Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

week or so off before the spring semester began. Seeing those boys, who looked older but not much healthier than I, gave me a shock because until now I hadn't really thought of this place as a school—that is, a place where children would be found. It had seemed to me an elegant nightmare concoction made by adults for adults, to further the aims and fantasies of adults, and what have children to do with such things?
    I plowed through the first section testing “verbal skills” and leaped into “reasoning skills,” and, famished, ravaged with thirst but afraid to ask Farrel for permission to get a drink of water, I plunged into the thick “achievement” pamphlet, and my eyes bulged at the diagrams, tiny drawings, and graphs that awaited my strained brain. It was oneo'clock by now and my body was pounding with hunger, with thirst, and a kind of slow, seeping terror, but I would no more have indicated my discomfort when Farrel peeped in to say in a bored voice, “Any questions? Problems?” than Nada would have talked of Thomas Mann to the village ladies she meant to befriend and win.
    And where was Nada? I paged through the pamphlet desperately, trying to find a question I could answer, and at the back of my brain was the thought of Nada, my mother, and where she might be, and what might be happening, for it was often because of me, somehow, that those things happened. (My dentist in Wateredge, who kept calling me back in order to check my cavities, my gums, who knows what, and to discuss me in detail with Nada, in his private office; a handsome hairy artist had sketched my face in charcoal one Sunday, in a public park in Chicago; and others, many others, had looped their snaky necks around me to see past me and ogle my mother.) I stared for two minutes at a diagram of a cylinder with its various dimensions indicated and gradually a sensation of disgust and horror rose in me, mysteriously, until my trembling hand moved over the thing to hide it.
    When Farrel came in at two to collect the test he seemed to have split slightly—two Farrels, a confusion of eyes and arms. I rubbed my own eyes and breathed hoarsely through my mouth, making a sound like the one I had made when I had bronchitis. Did I mention that I had thrown up my breakfast that morning? Yes, Nada had made a lovely mother's breakfast for her son, who was going to please her so that day: pancakes, orange juice, milk, tiny sausages. My stomach had cringed wisely at the smell, but eat everything I did while my mother watched over me, a little prisoner gorging himself on a final meal. As soon as she disappeared I dashed to the back bathroom and relieved myself of it, a big, hot, steaming mass of slop that had no resemblance to anything my mother could have prepared with her delicate hands. Then I trotted back into the kitchen, every nerve in my body ringing as if in sympathy with a ringing telephone in the other room, and sat panting and sweating at the table until Nada should return. So now at two o'clock I was starved. I watched the two Farrels—not quite two, just one and a half—sort out the many papers I had smudged and sweated upon, slap down another pamphlet, and turn to go. He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.
    I think this experience was the beginning.
    Shall I be so blunt? The obvious beginning, yes. Nada brought me there, Dean Nash led me to it, but for some reason it was Farrel, that small and indeed insignificant man, who made me realize a dizzying truth about human beings: they don't care.
    No, they don't care, and it means something irreparable to know that. Not just to be told it casually, or to be shouted down by a playmate, “Drop dead, will you?” No, I mean
knowingit,
feeling it, tasting it with all your insides.
    So I wrote on, dazed and swaying in my rock-hard little desk, in the midst of the “Attitudinal Testing” and such questions as:
    “Which would you rather