What I remember is the third meeting. It was late evening and about to rain and they took me to an administrative building I’d never been inside. The hall outside Mr. Bell’s office had plants and low lighting, but the office itself was small, bright, and covered in piles of paper. Empty soft drink cups crowded the ledges of the bookcase and a white plastic clock high on the wall to my left drew my eyes like a magnet. Three adults took turns in the room with me: Mr. Bell, who was the assistant headmaster (I never met the actual one); Ms. McCallum, who was my soccer coach but also had some other official title; and Mr. Calvin, to whom I’d submitted a drawing for the school’s literary magazine, but whose purpose in a disciplinary sense was otherwise unclear to me.
Mr. Bell’s red tie was loosened and his sleeves rolled back over crossed arms. He regarded me from behind his mountain of papers with bloodshot eyes and laid out a pretty accurate account of the night in question, up to and including my stay in the infirmary.
“So the three of you took the drugs, you got sick, Lauren left, we found out about all of it and got the truth from Melanie. Is that about the long and short of it?” I figured this admission was safe—Lauren and Melanie were already gone and Mr. Bell was clearly determined to finish up the job by kicking me out. This seemed fair. “Yes.”
“Good,” he said. “So now all we need to know is where you got the drugs.” Here again, I spoke what I considered, then and now, to be truth, and accidentally lit myself on fire in the process.
“There are lots of drugs here,” I said. “Getting them was easy. It took one afternoon. That’s all I’m going to say.” I truly felt that this was a fair answer, but maybe it wasn’t. I had no interest in protecting the identity of the girl who’d bought us the acid. Neither did I care about protecting the names of the friends who had either stopped talking to me or started openly threatening me. I guess I just felt like offering up my head on the chopping block was a fair exchange for admission of guilt, and that anything more should require a little more work on his part. I offered one other detail, the part about taking the extra hits and having a bad trip, thinking, stupidly, that he might view it as I had, as a possible down payment on punishment. This seemed to irritate Mr. Bell and he walked out of the room. I started crying at this point and continued on and off throughout the rest of my time in his office, gradually working my way through an entire box of tissues.
Ms. McCallum seemed a little more sympathetic. She had seen some promise in me during soccer season and had asked me to start practicing with the varsity squad. She had a way of doing a bear claw motion and braying, “Awwwww, sick ’em, Bears!” for her alma mater that was both self-deprecating and obviously deeply proud. We talked about my parents, about school. I tried to explain my position to her, but she insisted that for things to get better for everyone, I had to give them somewhere to start. I think my silence disappointed us both.
Mr. Calvin seemed uncomfortable with the whole tag-team arrangement. He looked miserable and spent a long moment bent over in his chair with his head in his hands. I waited for him to say something, and when he didn’t, I said, “I’ve told Mr. Bell what I did that night. I’m not saying I didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t remember the whole chain of events exactly after we took the drugs, but . . .”
“On multiple hits of acid? Who would?” His laugh was short and bitter, a sharp puff of air from the nostrils. He was quiet again for a long time and then he said something that completely surprised me. “Look, whatever happens from here, there’s more to life than this, okay? It gets better.” Then we just sat quietly in the room together, him watching the clock and me killing off tissues and staring at the floor.
Ms. McCallum came back and asked about depression. Or maybe she asked how I was doing with being homesick. Or maybe she just talked about soccer again. Whatever it was, maybe even without meaning to, she moved some of the electricity out of the air. She created room for possibility. Maybe Ms. McCallum would understand about my arms, and why I always kept the city map of long, puckering cuts hidden beneath long sleeves. I didn’t mean to gross her out or upset her, but when I rolled up my sleeves she said, “Hold on. I’m going to step out for a moment and I’ll be right back.” I was rebuttoning my cuffs when she came back in and brought up Charter Lane Hospital.
“It’s a safe place. They can look after you for a while.”