Helen Bown's skeletal fingers caught her nephew's wrist, planting her tiny fingernails pressed on his pale skin. Her other hand, still gloved, was resting against her chest, as if it was going to protect herself from any physical contact with the boys and their parents squeezed in the hall. They were jostling to make themselves a winding path through the place; some dragged their feet, their faces gloomy and moody, while others hopped cheerfully, abandoning their families in the midst of the crowd to greet their friends from the past years with a broad complicit smile.
Some students – often the youngest who were not more than eleven or twelve years old – had already dressed in the school uniform, and were walking around by projecting forward their black varnished boots to each of their steps as if they were hoping to attract some envious looks on their new clothes. Their hand to the knot of their striped tie, they slipped a finger between the white collar of their shirt and the skin of their necks, constantly adjusting their black blazer or the sleeves of their grey sweater on which the red and silver crest of the school, embroidered with the letters 'WI', was proudly hung. In the eyes of James Anderson, they were nothing but peacocks presumptuously displaying their resplendent feathers, and the patheticness of this ballet of Vanities only managed to get a contemptuous grin from him. He had already begun to imagine them squawking when a young man with dark brown hair perfectly capped on his forehead and temples, huge glasses with black branches laid on his nose, suddenly appeared in front of him, squeezing a notepad against his torso.
A polite but almost imperceptible smile passed briefly over his thin lips.
"Hello, welcome to Whitwood", he said in a minced voice, as if he were repeating a text learned by heart. "I don't remember to have met you before, is it your first year in our establishment?", he asked, lifting his deep blue eyes to James.
Without waiting for a reply, he glanced at a young man who was observing him from a corner of the hall, a mass of curly black hair at the top of his head, a discreet smile on his lips but a cold glow in the eyes. Immediately, the boy concentrated again on Anderson, plunging his eyes into his own, urging him silently to respond without seeming in the least intimidated by their significant difference of size. When James nodded slowly, he took a pen from his blazer and bowed his head to his notebook.
"Your name, please?"
"Anderson", Helen replied before giving her nephew the time to open his mouth, patting his hand as if he was a child.
"Anderson... Ah! There you are.", the young man mumbled, crossing his name on the list scribbled on his papers, before extending his hand to James. "I'm McKenzie, Victor McKenzie, student president", he stated by designating the strip of red cloth pinned to the crest of his jacket. "Nice to meet you. Follow me, I'll accompany you to the dorms."
***
Even if he was hating himself to think so, James had to admit: the park was impressive. If he didn't care at all for the history of the place, unlike Victor – he had spent the last twenty minutes reciting the names of nineteenth-century artists — the park had brilliantly managed to take off him a little smile. The three main buildings (the dorms, the one with all the classrooms and the library, and, finally, the kitchens and rooms for differents extracurricular activities) were only connected by large paths with a splendid view on the lake bordered by birches and oaks, surrounded by grassy mounds on which dozens of birds were sleeping in the few rays of sunshine that pierceded the clouds.
Victor pointed to the students' building, which stood on four floors.
"The West wing is reserved for middle-school students", he explained by designating a group of young boys, before taking a look at his notebook. "Your room, the 309, is located in the East wing. Your suitcases should already have been mounted. I think the student sharing this room is already there too."
"What?", James said, abruptly turning his face towards McKenzie who only blink, looking at the young man's wrathful air. "What do you mean? I have to share my room?"
"Of course. No one has a single room, not even me. Now if you would excuse me", he sighed, tapping his notepad with a finger, "I still have four new students to find, so I'll leave you here. If you need anything, I'm in room 320. Have a nice day.", Victor added with a polite smile to Helen before turning on his heels.
The heavy wooden door closed behind the boy's small silhouette and, while Helen Bown and her nephew James Anderson were advancing cautiously through the entrance of the building to lay their feet on a checkerboard stone tiles, a tsunami made of snatches of conversations, swallowed sobs and enthusiastic shouts smote their eardrums heavily. Motionless in the centre of this swarming anthill of mothers embracing their boys for the umpteenth time and proud fathers who tapped their son's shoulder, James looked up at the ceiling. Black iron candlesticks... The stairs, rising up to them, formed a hypnotic spiral on which hundreds of heads, arms and legs appeared while the boys were searching for their rooms. Small, tall, blond, red or brown, chubby or skinny, were running on the steps.
That vision gave him vertigo. He didn't want to be here, he didn't want to share his daily life with all these unknown and anonymous faces. Her aunt Helen was already his only family, and now she also left him and threw him in the middle of an environment he knew nothing about.
