The Academy

I was dragged through this large, massive lobby and into a hallway, blackened by no lights or candles. When I could finally see, my eyes were scolded by an outburst of sunlight coming from a large window at the back of an office. My wrists had started bruising behind the bright red and purple marks. My chest was rapid with fragmented breaths as I fought to catch one full sigh. I swallowed hard as my breath exhaled harsh from my throat. It became dry and scratchy every moment I sat there. It felt like my whole body went flimsy. I was weak and out of energy to fight them anymore, and, when they all closed the door behind them, I knew it was time to know the real faculty. The double doors to the Headmaster’s office closed loudly behind her and Caughenour. They entered and stood behind the desk in front of the window, blocking the sunlight from my eyes and giving me a chance to catch my boundaries. She looked around, down at her feet as she paced, and wasted a few minutes filling the silence with her loud shoes. There were other men who followed in after them, but stood behind the chair I now sat in, watching me cautiously through their black sunglasses.

“Cal,” she said. “I have regrettably given you too many chances at safety. When we order you to do something, you shouldn’t resist my faculty.”

“They were taking me away from my parents. They just wanted to come in! They just wanted to”-

She scoffs. “They just wanted to what; say goodbye? They wanted to hug you? Comforting their son; how precious. You’re a delinquent, Callahan Knight. You’re a criminal. I gave you an opportunity to be happy, keep both eyeballs in your skull, and keep other criminals from violating you. No one here is going to lay a finger on you. That is our plan for you; keep you out of trouble and keep you in line.”

I was finally started to catch my breath, but my words trembled from my mouth as my throat kept becoming drier.

“This academy isn’t like your other school, Mr. Knight. You’re given a chance here. In prison, they’ll throw you in a cell for twenty or more years and stop giving a damn about your well-being. I want to protect you.”

She wanders closer to my chair and leans in over me. Her eyelashes flutter with delicate charm as she sighs, her fragrance of perfume radiating from her breasts.

“Will you obey the orders, Cal? Will you do as we say? I wouldn’t want to put you away with the delinquents; the bad seeds.”

I hesitated. “I’m no better than anybody here, lady. We’re all criminal. That’s why I am here.”

“No,” her eyes gleamed. She ran a finger across my cheek. “You are different, Cal. I see great potential in you; far greater than anyone else here. I know you’re sensitive and well-mannered under that rough exterior. Give me a smile, dear. Give me a chance to see the real you. Be a friend to us. Don’t be one of those insects…”

I stood up quickly and shoved my way out of the chair, jerking the Headmaster to one side and giving her a loss of balance. My hand was frantic to grasp the arm of the chair to push his way up, hitting her face with the edge of my hand as a mistake. The men behind me started for me feverishly, but they stopped at the sight of red running down the Headmaster’s nostril. Seeing their gazes, I turned to see the fuss I had just caused. Silence rushed over the room and I watched as her eyes tore through me. Daggers of rage entered my body, and her fist had plunged its way into my nose. Mine, also, began to pour blood from one nostril. It dripped down my skin onto my lip, tickling it with its light and feathery touch. She grinned as I fell back into the chair. She managed to straddle herself over my lap and hold my arms down against the armrests. She glared into my face with red cheeks of embarrassment and rage.

“Cal… I think you’ve earned yourself a special place on my bad list. Officer… will you please escort Mr. Knight to our registration room, please? I have to go powder my nose.”

She stood slowly, still looking right into my face. Her gaze never broke until she found her way without looking towards the doors. The men opened it for her and she vanished down a dark hallway, holding her nose with a rag. Her stride was loud as her heels clacked down the hallway furiously. When she was gone, I was grabbed up by the wrists again and dragged. I was feeling dizzy and light-headed from the amount of blood leaving my head. She hit hard, I regret to say, and she made it very clear I was now one of the top priorities to her day. How dumb of me. Instead of loathing and forgetting the whole thing, I fought them and tried to free myself from their grip as I had before. I thrashed here and there to escape but it felt hopeless.

