The Assembly - Chapter 7

Lucy knew the other students each had two faces. She had known it forever, but it was clearer now that she was in high school. They would turn towards she and Treena and she could see their fangs all but dripping with blood, and then they’d whip their heads around, towards a teacher, or somebody’s parents and the fangs and the viciousness would be gone, the faces of angels in the place of the monsters she saw.

Lucy looked at the empty desk next to hers, wrinkled her forehead with worry, glanced at the sunshiny sky through the window and poked her finger with her No. 2 pencil. She looked around at the other kids in her class as they passed notes to each other, doodled or stared into space. One or two were listening to Mrs. Walden, the history teacher.

“I went all the way to the South Pole where I had my picture taken with the Emperor Penguins. They look like they are wearing tuxedos, so I wore a tuxedo, too. I’ll bring in the picture to show you one day. But it wasn’t all fun and penguins, I can tell you. No sirree. It was on that trip, I lost my little finger.”

She exhibited the stump for the class.

“And three toes. They froze and turned black.”

The bell rang.

“So you see, class, I was an explorer once.”

Lucy took a last look at the empty desk beside her and slid out from her own. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and pushed her way through the other students out into the hallway. Some girls followed closely behind. Lucy, as always, ignored them.

“Well, he’s nobody. His father doesn’t work for Socketry. He does something menial with I think like power lines or whatever. I saw him once. He was wearing like a tool belt?”

Lucy was tall and thin and nobody looked at her as she loped through the under lit hallway. She looked around, her blue eyes sharp sighted and icy, her glance striking other students without sympathy or friendship. If any inattentive student got in her way, she pushed them aside with her shoulder. When any of them accidentally, mistakenly, caught her eye, they shuddered, looked away and moved on. Most of them carefully kept their heads averted and rushed quickly by. She wasn’t going to her next class she decided. Her nostrils twitched.

A small girl, pale faced and younger than Lucy, tapped her on the shoulder. Lucy spun around and faced her. The girl turned several alternating shades of green.

“Girls Room. Second floor. West building.” And she scurried off without looking back.

Lucy ran. Students leaped out of her way, flattening themselves against their lockers.

In the West building, the hallways were always pretty much empty. The walls were locker-less, and there were no ordinary classrooms, only science labs. The decision to sequester the lab rooms in their own wing was made after a series of unfortunate explosions caused fires that spread to other parts of the school. Now all the science labs could happily burst into flame simultaneously, and the rest of the school would be completely safe.

Lucy rushed past shelves of jars containing bloated, pale, nearly glowing frogs, their eyes bleached white by the formaldehyde. This was one of the less frequented hallways. The students, as a whole, found it disturbing. At the very end of the hall was a mostly unused Girls Room. Lucy opened the door and went inside. She heard muffled sobs coming from one of the stalls.

“Treena?”

A hiccup and a gulpy kind of half sob was the reply.

“Treena, it’s me.”

The door to the farthest stall was kicked open with a shuddery thud. Lucy looked inside and Treena was sitting on the toilet seat, looking as miserable as anyone possibly could. She had been crying, smudging her copious eye makeup, black tears streaking her face in grit. Lucy thought Treena looked beautiful with black tears criss-crossing her cheeks. She wanted to take Treena’s face between her strong hands and lick the black lines of sadness off.

Treena had a hard time in high school. She was very pretty, pretty wasn’t the problem. She was sensitive and smart and couldn’t sensor what she said or thought very well. No one ever picked on Lucy. No one ever said mean things. Not to her face.

“Hi.” said Lucy. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Treena sobbed.

“What?”

“I’m such an idiot.”

Lucy looked down at Treena, a horizontal crease appearing between her eyebrows.

“Boys suck.” Treena said, and sniffled.

“Which boy?”

“It doesn’t matter. Just forget it.” Treena stood up and walked to the mirror and began to re-smudge her eye-makeup into a more attractive configuration.

“Was it Derek?”

“He’s a total jerk.”

