Through the gray steel door, each morning, the teachers come. They walk down the corridor together, past Melanie’s door, bringing with them the strong, bitter chemical smell that they always have on them: it’s not a nice smell, but it’s exciting because it means the start of another day’s lessons.
At the sound of the bolts sliding and the teachers’ footsteps, Melanie runs to the door of her cell and stands on tiptoe to peep through the little mesh-screen window in the door and see the teachers when they go by.
She calls out good morning to them, but they’re not supposed to answer and usually they don’t. Sometimes, though, Miss Justineau will look around and smile at her—a tense, quick smile that’s gone almost before she can see it—or Miss Mailer will give her a tiny wave with just the fingers of her hand.
All but one of the teachers go through the thirteenth door on the left, where there’s a stairway leading down to another corridor and (Melanie guesses) lots more doors and rooms. The one who doesn’t go through the thirteenth door unlocks the classroom and opens up, and that one will be Melanie’s teacher and Melanie’s friends’ teacher for the day.
Then Sergeant comes, and the men and women who do what Sergeant says. They’ve got the chemical smell, too, and it’s even stronger on them than it is on the teachers. Their job is to take the children to the classroom, and after that they go away again. There’s a procedure that they follow, which takes a long time. Melanie thinks it must be the same for all the children, but of course she doesn’t know that for sure because it always happens inside the cells and the only cell that Melanie sees the inside of is her own.
To start with, Sergeant bangs on all the doors, and shouts at the children to get ready. Melanie sits down in the wheelchair at the foot of her bed, like she’s been taught to do. She puts her hands on the arms of the chair and her feet on the footrests. She closes her eyes and waits. She counts while she waits. The highest she’s ever had to count is 4,526; the lowest is 4,301.
When the key turns in the door, she stops counting and opens her eyes. Sergeant comes in with his gun and points it at her. Then two of Sergeant’s people come in and tighten and buckle the straps of the chair around Melanie’s wrists and ankles. There’s also a strap for her neck: they tighten that one last of all, when her hands and feet are fastened up all the way, and they always do it from behind. The strap is designed so they never have to put their hands in front of Melanie’s face. Melanie sometimes says, “I won’t bite.” She says it as a joke, but Sergeant’s people never laugh. Sergeant did once, the first time she said it, but it was a nasty laugh. And then he said, “Like we’d ever give you the fucking chance, sugarplum.”
When Melanie is all strapped into the chair, and she can’t move her hands or her feet or her head, they wheel her into the classroom and put her at her desk. The teacher might be talking to some of the other children, or writing something on the blackboard, but she (unless it’s Mr. Galloway, who’s the only he) will usually stop and say, “Good morning, Melanie.” That way the children who sit way up at the front of the class will know that Melanie has come into the room and they can say good morning, too. They can’t see her, of course, because they’re all in their own chairs with their neck-straps fastened up, so they can’t turn their heads around that far.
This procedure—the wheeling in, and the teacher saying good morning, and then the chorus of greetings from the other kids—happens seven more times, because there are seven children who come into the classroom after Melanie. One of them is Anne, who used to be Melanie’s best friend in the class and maybe still is except that the last time they moved the kids around (Sergeant calls it “shuffling the deck”) they ended up sitting a long way apart and it’s hard to be best friends with someone you can’t talk to. Another is Steven, whom Melanie doesn’t like because he calls her Melon-Brain or M-M-M-Melanie to remind her that she used to stammer sometimes in class.
When all the children are in the classroom, the lessons start. Every day has sums and spelling, but there doesn’t seem to be a plan for the rest of the lessons. Some teachers like to read aloud from books. Others make the children learn facts and dates, which is something that Melanie is very good at. She knows the names of all the states in the United States, and all their capitals, and their state birds and flowers, and the total population of each state and what they mostly manufacture or grow there. She also knows the presidents in order and the years that they were in office, and she’s working on European capitals. She doesn’t find it hard to remember this stuff; she does it to keep from being bored, because being bored is worse than almost anything.
Melanie learned the stuff about the states from Mr. Galloway’s lessons, but she’s not sure if she’s got all the details right because one day, when he was acting kind of funny and his voice was all slippery and fuzzy, Mr. Galloway said something that worried Melanie. She was asking him whether it was the whole state of New York that used to be called New Amsterdam, or just the city, and he said, who cares? “None of this stuff matters anymore, Melanie. I just gave it to you because all the textbooks we’ve got are twenty years old.”
Melanie persists, because New Amsterdam was way back in the eighteenth century, so she doesn’t think twenty years should matter all that much. “But when the Dutch colonists—” she says.
Mr. Galloway cuts her off. “Jesus, it’s irrelevant. It’s ancient history! The Hungries tore up the map. There’s nothing east of Kansas anymore. Not a damn thing.”
So it’s possible, even quite likely, that some of Melanie’s lists need to be updated in some respects.
The children have classes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. On Saturday, the children stay locked in their rooms all day and music plays over the PA system. Nobody comes, not even Sergeant, and the music is too loud to talk over. Melanie had the idea long ago of making up a language that used signs instead of words, so the children could talk to each other through their little mesh windows, and she went ahead and made the language up, or some of it anyway, but when she asked Miss Mailer if she could teach it to the class, Miss Mailer told her no really loud and sharp. She made Melanie promise not to mention her sign language to any of the other teachers, and especially not to Sergeant. “He’s paranoid enough already,” she said. “If he thinks you’re talking behind his back, he’ll lose what’s left of his mind.” So Melanie never got to teach the other children how to talk in sign language.
Saturdays are long and dull, and hard to get through. Melanie tells herself aloud some of the stories that the children have been told in class.
It’s okay to say them out loud because the music hides her voice. Otherwise Sergeant would come in and tell her to stop.
Melanie knows that Sergeant is still there on Saturdays, because one Saturday when Ronnie hit her hand against the mesh window of her cell until it bled and got all mashed up, Sergeant came in. He brought two of his people, and all three of them were dressed in the big suits, and they went into Ronnie’s cell and Melanie guessed from the sounds that they were trying to tie Ronnie into her chair. She also guessed from the sounds that Ronnie was struggling and making it hard for them, because she kept shouting and saying, “Let me alone! Let me alone!” Then there was a banging sound that went on and on and Sergeant shouted, “Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up!” and then other people were shouting, too, and someone said, “Christ Jesus, don’t—” and then it all went quiet again.