Caughenour was the only face I seemed to recognize in the entire crowd of men in black sunglasses. He was leaning me against the wall in a very cold room. It was a blank room, unlike anything I’d seen here thus far. It was an awful room with white beds and white sheets. It was some kind of nurses’ office; complete with an infirmary setup and emergency equipment laid out like an art exhibit. I waited by the wall as Caughenour grabbed something from a drawer. It was a hideous shirt; blue with a pocket on the pec. He threw it at me and then followed it up with a pair of black sweatpants, a pair of white socks, and something strange. It was a mask; a black, plastic, blank mask. All that it was was a cut-out mouth and eyes coated with a black paint layer and nylon spray. A homemade mask. It was the last thing I would have expected to be given in this place. I threw the things to my feet and the men around me started to grab at my clothes.

“From here on out,” Caughenour announced over the men’s actions, “I am going to recognize you as Student 4827; so will all the Academy. Your classmates will not know you at all. You are being strip searched, stripped of your material items, and stripped, primarily, of the person you were before entering this academy. Do you understand thus far?”

I nodded as I stood naked, frozen in place. The sterile scent of rubbing alcohol lingered in the room, and singed my nostrils with a horrid oder. My nose was starting to feel wrinkly and crisp with drying blood stains. One man came with a wet rag and handed it to me. I used it to wipe at the blood until I didn’t feel anymore come through. Caughenour watched me carefully as put on the hideous shirt and sweatpants. I pulled the white socks onto my feet and stood there with my sneakers in my hands. He came over after I was dressed and picked up the plastic mask from the floor in front of my feet. He handed it to me angrily and then took a few steps back. He looked at me with stern eyes and sighed when I did not put on the mask. He took my clothes from me and threw them in a large heap in the corner. Other clothes laid there under mine like trophies. I cringed at the oder of them, hoping it would go away. When it didn’t, I nearly vomited at the stench of it; peoples’ underarms and stinking foul.

“Put on the mask. It’s to be worn every single day from here until the end of your stay here. Keep it from tarnishing or tearing. If it does, you will need to see someone immediately for a replacement. You will have ten hours to get a new one or you will receive punishment.”

I hesitated. “I… What punishment are you talking about? You can’t punish me for something stupid!”

“What is stupid is that you’d get it fucked up to begin with! Turn around and face the door, now, Knight!”

He’d just about had enough of me, I figured, and he didn’t seem too thrilled about tending to me. So he didn’t. He had two of his men carry me from the wall to the other side of the room. My feet were frozen at this point; it felt cold like the air conditioning was on full blast all year. They sat me down in a brown leather chair and strapped my hands down onto the armrests. Tightening the straps, I felt the bruises on my skin sting and burn at the friction. I winced, but my pain was interrupted by the sting of something more painful. A needle was injected into my arm, right not a big, bold, blue vein that poked out like a sore. Injecting a liquid into my veins, I felt the sting of it entering my body and draining my blood cold to replace it with the foreign substance.

“It’s eating my blood,” I cried. “Stop it! Please, it burns!”

Caughenour paced in front of me. “It’s something good, Cal. It’s a little cocktail, specially made for you. All for you… See, we were going to give you the easy route. If you hadn’t beaten the sense out of my wife, I would’ve reconsidered this shot.”

“Wife,” I said. “Your wife… is the Headmaster? You don’t…”

“What? The same name? Exactly, it’s to protect me from being found by my chief. That is how I manage to keep my position here. See, now, Cal? It’s all a game; one big, stupid game where you know nothing about the rules. Well, then, you better hang on. It’s about to get a little more confusing for you.”

I closed my eyes tight as more was injected into my arm. It was yellow green, like urine, and stung worse than a normal shot. I laid my head back in pain and screamed at the agony of it. It felt like they were having lead pumped into my veins. It chilled me. It froze me and kept my body stiff. I couldn’t feel my fingertips, my toes, or my face. My cheeks were freezing; like the feeling of having frostbite on your extremities. I was only this cold once, and it was grade school in the winter when I fell through ice into a freezing pond. It felt exactly like that.

“This is only one punishment you’ll know, Cal. I think it’s time you get used to it. The more bullshit you pull, the more I’ll have to give you a hard time.”

