Dislocation of Expectations

• Surrendering Bruiser
• "Nobody Knows" and "Worshipped in Wine and Flowers"

Thomm Quackenbush

The Moan's as good a place as any to start, though that's not the start. Or the end, obviously.

"The Incident at Spook Rock"? So needlessly dramatic yet neutered, but that's the government's way. You want to funnel Nazis into your space program? That's Operation Paperclip. You want to research UFOs? Project Blue Book. An exception might be Operation Midnight Climax, where-- Right, sorry. It's hard to talk about all this again, at least honestly, but what else is the point of your book?

Spook Rock wasn't the first place in the system I worked. I wouldn't have chosen it -- I would specifically have declined the interview no matter how hard it was to get teaching jobs -- but it was easier than unemployment when the governor consolidated the facilities, you know? The benefits of working for the state: it's hard to stop. They have this legal obligation to put every effort into keeping you employed.

Years before, I interviewed at another facility, about as high security. Those residents were more sex offenders -- molesters and rapists -- but what can you do? A job's a job. The guy interviewing me said, "You are white, you look like you weigh sixty pounds soaking wet, and they will think you are scared of them." I'd been substitute teaching in inner-city schools for years. At least if I worked in a facility, I would have a guard in the room.

I didn't get the job. I later got a canvass letter for the only non-secure facility, Maple Creek. I had that job before I left the interview, mostly because I was so tired of interviewing and may have gotten a little sassy. A sharp attitude was what they were looking for, not someone who was going to say all the right things that had been drilled into them in grad school.

I knew about Spook Rock only once I started at Maple Creek. Otherwise, people like to pretend places like that don't exist. You don't want to think how many kids do brutal things. It might affect your sleep, so it's better to think juvenile detention facilities are only things in old movies.

Spook Rock was a go-to threat at Maple Creek. "If you don't shape up, you'll go to Spook Rock." "If you revocate, right to Spook Rock with you!" Those kids were maybe ten percent scared by it, eighty percent knowing we were full of it, and then there was that ten percent that could not wait to go, to graduate in a sense. That was where you got street cred, short of DOCCS [Department of Corrections and Community Supervision]. It's like how they say college isn't about what you learn, it's who you meet. Low-level kiddos -- shoplifting, breaking into a house, drugs -- wanted to be around murderers so they could have gang connections when they got out. It's a stupid system. We didn't make better citizens, only better criminals. Between eighty and ninety percent of the kids who left Maple Creek ended up back in the system. I told people I did the job for those one or two kids out of ten, but I also did it because I was good at it. I'd had coworkers come and go, last a year before they burned out. Whatever I had in me kept me from carrying that with me when the day ended.

Unless they tried to murder or rape us -- and they were all roaring kittens, nothing but bluster, so I didn't ever worry, and it never happened -- there was not a direct route from Maple Creek to Spook Rock. You had to go out and pull something serious. We could ship your butt to somewhere else -- we did that on occasion -- but we never wanted to. When they were at Maple Creek, we could do something about them. We could save them a little. Once we shipped them to a medium secure, they were guaranteed to end up in that eighty to ninety percent.

The Maple Creek kids talked about "catchin' bodies," but they had maybe gotten into a serious fight once and just had terrible lawyers or mouthed off to the judge. They were obnoxious little jerks, but they were teenagers. If they weren't irritating you, they were not doing their jobs. Some of them were good kids at their cores. They'd just gone through some trauma and acted out. We've all done something stupid in the past. They were just more idiotic and were caught.

The residents at Spook Rock didn't talk about their crimes. They didn't have to. It was gauche, I suppose. It was safe to assume that, for each resident at Spook Rock, at least one other person was in the ground. Not every kid was a killer, but the law of averages.

It makes them less sympathetic, I know. How much do people care about a boy who murdered children, no matter how baby-faced he was? You can't understand what happened in Spook Rock if you buy into some liberal guilt explanation, though, and I say this as someone who skews left on most issues. These kids didn't do something stupid. They didn't "act out." You also can't condemn them all as beyond redemption because of this, though maybe they were as a whole. Law of averages again.

I could look up their crimes in the juvenile justice info system, but I never had much interest. I was supposed to try to educate them -- not that I managed that most days. Gangs don't recruit outside gifted classrooms if you follow. They weren't as receptive as the Maple Creek kids, and I had to adapt many of my curricula, but I felt good about passing most of the kids I did. I felt better about not passing the ones I didn't, too. You never want to fail a kid, but socially graduating a kid who can't read isn't doing him any favors.

