The Gray House

Once every six years, the wall separating the House from the world sprang a leak. Ralph had observed it three times already, and still he couldn’t make himself think of graduation as a natural occurrence in the order of things. That the Outsides could suddenly permeate the House—that the House could bleed its creatures, who until then appeared joined inseparably with it, into the Outsides—was not something you could accept and get used to. The more experienced counselors passionately loathed the pregraduation term, and their newly hired colleagues had to spend a couple of years listening to their horror stories. “If you haven’t been there for a graduation, you haven’t seen anything.” Ralph had been lucky (or unlucky, take your pick) to have arrived in the House shortly before a graduation, and so wasn’t a target for such remarks. He was one of those who “had been there” from the start. A fresh conscript finding himself immediately on the front lines and in the thick of battle. Even though all he could later recall from that, his first graduation, was an indeterminate feeling, mostly a result of the parents’ all-out assault.

Just as there weren’t two students who were alike, there weren’t any parents who were alike. But still counselors placed most of them in two broad categories: Managers and Contacters. Managers maintained active communication with their children, made regular visits on assigned days, and pestered counselors with phone calls. Contacters appeared only in the days before graduation. The rest fell somewhere between the two extremes, and were unworthy of a separate classification.

Contacters’ visits coincided with the arrival of supervisory committees, fire and sanitary inspectors, and all and sundry child-welfare agencies (it was always a surprise how many of those there actually were in existence). Every six years the counselors were reminded that there was an authority above them, and that the authority was very interested in what they had been up to. Their work was checked and rechecked. They had to produce reports and reviews, duty-shift timesheets and exhaustive evaluations of each and every student. All of that was then collated, examined, and cross-referenced. The fire inspectors tested the extinguishers and quizzed the counselors on proper procedures. Those who could not quickly rattle off the sequence of steps to be undertaken in case of a fire were sent to remedial training. The medical inspectors took over the hospital wing and turned it inside out. The sanitary inspectors went through the kitchens with a fine-tooth comb. The Contacters demanded advice, immediate attention, and, often, first aid. The Managers demanded respect. Some inspectors, after going away, returned for the second and even third go-around. By the end of the month the principal was a human wreck.

Then summer break came, allowing the counselors some time to recuperate, and then they were immediately thrown into the pool of freshly admitted six-year-olds. Ralph considered the system of handling admissions and graduations that had been adopted in the House completely idiotic. He could not understand why the juniors, in the graduation year, were not being sent away from the House earlier. Even by itself, the House losing half of its inhabitants was a shock to them, and that they were allowed to witness it happening Ralph considered inexcusable. Also that in the summer camps they received an unlimited license to discuss what had happened, with no classes to distract them and almost no counselors to supervise them. And that, upon return, they were faced with the new batch of students, their successors, a constant reminder that soon they too would share the fate of the seniors, because the seniors were now them. It was no surprise they didn’t have any love for the juniors, never cared about them or helped them with anything. It was also no surprise that they never forgave the counselors their betrayal and never trusted them again. What was surprising was the abject adoration that the juniors had for those disgusting youths. Seniors could ignore them or treat them like dirt, the squirts didn’t mind at all. They absorbed everything seniors had, including the dread before the graduation, and that dread by degrees became a part of the fabric of their lives. A sign of the coming maturity.

This time Ralph was alone among the counselors in having been through a graduation, and it struck him as curious that the pregraduation month had passed quietly, almost peacefully. A single visit from the supervisory committee. No parents except those explicitly invited. Several docile Managers, no Contacters at all, no inspectors, no reams of reports. The committee arrived and departed without a single comment. All that despite the House being completely, comprehensively in tatters. Shark was singularly inept at being a principal, and the state of records and accounts could only be described as disastrous.