Just when the torment was over, I was struck with absolute paralysis of my entire body. He unstrapped the wrist restraints and began pulling me up by my arms. Two other men took hold of me by my arms and legs. They carried me like a bail of hay down a hallway and into an elevator. It was warmer there, but I still felt like I was standing in the middle of a frozen wasteland, barefoot and helpless. Socks weren’t enough to keep my toes from feeling numb. I didn’t think any amount of warmth or blankets draped over me would be enough, either. When the elevator stopped, they stepped out and hauled me off down a corridor. It was silent until I saw dorm room doors lining the hallway as we went along. Small whispers of conversations echoed from within, and I could barely make out the words they were all saying. They were all boys. I assumed it was a separate place from where girls would be held. I figured it was just like college; a very separate place for boys and girls not to mix. It reminded me of school at home. Every science class I attempted to sit next to the most amazingly beautiful girl. My teacher was an actual prude and never allowed any fun; which included sitting next to a girl, or anyone, for that matter.

I felt the weight of my body increase as they opened a locked door. Inside was a dorm room. They threw me inside and I landed hard onto my back in the middle of the room. I was looking straight up at the ceiling, the wind knocked from every inch of my numb body. I heard the door slam and footsteps followed each other until they vanished entirely. It was quiet for a second. I was enjoying the silence. Then I heard thumping. More footsteps. It was a boy my age. He knelt down frantically looking me over. His eyes were hidden behind thick frames of glasses that reminded me of my grandpa. He was grabbing me up as much as he could, but I kept falling and stumbling as he attempted to get me to walk. He realized I couldn't move and was shocked. Appalled and taken back by my condition, he leveled me up onto the edge of a bed and laid me there on my side. I looked at him with panic in my face, and I felt the numbness in my fingers prickle like static. He looked at me with pity. He knew what this was. He knew it. I knew he knew. Somehow.

“They did this to me, too,” he said regrettably. “They put that yellow shit in you and you suddenly don’t know your right foot from your left. Stings, huh?”

I nodded.

“You probably won’t be able to move for another half hour. That itself is torture. You haven’t felt torture until you felt that stuff sting you. You skipped a bunch of levels. They usually start you off with simple beatings. You must have done something real sick if you got the Yellow Cocktail right off the bat.”

I gritted my teeth at the stinging.

“What did you do?”

“I hit that bitch,” I said angrily. “I didn't mean to; she was just all over me and in my face. I didn’t know what to do.”

He scoffs. “Jesus, man. You never upset the Headmaster… It’s like kicking a wasp nest. You messed up really bad. I’m surprised you’re even alive. Say, why are you here anyway? Did you rob a grocery store or something?”

“No.”

“Murder?”

“I didn’t do it.”

He smiles and sits beside me on the bed. “Neither did I. Who died?”

“It’s none of your business.”

He scoffs. “Well, if you’re going to be here for four years in this room with me, we might as well get to know each other a little bit. Come on. Enlighten me.”

I was getting annoyed with him. He was pestering me for a long time before I finally felt my face turn red and warm. I wanted to clench my fists but I couldn’t move a single muscle in my entire body. I sighed.

“It was this girl from my school, okay? She got hit by my… ex best friend. He framed me. He totally framed me. He fled the scene and made me the bad guy! It was my ass that got arrested for what he did.”

“Sounds like you got dealt a shit hand,” he said empathetically. “I guess we’re in the same boat. A year or so ago, I got arrested because my stepdad called the pigs on me. It was a crock. He accused me of killing our neighbor, which was so idiotic I was surprised they even bought it. My neighbor got hit in the head with a glass plate; an old bat she was who could’ve dropped it and got hit with it from a cupboard or something. He planted my muddy shoe in her yard! What an ass. The whole thing was a setup.”

I sighed, staring up at the blank ceiling wondering how I ended up in this spot. I knew what happened, of course. I just didn’t understand it. It was all nonsense. The Headmaster and her cop husband were thick as thieves, scamming parents into thinking their delinquent kids were better off under their care. It was genius; I had to give them that credit. I was more angry that I was paralyzed in my new room than the fact I ended up here in the first place. It was just the way it was.

“You’ll get used to that stinging shit they inject you with,” he said. “Soon you’ll be numb to everything they put you through.”

He wandered over to his own bed. When he turned around to walk away from me, I could see something on the back of his neck. It was a deep gash scar. It was scarring over and scabbing as if it was a fresh mark left on him. It looked like someone had stabbed a pot fork into his neck with a great deal of force. Two small wholes had scabbed over just below where his hair ended. It was an ugly sight. He sat on his bed like nothing of it was the matter. He must have gone through hell to get that done to him. I couldn’t imagine that pain. It had to feel a little more painful than the stuff in my body. It made me feel scared, but more angry than anything. In fact, everything about the situation made me angry. I hated so many things. I hated the faculty, the dorm, the way we are treated… It was unfair. What did he have to do to get that mark on his neck? It reminded me of a cattle prod, the end of it, with those two electrode nubs that jab into a cow’s hindquarters to make it move. He sighed and looked at me, pushing his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose.

