Boarding School (15 page)

The next morning was difficult for both of us. Once we were awake I couldn’t get Matt to say anything. He wouldn’t even look at me. He still didn’t know that I already knew about everything he had been forced to go through, and when I tried to talk to him, he just rolled himself over and stared at the wall next to him.

“Matt, we need to talk.” Though I was feeling extremely groggy this morning for some reason, I tried to get a conversation going. I knew that until he began to speak about it, he would be unable to come to terms with the events of last night.

There was no response from my friend. He continued to stare at the wall with his back turned toward me.

“Matt… really man, we need to talk about last night. I know all about it.”

Again Matt gave no indication that he was even listening to me.

I knew he could hear me just fine, so I began the conversation without him. “Matt, I know that they tricked you into going with them. I know that they got your clothes off. I know that they put you in the coach’s shower. And I know the leader raped you and the rest of them made you give them each blow jobs. I know all about it.”

Matt then rolled back to face me as abruptly as he had turned away. I could see tears on his cheeks as he spoke to me. “How could you know all that? Did you have something to do with it?”

I knew that the time had come for me to tell him everything. He was in it now as deeply as I was and the two of us were going to have to stick together. Before last night we had just been roommates and friends. Now we were both in a struggle that neither of us fully understood, yet I knew that we would both be better off if we resolved to work together. And so, I confessed to Matt everything that had happened to me for the past three days. I told him every detail from the moment on Monday night when I was first awakened, to the comments I had overheard the night before about how submissive and afraid they thought he was. My friend lay there transfixed. His expressions kept shifting from disbelief to horror and eventually to anger. And when I was finished, I had never seen him as livid as he was with me then.

“Why the hell did you let them do this to me? Why didn’t you warn me ahead of time that this might happen? I’m sorry they got you, but you didn’t have to sit back and do nothing and let them come and take me too! I thought you were my friend, Clint.” And then Matt rolled over in his bed and refused to look at me again.

And so I explained again about my conversation with Mr. Stuart. I told Matt how our headmaster had felt certain that nothing like this would happen again and how he had told me specifically not to tell my roommate anything right now. And I admitted to Matt that I was also ashamed and embarrassed over how easily they had overpowered me and forced me to do every vile thing they demanded of me. I was nearly in tears myself when I summed it all up by assuring my good friend, that if I had known for sure that he was in danger, I would have told him everything sooner. And then I stopped talking and waited to hear my roommate’s response.

At first, Matt still refused to look in my direction. He was still, apparently, mulling over in his mind everything I had just said. Then, after a few more moments had passed, he turned his head around and looked at me again. “I want to say one thing.”

“Ok. What?” I had no idea what was coming next.

“From now on, if you find out anything when I ‘m not around, I want you to tell me about it immediately so we can both be prepared together. No more making decisions for me on your own. And I don’t care how embarrassed you feel or what Stuart says about it. You tell me everything. Is that agreed?”

I was relieved. I knew whatever it was that we were facing, we would be better off facing it together as friends. “Yes,” I accepted his conditions. “I agree.” And then I had one more thought. “And the same goes for you, ok? If you find out anything, you be sure to let me know too. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Matt said. And then he smiled for the first time today and stuck out his hand for me to shake. I took his hand and we shook on it, and then he continued to speak. “So now what do we do?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I suppose we go to breakfast and act like nothing’s happened.”

“Yeah well, we’re gonna have to do a better job of acting than you did on Monday.”

“What do you mean?” This news surprised me.

“Frank was right. You were a gloomy Gus.”

“Well, I don’t know what else to do. We can’t sit in here all day.” Then I got an idea. “I know what… I’ll talk to Stuart again after breakfast.”

“No!” Matt was profoundly against this idea. “They told me last night that ‘f I go to any teacher or the headmaster about this, they’ll start breaking my bones and keep going until they get bored.” A look of fear had now returned to Matt’s face. It was clear that involving Mr. Stuart was no longer an option for us.

