my own thoughts, I might just make it through without incident.
At lunchtime, the quiet and coolness outside the laundry room were a bit of a shock.
Charles was watching for me, standing just outside the dining hall entrance. Was this normal behavior, I wondered? Not that there was much I could do about it. I couldn’t complain even if I wanted to. But to tell the truth, I was actually kind of glad to see him. Since I couldn’t talk to anyone, I couldn’t make any connection with the other kids in the laundry room. And there were so many of us with yellow stickers that anyone who wasn’t in SafeZone probably didn’t talk out of—I dunno, maybe courtesy? Or maybe they’d been told not to talk at all so they wouldn’t accidentally speak to one of us? Anyway, it was a relief to be with someone who had even the vaguest idea of who I was.
This time Charles took no chances about having troublemakers sit with us. He steered us to a table with two guys already seated, and after he said grace for us, he introduced me to Hank and Sheldon. Sheldon had a yellow tag like mine, and when Charles introduced us and we nodded obligingly, he said that Sheldon was Hank’s new roommate. So we were a matched set, though Hank seemed almost as humorless as Charles, so no one who could talk made any cracks about bookends.
Lunch conversation went from how great it had been to have Kelley—whoever she was—open up at Prayer Meeting last night about her sexual escapades with any boy or man she could get and how Jesus had led her to safety, to anticipation of the dinner on Friday. Hank, it seemed, had not convinced any girl to “accompany” him, as they kept phrasing it, so I was thinking that he wouldn’t be going. And, for that matter, that I wouldn’t. But at some point Charles turned to Sheldon and me and explained that although Danielle would accompany him, everyone would go. He talked about it being a great time for Fellowshipping. Made me wonder why anyone would care about having a “companion.” I mean, if you wanted to go someplace with a date, wouldn’t you want a little quality time alone together? It made no sense to me. But I was new here. And, I reminded myself, Charles was gay—he had to be. So how much quality time would he want with a date named Danielle, anyway?
Sean pulled me aside as soon as I got back to the laundry room, and we went into the office just inside the entrance. He closed the door.
“Taylor, I need to coach you about something. This morning at the folding table, you were humming. Is that correct? Nod if it is.”
Good thing he said to nod; I was about to say, Sure, so what? And then, How the hell did you know that, anyway?
“And the song you were humming had FI lyrics. Do you remember what that is? From the Booklet?”
I had to think about that one. I wasn’t quite sure what the FIs were all about, anyway. Former Images—what did that mean? I must have looked puzzled, ’cause Sean opened a drawer and pulled out a Bible. He flipped through to find the spot he wanted and read.
“Ephesians, chapter four, verse twenty: ‘But you did not learn Christ that way; if indeed you heard him, and were taught in him, even as truth is in Jesus: that you put away, as concerning your former way of life, the old man, that grows corrupt after the lusts of deceit; and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, who in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of truth.’”
He set the Book down. “We all need to remember to leave our old selves behind. I’m sure you felt those songs were great in your former life, but they have no place here. They have no place in your new life, and they don’t suit the new you. In fact they make it harder for you to come into your new life. They help trap you in the old one, the one you have to leave behind. So it’s bad for you, and it’s bad for others, too, to hear those songs. Do you understand?”
I should have nodded, I suppose. He’d made it clear enough what he’d meant. But instead I had to be a wise ass. I went over to the desk, found a pen and pad, and wrote, “I hear what you say.”
Sean’s teeth ground together. “Don’t make this harder for both of us, Taylor. If you resist, it means I’ll have to report you, and I don’t want to do that. I hate doing that, do you understand?” He actually looked like he meant it. “Now, please, nod to let me know you’ll stop. Please.”
He looked almost desperate. I nodded. But then I wrote again. “How the—could they hear me in there?”
Sean obviously didn’t know how to answer that one, so I scratched it out and wrote, “Who told you?”
Sean’s eyes closed just for a second. “I can’t tell you that. Now, come on. Let’s go to the washers so I can show you how to use them.”
So I had three hours before my “quiet time” to think about what had just happened. Someone who recognized that tune had ratted on me to Sean, who seemed like he didn’t want to be the disciplinarian. Someone who must have been close enough to me to hear what I almost couldn’t hear, myself, and close long enough to figure out what I was humming. I tried hard to conjure up the faces of the two guys who had been nearest me, but all I could remember was that one of them was short and had really black hair.
At break, around two thirty, we went in single file through a door in the back of the room that led out to an enclosed yard. There was a green roof over part of the yard, fiberglass I think, the kind with white swirly strings. Some of the kids who weren’t wearing yellow tags talked to each other, but I was looking for Shorty. I mean, the short guy with the black hair. I felt like I wanted to punch his lights out, but when I saw him, I realized how pathetic that would have been. First, I wasn’t sure it was him who’d ratted. Second, he was a pipsqueak. So instead I decided to find out more about him. I needed to believe that not everyone in this place was a rat, which meant that it would be really helpful to me if I knew which ones were which.
Slowly I made my way over to where he was kind of huddled into a corner, watching everyone else. I stood near him, which wasn’t hard, since no one else did—not a good sign for him; it could mean everyone knows he’s a rat and hates him. Then I started humming. Very quietly I began the tune from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which has at least seventeen different sets of alternative lyrics, ranging from silly to scatological. I watched Shorty out of the corner of my eye for any signs at all. If he hadn’t ratted, he’d look puzzled. If he had, he’d look either guilty or defensive or both.
At first I wasn’t sure he could even hear me, ’cause I couldn’t catch a sign that anything had registered at all. So I started humming a little louder, in my head hearing lines like “We’ve wandered down the halls writing cuss words on the walls,” and “Shot ’em up to heaven with an AK47.”
Suddenly his hand flew up to cover his mouth, and this confused me enough that I looked right at him. He was laughing. Laughing! Like he was thinking in his head some of the raunchier lyrics and couldn’t stop himself singing along silently. Well, this didn’t seem like the reaction of someone who had just ratted on me for humming, so I grinned at him. He dropped his hand and grinned back.
Even though he didn’t have a yellow sticker I couldn’t talk to him because of mine, so I wandered away again before anyone wondered what was going on. I lost sight of him after that, until he wandered out toward the other end of the yard.
This little encounter brightened my whole afternoon. For the first half-hour I hummed for all I was worth, going over the “Battle Hymn” again and again, loudly enough that I was sure to be heard over the other noise in the room, until Sean finally came over to me, looking like he was trying not to grin.
He said, “Okay Taylor, that’s enough. You’re driving everyone around you crazy, you know.” He squeezed my shoulder and said, really quietly, “You’ve made your point. Quit while you’re ahead.”
So I had to stop humming. Which meant I had to find some other way to occupy my mind, because otherwise I knew I was gonna be looking around trying to figure out who’d ratted on me. I looked around anyway, trying to identify something that would lead to other thoughts. And that happened in a way I really didn’t want it to.
What came to me was thinking about Mom. It was the laundry