I didn't find the Spook Rock kids that bad. They were more mature than the Maple Creek kids, not that I didn't cherish seeing a minor gang patsy making a snowman for the first time. They might have wanted to keep things calm since this was where they were stuck for years. Usually, until they went to DOCCS, sometimes for twenty-to-life, though some of them went to a step-down or home. If you see the syllogism, Spook Rock saw DOCCS the way Maple Creek saw Spook Rock. The kids would write letters to judges, begging to be "sent up top," as they called it. Then, once they moved, they'd write letters begging to return. Sorry, no. One-way transition.

When I started working there, some kids tried to intimidate me. Some were twice or three times my weight, much of it muscle, and what did they have to do locked in their rooms but exercise? I mean, masturbate, obviously, but primarily push-ups.

I would laugh at them, and they stopped trying. Being a tiny woman worked to my advantage since they did see me as, in essence, this walking marshmallow: sweet, fluffy, and white. In every unit, at least one kid liked me enough to tell the others to back off, not that I really needed that. I was still grateful. That's how I ended up the unofficial ambassador in the hostage situation.

Does it surprise you much if I tell you that The Incident proper didn't start that badly? They called over the radio that we were supposed to stay where we were -- they wouldn't open the doors -- but I heard the shouting and banging on doors. Then we heard gunshots. I wasn't going anywhere then, not until I had to.

The other teachers were, you know, not happy being captives once 3:30 hit, but someone had to try to figure out what the situation was. They voted for me.

No one was shot right then. It was just warning shots, the kids letting the staff know they were armed. No one wanted to kill anyone, or they did not want this enough. Even when I heard the gunshots, I knew that, but some of these kids had life sentences for their lousy aim on warning shots. Intention doesn't matter when you accidentally shoot a six-year-old in the face.

I hated being unable to go home for a few days, but I wasn't too worried. As I said, the kids liked me, and we already had a unit cleared for maintenance, so there were places to sleep that night, not that I slept there. They also got some mattresses and put them in the classrooms that weren't attached to the units. I'm not saying it was cozy, but it wasn't awful. It was a little like summer camp, except with murderers. So, like summer camp in horror movies.

There is this thing they taught us in one of our first training courses, the dislocation of expectations. The residents try to make you react one way, and you give them something different. Diffuses them every time. So, this kid, DJ -- confidentiality, so I'm only going to provide you with initials. If you find him, you can ask him yourself, but I'm not supposed to say it.

DJ, right? Steps up to me, tries to pull a whole, "You locked in here with us, bitch!" I told him that the policy stated being held hostage for twenty-four hours meant I was entitled to a full year's pay, so I was in no hurry. Was I scared? I wasn't thrilled at the notion of being a hostage, but what was cowering going to get me? I emailed my husband, letting him know what was happening, and I was fine. I figured it would be on the news pretty quickly. I didn't want him getting worked up.

So, another kid, RH, came up a minute later, same bravado, same swagger, thinking he was going to intimidate me. DJ told him I would get a year's pay if they kept this up. RH cackled, asked me, "Dead ass?" and then gave me a fist bump.

I didn't know if the whole "year's pay" thing was real or just some urban legend in the system. I was real, it turned out, but I was just dislocating their expectations. Do you get that? They wanted me to hate it, to shiver that they had power over me. I said it was to my benefit so that they couldn't use it against me. In a way, we were on the same side.

No other kid bugged me much after that. I wandered around reasonably freely. No one had grudges against me -- they did with some staff and teachers, but that's their story. I was too weird, I think. They couldn't get a handle on me, and I didn't see a reason to yell at them since it only escalated situations. So, I slipped under their radar. I have a disarming smile. [She gives a toothy, eyes-closed grin at the interviewer, jutting her chin forward in a demonstration.]

I was the one who told them to order pizza. That's true. It wasn't a trick. We had a lot of food at the facility -- we always did, since we needed to feed a hundred kids and whatever staff were mandated, and we didn't want to get shipments every day. I hoped directing them toward something tangible would focus them away from shooting hostages to prove they were serious. They weren't the brightest and fell into hierarchies naturally. They would do it if the right person told them what to do.

They didn't want anything in taking the facility hostage, except someone told them to and had smuggled in guns -- I still don't know who. I wouldn't give those kids candy. I couldn't bring in pens, but they could somehow get guns.