“Well, I don’t know what else we can do then except wait for Stuart to get to the bottom of all of this for us,” I admitted.

Matt then got an idea and perked up again. “I think we ought’a call the police. These bastards need to be arrested and put in jail.”

“No, we can’t do that either,” I protested. I then recounted in greater detail the things that our headmaster had said about police involvement and how calling in the authorities could only make matters worse for us. “Just think what would happen if the upperclassmen were arrested and then let loose because the police couldn’t make a case stick against them. Besides,” I reminded my roommate, “… we can’t call out on any of the phones around here except for the ones in the office.”

“Oh, yeah.” Matt understood. “So if we can’t go to Stuart, and we can’t call the police, then what do we do?”

I thought about my answer for a moment longer, but our course of action seemed clear. “I guess we simply wait for Stuart to finish his investigation and we hope that it doesn’t take him too long to solve this for us.”

Matt didn’t look very comfortable with the idea of putting our fates entirely in the hands of a man whom we barely knew. “Are you sure he’ll do it?”

“I think so,” I answered. “I get along with him pretty well. I really think he believed me the other day, and I think he wants to do what he can for me.” And so our game plan was set. We would wait and hope for the best. “We’re just gonna have to stick together all the time from now on and let ’em know that we know what they’re up to now and we’re not gonna let ’em get us anymore.” Matt smiled at my challenge to be defiant against the perverts who had turned our lives inside out. “Ok,” he agreed. “I guess that’s what we’ll do.” We continued to talk for a few minutes longer. Indeed, I had been wrong to keep what I had known from Matt. He had been right when he had said that it had been as if I was trying to inject myself into his life and make decisions for him. But I had been right about something also. The innocence in him was now faded, and he was no longer the same boy he had been yesterday. But his kindness still remained, and out of the rubble that the night before had created of his life, a stronger, wiser young man had emerged. And I guess I felt pretty much the same way about how I had come through the experience. So we went to breakfast that morning and we didn’t go as two timid little boys. We went instead as defiant young men. Ready to challenge anyone who would try to dominate us.

* * *

Except for a big change in the weather, the rest of that day and the next one were unremarkable. Matt and I figured that in a school as small as the Academy, it would be no time at all before we’d be able to identify who these upperclassmen really were. And so we both began to pay close attention to every post-pubescent voice we encountered. Our thinking was that if we knew who these guys were, they’d lose their advantage over us and we’d be able to then go to the headmaster to have them all expelled, or something. But our opportunities to discover the true identities of our adversaries were limited. Since all of our classes were with the other first-year students, the only times we were really around the older kids was at meals or soccer practice and there were always too many other things going on during these occasions to ever permit us to make a positive match.

And so the perverse demons of the night which had succeeded in their design to soil Matt and me, were able once again to revert to their guises as ordinary everyday Academy students, and despite the “hang tough” optimism that we had started off our Thursday with, feelings of paranoia and foreboding were soon getting the better of us. So as much out of fear as from feelings of defiance, Matt and I started sticking together like Siamese twins, or in other words, we became inseparable. If one of us needed to go back to the room for a book, we both went back to the room. If one of us needed to go to the bathroom, we both went. We resolved that if there wasn’t anyone else at the Academy for us to go to for help, we were determined to rely on each other. Just the same, an experience we had at lunch on Friday didn’t help matters any for us.

The meal started off normally enough. After we had all been seated, Mr. Stuart tapped his glass as he always did with his spoon to get our attention. If I remember correctly, a group of students were scheduled to be driven by one of the teachers down to Providence in the school’s van later that day to hear a performance of that city’s symphony, and we were given the details of their departure and eventual return times. Mr. Stuart also gave us information about the intended times after Saturday morning classes when the van would be made available to take those of us who wanted to go to and from town for shopping or whatever. And then after that, our headmaster sat down again and lunch was begun.

