Boarding School (14 page)

“Fine,” Matt answered.

“Yeah, fine,” I answered as well just before I shoved another fork full of food into my mouth. This was the kind of dinner I liked.

Frank didn’t play soccer so he didn’t say anything. Since athletics weren’t mandatory at the Academy, Frank chose instead to spend his afternoons sitting in his room or walking around the campus or hanging out in the TV lounge.

“Well, I think the soccer team has another game coming up next week,” the head proctor continued.

“Oh yeah, with who?” Matt asked.

The head proctor named some school in a nearby town, but since Matt and I were still new to the area, it wasn’t a name that either of us recognized.

As I ate my dinner, I recalled Matt’s comment the last time we had been served mashed potatoes about how he had believed them to have a funny taste to them. So this time I paid closer attention to the way mine tasted. And oddly enough, by the time I had eaten about half of the portion on my plate, I decided that I wasn’t going to eat any more. I didn’t know if it was merely the power of Matt’s suggestion, or if there really was something different about them this time, but I wasn’t comfortable with the way they were tasting any longer. At first when I was hungry, I had figured I could just put up with this change in their taste, but after I had been eating for a while, a nagging feeling inside told me that I shouldn’t be eating them at all. And so I left perhaps half of them on my plate.

“Would someone please pass me the bread?” Frank loved his bread. He once told me he liked bread so much because of the Italian in him. I never really understood what he had meant by that. Thomas’ idea of giving us garlic bread or dinner rolls was to pull a quarter to a third of a loaf of white bread out of its wrapper, and then pile the slices onto a plate and serve it to us. It wasn’t that this was a necessarily bad way to serve bread to a student body of sixty-two, it was just that, to be served bread in this manner for practically every dinner seemed to me to be far less than what we should have been getting for the high tuitions our parents were paying.

The plate was closest to me so I reached out and passed the bread to Frank. As I did I happened to notice that this time Matt had eaten all of his mashed potatoes. After dinner I asked him if he still thought they had tasted funny.

“No, they were fine tonight,” he replied.

“Really?” Because of my experience this time, I found his answer surprising.

“Yeah, I don’t know what it was about ’em last time, but tonight they tasted just fine to me.”

To be honest, most of what Thomas cooked for us tasted odd in one way or another anyway, so I decided that today perhaps he had simply dropped his wristwatch in the pot again or something. So I didn’t consider the matter any further.

During study hall that night, I remember finding it hard to concentrate on my homework. I figured at the time that I was feeling extra tired because I hadn’t gotten much sleep for the previous two nights. So when it came time for lights out, I was ready for bed. And soon after we were under our covers, I was asleep.

It’s a strange sensation to describe. When it occurs, there is an awareness on some level in your mind that something has taken place. Perhaps a sound of some sort registers somewhere deep in your brain. And then, after a stretch of time which is usually indeterminate in length, the impression somehow manages to work its way to the conscious part of your mind causing you finally to react.

Suddenly I awoke in the darkness and sat up in bed as if my head had just been shot away from my pillow. “Matt?” I called out without thinking. I then turned my head and looked at Matt’s bed. He was gone! The covers had been pulled back and his bed was now empty. Quickly I pulled away my own covers and bolted out of my bed so I could make a closer inspection of the scene. I placed the palm of my hand on Matt’s sheets and could feel that they were still warm from his body heat. “Shit, it just happened!” I exclaimed to no one. I decided the sound I had just heard had been the door closing when they all had left the room.

There was no time to lose. As fast as I could, I stuffed my feet into my tennis shoes. It took me an extra few seconds, but I knew my flip-flops would make too much noise at this time of night. An instant later I was out in our hallway, but before going any farther I made a quick check of the bathroom to make sure I wasn’t overreacting. Unfortunately, I wasn’t—the bathroom was empty too. So an instant later, I was down the hall, through the large wooden door and out into the balmy night air.

