Boarding School (27 page)

“Yeah?”

“Was that cocaine they gave us last night?”

At first I thought this was a really stupid question for Matt to ask me. But then I remembered that the word “cocaine” had never actually been said throughout the entire evening. “Yes, Matt. That was cocaine they gave us,” I answered thoughtfully.

“Oh, no!” Matt then began to cry.

I figured he was upset because I had just confirmed for him that we were now using hard drugs. In those days most people in our generation believed that using the so-called soft drugs like marijuana and alcohol was practically harmless. But hard drugs like cocaine and heroin were substances which only hard-core users indulged in, and were to be avoided at all costs by average and younger people like us. And then my friend said something to me that I wasn’t prepared for.

“Clint, I think we’re addicted now,” and then he continued to cry.

“I can’t believe that, Matt. Not after one time.”

Matt tried to pull himself together enough to explain. “We used it four times last night. Listen, a bigger kid who used to live down the street from us in Michigan had this happen to him after only using cocaine for one night. After that everyone said he was hooked. Clint, what are we gonna do?” And then Matt broke down completely. “Clint, I don’t want’a be a drug addict,” he sobbed.

I hated to see Matt this way. “Come on, Matt. Maybe it’s not as bad as you think. Let’s just lie here for a while and give ourselves some time to gain our strength back. I’ll bet in an hour or so we’ll feel a lot better.”

“Ya think so?” Matt sniffed.

“Sure. We’ve got a couple of hours ‘til lunch anyway.” Besides, there were other matters we needed to discuss which were equally as compelling. “And there’s something I need to ask ya, anyway.”

“Like what?” Matt had managed to compose himself again.

“Did you notice that last night there were more people taking their pleasures jth us than just the usual eight guys? And did you also notice that some of the ones who were using us were grown men?”

Now Matt became pensive again. “Yeah, one of the guys that did me sounded a lot like Mr. Werbick, our history teacher.”

“I’m sure it was him,” I observed.

“No shit? Then that means the other man I sucked was Mr. Foot, our Spanish teacher?”

“Probably,” I acknowledged.

“Unbelievable! Jeeze, my teachers came in my mouth. How the hell am I gonna face them in class on Monday?”

Actually, it was a question that I had asked myself. “Well, they may think that because of the blindfold, you don’t know who they really were. Especially when you figure in how much booze and drugs they had filled us with.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Matt conceded. “You know I’ve been worried all along that there were more people here at the Academy who were involved in this crap than we were being shown. So now I guess we know, don’t we?” Matt was unsettled by this information.

“Yeah, well, you don’t know the half of it,” I offered.

My comment caused Matt to raise an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah? Ok then, tell me.”

At this moment, I realized how upset I still was over my discovery. “I think Thomas Jefferson was one of mine.”

“No shit? That guy’s huge.”

“Yeah. And he was pretty scary too. He kept threatening me.”

“Really?” Matt was giving me his full attention now. “Like, how?”

“Oh, he grabbed my face a lot harder than anybody else did, and he threatened to hit me if I didn’t give him a great blow job. Stuff like that.” Then I thought for a moment about what else I could say. “And I think he’s got a lot of rage in him.”

“Huh. Well maybe that’s why everyone’s always too afraid to ask him for seconds.” Matt then chuckled a little. “Was there anyone else who did ya?”

If Matt’s reaction to my news seemed cavalier, it was because by now we were both resigned to our roles as sex slaves and as such, we had become jaded. And actually, I wanted to chuckle along with my roommate, but the rest of my story was just too depressing, and I knew would prove to impact our lives profoundly for the rest of the time we lived at the Academy. “Yeah, well, the first guy who did me last night was Stuart.”

Matt’s face drained when he heard my news. “Stuart? Our headmaster? The man you told me we could trust to get us out of this mess? Stuart? Clint, do you know what this means? This means that the things they’ve been doing to us are school policy. Shit! Clint, it’s the policy of this school to take kids in their first year and turn them into sex slaves. It’s not just some group of renegade students. It’s the way things are done here. Damn it! Clint, did he say anything last night?”

