Boarding School (47 page)

Artist then looked at Matt quickly as my roommate sat next to him in the middle of the front seat. For that instant, we could both see the rage in the bigger kid’s face. “Oh, like you two didn’t know anything about this,” he stated in an accusatory tone.

“Know about what?” I asked in exasperation.

Artist then continued. “As soon as I got into my motel room and was getting ready to welcome in the first customer, I got a call from the woman at the front desk. She told me that she happened to just notice on her board that someone was making an outside phone call from the room where only a minute earlier I had left our friend Juan back there,” he said sarcastically.

“Oh?” I replied.

“Yeah well, so I ran down the hall to Juan’s room and when I got the door open, I found both of these guys standing next to the phone while Juan was talking to somebody on the other end. As soon as the little shit saw me, he said ‘please hurry’ into the phone and then he hung up. So since I’m all by myself with you guys, I figured I needed to take the starch out of them to keep them from running away on me, so I slugged them both a couple of times. Then I called the front desk to let them know that these assholes had just called the police, and then I walked them to my car before I came to get you two guys.”

Juan’s idea to call the police had not worked out the way we had expected. Instead of elation, we were all now frightened over the consequences we were hurtling toward at sixty miles per hour. In a moment of weakness, I found myself suppressing the urge to point out to our jailer that Matt and I had not been in Juan’s room when the phone call had been made. But Artist was the one upperclassman who often showed sympathy toward our plight. So I decided while we still had the chance, to attempt an appeal to his better nature. “Look,” I began. “You’ve already punished them. Maybe you could just let this go this one time if we all promise you that this will never happen again.” It was a lame attempt at salvation and I knew it. But at that moment I couldn’t think of anything else to try because by now we had turned off of the highway and were speeding toward the forest. And the reality of the leader’s black belt was once again beginning to shake me.

“Are you kidding?” Artist shot back. “I don’t think you guys realize the damage you’ve done this afternoon. You’ve just shut down Fatso’s entire operation at the inn. Now that the cops know that something’s been going on there, they’re gonna be looking for us all the time. So we can never go back to the Friendly Inn again, and we probably can’t even set up anywhere else in Ulster. All the money we were making for him was keeping Fatso out of trouble with the South Americans. Now I don’t know what’s gonna happen because those guys don’t play nice when they don’t get paid.”

Now I felt awful. It was true that Fatso was corrupt, and enslaving us to earn money for him as boy prostitutes was indefensible, but he and Sweetie had always treated Matt and me very well. And even though we hadn’t seen that much of them for the past few months, we still thought of them as sort of surrogate parents—in an admittedly weird sort of way.

At first, once we were back on campus, all of us were convinced that punishment for our crime at the inn would be inflicted without delay. But surprisingly, nothing happened to us. And later, once we had trotted off to the dining hall to rejoin the rest of the student body at dinner time, the four of us concluded that the upperclassmen were preferring to wait until after lights out to invade our rooms and spirit us away to whatever obscure location seemed appropriate to their plan of discipline for our egregious act of defiance. So as the hours wore by, our tension from the fear we were feeling grew, and Juan began to talk again about running away while we still had the chance.

Throughout study hall that evening, as Matt and I sat obediently in our room, we found ourselves wondering whether or not we might be spared from the anticipated reprisals altogether since, in reality, we had never actually done anything wrong that day. And the more we considered the matter from this point of view, the more we were able to convince ourselves that once he had calmed himself down, Artist would certainly have told the others that Juan and Carlos had been the perpetrators of the phone call and that Matt and I had been doing as we were instructed by waiting quietly in our rooms for the day’s first customers. In fact, in time Matt and I came to feel relieved from our belief that we were going to be successful in avoiding any acts of torture this time, and we maintained this sense of complacency right up until fifteen minutes before the end of study hall when the sound of the large wooden doorway down at the western end of the hallway suddenly overwhelmed and ended our silence as it swung open with its customary mid-range groan and then slammed shut again a few moments later as if to announced with finality, the approach of our doom. “Oh shit!” Matt whispered quickly. “I don’t think this is gonna be good, Clint.”

