LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER 3

      Secret

       I’m seven years old, talking to myself, because I’m scared, and because I’m the only person who listens to me.

      —Andre Agassi, Open

      On July 15, 1976, the rural farm town of Chowchilla, California, made national news. It was the next-to-last day of summer school and a school bus was ferrying children home from school when its driver slowed for a white van stopped in the street. Two masked gunmen jumped out of the van, boarded the bus, and then drove away with twenty-six children between the ages of five and fourteen, along with their bus driver, a man named Ed Ray. Guns trained on the children, the masked men drove the bus down into a nearby gully where the confused hostages were transferred to two windowless pitch-black vans. The children were driven around and around, with no explanation, for eleven hours. There was no food or water, and no bathrooms, yet no one panicked or became inconsolable. The children sat calmly—many in their own urine—and passed the time by singing, “If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands.”

      Deep into the night, the vans came to a stop. The masked gunmen ordered the children off the bus and down into a “hole,” which later only a few recognized to be an opening in the top of a moving truck that had been partially buried underground. Once inside, the children heard a heavy metal plate being dragged over the opening above, sealing the twenty-seven hostages within. Then came the sound of shoveling, and of dirt and stones raining down on the roof above. One hundred miles away, parents had long since noticed that the school bus had disappeared, and as the FBI and the media descended on Chowchilla, the twenty-six children and their bus driver were being buried alive.

      A few kids cried and screamed, and the bus driver pleaded for the men to stop, but before long, all went mostly silent both inside and outside the truck. As it had been all along, the children’s behavior remained quiet and directed. The students and their bus driver made use of the mattresses, the few flashlights, and the bit of food left for them in the van. The older students looked after the younger ones, as the children mostly slept and sat in the dark and waited until far into the next day for what would come next. What came next was that, heavy with dirt, the roof of the moving truck began to collapse. Spurred into action by this immediate, life-threatening emergency, the driver and some older kids stacked the mattresses high, and they found a way to move the metal plate and dig their way out. The children expected to be shot when they emerged from the truck, but instead they stumbled into nothingness in the middle of nowhere.

      After finding help, the children were taken to a nearby prison where they were given hamburgers, apple pie, and brief physical examinations. None of the students were shaking or screaming or falling apart, so the doctors declared that they were “all right.” Only two kids connected the word kidnapping to the experience they had just lived through. According to Lenore Terr, a psychiatrist who later worked closely with the families, “Nobody else in the group had known what to call it.”

      ***

      That same summer on the East Coast, a six-year-old girl named Emily and her thirteen-year-old babysitter were spending a Sunday playing board games. Emily’s neighborhood was an orderly grid of tree-lined streets, where large, old homes were set back tastefully from the sidewalks, and sidewalks were set back tastefully from the street. It was a neighborhood where no one said no to anyone; that was not neighborly. And certainly no child said no to an adult; that was not polite. So when the red-faced man from down the block pounded on Emily’s front door while Emily’s parents and her twin brothers were at a baseball game, the babysitter flung the door wide. And when the man pushed past both girls and charged into the kitchen looking first for Emily’s father and then for something in the kitchen, both of them did their best to help.

      Slurring his words, the man rifled through the cabinets demanding to know where the liquor was, yet Emily thought he was saying pickles. “Where are the pickles? I know your father has pickles! Where does your father keep his goddamn pickles?” the angry man yelled, more into the cabinets than at the uneasy girls shifting around nearby.

      This was confusing. Pickles were kept in the refrigerator, not the cabinets. And it was Emily’s mom who pulled out the pickles for sandwiches, not her dad. Emily looked in the refrigerator but there were no pickles that day. She told the man this—over and over—but he went on searching for pickles in all the wrong places, knocking boxes of macaroni and crackers on the floor.

      This did not make sense.

      When the angry man left, Emily and her babysitter went back to their board game. They acted as if nothing had happened because nothing had happened that they could explain.

      When Emily’s parents and the twins returned, the babysitter reported what she could, and now it was Emily’s mom who looked angry. Emily’s parents whispered forcefully to each other in the next room, using some words Emily did not understand. Her mom hissed the word “alcoholic.” Her dad said “fucking New Jersey blue laws.” The conversation ended with her mom saying in a strange tone: “Of course you’re his first stop when he runs out on a Sunday . . .”

      All Emily could piece together was this: There was something wrong with Emily’s father, and some people—like their neighbor—might know about it.

      ***

      Watching a man ransack your kitchen is surely not as terrifying as being snatched off your school bus at gunpoint. Yet as different as these two stories seem, both tell us something important about what many children—and even many adults—do when they are afraid: They tend to go on behaving as usual. This comes partly from a wish that life would go on behaving as usual, a wish that if we just keep acting normal then everything and everyone around us will go back to being normal, too. But this is also what our brains tell us to do.

      Remember that when the amygdala detects a threat in the environment, it fires up a state of preparedness or a “readiness to behave.” What it means to behave, however, depends on the situation. Maybe we get ready for a fight, or maybe we get ready for flight. Yet because children are often outmatched by bigger, stronger, faster adults, fight and flight can feel like options they do not have. This leaves children feeling helpless and vulnerable and, in that case, the best thing may be to take it easy, to make no sudden moves. Go along to get along. Be quiet in every way.

      If

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