“I’m Collin.”

“I’m Cal.”

He smiled through a pained expression. His hand reached for his neck and he rubbed away the pain he felt to continue our talk.

“Do you want to talk about that thing on your neck?”

His face flushed. “It was my own fault, really. Nobody messes with the Headmaster, remember?”

“What’d you do to deserve that, though? It’s craziness… You didn’t need to get stabbed for doing something stupid. I think a single punch to the gut is less unfair than that crap!”

He shrugs. “Not here. You mess with her once here, you’re automatically the priority of pain to them. Officer C. makes it really hard like living; I can tell you that much.”

Collin was quiet the rest of that afternoon. It felt like just a moment ago I was standing outside in the cool air begging for one last touch at my normal life. I felt sadness laying there. Even as the stuff in my body subsided I laid there on my bed. It was a lump of a bed, but a bed nonetheless. In times like these I couldn’t be picky. It felt like my head was going to fall off my neck. I was so dizzy with sickness at the thought of being here for four whole years. I had a calendar in my bag, but nowhere had my bags showed up in my dorm. I figured they took it somewhere to snoop through everything and hand me the things I could keep. I just prayed they had a small ounce of kindness to give me the picture of my parents. I really only cared about that. If I couldn’t see them for the four years, I was going to drive myself insane with homesickness and despair. My mom’s face was all I pictured with my eyes closed. Collin had laid on his stomach in his bed and started to read a textbook. I didn’t mind him. He kept to himself that afternoon and we spent our time in silence. I wished I hadn’t been quiet, because the next time I left my room I was forced to shut up.

There was a loud buzzer that sounded at three. It scared me half to death and I sat up faster than I’d ever felt my body could. Collin got up calmly and stood at the locked door.

“What’s happening?”

He waved me over to the door with him. “Just stand still behind me and keep your arms down at your sides. It’s the lunch call.”

Before I could say anything else, Collin was grabbing something from the end of his bed. It was a plain black mask with a stretchy string attached behind each side of it. He took off his big glasses and put them over the front of his shirt pocket. He pulled the mask over his face and looked at me through the eye holes in the mask. His eyes were green and pale. He looked like a freak in that mask. I was worried because I didn’t have one.

“Where is it?” Collin looked around. “Where’s your mask?”

“They ditched mine when I was downstairs. I don’t have one.”

He sighed and told me to put my hood up over my head and keep my head low. If the guards saw this, it was a sign I didn’t have a mask. They pulled me out of line when everyone was evacuated from their dorm rooms in a giant line down the stairs. I felt a tug on my arm as I stood in the line and a guard took me aside into this dark room with a ton of boxes. In each box were stacked up masks. Black masks were on the right side and white masks were on the left. Handing me a black one, he waited for me to put it on over my face. If I didn’t, I was afraid of what might happen to me. How was I supposed to find Collin in the parade of lunatics? Everyone looked the same! Everyone was wearing the same thing; just different clothes. I couldn’t remember what Collin was wearing, but he had on a pair of glasses. I knew if I could find the same guy with a black mask, thick glasses on his pocket, and brown hair I could guarantee it was Collin.

The guard escorted me by the arm back into the long line and everyone continued walking in silence. Behind me was a long train of other people; boys and girls together. I could hear someone whispering and a guard yelling after that. He told them to shut up and keep their mouth closed or else. Or else what; I don’t know. I wanted to turn and look at what the commotion was about, but guards looked each one of us over before heading down a flight of stairs. There was a massive cafeteria beside double doors down a hallway. Everyone was lined up with a tray waiting for their turn in line. I didn’t know what was happening besides walking and waiting. Everyone was just so quiet. I was afraid of doing something out of place or straying too far from my place in line. If I had, someone would be right there beside me making sure I didn’t fuck up. A few times I would feel a shove on my arm by a guard, forcing me back right behind the person in front of me. All I could see were the backs of peoples’ heads for what felt like forever.

