I had a faculty mentor, Miss Healy, who was some sort of social coordinator, and at whose small apartment I was required, with a few other boarder girls, to check in every morning before chapel. She was an ardent Disney fan with a round face, short blond curls, and a bubbly personality, and she made it abundantly clear from the first time we met that she didn’t like me. The one time I visited her outside of our required morning meetings to talk about my feelings of depression, she took multiple long calls over the course of our conversation, giving me the “just a minute” finger but seeming in no hurry to wrap up her conversations, until I finally excused myself, embarrassed.
So while these things were true, it was also true that along with maintaining only the bare minimum of contact with my family, enough to prove I was alive and to continue getting a small allowance, I stopped eating much other than Ramen noodles, Doritos, and Dr Pepper from vending machines. I started sneaking out of the dorm at night to cross the dewy soccer fields and wander around in the woods beyond, sometimes with Lauren, who introduced me to weed with a tiny pinch of it that we smoked through holes punched in the dented side of a Dr Pepper can, and sometimes alone, walking for miles hoping to get lost or fall in a hole or off a cliff somewhere.
Months went by in a kind of slow, downhill slide. Christmas came and went with my solo flights to and from Saudi Arabia, a trip during which I’d bailed out on a hesitant conversation with my mom about not wanting to go back to school. Instead, I’d learned that international airlines don’t card for booze, and that I could pass the time on an eight-hour flight to Amsterdam by shamelessly making out with some other random sad boy on his way back to a boarding school on the East Coast. When I came back, Lauren broke the news to me that she’d convinced her parents to withdraw her from St. Stephen’s and bring her back home. She promised to write, and in her one letter was a suggestion that maybe over spring break she could come get me. “Can you say ROAD TRIP??”
A new element added to my solo night walks, one that seemed to arise out of nowhere. I discovered that if I used my Swiss Army knife, the one my dad bought me in a shop in al-Khobar, to slowly carve intersecting lines into my forearms and shins, I could achieve a temporary high, the singular feeling that for once I knew exactly where I was on the globe.
It shouldn’t have been much of a surprise that I got expelled from boarding school, but nevertheless, I was surprised when it happened. Mr. Bell summoned me from American history class to ask me about a particular night more than a month prior in which Lauren and I, with Melanie home early from a tournament and joining us at the last minute, had dropped acid in the dorm. None of us had any prior experience with psychedelics, and we had in fact not even intended to buy acid. Lauren and I had handed eighty dollars in cash to a senior girl in another dorm and, in total ignorance about prices or quantities, just asked for “as much pot as that will buy, or hash if you can find it.” Presented the next day with five hits of acid and no instructions on how to take it beyond “Have fun!” we’d each taken one hit, and then, convinced the drug wasn’t doing anything, I’d taken the other two. Lauren and Melanie did okay, from what I can remember, but my trip took a different direction and I ended up spending the next twelve hours pacing the halls and grinding my teeth until eventually a nice girl who lived on the first floor realized what was going on and let me into her room. She’d had a bad trip before too, and she sat talking soothing nonsense to me, mother-to-baby words, until I came back down, sometime in the gray early morning hours.
The drug itself, and then the two-week mega-flu that followed, seemed like punishment enough, so Mr. Bell’s sudden, grave curiosity about the event felt redundant and also sort of improbable, since he could have named almost any weekend in the past six months and found some sort of major infraction to ask questions about.
At any rate, there was a reckoning to be had with Mr. Bell and it was overdue. Our first encounter yielded nothing. I denied everything and went back to class and then on to soccer practice, which was apparently sufficient time for him to question Melanie, call her parents, and have them drive down and withdraw her from school, leaving behind only a few clanking hangers and a scrawled Post-it Note from her that read, “I told them everything. I’m sorry. I’ll miss you.” The next two days were a blur. I recall one other meeting, perhaps during classes, in which I continued my attempt to stonewall, but by now other students were nervously pulling me aside and making threats. “You’d better not let my name drop. I can find you wherever you end up.”