Something jumped inside me, like a toy ball on a string.
“Where are you sending me?”
He was enjoying my fear immensely. He basked in it for a while. Shuffled things around, inspected his fingernails, lit a cigarette.
“Where do you think? Another group, of course.”
I smiled. “You must be joking.”
It would be easier to drop a live horse into any other House group than somebody from the First. The horse would have a better chance of fitting in, size and manure notwithstanding.
I should’ve kept my mouth shut, but still I blurted out, “No one would have me. I’m a Pheasant.”
“I’ve had enough of this!” Shark spat out the cigarette and smashed his fist on the desk. “What’s this Pheasant stuff? Who invented all that crap?”
The papers scurried from under his fist, and the cigarette butt missed the ashtray.
I was so scared that I yelled back at him, even louder, “How should I know why they call us that? Ask those who started it! You think it’s easy, remembering all those idiotic nicks? You think anyone explained to me what they mean?”
“Don’t you dare raise your voice in my office!” he screamed back, leaning over the desk.
I glanced at the fire extinguisher and immediately looked back.
It was still hanging there.
Shark followed the direction of my gaze and suddenly whispered, as if taking me into confidence, “It won’t. The bolts are this thick.”
Then he showed me his disgusting thumb. This was so unexpected that I was stunned. I just sat there ogling him like an idiot. He was smirking. It dawned on me that he was simply bullying me. I hadn’t been living in the House long enough to easily address everyone by their nicknames. You had to be pretty open minded to call someone Sniffle or Piddler to their face and not feel like a complete jerk. Now I was being told that the administration did not approve of it either. What for? Just to have a good yell and see how I’d react? And then I realized what had changed in the office since my first visit. It was Shark himself. The unassuming body hiding under the fire extinguisher had turned into a real shark. Into exactly what his name was. The nicks were given for a reason.
Shark lit up again while I was considering all this.
“I don’t want to hear any more of this nonsense,” he warned, fishing out the remains of the previous cigarette from my file. “Of these attempts to disparage our best group. To deprive it of its rightful status. Understood?”
“You mean you too consider the word to be an insult? But why? How is it worse than simply Birds? Or Rats? Rats. I think that sounds much worse than Pheasants.”
Shark blinked at me.
“That’s because you know what those who say it actually mean, correct?”
“Right,” Shark said severely. “That’s enough. Shut up. Now I understand why the First can’t stand you.”
I looked at the sneakers. Shark was much too generous toward the Pheasants’ motivations, but I decided not to say so. I only asked where I was being transferred.
“I don’t know yet,” he lied. “I need to think about it.”
No, he wasn’t called Shark for nothing. He was precisely that. A blotchy, slit-mouthed fish with eyes looking in different directions. It was getting old, and the hunting was not what it once had been, which is why it was entertained by chasing after minnows like me. Of course he knew. He had even just been about to tell me, but then decided not to. Just to make me squirm. He overdid it, though, because the group didn’t really matter. They all hated Pheasants. Suddenly it came to me that this might not be so bad after all. I now had a chance to escape. The First threw me out and the others were going to do the same, whether right away or not. If I really applied myself I could make it as quick as possible. Think about how much time and effort I’d spent trying to become a good Pheasant. Convincing another group that I didn’t belong there would be much easier. Besides, they were all sure of it already. It was even conceivable that Shark thought so himself. This was me being expelled in a roundabout way. And afterward he could say that I wouldn’t fit in anywhere, no matter how hard they tried. Because heaven forbid any blame would attach to Pheasants.
This calmed me down. Shark caught that moment of enlightenment and didn’t like it.
“Go,” he said with visible disgust. “Go pack your things. I am coming tomorrow at half past eight. Personally.”
As I was closing the door to the principal’s office behind me, I knew that he was going to be late tomorrow. An hour, maybe even two. I could see right through him now, him and his petty shark pleasures.
“The students just call it Home, succinctly combining in this word everything that our school means to them—family, comfort, care, and understanding.” This was what it said in the promotional booklet. I was planning to frame it and put it on the wall once I was out of there. Black frame. Maybe even gilded. It was quite a piece of work, that booklet. Not a word of truth in it, but also not a word that was a direct lie. I don’t know who had written it but he was a genius, in a sense. It was House, though, not Home. But we did succinctly combine a lot of stuff into this word. And it was quite possible that a Pheasant really was comfortable here. And that other Pheasants were a family to him. There are no Pheasants in the Outsides, so I could not say for sure, but if there were, the House would be the place they would all fervently seek out. But there aren’t any, and I had a suspicion that they were created by the House itself, which meant that before getting here they all might have been normal people. A very disconcerting thought.
But back to the booklet, page three: “More than a hundred years of history and lovingly preserved tradition” are all present and accounted for. One look at the House is enough to realize that it started falling apart in the last century. There were also bricked-in fireplaces with a complex network of flues. When it was windy the walls moaned like in a medieval castle. Total immersion in history. Oh, and traditions, it’s certainly right about those. The absurdity that is the House was definitely a product of several generations of not-quite-right people. Those who followed needed only to “lovingly preserve” and reinforce.
“A massive library.” There was one. Game room, swimming pool, movie screen . . . all there, but each “there” came with its own little “except,” and then it turned out that actually using those luxuries would be impossible, dangerous, or unpleasant. The game room belonged to Bandar-Logs. That meant no Pheasants allowed. The library was the card players’. You could wheel up there and take out a book, but you were unlikely to want to return it. Swimming pool? Under construction for the past couple of years. “And it is going to be at least two years more, the roof is leaking,” as the Little Pigs had kindly clarified. Oh, they had been very kind for a while. Answering questions, showing and explaining. They were sure that they lived full and interesting lives in an uncommonly wondrous place. This had me completely floored. I shouldn’t have tried to convince them otherwise, I guess. Then maybe we’d still be friends. But as it was, the kindness was soon over, together with the budding friendships, and the three almost identical signatures appeared at the bottom of the letter demanding my transfer. They had still managed to teach me a lot. Almost everything I knew about the House I had learned from them. The life of a Pheasant was not conducive to new information. To anything new, really. Life in the First was rationed minute by minute.
In the canteen, think about food. In the classroom, think about learning. At the doctor, think about health. Shared fears, of catching a cold. Shared dreams, of a mutton chop for dinner. Uniform possessions, nothing extraneous. Every gesture automatic. Four parts to the day, divided by meals—breakfast, lunch, dinner. Movies once a week, on Saturdays. Assemblies on Mondays.