When I made it safely out of line with my tray, I looked around for an open seat. Everyone was talking amongst themselves and nobody told them to shut up. It was free roam here. You could say or talk about anything and nobody would scold you for it. Everyone was segregated like it was back in the fifties. Black masks sat with black masks. White masks sat with white masks. It was like middle school all over again; gossiping girls in their own little worlds and tough guys blabbing about something provocative. I didn’t know where was safest to sit. I found one table in the back where a lonely black masked figure sat, slumped over his tray and feeling the back of his neck with a pale hand. He wore a pocket shirt and a pair of glasses hung from it. Collin.

I rushed quickly over to the table and he welcomed me with a friendly voice. He was the only person I could make out. I felt comfortable around Collin most of all. Maybe it was his calm nature, or the way he knew everything about everything. I was grateful to have an upperclassman as my roommate. He would fill me in on anything I didn’t understand.

“Lunches here aren’t so bad. You won’t find maggots in your mashed potatoes,” he laughed.

I shrugged. “I’m not too concerned about the food. I’m more interested in knowing how I’m supposed to recognize people in a crowd!”

“You’re not supposed to know who’s who; that’s the point. They take away your identity here and replace you with this mask. It’s some psychological bullshit they use on us. They think if we’re stripped of our identities we’ll be better people. In here, nobody cares if you have brown eyes or blue eyes. It’s just a figure you are, Cal. All you are is another mask here.”

I guess that was a good thing. After all, being anonymous was sort of comforting. Nobody knew me here. Not a single soul here felt like I was different. We were all equals. At least, that’s what I thought.

“However,” Collin said, “I do know of some ways to identify each other. See, after this lunch period, everyone goes back upstairs to their dorms. You’ll get your stuff from the guards. It’ll be on your bed, most likely. Sometimes they’ll fuck up everything you own. That’s only if you did something. You find something in your stuff that’ll be your new identity. You’ll wear something every day, every night, and all the time of your life here that says “Hey, I’m Cal” or something. Like for me, I have my glasses. Not a lot of people wear glasses around here. If they do, they usually put their glasses in their pockets. Not me. That’s how you’ll find me, I guess.”

He shoved a straw through the mouth whole of his mask and swallowed down some milk. I wasn’t sure how I would be able to eat with a mask over my face. I tried hard to keep from getting angry, but it was ridiculous.

“It helps to keep your head low. You pull your mask up a little bit so you can fit stuff in your mouth. You figure shit out when you’re in here. It’s like a game. If they spot you with your mask off, they take you out and pummel you a little bit.”

I sighed and tried to move the mask up over my face. I could make enough room to fit the food up into my mouth, but it was a ridiculous thing to have to do.

“It’s so stupid,” I grunted.

“Yeah, I know. Too bad, I guess. The number one rule here to make it through the day is to never, ever, ever take off your mask.”

Shrugging, I continued to eat lunch through the dark space under my mask. I managed to eat a little. I’d felt this emptiness in my stomach for a long time. I hadn’t eaten much the prior week, and my nerves made me feel sick to my stomach. Being here made everything hurt. My head hurt, my body ached, and my stomach was in my chest. Each bite I ate made me feel twice as awful. I just didn’t want to eat. My only priority was to sleep. I didn’t know what to expect for the first day. So far, it wasn’t exactly going in the right direction. I’d been here only a few hours and already got injected, shoved, and nearly beaten with bruised wrists from the guards. I didn’t want it to be true, but I knew it was only going to get worse from here. Collin didn’t say so, but I knew that was what was going through his head when he looked at me with pity.

“What is the worst thing you could be put through here?”

Collin put down his drink and sighed. “It’s a long story. Just eat.”

“Tell me what it is. What’s the worst thing they could do to you in here? The guards. What do they do?”

He looked in my eyes and I felt his intensity. “It’s not a conversation we can have here, Cal, okay? Just wait until we get to the dorm and I will tell you whatever you want to know.”

I sat quietly and watched him. He became quiet again and shook his head at the thought of telling me. If he couldn’t talk about it here, where conversation was okay, then it must have been something really awful to not talk about. I wondered about it for the remaining minutes of lunch. Those forty minutes felt like two thousand minutes. When the buzzer sounded at the end of it, everyone started to flood out of the cafeteria into the long corridors. Lined up like sheep, we all walked back up the stairs to the dorms. Everyone was silent and the same things happened all over again. It began to feel like there was routine. It felt like there was a repetition about this place and how it worked, so I was a little more comfortable in knowing now what to expect. The shoving from guards continued, the quiet was deafening, and the only thing audible was the yelling of guards and the tapping of shoes against the floor.