I glanced at my roommate quickly and saw the fear which was now covering his face. But before I could respond, the appearance suddenly of two large figures in our doorway drew my attention to the front of our room.

“Well, I’m glad to find you boys here where you’re supposed to be, and sitting on your beds too.” It was the leader, and he wasn’t smiling as he entered our room.

“Hey, guys,” the head waiter added as he followed his boss in and then stopped near the foot of my bed. We could hear other upperclassmen remaining out in the hall and one of them, an instant later, appeared briefly to reach in and pull our door closed.

“You guys have had quite a day,” the leader continued with a hint of sarcasm.

I now noticed that the leader was placing a small flat box onto the top of our dresser and he was opening its lid. At this moment, I had no idea what this guy was planning for us but I was certain, at least, that I wanted nothing to do with whatever it was he had hidden in his box.

“You know, you guys have been getting harder and harder to control all this year. The cocaine we keep givin’ ya just doesn’t seem to do the job for us anymore.” At that, the leader pulled from his box a syringe and two small vials of a liquid of some kind.

“NO!” Matt shrieked, and then he turned instantly to open our window and try to escape through it. He wanted no part of what the leader was now preparing for him and if there was any chance for him to break away from the Academy, now was the time to do it.

“So to control you guys again, we’re going to step you up a notch and put you on the horse.” As the leader calmly filled his syringe with the liquid from the first vial, he seemed unconcerned by Matt’s reaction.

Of course escape had been lost to us long ago and the head waiter had little trouble pulling my roommate’s head and upper torso back inside our room and then sitting on his body to hold him steady for his first dose of this new drug. And as I saw Matt’s bare arm lie open and away from the tangle of the two of them, I watched as the leader then bent over Matt’s bed, tied a rubber strap tightly around his upper arm, and then as Matt continued to protest, inserted the needle into my friend’s arm and emptied the contents of the syringe into his young body.

“No! No!” Matt kept yelling. And then when he felt the heroin enter his system he let out one last pathetic “Nooooooo!” After that he stopped struggling. Once the leader had removed the needle and the strap from my friend’s arm, the head waiter pulled our window shut and then stood up again to leave Matt to cope with his new circumstances on his own.

“Ok, Adams,” the head waiter then spoke to me as the leader prepared his next injection. “Are you gonna give us any trouble?” he demanded.

I looked at my roommate as his crumpled body still lay in a fetal position on his bed. He was sobbing quietly and rubbing the spot on his skin where the needle had penetrated him. “No,” I answered simply. If anyone had told me all those months ago when I was playing in the swimming pool in my parents’ back yard in Denver that one day soon I would be shooting up with heroin, I would have told them that they were crazy. The idea would have seemed as impossible to me as life without pizza. And yet now, at this moment of truth, the thought of taking this next step in a downward spiral that had pulled me to such a low level of existence, really didn’t seem like such a big deal any longer. So when the leader stepped over to do me next, I extended my arm to him without question and accepted the drug when he put it into my body.

“There,” the leader concluded as he put his things back into his box and prepared to leave our room. “That’ll hold you two until the morning. See me after breakfast tomorrow and we’ll get you two started on regular injections and teach you guys how to give ’em to yourselves.” The leader then walked to the front of our room again and opened our door. But before he left he turned back around to say one more thing to us. “The days of your defiance are now officially over.” And with that, the two bigger kids turned off our lights as they left our bedroom and closed our door behind them.

Matt and I knew there was nothing that either of us could do. In silence we tried then to make ourselves comfortable while we listened to Juan yell and get knocked around in the room next door. His ordeal seemed to go on forever, but by the time we began to feel the heroin take control of us, we knew that there would be two more boys this night who would be having their first taste of the big “H.”