“What do ya mean?” I asked. I was still taking in everything that Matt had just said.

“Was he talking to anyone?”

“Yeah, he talked to the leader first, and then he talked to me a little.”

“Well, what did he say?”

“Oh, well, I was gonna tell ya this part also. He said he likes blonds and he’s been waiting to have a chance to get at me ever since I got here.” I continued to recall as I spoke. “I was kind of goin’ in and out of consciousness when he was talking to the leader, but I did hear him say something about two more kids to train and he talked once about customers.” I then stopped to see what Matt’s reaction was going to be.

“Yeah? Ok. And was there anything else he said?” Matt was emotional now and pressing me for my recollections.

I was ready now to go on. “Yeah, there was. He used the word ‘customers’ when he said that you and I both have great cock-sucker hair and that customers love that.”

“We have what?”

I went on to explain our headmaster’s theory of what it was that made for an appealing young blow job artist. And after I was done, Matt became even more agitated.

“Clint! Why the hell didn’t you tell me this last night? Didn’t it worry you?”

“Well yeah, kind of. But with all the drugs in me last night, I guess it just didn’t hit me fully until this morning. And Matt, don’t forget you were way too out of it last night to handle any kind of information like this, anyway. That’s why I waited until now to talk to you about it.”

Matt was then quiet for a moment. He was reviewing in his mind everything we had just discussed. A moment later he had reached his conclusion. “Clint?”

“Yeah?”

“I think, when you heard Stuart talk about customers, he was talking about selling us!”

“Selling us? He can’t sell us.”

“Oh yes he can. Clint! He’s talking about child prostitution!”

Matt’s words hit me like a brick on the back of my head. I had briefly considered the same idea several times on my own since last night, but hearing Matt actually say the words out loud, now made the whole idea seem plausible all of a sudden. And if my roommate was right, then we were truly in very serious trouble. “So what do we do, then?”

“I don’t know about you, but I ‘m leaving this place right now. I don’t care if I have to go begging on the streets of Boston, I am not going to be sold as a boy prostitute.”

“I didn’t think there was such a thing as child prostitution in this country.”

“Are you nuts?” Matt was now acting hyper. “Every year over a half a million kids go missing from their homes in this country. That’s like….” Matt began to run some figures in his head, “…almost seventeen times the population of Ulster that just disappears off the face of the earth every year, and their families never see them again. And they all aren’t just runaways, either. A big percentage of these kids wind up in child prostitution rings.”

“How in the hell do you know something like that?” I asked. I was amazed at my friend’s knowledge on this subject.

“I read an article about it in a magazine after my aunt told me she was sending me off to a boarding school. Huh! I guess I was worried that I’d never be seen again, or something.”

“Yeah, well, how are we gonna get out of here when we can’t even get ourselves out of bed? And you know, if we don’t get a really good head start so we can have the time we need to get all the way down to the highway and then find someone to give us a ride, the leader or someone else from here is bound to catch up with us in the school van long before we’ll be able to walk all the way into town.”

The reality of our physical limitations was now back with us. “Well, let’s start by seeing how long we can sit up.” Matt always looked at things methodically.

“Ok,” I replied. I was game if he was. And so we both pulled ourselves into sitting positions, and our determination held us there for nearly a full minute before we both fell backwards onto our mattresses again, out of energy and out of breath.

“Oh!” Matt gasped. “Clint, what are we gonna do?”

I was also breathing hard. “Ah… well, as soon as we’ve regained our strength, we need to try to make a run for it, I guess.”

“And when’s that gonna be?” Matt now sounded as if he believed it was hopeless for us.

“I don’t know. Maybe in a couple of hours,” I was still finding it hard to catch my breath. Neither of us said very much after that. We both figured that the less we did or said, the faster our strength could return to our depleted bodies.

An hour later it was time again to see if we had gotten any better. “Do ya want’a try sitting up again, Clint?” Matt asked me.

“Yeah, ok.” And so we tried, and this time we were able to sit up for nearly two minutes before our bodies gave out and we crashed back down again.