“I bit his thumb in second grade.” Lucy volunteered. “I think he still has the scar.”

“He told me.” Treena smiled through the mirror at Lucy. “Thanks. Oh, God, Lucy! What time is it?”

“I’m not-“

“It’s almost two. We have to run.”

“Why-“

“Don’t you remember? The mandatory Socketry assembly is today. They take down your name if you don’t go. My Dad would kill me.”

Treena’s father, like Lucy’s, worked at Socketry International, but in an entirely different department.

Treena grabbed Lucy’s hand and yanked her out the door. They ran through the frog-lined hallway, out of the science building, through the central quad and into the Front Building where the auditorium was located. When they arrived at the assembly hall, they realized they needn’t have hurried as long lines snaked in front of each entrance, a man in a dark green suit at each door taking each student’s name as he entered.

Lucy and Treena drifted to the back of one of the lines. Treena looked surreptitiously at the students ahead of her. She thought they all looked so clean and shiny. None of them looked at her, but what she perceived as their teenage perfection made her feel self-conscious of her smudgy face and black-smeared eyes. Two girls who stood in front of them eyed Lucy apprehensively, not sparing so much as a glance for Treena. She saw this and it made her want to do something. Scream, or dig her nails into one of their faces, but she knew she never would. She would stand there quietly on line and if anyone dared to be mean to her, Lucy would snap her teeth and growl.

Treena sighed. Lucy looked at her and wondered what was wrong. They were nearly at the entrance. The girls in line ahead of them gave their names. Lucy stepped forward, Treena pouted and looked at the floor. Lucy looked the man at the door straight in the face, as they were about the same height. Dark lensed glasses hid his eyes, his jaw was narrow and long, and he wore the anonymous dark green suit she had seen on other Socketry International employees. When she was a little girl, she had asked her father what the men in the green suits did. Mr. Troma said, “Security,” and quickly changed the subject. And as the grade-school aged Lucy looked into Mr. Troma’s face, she thought he looked ashamed.

Lucy didn’t say anything to the man in the dark glasses. Treena poked her. She looked down, avoiding the man’s invisible gaze.

“Name please.” His voice was surprisingly friendly.

“Lucy Troma.”

He nodded and smiled, and just as he lowered his head to tick off her name on his clipboard, Lucy’s sensitive ears heard a very quiet whirring and a nearly silent click. She looked him in the face, but his sunglasses regarded her blankly.

Treena gave her name and they entered the auditorium. By now, most of the seats were taken. The din of students chattering to each other echoed off the walls. They found two seats together and sat down. The last of the kids entered and took their seats. The lights in the auditorium dimmed as the stage brightened. Principal Jeffries walked up to the microphone at the podium.

“Good afternoon, students.”

The noise lessened, but the hum of whispered conversations was still clearly audible.

“Quiet.”

There was a note in his voice that made them stop whispering and go silent.

“Thank you. It is my pleasure to introduce you to Dr. Arnold Messner, Senior Director of Outreach for Socketry International. I am sure you will make him feel very welcome. Dr. Messner?”

A very ordinary looking man in a sports jacket and an open-necked shirt walked up to the podium and shook the principal’s hand. The principal left the stage and took his seat as Dr. Messner smiled benevolently at his audience. The three men who had been taking names at the door quietly positioned themselves behind them.

“Thank you, Principal Jeffries for that kind introduction. Hello, students.”

A pause, and then some scattered applause.

“Socketry. Many of your parents work with us at Socketry International. But then, you already know that. I have come here today to show you a little bit of what we do and to answer any questions you might have.”

Lucy and Treena looked at each other. Both their fathers worked at Socketry and no one had ever answered any of their questions.

“I’m going to show you what some of your parents do every day. And those of you whose parents don’t work at Socketry are not to feel left out. You yourself might one day be an employee of Socketry International.”

Winston Marks poked David Stern in the back and hissed, ”Yeah, as a janitor.”