Well, they wanted chaos, I suppose. They knew what guns meant, so maybe the guns were what told them to do this, in a sense. If they were long-range thinkers, they wouldn't be incarcerated. They weren't demanding to be let out or that their family members be released. They weren't trying to escape. They could have made those demands. I'm sure the feds outside the fences would have considered it, but I told them they wanted pizza, so they focused on that—short-term appetitive goals.

There was almost a new riot on what toppings to get until I pointed out that, as hostage takers, they could get as many pizzas with as many toppings as they wanted. I don't know how many happy Christmas mornings these kids had, but they got that same bright-eyed glee a normal kid gets in front of a pile of presents.

Some of the combinations they demanded would turn your stomach.

I thought maybe the police would use the pizza to sneak in. It seems like the sort of thing that would happen in a movie. Instead, it was this smooth transition. Open the outside door, put down a bunch of boxes in that cage, close the outer door and open the inner one. They sent a couple of kids and guards out to pick it up. I watched from the door. Weirdly peaceful.

There were snipers. Or I want to think there were little invisible laser points on each of their foreheads, but that's my fantasy. I don't know for sure.

I don't know why the police didn't bust in. They had in the past when we'd had a group disturbance, with dogs and tasers, but not this time. The feds told them not to, I heard, for whatever reason.

The kids were threatening the staff. They had shanks, too, though I didn't see any in person -- they weren't going to let me do anything with the affected units but talk to them on the phone and through the doors. I may fancy that I had a good relationship with the kids, but no one wanted to put that to too much of a test.

I don't think the shanks were anyone's fault. Making shanks was the kids' main hobby, but it is a Mutually Assured Destruction. They didn't want to stab anyone, but they didn't want to be stabbed, so it's a deterrent more than anything. The guards found them and punished the kids, but it wasn't a strong enough disincentive. This was the first time I'd heard them using them.

There are these buzzers near the doors. The feed from that camera pops up in CSU [Central Security Unit] when you press them. Some kids pressed buttons simultaneously, and the doors to their units opened. I heard it was a glitch, that there wasn't evidence that someone in CSU opened the doors. After everything that happened, I have my doubts. Some kids who got out of their units brawled in the hall, banged on things, tore down a bulletin board, settled old scores, or racked up new ones.

We were never flush with staff, but I don't know why the guards didn't quell it. Getting in the hallways happened a few minutes before they had guns, so maybe they could have-- Sorry. It doesn't do me any good to speculate like that, play armchair quarterback. Especially after the casualties, I don't want to be victim-blaming. Being a guard is an impossible job. The facility mandated them often, so they were there for over twenty-four hours some days. They got no respect. I don't know why they didn't stop the riot before it escalated.

I heard stories of what happened before the Moan. After. Not anything I can prove, and you know how kids talk. But, yes, I heard them too. Do you want me to play this down like I am reasonable? "Oh, no, it was a series of unfortunate and confusing factors coalescing into a huge problem. Nothing strange." We know that isn't true. People can make YouTube videos and author books about it -- I mean, you are doing just that -- but they don't know more than I do, and I know barely anything. It was strange. As strange as the worst of the theories? I hope not, but I'm not going to put it on the record that it wasn't.

I was outside when the Moan happened, supervising the pizza delivery. Be sure to capitalize that in your book. It feels like a significant noun. No one who heard it up close is going to, or able to, talk to you about it. It was the sound you hear when the storm winds are hitting your window so much you think it will break.

We all stopped when we heard that. I can't tell you what made it. Nothing living. I don't know how it killed the kids and guards. The cliche is that it made my blood run cold, but it felt like all the heat left my body in a shiver. Maybe that was a side effect of the Moan or a normal physiological reaction to terror. I haven't felt it since. I'm not eager to.

One of the kids bringing in the pizza toppled right over, covering his ears, but it was only maybe three seconds. It felt longer, obviously, but that's what I heard once I got out. Three seconds.

Half of his pizzas were ruined, spread over the driveway. He was more upset about that.

Do you know when I said I didn't know why the cops didn't burst in? After the Moan, I couldn't believe it. I was emailing my husband and family members -- I have the emails printed out if you want to take a look -- and I let them know when I heard it. The internet went down soon after that. I don't think the kids had the know-how to manage that, so make of it what you will. No kid is going to shut down access to internet porn -- though everything was firewalled anyway. I couldn't get to educational sites sometimes. I want to think they couldn't get themselves riled looking at big booties.