“Oh, Clint!” Matt was again out of breath. “How are we gonna keep them from selling us? We can’t stay here anymore, but there’s no way we can get out of here, either. In fact, I don’t know how we’re supposed to meet that guy they said they wanted us to see today.”

“Oh, yeah.” I had forgotten that Artist had mentioned something last night about plans for us today to meet the guy they were getting their drugs from. And then I wondered what sort of a man would have an apparent formal relationship with a school in order to supply numbers of its student body with drugs.

At that, our door blew open and the head waiter walked in. “Well good morning, boys. And how are we feeling today?” He then pulled out my chair from under my desk, placed it in between our beds, and sat down in it.

“Don’t you ever knock?” I asked. I was irritated that he had just acted as if our privacy meant nothing to him—which obviously it didn’t.

“Why? Are you worried we’re gonna see what ya look like without your clothes on or something? Huh? Ha, ha, ha!” The head waiter was amused by his own words.

A second upperclassman then walked into our room and closed our door behind him. “Hey, guys,” he said as he walked straight over to our dresser. The head waiter didn’t wait for either Matt or me to respond. He had things he had come to say to us, and so he proceeded to speak. “No, really. How are you guys feeling today? How come you’re still lyin’ around in bed?”

“You know why we’re still in bed,” Matt replied. “For some reason, we don’t seem to have enough strength to get onto our feet—let alone stay there. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about any of this would you?”

“Yes, well,” the head waiter continued. “The reason why you two have no strength anymore is because your bodies have gone through a change. From now on, they’ll only work when you’re using cocaine. Your bodies now crave the stuff and this weakness you’re feelin’ is your bodies’ way of tellin’ you that it wants more cocaine and it isn’t gonna work right again until you do a couple more lines. So when you’re not on the stuff, you’re gonna be wiped out and helpless, like you are right now.” The head waiter then grinned. “So sorry, boys, but you’re both hooked now and the only way you can ever feel better is to keep loin’ the drug so it always stays in your systems. And fortunately for both of you little guys, we just happen to have plenty of it around all the time so you won’t ever need to worry about not being able to feel good after this. I can guarantee yuz that we’re always gonna make sure that we take good care of you two”.

While the head waiter was pronouncing our sentence, the second guy was setting busy at his assigned duties for the morning. Without saying a word, he reached into one of his pockets and pulled out another oversized compact.

“Are you guys issued those things at the beginning of every year, or something?” Matt asked.

“No, we buy them ourselves,” the second guy answered as he pulled out another bag of cocaine and placed it and his compact onto our dresser. “Time for a little hair of the dog, boys. I’m gonna start cuttin’ up some lines for ya,” he said in a patronizing tone.

By this time, I was fuming mad. It was obvious now that these guys had never regarded us as real friends. Not even in the twisted way they defined the word around here did they care about us. Instead we understood that we were nothing more to these upperclassmen assholes than a means. A means to some end which we suspected we were going to be learning a great deal about later on that day. “Well I ‘m sorry,” my voice began to rise in volume, “but you two can just take that crap and get the hell out of here! Matt and I have no intention of becoming drug addicts.”

My words quickly shifted the head waiter’s condescension to anger. Immediately he rose to his feet and began to come toward us. “You’re already drug addicts, you moron!” The head waiter then moved to stand next to Matt and as I watched, he grabbed Matt’s wrist and pulled my friend’s weakened body up into a sitting position. Then, in a move which had obviously been planned ahead of time, the head waiter backhanded my roommate across his face.

“Auh!” The blow forced Matt down again to his mattress with pain from the sting of the bigger kid’s hand now added to his misery.

“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted. For the moment, that was all I could do.

“Shut up and watch this.” The head waiter yelled back at me as he then grabbed Matt’s arm and pulled the boy upright again.

“Uh!” Matt was struck again, and as before, he fell back down to his bed with a thud.

“God damn it! Stop hitting him!” I shrieked.

“Oh, you want me to stop hitting him?” The head waiter asked me in a childish tone. He then took two steps toward me. “Fine!” he said as he took hold of my arm and pulled me up into a sitting position.