Matt and I had already decided that on the next day, we would catch a ride into town in the van so we could find a phone to use in secret. Then, Matt was going to try to get in touch with his aunt, while I would try to reach someone in my dad’s office out in Denver. The only problem we saw with this plan was that since we were going to be making these calls on a Saturday afternoon, there was probably little hope that either of us would be able to reach anyone. And this was before the time when answering machines came into use. But we had decided that if there was no one in Massachusetts who could help us, we needed to do what we could to find ourselves some help from someplace else. At the very least, we figured we had to try to let our families in on the activities we were being forced to participate in at the Academy.

As our lunch was brought out to us by the kid who was assigned to be our waiter that day, Matt and I were horrified to see that the lunch for this day was hamburgers. So once the meat and the buns had been passed around the table, the other kids began to grab for the squeeze bottles of mustard and ketchup. While this went on, Matt and I sat motionless and, I guess, just stared at the bottles without grabbing for them ourselves. A feeling of disgust came over us both very quickly as we watched our friends squeeze out the contents of these bottles all over their food. Even after some of the kids at our table and elsewhere had begun to eat, Matt and I continued to sit transfixed by what we were watching. So I guess it had to be that after a bit, our odd behavior would catch the attention of someone sitting next to us.

“Hey, how come you guys aren’t havin’ any ketchup or mustard? I thought you guys liked that stuff?” Frank finally figured he had to ask. He loved to say something when others were behaving in ways that he thought looked weird. “Oh ah,” Matt attempted to offer our friend an explanation as he picked up his dry hamburger and raised it to his mouth to take a bite. “Ya just never know where those things have been.”

Later that day after our afternoon classes, soccer practice and dinner had been completed, Matt and I kept ourselves around other people as much as we could. There was never any study hall on Friday nights, so we started off our evening by staying a few hours in the TV lounge. It always seemed to me, and Matt too, that the shows the rest of the student body wanted to watch were never the sort of programs that we found interesting. Because of this, I rarely ever went into the TV lounge. But on this occasion, it seemed the safest place available for us to be.

Later on in the evening, though, when the cigarette smoke in the TV lounge became too much for either of us to put up with any longer, Matt and I left the lounge and found a group of kids talking in the library. So for the rest of this night we hung out with these guys until the time finally arrived when we had to head back to our rooms for lights out.

Neither Matt nor I were all that thrilled with the idea of going to sleep on this night. So far this week we had received visits from the upperclassmen every two nights, which meant that if they held to their pattern, we’d be having another encounter with them tonight. Nevertheless, since there was nothing we could do about it, we soon were in our beds, and a short time later had both fallen fast asleep.

* * *

“Wake up, I say wake up there, son.”

My first conscious thought was
Oh no\ They’re in our room again!
I opened my eyes and saw the improbable face of a rooster, or rather the cartoon image of a rooster painted onto a Halloween mask which was staring down at me as I lay in my bed.

“Wake up, Matt, let’s go, kid.”

I looked over at my roommate and saw a second figure standing over him wearing a “Casper the Friendly Ghost” mask. The ghost was trying to awaken Matt by patting him on one of his legs.

“Come on, Matt. We didn’t give you guys any sleeping pills tonight, so you ought’a have no trouble waking up now. So let’s go.” The ghost then placed a hand on Matt’s chest and began to shake the boy.

When Matt did finally begin to stir and open his eyes, he gasped and froze when he saw that we had visitors again.

Fog Horn then took a step backwards to give me a little room. “Sit up, boy,” he commanded in his best Harvard Square version of a southern accent.

I was outraged that they would give us drugs without our knowing. “What do you mean you gave us sleeping pills?” I asked as I sat up in my bed suddenly.

The ghost then turned his head and looked at me. “Huh? Oh, yeah. When we wanted Matt to sleep we put sleeping pills in his mashed potatoes, and when we wanted you to sleep, we put ’em in yours. But you only ate half of your mashed potatoes the other night and we were kind of worried that you might not stay asleep when we came for Matt. But you did.”