let’s be clear—Kennison and I are not in the same boat, no way. So, I just go and sit. I ran out of licorice the day before, and Green Gully ran out too, so I didn’t have any. To explain: there are two stores that sell the licorice I like. One of them, I can steal from. The other I have to have money. Now, my aunt has almost no money, so I can’t use the almost no money she has to buy licorice. That means, I only get licorice when Green Gully has it. They are a fancy supermarket, which means they charge so much they don’t need to have proper security.
By the way, I don’t think spitting on people is that great, but Lisette said something about me living with my grandma, which I didn’t like. All the time—all the time, people basically beg me to freak out on them, and mostly I keep my cool.
DAY FOUR
This is the day when I realize that the girls who sit at the other corner in the back alternate smoking a joint in the bathroom essentially the entire time they are in detention. They do this by repeatedly asking to go to the bathroom and claiming they have their period. I thought that was funny, when I saw them doing it, but I didn’t understand. Then, when I was actually in the bathroom to use the bathroom, I saw one of them, and she offered some to me. So, that made the detention go by pretty quick. In fact, I was high for maybe two hours, so after detention, I went with them to a park, and we watched a homeless guy chase seagulls. At some point, we had been watching him do it for maybe twenty minutes, Lana says, I think he’s chasing the seagulls, which made us all laugh until we cried. Even I laughed at that, and I never laugh.
DAY FIVE
I decided on this day to just do the research paper, even though it would be three weeks ahead of time. So, I browsed through the Russia book and wrote up a gloss of what the paper would be. Then, I wrote the first few pages. The position of the author as far as I could tell is that peasants burned down their own houses not for political reasons, but out of ignorance, and sometimes as vengeance for minor slights. This was a bit depressing, but seemed almost inevitable. There was a part about peasant women waking up early in the morning to take their babies out of the iron stove where they had put them in the night. Yes, they put their babies inside an iron stove full of coals. So, if you see a Russian person doing something crazy, as you sometimes do, remember—they have been doing that shit forever. It’s nothing new.
On day five, which was Friday, I should say—I found a note in my locker. It said—11 p.m., Alcatraz.
Alcatraz isn’t really Alcatraz, of course. It’s just a little island that is in the middle of a lake in one of the medical parks. Kids like to go there to drink.
ALCATRAZ
My aunt doesn’t mind if I go out late, because I mostly don’t go anywhere. She thinks that if I’m out late, then maybe I have some friends. In her mind that outweighs the dangers of being out late, whatever those might be. As it turns out, when I am out late, it is just that I am sitting in a park somewhere, or in a cemetery, or even at a laundromat. You know, places where people go when they don’t know anyone.
That meant I could very easily go to this meeting if I felt like it. I stopped at home to drop off the library books and I got a screwdriver from under the sink. My aunt wasn’t even there—on Friday she volunteers at a shelter; I think it’s some kind of soup kitchen. The other people who work there are religious and she can’t stand them, but she goes anyway. She’s like me—she doesn’t know very many people, and so she gets stuck with the ones she does know.