All of my senses were now keenly tuned to the environment around me. As soon as I had reached the top of the cement steps, I stopped moving and searched the upper campus with my eyes and my ears for signs of any sort of nocturnal life. And as I had figured, it took me only a second or so to hear voices off in the distance and then a slam as one of the doors on the front of the gym was closed. After that, everything was silent.

I was frantic to stop them before they could get at my roommate, and I was about to take off running diagonally across the campus toward the gym, when I heard another sound and noticed a dark figure emerging from the far side of Ulster Hall. I then watched as the figure began to head directly toward the gym. The guy was far enough away and in the darkness most of the time so I couldn’t make out who he was. In response, I froze and squatted down to reduce the size of my frame and make me a smaller target. There was nothing nearby for me to hide behind, but I was in darkness as well, so I waited and hoped that the guy over on the other side of the campus would miss seeing me.

“Hey, hurry up. They’re already in there.” After he had walked about a quarter of the way to the gym, the guy I was watching stopped and turned around to call back to a second guy who then appeared also from the far side of Ulster Hall. I decided then that both of these guys had come outside through the back door to the kitchen.

“I’m comin’, keep your shirt on,” the second guy hollered back.

I continued to keep myself down and still as my eyes followed this second guy as he walked quickly to catch up with his buddy. I also observed that he was carrying a small item in one of his hands, and after a few moments I determined that the object was one of the squeeze bottles from the kitchen.

Looking back on it now, I often wonder what would have happened if I had just stood up and yelled at them. And then I realize that if I had done that, they probably would have run over and pounded me. I was, after all, only thirteen. At the time, though, I knew I needed to do something to try to help my friend, but I continued to be afraid for my own safety. So for the moment, I remained crouched in the darkness near my dorm and I continued to watch the two upperclassmen until they had walked all the way over to the gym, and had gone into the building through its side door.

Now that I was free to move again, I felt compelled to run to Matt’s aid and, at the same time, stay out of sight just in case any more of them happened to show up outside. So instead of taking off directly for the gym, which would have kept me mostly out in the open, I decided to take a longer route along the perimeter of the grounds so I could keep myself behind cover more often.

And so, I took off toward the headmaster’s house. A moment later, as I was passing by his front door, I gave some thought to the idea of waking him up so he could come along and end all of this. But this was a two-story house and I knew by now the man would be upstairs and passed out. So any attempt I might make to wake him would probably be useless and only succeed in drawing attention to me—which at the moment was something I was trying to avoid. So I continued my journey. Once I had passed the three classrooms in the lean-to, and I was out onto the grass again, I kept myself close to the chain-link fence which ran along this south boundary of the upper campus.

As I passed the back side of the house belonging to Danny the neighbor kid, I could see that his family were all asleep at this hour. Even Bandit failed to notice me as I passed by their back yard. A moment later, I had reached the tennis court. I remember wanting to go around to the outside of the court so I could use it for cover, but it backed up against the west fence, so instead I had to cut across in front of it as I made my right turn to head north along the front border of the grounds and toward the gym.

A moment later, I crossed the main drive next to the front gate, and then made my way along the cement path toward the front of the gym. Both of the front doors, which stood on separate ends of the building’s south side, had windows with safety glass set into their upper halves. And so as I approached, I was able to see that the lights inside were turned off.

Once I had arrived at one of the doors, I took a quick look around, and then I slowly pulled the door open to avoid causing any squeaks. A few moments later I was inside the gym with the door closed behind me and wondering what in the world I was going to do next.

“I think this kid’s gonna work out pretty good,” a voice then said from beyond the lighted doorway at the other end of the gym. “In fact, he submits pretty easily. He may wind up being the best one yet.”

Immediately I focused all of my attention onto that doorway. It sounded to me as if the person speaking was about to appear and then enter the gym, so I looked around quickly for a place where I could hide.

“Yeah, he’s not nearly as feisty as the last one, and he seems pretty scared right now,” a second voice, also approaching, then replied.

