Free In the Company of Crazies by Nora Raleigh Baskin Page A

she had just calculated the years and suddenly felt the passing of every one of them. “It’s been seventeen years.”
    I wondered if she was happy or miserable. Why hadn’t she married again? Did she have any children? I had this funny sense that Karen hadn’t planned on staying here this long, that maybe it was like waking up from a dream only to find you’re still dreaming.
    Mountain Laurel.
    Sometimes I try to imagine where I will be in seventeen years, or twenty years, or five years, or shit, next year.
    And I wonder. It scares me. I just wonder.
    * * *
    After she died, I still had to pass Debbie Sanders’s house every day coming home from school. I had to imagine her family inside. And I’d imagine her room, even though I had never been in it. I imagined it empty but everything left just the way it was. Maybe her clothes still lying on the floor and her notebooks open on her desk.
    I don’t know why. I really didn’t know anything about her. I knew she had an older brother and a sister in college; that’s all. I’m sure they never imagined anything like this. Or even if they imagined it, they never thought it could really happen. I didn’t think I had any right to be sad or to cry when I saw her house and thought about her family inside.
    But that didn’t stop some other kids.
    There were kids in school who thought nothing of writing something at the top of their test when they hadn’t studied, like “Need a re-test. Too upset…” And then in little letters underneath “…about Debbie Sanders.”
    Or when they didn’t have their report done or their project completed.
    “Can’t concentrate since the funeral.”
    Girls hung out, putting on makeup in the bathrooms, and when they were late for class they’d say, “We just started talking…about Debbie.”
    Sometimes, they’d cry.
    I knew for a fact that those two girls in the bathroom wouldn’t have been able to pick Debbie’s picture out of the yearbook.
    I had talked to Debbie before. She rode my bus. We were both on the volleyball team.
    And still I hadn’t cried at all.
    * * *
    Billy wasn’t so bad once you got to know him a little. Once you got past the fact that he wore some article of army clothing every day, whether it was army fatigue pants or a camouflage jacket or a camouflage T-shirt. Once you stopped noticing how he bit his nails and when his nails were too short he started in on the skin of his palms until they were red and scabby.
    Once you got to know him and got past all that, you liked him anyway.
    He was really just a big crybaby.
    Tuesday morning, my second week at Mountain Laurel, Billy burned himself on his electric blanket. Sam had to drive him to the local hospital. Any break in the routine at Mountain Laurel was a good reason to hang around and talk. Even the teachers thought so. We had hot chocolate and worked in our journals all morning.
    When Billy returned he was a hero, with an ugly burn on his forearm to prove it.
    “Where did you get an electric blanket, anyway?” Tommy asked him.
    “None of your business,” Billy answered. He had his sleeve pushed up to the top of his white chubby arm. His burn was uncovered, but it had a layer of something gooey over it. It was red and blistery and just gross enough for everyone to be interested in it.
    “How did it happen?” Drew wanted to know.
    “I don’t know,” Billy told us. “I didn’t even wake up, I guess.”
    We were in the living room. Maggie was in the kitchen, getting lunch ready. Gretchen was on the phone with someone at Billy’s house. She was in her office with the door shut. You could hear her voice, but you couldn’t make out what she was saying. Billy could have called home himself, but he seemed to prefer showing us his wound.
    “What a jerk you are then,” Carl said. “How could you not wake up when your arm was on fire?”
    “It wasn’t on fire,” Billy said. For this much attention, he didn’t even mind being called a jerk. “The guy