An hour later, one of the guards mentioned the bodies over the radio. That changed things, and these kids do not respond well to change. RH started talking about how the police must have gassed the unit or snipers took them out. DJ reasoned that if the police could do that, they would have done it to all the units already.

Juvenile records are sealed but do an internet search for felonies committed by kids, and I can assure you that most of them came through Spook Rock. So, yeah, it's not like they hadn't seen death, but this wasn't death they recognized. No one was stabbed or shot, despite the shanks and guns. No one OD'ed—just empty bodies.

Maybe it is naive to think their unit mates -- I don't think any of them are friends -- being suddenly dead would deescalate them. Shock them into clarity. [She laughs under her breath] Dislocate their expectations.

Correlation isn't causation. Do I know the Moan killed them? No, but something did; that was the closest and strangest stimuli. It wasn't the whole unit. Two kids next to each other, and one dies. The other is unharmed, at least physically. I know they weren't after, but they didn't die that day or as long as they were residents at Spook Rock. I can't speak to what happened later, if it was related.

There was quiet havoc after rumors of the bodies got around. Before, the kids were assholes, but they had pizza coming. It was kind of festive, if that isn't too callous to claim when kids have shanks and guns. Unexplained deaths soured that mood. Bodies -- bloodless, wide-eyed bodies that were acting like demons only moments ago -- became a new problem. Huge one. Some of the residents looked at the staff to do something about it. Not all of them. Most had already learned that adults couldn't do anything for them, but a couple turned into kids again, desperate for mommy and daddy to tell them it would be okay.

You'd think -- I thought then -- that the Moan would be the end of a gruesome story, not the beginning. Or, I guess, near the beginning. It wasn't as though the Incident happened out of nowhere.

It taught one of them, the boys who died on Unit 6. JJ -- there has always been a JJ every year I've taught. He was always trying for an off-color joke, trying to look at my cleavage. Had this crooked grin with two cracked teeth in the front. Read below grade level. He told me how he killed his sister because she slept with this -- [She stares off]

I'm sorry. You're not supposed to speak ill of the dead. I liked JJ. When your schedule shifted at Spook Rock, you might not see that unit again. You don't visit socially -- administration would look askance if you did -- and you get busy with the kids you do see. So, I hadn't seen him in a year, even though I was maybe ten feet away, on the other side of a locked door. I had no reason ever to ask that CSU open that unit. It wasn't my problem.

So, yeah, of all of them, I only knew JJ. The other boys by reputation -- the teachers complain about their classes as a matter of course -- but I couldn't put faces to the names.

I didn't know JJ was one of the dead boys until after it was over. It was a week before anyone shared that with me -- the teachers were told to stay home, and we were only cleared to go back after speaking to the feds and counselors.

The feds were unhappy with me because I demanded a lawyer, and the union provided one. They wanted to pin it on someone -- as many someones as they could -- and Pizza Girl seemed like a coconspirator. That's what they called me, some websites, but the feds saw my point of view, and everyone at the facility vouched for me. I didn't bring in guns, and it wasn't up to me to search for shanks. What is criminal about telling hostage takers to ask for pepperoni?

I don't know that I would have done anything different afterward had I known JJ had died. Shock is more productive than grief. Yeah, better that it was a passive abstract -- "some people have died." Process after you are rescued and can indulge in that.

What do you do in that situation? I didn't know yet that the Moan was anything. No one from that unit was talking -- You know that. I don't understand why CSU didn't alert someone -- they must have been able to see the deaths on the cameras -- but they didn't.

So, with a couple of residents following me around, playing Lord of the Flies, I went unit by unit, handing out boxes of pizza when the unit was open. That's how I was handling it. Smiling like this was all normal and giving myself little, easily achievable tasks. Most of the teachers were hiding still or imprisoned if you want to see it that way. Maybe it defused things a little that I was joking around with the kids. The hostage-takers, according to the newspapers, but I didn't feel as though I were a hostage while they were still treating me like Ms. C.

That's why I was this de facto ambassador between the teachers and kids. That's why they sent me out to get pizzas. It was my idea, and they trusted I wouldn't betray them somehow. If it would have ended this sooner, I would have betrayed them in a second, mind you. There didn't seem to be any opportunities in supervising pizza delivery, so I made myself useful and bided my time.

It's not like they couldn't have done something to me if they had wanted to. Sixty pounds soaking wet, right? And I didn't have a gun. I doubt I could use it if I did.

