CHAPTER NINE

      The stump-brown Kmart cords are more like three sizes too big. They bunch round my ankles and the only thing that’s holding them up is Pony Girl. She’s removed her damnable kitchen gloves – never again to be associated with Audrey Hepburn and playing dress-up with you on Indian summer afternoons so sunny and lazy we could see the dust move through the air – and has hooked her fingers through my rear belt loops which she’s hitched up high enough almost to touch my shoulder blades. The loose cord material swishes and grumbles between my thighs as she steers me away from the scene of my humiliation. She instructed me to leave all my real clothes, bar my bra and day-old panties, in the room.

      She made me hand over my Swatch and even my retainer. Nothing with wire or metal, including no jewellery, no belts, no barrettes. Hair ties were OK, she said, her own ponytail bobbing in evidence, but I didn’t have one of those, so my hair stays electrified. I couldn’t care less about the barrette or the retainer – good riddance – but the loss of the watch is a blow. Ordinarily, I’d claw at anyone who tried to take it off me, but I’m no longer in a state to protest.

      I’m silent and glum as Pony Girl leads me out of there, past Mark and Leroy who fall in behind us, down a dim, low-ceilinged corridor, past other small empty rooms like the last one and other rooms with closed, signposted doors, and into a large meeting hall. This is the main warehousey part of the building and the height of the room soars accordingly, with tubes of fluorescent light buzzing from the iron rafters up there in the distance. I recognise this room at once. This is where we came for the ‘Open Meetings’ when you were in the programme. Every Friday night, as if none of us had better things to do on a Friday night, Mom, Dad and I would file into this room with the rest of the parents and siblings and we’d have our one chance to see you, sitting at the front of the room with the rows – boys on one side, girls on the other – of other…inmates, patients, clients? Phasers, that was the term they used.

      You’d sit at the front, usually in the back row on the boys’ side but sometimes in the first or second or third, I always counted, and you’d stare out at us, the collective families. Every week I’d try to catch your eye. Though we were a much larger mass, I was sure you could sense when I arrived, was certain you knew exactly where I was. But if you did, you never showed it outwardly, never caught my eye, smiled at me, waved, blew me up cartoon bubbles to read your thoughts or made one of our secret hand signals, the three-fingered rub of the nose perhaps, the fanning across the chin or even the Fonzie thumbs up.

      Today’s phasers are congregated again here, but to one side with a grey concertina partition half unsprung across the middle of the room. They’re not in neat parallel corn rows like you were either, though they are still separated from the opposite sex. Their chairs form a sort of ellipse in the middle of the room, boys all arcing on the right, girls mirroring them on the left. The female arc is somewhat shorter than the boys’ one, which makes the careful arrangement appear strangely asymmetrical. I scan the boys’ section. Left, right, left. Some faces look familiar, but I can’t be sure. I know none of them attend JFK High.

      Encircling those seated, a smaller number of boys and girls stand straight and Mark-and-Leroy-sentry-like, legs wide, hands tucked into the smalls of their backs. And here again, towering above all heads, seated and standing, in the centre of the group, is Hilary, a young man with slicked-back blond hair and model looks pacing at her side.

      As we enter, the phasers are all chanting: ‘…make a list of all persons we have harmed and make direct amends to them wherever possible.’ The model guy nods vigorously then karate chops his right hand into the palm of his left and shouts, ‘And Seven!’

      Hilary spots me before the group can respond. As she blows her whistle, a couple of the female phasers, startled by the sudden noise, scrunch up their faces and raise their hands as if to cover their ears. But they seem to reconsider mid-action and let their hands settle back into their laps.

      ‘Newcomer arrival!’ announces Hilary as Mark and Leroy peel off from behind and Pony Girl propels me through a narrow aisle of chairs, into the centre of the circle.

      All eyes are on me, including Mr Model’s. He appraises me from the electrified ends of my hair to the tips of my Mary Janes, which are just barely visible beneath the acres of cord. He lingers on my leather-bound toes for a beat or two then lifts the cuff of one pant leg at the back and sighs all weary-like. The sight of my heels pains him.

      ‘She’ll need new shoes,’ he informs Pony Girl disapprovingly.

      ‘There weren’t any shoes in the bag.’

      ‘Whose problem is that?’

      Pony Girl’s jaw tightens. ‘Mine.’

      Next, he assesses my chest, looking down at where my cleavage would be showing if I weren’t wearing this stupid tunic. ‘Did you check out her bra, too? Did you remember about the underwire?’

      ‘Yes,’ claims the girl, even though she and I both know that’s a lie. She checked a lot of things, too many things, with those kitchen-gloved hands of hers but my bra wasn’t one of them. Mr Model ogles my chest, unconvinced, as he should be. Will he grab hold of my boobs and check for himself? Maybe he’ll just shoot one of his own hands right up under my shirt and have a grope? Instinctively, I tighten my arms across my chest, shrink back into the crook of Pony Girl’s elbow.

      ‘It’s imperative not to forget the underwire,’ he chastens.

      Pony Girl’s arm solidifies against me. ‘Yes, Dwight, imperative.’

      Dwight, his name’s Dwight, dismisses her with the wave of a hand. She releases my belt loop and shuttles off to assume a standing position at the back. Beneath the cover of my oversized trousers, I clench and unclench my buttocks, try to jiggle the wedgie she left behind loose, but Hilary snatches up the loop position again before I can.

      Dwight turns back to the rest of the group. ‘Who of y’all wants to remind us what the rule is on footwear?’

      The phasers go mad at the question. They bounce in their seats and wave their arms. At first, their reaction reminds me of Norman Macalister, the brainy sycophant of second grade (and third, fourth, fifth and so on) whose hand would always shoot straight for the ceiling every time the teacher asked the class a question. Couldn’t stand for one minute not to be teacher’s pet, the little nerd. You hated him.

      This lot, though, they make Norman’s eager-beaverness look like indifference. As Dwight strides around contemplating who to call on, their gesticulating grows wilder. They’re waving in different directions at slightly different speeds but all getting faster and faster and harder, their wrists snapping in the air as they pump their arms up and down, side to side. Elbows fly in neighbour’s faces and no one slows. Several brows start to redden and bead with perspiration and still they don’t stop. They wave, flap and pump like…like wild birds or I don’t know what.

      ‘What the heck are they doing?’ I say, to no one in particular, not expecting anyone to hear me over the din anyway. But Dwight hears, fires daggers in my direction, and everyone else hears too, the flapping stopping as suddenly as it started. The phasers stare at me aghast.

      ‘Did someone ask me a question? Did I just hear a fucking question asked out of turn? I’m sure I did.’ He sucks in air loudly so no one in the room can mistake his astonishment. ‘But let’s take things in order, shall we?’ Dwight points to an exhausted-looking boy in the front row. ‘Jim P, tell us the rule on footwear.’

      Jim P jumps to his feet. ‘Shoes should be used for walking purposes only! No brands or druggie images allowed! No heels allowed! No shoelaces allowed!’

      ‘Thank you, Jim. You may sit down,’ and Jim P sits. ‘And because