The heroin interacted with the cocaine which was already in our systems and caused a high which was more potent than either of us had anticipated. So by the time the bell for lights out had rung a while later, Matt and I could do nothing more than lie on our backs on our beds with our arms outstretched from our sides, and stare with blank expressions at the ceiling in our room.

The next morning when Matt and I got up, our first thought was of our friends next door and we checked on them right away to make sure they were all right. Juan, of course, had defied the bigger kids the night before and had even tried to fight them off. In the end, though, he had been beaten for his insolence, and made along with Carlos to take the heroin. But with a beauty of a black eye this Friday morning, the boy began to talk again about running away and how we all needed to leave before it became too late for us to do so. Just the same, after breakfast he was lined up in the infirmary with the rest of us for his next injection of our new drug. I had always heard that heroin addicted its victims on the first occasion of its use, and sad to say in our case at least, this information was true.

It wasn’t until dinner time later on that Friday, a few hours after the day student’s boat had turned up missing, before we understood that Juan and Carlos were nowhere around. At first Matt and I decided that our friends had stolen the boat as a means to get away for good.

At lights out that night, when we realized that we had gone through our first entire day as full-fledged junkies, we were happy that our friends at least had managed to escape the fate we were now so resigned to accepting. But when we went to bed, it bothered us to know that the room next door was now empty, and our friends were out in the night somewhere with probably no place to stay. In fact, by the time we turned out our lights for the evening, Matt and I had become nearly frantic over the idea of Juan and Carlos being on the run in a foreign country and not knowing who they could trust. And in the morning, when we awoke and prepared ourselves for our Saturday morning classes, we found the room next door vacant still, which caused us to continue our worry over the welfare of our friends.

During breakfast that morning, it was all over school how Juan and Carlos had not come home the night before. Matt and I did our best to have our meal without dwelling too heavily on the topic of the day. After breakfast, the head waiter caught up with us to let us know that a sudden booking for our services for the weekend had come in and we were to have our overnight bags packed and ready so we could be picked up after lunch that afternoon. And as Matt and I walked through the lobby to make our way over to the other end of Ulster Hall so we could be on time for our first class of the day, I remember being surprised to notice through the windows in the front doors of the building that Mr. Stuart’s car was driving away.

* * *

The divers knew right where to look because a woman who lived nearby on shore had heard an explosion the night before and had looked out her window in time to see a boat on fire out on the lake. And by lunch that Saturday, the news had spread all over the campus that the charred bodies of two boys around the ages of thirteen or fourteen which had been pulled from the lake that morning were the remains of our missing students: Juan and Carlos. Mr. Stuart had been able to identify the boys by Juan’s ID bracelet and Carlos’ gold cross. Both pieces of jewelry were still on the bodies when Mr. Stuart had arrived on the scene.

The theory that our headmaster brought back from the authorities was that our friends had stolen the boat so they could use it to go joy riding on the lake at night. Because of the age of the vessel, a fuel leak—which neither of the boys had probably noticed—became ignited somehow—probably from smoking cigarettes—and had caused the boat to explode once the flames had reached the fuel tank. Of course autopsies would be performed to determine the exact cause of the boys’ death, but with what little there was remaining for the coroner to work with, there was little doubt that the final report on our friends would concur with this theory.

“Unless they find bullet holes in their bodies, the deaths are gonna be ruled an accident,” Matt observed while we packed our bags in our room after lunch that day. We knew our friends hadn’t been joy riding, and we were pretty certain that the in-board out-board had never had a fuel leak. Tom, the day student, had always kept his boat in perfect running condition. This meant only one thing then, and neither of us were able just yet to grasp the idea that we were living and dealing with people who were capable of committing such an act.

“You don’t think the leader or the head waiter…?” I asked my friend.

“No,” Matt answered quickly. “They’re both sadistic assholes, and maybe they could kill in a fit of rage, but I don’t see them going to all the trouble to stage something like a boat exploding and then sinking to the bottom of the lake.”