Everyone gathered in twos into their dorms and the doors locked behind them. I watched farther down the halls as people in their masks vanished behind the doors. Clicking sounds echoed as the doors locked. I followed Collin into the room and waited for the clicking noise. Sitting on the bed, Collin rapidly stripped his face of the black mask and threw it to the end of his bed. His cheeks were red and he waited to put his glasses back on. He was sweating from the mask. As was I. I took mine off and waited for the sweat on my forehead to dry from the cold air that blasted me when I was free of it. I smelt the clean air in contrast to the scent of plastic. It cooled me and I felt a lot more free and comfortable. I then noticed my suitcase on the floor at the side of my bed. I hauled it up onto the bed with me and sifted through the belongings. Everything was there. My clothes, my photos, my calendar, and the books recommended by the academy were all in there. I was shocked to see that nothing was stolen or vandalized. It was a miracle, to be honest. Collin smiled at the sight of a barely touched pile of crap.

“Looks like somebody read the “do’s and don’t’s” list in the pamphlet. Nothing taken, I’m guessing?”

I smiled. “Nope, not a thing. I just wanted this.”

I held up the photo of my parents and the younger me. Collin reached over and snatched it from my hand with his two fingers. Looking it over, he smiled and chuckled lightly at my ugly childish face.

“Cute kid. No way that was you… Kids that innocent don’t end up in here,” he laughed, handing it back. “And your folks? They still look like that, right?”

I shrugged. “They look similar. A little more gray here and there.”
I looked it over and then stuck it on the wall above my bed with sticky tacks. I wasn’t allowed to pack a roll of tape, and especially not tacks, so I had to make-do with the things I could bring. Sticky tacks were the only thing on the “don’t’s” list that I didn’t see. Lucky for me, the adhesive was strong enough to hold photos and my calendar. I opened the calendar and started marking off the dates and writing down on the current date in the little box, “Entered hell.”

“Wow,” Collin smirked. “I should’ve thought of that.”

He had a calendar of his own. It wasn’t nearly as exciting than I’d thought; he seemed like the kind of person who wrote down all assignments, to-do’s, and anything else that seemed worthy enough for a nerd like himself. I couldn’t tell if it was something important on today’s date, but I figured it was nothing. Until I stood up from my bed to read it, I realized it wasn’t so crazy after all. It read, “New roommate!” I was a little sad at this. He looked so uninterested in me being here; calm and collected like everyone else in this place. However, I now could see it was his way of hiding what he cared about. I liked how he was enthusiastic. I couldn’t help but wonder why he had “new” on there instead of “getting roommate,” but never really asked. I then thought maybe it was because his old roommate left. I couldn’t imagine something else happening to make Collin’s past roommate disappear. The thought made me panicky. Collin’s collectiveness made me feel a little better, but everything was so strange and creeping me out every which way I turned.

“You’re probably wondering about the dorm.” He shrugs and stands up with me. “I have to warn you, though; the dorm leaders don’t like a lot of noise. If you make so much as a peep after daylight, they’ll report your room and have you do Tutorial Rounds.”

“Tutorial Rounds?”

He smiles. “It’s their way of making you do their shit. Stupid, I know, but that’s how they do things. Seems to me the only thing we’re all here for is to scrub the place spotless and be monkeys in a circus act.”

“What do you do then?”

He paced to the door and opened it a little, sticking his head out to look both ends down the corridor for anyone outside. “Come here.” I stepped next to him and listened. “There’s this hallway and another one down at the end. The girl’s wing. What you do on Tutorial Rounds is go up and down these two sections and clean. You mop, clean everyone’s windows, make their beds, you name it… It’s bullshit. If you skip it, though, you get detention.”

“Detention,” I laughed. Collin didn’t find it so funny.

“Detention is worse, Cal. You sit in a small single room with a chair for however many hours they want. If you don’t go to detention, you get a worse deal. It’s called The Pit. It’s a dirty room in the basement where they lock you in there for days. Hell, even weeks if you act up real bad. I wouldn’t act like a smart ass if I were you.” He hesitated and gave me a glare. “They sit you in there. No food or water for the first however many days. You kind of lose track of time in there. You eat and drink when they say, you take a leak when they say, and you can’t shower for the entire time you’re down there. You come out smelling like a filthy slob of sewage. In other words, you come out smelling like an armpit.”

