“It’s okay.” She speaks with considerable authority. “I’ll take full responsibility. Just pick it up by the handle, the black part. Don’t touch the sharp part and you won’t get cut.”

The MR girl makes sure no one is looking, then reaches for the knife, lays it on the table, and skitters away.

“Margie’s just a little tiny bit shy—at times.” She takes the knife and, with a little grunt, scrapes the string across the serrated blade. Then she cuts a second piece.

“So what do you want your name tag to look like?”

I am puzzled.

“I’ll give you some options.” On a scrap of paper from the pile of supplies, she writes Jean three times. In block capitals, then a neat capital J and e-a-n in lowercase, and then in round cursive letters, just like the smart girls who take notes for me in school. I look around; all the name tags I see are in block capitals. That’s how the counselors are making them.

“I like the last one.”

She sets back to work. “Do you go to school?”

I say, “Yes.” Very distinctly.

“Where?”

“Near Cha-pel Hill.”

“Where exactly? Butner, maybe? You’d know Dolly.”

Butner! All over North Carolina people tell jokes about “going to Butner,” the place for the criminally insane and mentally retarded. When I was three years old, our family doctor urged my parents to send me. “But there was no way I could send my baby off” was how my mother told it, so proud, on the telethon. “I just kept her at home. Then I wanted her to go to school. At first they said no, but then they said they’d give her a try if her daddy built a ramp. We always treated her just like a normal girl. We didn’t know what else to do.”

I’ve started stuttering again. Sara is looking at me with an inquisitive face, waiting for me to answer her question. I drop whatever got me stuttering and start over.

“I’ve ne-ver been to But-ner.”

She busies herself with her little project. I stare at my Coke bottle, study the green glass neck, observe the cold smoke rising. I’ve been left with eyebrow tappers and babblers and all kinds of strange people, left to stay for ten days at this place—a place where it seems Butner is normal and Crosstown High is unusual. Can this be an outpost of Butner? A dress rehearsal? My nerves spark with silent terror. But as soon as the terror becomes conscious, I will it away. Ridiculous. I’m not the kind of person who goes to Butner.

I draw in some Coke through a plastic straw and feel it burn cold in my throat. I listen to all the sounds around me. The voices. Strange voices. That big roaring fan.