James felt a long sigh leave his lips when he rested his eyes on this woman who had always raised him as her own son. She was looking at a family with a reprobating look, her little lips pinched as if she strongly disapproved the scene: the father, an elderly man with white hair, briefly passed his arms around his son's shoulders and affectionately patted his back before resuming his distance. A modest smile stretched his lips, and the same appeared on the black haired boy's little mouth. They both seemed embarrassed by their hugs, but the discreet softness that tinted their same green and dark eyes replaced all the gestures and words they didn't dare to express.
Helen hated demonstrations of affection in public. It is for this reason that, despite all the love she wore to her unbearable nephew, she merely put her hand on his shoulder and exerted a brief pressure as a farewell. Then, she turned around and left Whitwood.
Helen adored James, but she had never known how to love him.
***
309.
The young man passed a hand in his greasy hair, plating a few rebel locks against his temples, glancing around him. The corridors were beginning to empty now that all the parents had left the premises; groups of students were leaning against the doors of the rooms, discussing their summer holidays with their comrades, bragging about their activities or their travels. Others had left the dormitory and visited the park or the lounges on the ground floor, trying to sympathize with the newcomers or to make themselves a place in a band already formed. No one, on the other hand, felt the slightest desire to approach James. The annoyed glances he addressed to anyone passing by him did not render him particularly sympathetic.
Taking a deep breath through the nostrils, he laid his hand on the handle of his room and penetrated into the small room. He couldn't stop praying that his roommate would be a discreet and erased boy who wouldn't spend all his time talking to him...
"Hi!"
There we are, thought James with a startled surprise, seeing a young brown man of small stature, his face heavy with a hunchbacked nose and a broad smile leaping towards him. He grasped his hand with a surprising force, and shook it with such enthusiasm that James' whole arm was shaken.
"Anderson, right? I read your name on the label of your suitcase", he said with a grave and dragging voice. "I'm Hamilton. Robert Hamilton, that is. But you can call me Rob, like everyone else does", he added by clapping his hands joyfully. "It's your first year in Whitwood, isn't it? It's my fourth. The guy who shared my room asked to change it – I don't know why. Oh, you'll see: You get used to this life quickly..."
He continued to speak, shaking his little head, never letting James the time to open his mouth. However, he had stopped listening to him as soon as he had mentioned his suitcase, placed beside one of the two single beds with white sheets, perfectly identical, each against a wall. The room itself was terribly impersonal: the walls covered with a plain white wallpaper were devoid of any decoration, the floor of a brown parquet did not have the slightest carpet to protect it. An odor of disinfectant floated in the air, impregnating the sheets and, at the head of the two beds, a night table composed of two drawers waited patiently for some object of its new owner to join its bedside lamp. James had the feeling that everything in this room was shouting at him that he was not at home.
His eyes laid on his luggage and, before he even understood what seemed abnormal to him, he frowned nervously. Robert – or Rob, if he cared so much that a perfect stranger called him by this nickname – had stopped talking and had sit at the edge of his bed, his eyes following his new comrade as he opened his suitcase and threw the clothes over his shoulder, letting them form a heap of crumpled cloth on the ground. One hand closed on a plaid shirt and the other around a pair of socks, he abruptly lifted his nose towards Hamilton with wide eyes, pale as a dead man.
"Where are they?", he asked in a hoarse voice.
"Where is what?"
"My records, my magazines. And my radio. Everything is gone", shouted James between his teeth clenched by an incipient rage, sensing his blood pulse in the veins of his arms and a heat invading his thorax.
Robert's brief, sorry smile woke up his curiosity, but failed to reassure him.
"In the stockroom, I suppose. That's where the guards put all the confiscated items. You haven't read the rules, have you? Music outside the clubs is forbidden. And I guess they didn't like your magazines either."
"The stockroom?", repeated James in an incredulous air.
"Yeah. Look at this", he said, opening the first drawer of his bedside table to take out a red book engraved with the words 'The Whitwood Institute, Rules'. "You should at least read the chapter on punishment and deprivation..."
"This book is bigger than my head!"
Rob laughed at this, then put his elbows against his knees and waved a finger in the air, his large, bright blue eyes animated by a gentle spark of compassion and strange complicity.
"You'll have a hard time here, lad."
***
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
A jet of icy water whipped his chest, and an exclamation of surprise left his mouth when he felt his breath cut off in shock; however, the showerhead attached to the white tile of the wall quickly released an acceptable temperature water, but this did not prevent James from hearing Rob's amused giggle in the next cabin. They were separated by a simple bulkhead that left the water and the fragrant moss flowing on their feet.