I know they did to other people to get to Spook Rock. RH, I heard what he did to that girl. But yeah, I didn't get the bad vibes. They were complicit in the Incident and, you know, murderers before that. As I said, I was too weird, as a rule, so they didn't bother with me. It relaxed them to have an adult "on their side." I would have loved it if a police dog bit them into compliance.

After delivering the pizzas, I asked them to leave me with the girls. That was the most scared I was that whole first day, as though mentioning the girls put them in danger. It was insanity that the state housed girls in a maximum security boys' facility. I didn't feel I could broadly protect most people -- kids or adults -- there, but I might have been able to help my girls. I had to promise to come out if either of them asked me -- and I did later to keep them from asking twice.

If JJ had been there, I wouldn't have asked. He did... other things. Things aside from murder and what RH did. I might have fought him to protect the girls for all the good that would do me. It probably just would have meant that he brutalized me or worse, before he got to them.

DJ told me I could stay with them. He was a co-defendant with one of them, AT. I guess she had taken some more credit for their crime than she should have and got herself a more significant sentence to shave a few years off his, so he wanted to do her a good turn.

I'm unsure how much the girls knew when I arrived here. The fact that I was at the facility so late told them things were indeed weird. They had this barrage of questions. The ones I could answer, I didn't. The ones I couldn't, I made into jokes to calm them.

Over pizza -- which they bitched about because they had plain and onions & spinach since I came to them last -- they mentioned the Moan. It made sense they heard it since I did outside the building. JG kept talking about how it had come from their old facility, Hudson Girls, across the road. No one gave that any credence, especially coming from him. He'd been harping about that building for weeks.

The girls were pretty happy until we heard people were dead. They had pizza, video games, and movies, and they were doing crafts. No one was making them do program because I impressed upon their guards that they did not want to call movement over the radios.

After we knew there were bodies, that's when the rules crumbled. Some boys -- I don't know who, but they were on camera -- banged on the door, trying their damnedest to get into the girl's unit. I want to think that CSU was standing firm, but I'm not sure anyone was staffing it by then. They didn't get in then because there was nobody to let them in, maybe. We don't have keys to the doors -- teacher or most of the guards, so it wasn't like they could do anything more than terrorize. I believe in my soul they would have.

You can guess what they were saying. Ninety boys and ten girls -- or assigned female at birth, at least, since a couple of the residents on the girls' unit were trans. It was always ridiculous, having them housed there instead of Hudson, but it was glaring then.

And I was in there, talking back at them. I was trying to keep my voice even, wanting to wear them out. To protect my girls, but, you know, it wasn't like those boys didn't have a specific type of violence on their minds.

Honestly, even if they had gotten in, my girls would go for the eyes and balls. These were not sweet dainty angels. Maybe they wouldn't have won in the end, but they would not have gone down easily or without injuring the boys.

During the Incident, no sex occurred that both parties -- all parties, I guess would be right -- didn't want and sought out the second the social order degraded, damn the cameras. I want you to know that. I heard the speculation. Not the most significant charges and incredibly illegal anyway, but not forcible.

I'm also not saying that the boys didn't want to. They did. We just prevented the worst of it.

The pizza let people know something was wrong with Unit 6. Everywhere else, CSU opened the door one at a time, and someone brought it onto the unit. No one came for the Wing 6 pizza until the other kids got out. After they'd eaten it all, someone thought that was weird and... You know how it was on Six. Dead people and the rest were semi-catatonic, just looking at the bodies. I would react with horror and revulsion in their positions, but they just stared. Once guards got them out of there, they livened up, which wasn't necessarily better. You went from having kids who were stunned into silence to ones rabid with a desire to destroy the world—not avenging the dead ones but the idea that they might have been killed by the Moan instead. It was the fury that fate could have taken them out without recourse or a chance to fight.

How do you fight a lethal sound, though? They scapegoated. That's how a couple of kids and one of the staff got killed, by Unit 6 residents who wanted to take it out on someone. But I was with the girls by then. I still had my radio on low, even though I knew no one would use theirs if they didn't have to. A couple of people hit the button -- not to talk, maybe as an unconscious reaction -- and you'd hear this snippet of what was happening around them. So, yeah, I knew the Incident was getting bigger, much worse, but I didn't know about the murders for a few hours. I was proud that I kept that from the girls, that they were contained away from it, quarantined from the terror.