All I could find near me were some gym mats which had been rolled up and shoved over against the south wall. So I took a few quick steps to my right and then dove behind them just as the two figures appeared in the gym and looked my way.

“Yeah, but after a while he should get over most of that. Besides, a little fear in these kids is a good thing. Right?”

The second guy then laughed. “Yeah, you’re right.”

I had to come up with something fast. I knew that time for Matt was running out. I could hear the shower so I knew by now they had gotten his clothes off. So I began to wonder how I might be able to create some sort of a distraction which could clear the building long enough to give me a chance to rescue my friend. But before I could come up with any kind of a plan, I heard that awful sound.

“Auhauhauhauh! Auhauhauhauh! Auhauhauhauh! Auhauhauhauh!” I couldn’t stand it. Not only did Matt sound as if he was in excruciating pain, but his cries sounded as if they were being made by a boy who believed that his situation was utterly hopeless and that his life was about to end.

“No! Auhauhauhauh! Auhauhauhauh! Stop it, please… Auhauhauhauh! Auhauhauhauh!”

This was too much for me to listen to. I had failed Matt and I felt terrible about it. In a moment the two figures in the doorway went back into the coach’s locker room, so I decided the time had come for me to leave too. There was nothing I could do and I didn’t want to stay and listen to my friend be raped by these bastards any longer. They had Matt now and they were going to do to him everything they had done to me. So I stood up and sneaked back out the same door I had come in through. And once I was outside again, and as I began to walk away from the building, I could still faintly hear Matt’s voice behind me as he continued to cry out for help which could never come.

“Auhauhauhauh! Auhauhauhauh! Auhauhauhauh! Auhauhauhauh!”

* * *

I guess I must have drifted off after I had returned to our room, because the next thing I remember was being abruptly awakened out of a deep sleep by the sound of our door being slammed open against the east wall of our room. I then opened my eyes in time to see Matt—his body naked and wet against the light coming in from the hallway—as he crossed our room and then threw his abused body down onto his bed with enough force to cause its metal legs to scrape a short distance along the linoleum.

I froze for a moment, not sure what I should do. Matt sobbed uncontrollably into his pillow, and I wanted to do something to comfort him, but I was still feeling guilty for all of the atrocities which had just been visited on him and as such, decided that anything I’d try at this moment would be of little use to him, anyway. Besides, I knew Matt well enough to know that it would help him to go on with his crying so he could get it all out of his system. It might be said now that my inaction at this moment was a bit cowardly I suppose, but as I had already proven, I don’t always make the best decisions when I’m only half awake. And so, for the next few minutes, I did nothing but listen to my friend cry.

I did, however, make sure that I stayed awake just in case Matt decided to need me for some reason. But soon, the sobbing ended and he fell silent. Worn out and distraught, a few moments later when I could hear him breathing deeply, I realized that Matt had cried himself to sleep. So with the coast now clear, in a manner of speaking, I got up to close our door and then I walked over to take a look at my roommate and see if there was anything now that I could do for him.

Since the boy hadn’t dried himself off before he had lain down on his bed, his hair was still soaked and in clumps all over his head. I could see his right ear clearly where the clumps had parted, which looked a little odd to me because when his hair was dry it always covered his ears pretty much. Water was also beaded up everywhere on his skin. And I admit that I took a moment to inspect his bare bottom. Not because I was interested in it, but because when I had been raped, it felt to me as if something had torn and I was surprised not to find any blood afterwards. So I figured that Matt had probably had the same experience and I wanted to see if I could spot any blood emanating from the area around his hole. And as it turned out, I couldn’t.

Finally, I decided that for now, the only way I could help him would be to cover him up so he wouldn’t get chilled. And so I took one of his blankets and covered him with it. He was clearly exhausted from his ordeal, because he never noticed me. This, then, was all I figured I could do for Matt until morning. So with everything in our room now quiet again, I went back to my own bed and was asleep again a few minutes later.