The Gray House

He chewed on this for quite a while. The finger traveled up and down the bridge of his nose, his eyes were getting bloodshot. Everything he could say I knew by heart—everything that was fit to be trotted out for the occasion. Every word emanating from Ghoul was just as colorless and desiccated as he was, as were his finger and the nail on that finger.

Then it was Top’s turn. Basically the same speech, and about as engaging. Then Straw, Sticks, and Bricks, the triplets. The Little Pigs. They would talk all at once, cutting each other off, and this I actually watched with great interest because I had not expected them to take part in the discussion. I guess they didn’t like the way I was watching them, or they got self-conscious and that only made it worse, but they ripped into me the hardest of all. They dragged out my habit of folding page corners (even though I was not the only one reading books), the fact that I had not contributed my handkerchiefs to the communal pool (even though I was not the only one with a nose), that I occupied the shower for longer than was allowed (twenty-eight minutes on average, when the norm was twenty), bumped my wheels while driving (and wheels need care!), and, finally, arrived at their main point—that I was a smoker. If you could call someone smoking one cigarette every three days a smoker.

They asked me if I knew the extent of damage caused by nicotine to the well-being of others. Of course I knew. I not only knew, I could easily give a talk on the subject, because over the last six months they’d stuffed me with enough booklets, articles, and pithy quotations on the dangers of smoking to comfortably feed a multitude. I was lectured on lung cancer. Then, separately, on cancer in general. Then on cardiovascular diseases. Then on some additional horrible ailments, which was when I stopped listening. On topics like these they could go on for hours. They would shudder, horrified, eyes lit up with excitement—like decrepit gossips discussing the latest murder or accident, drooling happily. Neat little boys in neat little shirts, so earnest and wholesome, but hidden underneath their faces were old hags, skin pitted with acid. This was not the first time I saw through to those wrinkled old crones, so it was not a surprise. They got to me so badly that I started dreaming of poisoning them with nicotine, all together and each one separately. Pity I couldn’t do that. To smoke my paltry once-every-three-days cigarette I went to hide in the teachers’ bathroom. Not even our own bathroom, god forbid! If I poisoned anyone or anything it could only be the cockroaches, because only the cockroaches ever ventured there.

The stoning had been going on for half an hour when Gin rapped his pen on the table and declared the footwear discussion closed. They’d just about forgotten the topic by that time, so the reminder turned out to be quite appropriate. They stared at the damned sneakers. They loathed them in silence, with dignity and with contempt for my childishness and tastelessness. Fifteen pairs of soft brown loafers against one fire-red pair of sneakers. The longer the stares continued, the brighter the shoes burned. Soon everything except them became gray and washed out.

I was just admiring them when I was told it was my turn to speak.

I don’t know quite how it happened, but, for the first time in my life, I said to the Pheasants what I thought of them. I told them that this classroom and everything in it were not worth one pair of gorgeous sneakers like these. That’s what I said to the Pheasants. Even to poor, cowed Top. Even to the Little Pigs. And I really felt it at that moment, because I can’t stand cowards and traitors, and that’s exactly who they were—cowards and traitors.

They must have thought they’d scared me so much that I’d gone crazy. Only Gin didn’t look surprised.

“So now we know what you actually think,” he said. He wiped his glasses and pointed his finger at the sneakers. “This was not at all about those. This was about you.”

Kit was still waiting at the board, chalk in hand. But the discussion was over. I just sat there with my eyes closed until they all wheeled out. And I continued sitting like that long after they did. My tiredness was flowing out of me. I had done something out of the ordinary. I’d behaved like a normal person. I’d stopped conforming to others. And, however it all ended up, I knew I would never regret that.

I looked up at the board. It was supposed to say: Footwear discussion. 1. Self-importance. 2. Drawing attention to collective disability. 3. Thumbing nose at collective. 4. Smoking. Kit had managed to make at least two mistakes in every word. He could not write for sour apples, but he was the only one who could stand, so he ended up at the board for every meeting.