“Socketry affects all of us. Every day.”

“Same old platitudes.” Lucy whispered under her breath. Treena nodded back.

“Teenagers like yourselves are on the brink of adulthood. On the verge of making the important choices that will determine where your lives will lead.

“You kids look pretty smart to me.”

The teenaged audience looked at him stony-faced.

“So, I’m going to tell you a secret.”

No reaction. Dr. Messner’s enthusiasm was not dampened.

“All paths, even if you don’t major in socketry in college, no matter what you decide to do, all paths, no matter how circuitous the route, will eventually lead you to Socketry International.”

Dr. Messner looked out at his audience and smiled.

“There. I said it. Some people find this notion a little scary. They say Socketry International ‘rules the world’. Well, that’s one way of looking at it, I guess, but that’s not really the case.”

Lucy and Treena heard a boy’s insistent whisper from a couple of rows behind them.

“Lucy. Hey, Lucy!”

She turned her head. Jeremy Welk was sitting up and looking right at her.

“Hey, Lucy. Come over to my house tonight. You can show me how much of a freak you really are.” He laughed silently and high-fived one of his friends. Lucy’s eyes narrowed. As his eyes met hers, the smirk vanished. Her head snapped back around and she sat up very, very straight.

“So, the question that’s usually asked is: What the heck is Socketry exactly? I’m here to tell you exactly. And do more than tell- to show you what you can accomplish, how the path to wherever you want to go in life, whatever it is you want to do, can be shortened, simplified- if you decide to become a part of Socketry International. To show you what the possibilities are, where you can go, what you can have.” Dr. Messner lingered affectionately on the word ‘have’, and then made eye contact with as many students as he could. He flashed his warm smile.

“I think you’ll like what you hear.”

One of the green suited men pulled down a projection screen.

“First: What is Socketry? Here’s the dictionary definition.”

A slide bearing the definition appeared on the screen.

Socketry: (n) 1) The study of causality; of what fits in where and how actions affect events 2) the practice of ensuring objects, people or events behave or occur in a predetermined manner in order to produce a particular outcome

“This is just a fancy way of saying socketry is a name for the way things work. Or the way they should. Socketry International studies the way the way things fit together, interconnect. Once these connections are identified, the conduits between anything- people, events, corporations or nations, can be smoothed out and things can be accomplished more cheaply and more easily. You might say that socketry is the grease that keeps the cogs, all the cogs, moving.”

The audience’s attention had once again drifted. They had all heard this grease-cog-interconnecting speech a hundred times.

“So much for secrets being revealed.” said Treena.

Lucy nodded, and looked back at Jeremy Welk, her eyes blank. He caught her glance and began to look nervous.

“Treena, why do you think they made such a big deal out of everyone in our class showing up. I mean, if they’re just telling us the same things we’ve all heard at every assembly since kindergarten.”

“Who knows.” Treena was distracted by the sight of Derek Lipinsky deep in conversation with Brenda Jakes. She had day-dreamed about Derek since the fifth grade, ever since he had defended her from some mean big kids who threw mud on her sweater. A couple of weeks ago he had started talking to her. She obsessively related every word, every gesture, to Lucy. Two days ago, Derek took Treena by the hand and led her to the concrete stairs behind the gym building. He kissed her. They sat making out on the concrete steps until Treena realized she was so late for Earth Science, she might as well skip it. That was the last time he spoke to her. Treena hated him. But she knew if he took her by the hand again, she would let him lead her anywhere. She hated him so much.

“When those Socketry men asked for your name, did you hear a clicking sound? Like a camera, I think?”

“What?” Treena was still staring at Derek, suffused with malevolence and lust. “No. I don’t think so. I mean I don’t remember.”

“I think there was a clicking.”

Dr. Messner was talking about how the smallest acts of Socketry workers could affect the lives of starving disaster victims in Bali for the better.

“This isn’t a real assembly.” Lucy said. “It’s a fake. An excuse. They’re after something else. It’s socketry. “