The bathroom, common to all the students of the second cycle, hadbeen taken by the students at seven o'clock in the morning. A simple towel around the waist, carefully donning their uniform or still dressed in their pajamas, the boys were arguing to find a free shower, still clean enough to be usable, or a sink over which to shave, brush the teeth or combing their hair (James had learned, not without feeling a certain annoyance, that any kind of hair grease was banned in the school). They were maintaining conversations with their friends but the humidity, warmth and the deafening echo of the slightest noise managed to convince them not to spend more than twenty minutes in this room, which effectively regulated the crowds. It was not even seven and a half hours when Hamilton and Anderson – who felt perfectly ridiculous in this strict uniform – left the dorms and took the way to the refectory.
A warm breeze came to lift some of theirs locks of their still wet hair, and created a few swirls of dead leaves on their way. Robert walked with his nose up to the cloudy sky, mumbling a few words about the rain of the last few days. The white clouds reflected on the smooth surface of the lake at the edge of which some boys in white shorts and red tank tops ran slowly, punctuating their steps on a few whistles. The Athletics club, according to Hamilton. James had never been a sportsman.
"Bad night?", Robertasked with an amused smile when he saw James yawn noisily, his hands shoved in the pockets of his grey trousers.
"You bet. I'm not used to go to bed at ten, I had a hell of a time to fall asleep", he sighed by raising his shoulders. "Damn curfew... "
Rob chuckled, gently patting his arm, but his big blue eyes stood out from James' face, going on two others boys walking a few meters ahead of them, side by side, focused on a seemingly exciting conversation. When he fully recognized the tuft of blond and tangled hair of the first boy, a weird smile stretched his lips, discovering each of his white teeth.
"Walter!", he shouted abruptly, waking up James of his half-sleep.
The boys stopped, watching Hamilton waving his hand cheerfully in their direction, under the somewhat abashed eye of Anderson, before he too turned his attention to the two students.
It was him. He was certain of it from the moment he saw his big dark green eyes surrounded by long black eyelashes emphasizing the cold gaze he was addressing them. Wind lifted the black hair which covered his forehead and encircling his pale face, almost completely white. It was the boy who had shyly kissed his father the day before, under the reprobating eye of Helen Bown. However, the other young boy, Walter, took him out of his thoughts by emitting a strange bored grunt and, grasping firmly the arm of his friend, walked away from Hamilton and Anderson.
"Oh...", Rob sighed, following them with his eyes just like James, until what the two boys disappeared inside the refectory. "I was hoping that he would stop hating me by the end of summer..."
"Hating you?", James asked, turning his head to look at him, detaching his eyes from the high building's doors. "What did you do to him?"
"Last year, I went back to my family's house during the holidays. I was carrying my suitcase, but it was so heavy that it slipped out of my hands. Walter, who was going down at the same time, took it right in the head and fell down the stairs. Broken a tooth."
Robert, tapping his front tooth with his fingertip at these words, shaked his head violently, feeling James' silence weighing on his shoulders.
"It was an accident, I swear! I thought he would have forgiven me after a year, but he seems to be... slightly resentful."
"I'm not sure I would have forgiven you, if it had been me."
The young man shrugged, then entered into the refectory already occupied by a crowd of boys in brand-new uniform, settled on benches all along five large wooden tables. Some students sat alone at the end of the table, their noses low on their toast or fried egg, others seemed perfectly integrated with a bunch of friends and chatted loudly, throwing a few pieces of bread towards a boy's head at another table before one of the supervisors comes to give them a warning. Ah! The supervisors. James had hardly noticed their presence. They were in every corner of the room, hands in their back and as motionless as wax statues, scrutinizing every gesture with a cold interest, ready to intervene at the slightest deviation of behavior. If they were wearing a black bear hair cap instead of a simple gray suit that helped them to blend in, they could have been able to be part of the Royal Guard.
One of them turned his head towards James in an almost imperceptible movement, just enough to allow him to fleece James from the feet to the head until he looked away. Which he did not do. To think that James Anderson might be afraid to appear insolent, whether it was with supervisors or even teachers, was pretty stupid. And if someone dared to provoke him by trying to have a slight authority on him, he did not know what he was putting his feet into.
So James didn't lower his gaze. He did not even bother to blink. He counted every second that flowed without any of the two men breaking this icy link. Seven, eight, nine... The first to lower their eyes would immediately lose the credibility of a meagre attempt at rebellion, or that power conferred by an admitted and indisputable authority. James knew for a fact that he was the one who had to lose. He had to lose, because it was his place within this strange and underlying society that seemed to be Whitwood. A society where everyone remained in their place and blended into a mass of black blazer, grey trousers and varnished boots.
