Commotion

Their voices, when Hanna heard them at last, meant that something strange was going on, that much she could tell as she made her way up the spiral flight. (Somehow she had ended up below them.) There was a lot of chatter, as though they were all talking at once, and laughter. The nerve of them, laughing! She had been thinking hard as she wandered, and was in no mood for laughter herself. Even Peter seemed to be talking a lot. Or singing. The unlikelihood of Peter singing was what made her begin to think that there was an unfamiliar male up there, and that he was singing. She stopped just below the hole.

"Happy little sunshine, baby boo," came the singing voice. "Gurgily goo, Boppity boo. Strange flowers, growing in my garden of love, my garden of love love love."

Mystified, Hanna took a deep breath and stuck her head through. It was a new boy all right, and good-looking, she supposed, in a kind of chiseled and yet puckish way. He was shamelessly showing off, singing some stupid song, and they were all adoring him. Especially Cheryl, who was standing beside him and actually holding his hand. It was awful, grimly watching them have fun, feeling out of it, but afraid to interrupt and spoil it all.

But he noticed her right away. "Hanna!" he said, stopping suddenly. "It is Hanna, isn't it? Welcome to the funny farm."

In two bounds she was up on the landing, standing an inch away from him, and glaring up into his eyes. He was at least four inches taller than she, and grinning at her in this maddening way.

"Yes, it is Hanna," she said, "and this must be the funny farm. What the hell's going on?"

"We were just having fun," Blossom piped up in her nasal whine. "There's nothing wrong with that."

Hanna put her hands on her hips. "Who said there was anything—"

"Yeah," said the boy, turning his head to look at Blossom. "She didn't say there was anything wrong." Blossom glared at him, but he didn't seem to notice, turning back to Hanna. "I've been working," he explained goodhumoredly. "Entertaining them. Keeping their spirits up."

Hanna looked quickly around at the others. All the laughter had gone out of the situation. "Oh," she said, still an inch away from him. She wanted to say something slightly nasty, for it wasn't very pleasant to have ruined their fun.She felt like an old grouch. "Oh," she said again, and looked down; then she slipped quickly past him and over to the empty stairs across from Blossom.

She sat down and lit a cigarette, forcing herself not to notice how few were left.

"So why the silence?" said the new boy, turning from one to the other of them and shrugging slightly. "Why the long faces? We were having fun."

"Why don't you ask Hanna?" said Blossom. "She's the one who ruined it." That did it.

"Yes, why don't you ask Hanna?" Hanna said, ripping the cigarette from her lips. "Ask Hanna, because she knows; she knows where we are. If any of you spent one second using your feeble brains to think about it, you'd know it too. We're in a prison, do you realize that? A prison. And it's not just an ordinary prison, it's a torture chamber. Get that? A torture chamber. But it doesn't torture our bodies, it doesn't do easy, obvious little things like pulling off our arms and legs or sticking red-hot knives under our fingernails. Oh, no. It's worse. It's supposed to make us go insane, don't you realize?" She waved her cigarette over her head. "All these stupid stairs going nowhere, no flat place, no walls, nowhere to hide, no way to get out, no explanation. Don't you realize? They made it on purpose, it's all for us, they're doing something to us. It's so obvious. And you sit around laughing and singing stupid songs. Think about it." She paused for breath.

They were all staring at her as if she really were insane. "And," she went on, "and … oh, hell! And I found a toilet. And I guess we've gotta drink out of it too. I couldn't find any other water."

For a moment no one spoke. The new boy's face had loosened, the high color draining from his cheeks; but almost at once he pulled it back together, looking at her now with angry determination, and no humor at all.

Cheryl spoke first. "A toilet? You really found one?"

"Yes," said Hanna proudly, partly mollified. "And wouldn't you know, it's right in the middle of one of those lousy bridges. The worst place it could be. Don't you see what that means? Doesn't it tell you something? Why are we being forced to drink out of it, why in hell should it be there, except to be unpleasant and frightening to us?"

"I—I guess you're right," said Cheryl. "I'm sure you're right, there's no other explanation. But we … for a minute we forgot. For a minute, we were almost having fun. That's all."

"I know," Hanna said less fiercely. "I'm sorry. I didn't want to spoil it. But I was so upset about all this."

"So what? Other people get upset too," the new boy said. He was still standing, staring at her. "That doesn't give you the right to criticize what we were doing. You act like you think you're pretty tough, but you're just as hysterical as any other girl. We don't have to listen to it."

He was her adversary now, she could tell. And she had done it herself, just as she had done with Blossom. Silently, she cursed herself. It was so stupid, opening her big mouth like that and making him hate her; it was just going to make everything worse. But maybe it wasn't too late. Even though "hysterical" still rankled, Cheryl's recognition had calmed her down to the point where she could swallow her pride. "I know," she said. "I shouldn't have gotten so mad. But it was frustrating. Nobody seemed to understand how serious this was. But," and she let her pride sink down to the bottom of her stomach, "but what you were doing was a good thing, I guess. I'm sorry I said it was stupid. It's," she sighed,"it's important to keep people in a good mood."

The boy grunted, turning from her to the food machine.

"Oh," she said. "Did anybody make it work?"

"No," Blossom said pettishly. "And nobody even wanted to try."

"Well, I'm ready now," said the new boy. "Suddenly I'm starving."

And they tried. One by one, each of them struggled over the unresponsive screen while the others watched impatiently, growing hungrier and hungrier, waiting and hoping for the whirs and the clicks that would not come. And at last they grew tired of it, and quietly, one by one, they retreated to their respective stairways, Oliver sitting above Peter. They sat for a while, too dispirited to speak; until at last their eyes began to close.