I nodded. “The Pit.”

Collin shut the door and sat back down on his bed, pulling his legs up onto the blanket and crossing them. His hands fell to a notebook on the floor. He opened it and ripped out a piece of paper. Handing it to me, I realized just what it was. It was all of what he had just told me. It had the do’s and don’t’s of the Academy. On the top of the paper in the blank white margin was an acronym, “S.O.M.B.E.R Academy.” I realized that it was a joke, but it wasn’t really all that funny to me. I didn’t get it until now. Somber was the exact word to describe what I felt right that moment. Collin had made a valid point that the Academy was called “The Academy” by staff so they wouldn’t have to use the acronym for it; let alone the entire written name.

“It’s a joke here. Not that funny, but, still, it’s like a forbidden word. If they catch you calling it Somber Academy they’ll give you hell.”

I folded the paper up and put it in a notebook of my own. It was a brand new notebook with nothing written inside; no notes or things like that until now. I was sure that by the end of my first semester I would be needing a new notebook. I sighed and looked down at my lap with the worst brewing headache I’d ever felt. I was half sick with overwhelming fear and the other half with shock. I still felt the horrible sting in my body trying to subside. Collin noticed my intense facial change and knew exactly what I was feeling. I figured he knew it all too well.

“How many roommates have you had,” I asked cautiously.

He shrugs. “Oh, I don’t know. Last I remembered it was four. I don’t usually remember the ones who stay for a little while. They end up going to The Pit or another section of the school. I don’t think you’d be here too long, either. Then again… you’d be surprised how much people can take here. Or other stuff.”

“What other stuff? What else could someone do?”

He chuckled as if I were an idiot. “They’d kill themselves, obviously.”

This unsettled me and made my heart sink deeper into my body. The thought of someone being so miserable here that they would take their own life. Why is it that this place is so confident about their way of teaching and “rehabilitating” yet are so insane? They don’t realize their students are dying? I suspected as much, though. Thinking about it, and thinking about the stuff I was dosed up with, I made a little more sense of what exactly was going on here.

“So, what, we all get tortured here? If we’re bad we get punished; I get that. Why do this shit? It’s insane and medieval! Nobody knows about this crap?”

He gave me the same chuckle. “You do realize that dick Caughenour is married to the Headmaster, right? He’s got all of this shit locked under his thumb! Bolts and chains over a lock… If there’s one thing he is good at it’s his job.”

I fell quiet and let Collin do the talking for the remainder of that day. It was a Saturday. Which meant no classes. Same with Sundays. Only, on Sundays they have this church thing with pews and an alter. It’s like Sunday church but for crazy fucks. Well, the crazy religious fucks, that it. I wouldn’t have to go, because I myself have no interest in prayer. Things like that give me the creeps. Collin wouldn’t go, either. He used to be Catholic, but his mom was some huge religion junky and made him go to church and mass and all kinds of stuff. Especially when he didn’t want to. He just about had it when it was that age he rebelled. He told me about the day he shut his mom down about being Catholic. I mean, it was great and all that he got out of something insignificant to him, but he didn’t have to be a dick about it and completely blow up on his old lady.

“She was up my rear about it! Pretty soon she was having my stepdad do the dirty work and beat the crud out of me. It went on for a few months. I just about had it with him, but, for God sake, look at me! I couldn’t kill anybody. Especially not my stepdad! He used to be chill. He wanted my mom’s insurance so he pretty much did whatever the hell she ordered. Like a minion… Like I said before… I didn’t do it.”

I believed him. Maybe not at first, with the beating and all, but after thinking about it I did see how he felt. Collin wasn’t a big kid. In fact, he was the opposite of every one of my friends and me combined. He wasn’t tough or built in the shoulders. He had nothing! Collin was a good guy to me. I think out of everyone in this heap I could trust Collin the most. I felt glad to have an innocent guy as my roommate. I couldn’t imagine having a guilty convict in the bed next to mine. I’d never sleep; at least not without a shiv or something to defend myself. A pencil would be enough for me to defend myself if I had to, but this wasn’t that kind of scenario. Collin was trustworthy. By no means was trust going to be something easily found; especially in this place.