James had never been good at staying in his place.
But, before he won this duel, an sudden pain passed through his chest, so surprising and violent that he stepped back, his back bent, and carried a hand to his sore thorax. By reflex, he had diverted the eyes of man.
"Oh, excuse me. Did I touch you?"
James had to bite his cheek not to let out a grunt of hoarse pain when he crossed the little eyes of Victor McKenzie, almost hidden under his brown hair. His nose dotted with freckles was slightly rolled up, and her pink lips were pinched with such strength that they became white. He had slipped, or rather imposed himself between Robert and James with a violent blow of shoulder to James's thorax, ruthlessly taking advantage of their wide difference of size.
He had hit him, and it was not an accident. He was dead certain of it.
While massaging his chest in hope of alleviating this throbbing pain, he again postponed his brown irises to the supervisor. He had turned his eyes away, now. On the other hand, two other faces turned to him from one of the tables. Walter and the boy who accompanied him, both seated at the end of a bench, had lifted their noses from their plates and stared at him with an almost embarrassing curiosity. But before James could even do a move in their direction, Robert grabbed his arm to draw his attention to a first-year student who had awkwardly spilled his glass of orange juice on his white shirt. By the time James returned to the two boys again, they were talking to each other as if nothing had happened.
***
The classes were worse than anything. Worse than the curfew, than the common showers, than the tasteless breakfast he had forced himself to swallow despite the pain of his chest. As he had imagined as soon as his aunt had mentioned the existence of this boarding school – and had not given him the opportunity to refuse to be enrolled there – the teachers were all decrepit old men who recited word for word the same song for dozens of years. They seemed weary but stern, passing through the ranks like dark shadows, waving the tip of their iron ruler into the air. As soon as he stopped talking, stopping in the middle of a sentence to allow them time to take every word in note, James only heard the pen dance on paper and, from time to time, a page of a manual being turned. A deadly boredom.
He rejected his back against the wooden backrest of his chair, which emitted a weak squeak under his weight, breaking this stifling silence. He felt his teacher's owl eyes staring at his neck, and the sound of the soles of his boots against the ground warned him of his presence before he even entered his vision field. He stopped near his table, and waited for James to stop tapping his pen against the wood of his desk and look up at him before asking dryly:
"Your name?"
"Anderson."
"One should get up when talking to an adult."
Some heads immediately turned to them, not wanting to miss anything from this scene. Those who had already spent one or more years in this establishment knew it well: the insolence of the new ones disappeared after a few weeks, with great reinforcements of humiliating chores or painful punishments. The first month was the one and only time of the year that allowed them to attend these shows, and that was their only distraction during the day.
For a brief moment, Anderson crossed the big blue eyes of Robert, who looked at him over his shoulder, seated a few tables in front of him. But his gaze was quite different from the other students in the class. He did not seem at all amused by James' behavior. Quite the opposite. His gaze had something sad, weary, and perhaps even... anxious.
With wilfully slow and exaggerated gestures, James deigned to lift his buttocks from his chair and, once standing, performed a perfect military salute. At this gesture, he saw Robert raising his eyes to the ceiling and putting his hand against his forehead. But he had already gone too far to stop now:
"Soldier Anderson, sir."
If his show offered him some amused smiles from his classmates, his teacher seemed to be struggling with the sudden urge to throw him out the window. Instead, he laid the end of his rule against James' table with a dry and contemptuous rictus.
"I dare to believe that the so-clever Mr Anderson is able to give us the answer to our equation?"
Equation? What equation? He had not listened a word of what this old man said since the beginning of the course. And mathematics, he had to admit, was the last matter to arouse in him the slightest interest. Honest, he only shook his head. With this silent answer, a victorious smile passed briefly on the lips of his teacher.
"Do I have to infer that you are not listening to my lesson?"
This time James did not answer at all, but he hardly seemed to notice.
"You must be aware of the rules of this institution, Mr. Anderson, right? A lack of attention... a punishment", he said, pretending a slight grief. "Stretch your fingers."
It passed a few long seconds, cruelly ringed by the pendulum of the wall clock, before Anderson consented to execute. What else could he do? To resist would have led him to a much more severe punishment than this, and he did not need to read any rules book to find out.
The ruler cracked the air with a whistle and fell on the end of his fingernails. The pain passed through each nerve of his fingers, and went up to his lip when his teeth bited it. But he did not let any sound escape, and the muscles of his face did not contract. James felt like he was facing a cobra in the desert: if he had to be the prey, he would leave no sign of weakness to appear on his face. He would not admit to being defeated so easily.
As he had hoped, some silent disappointment appeared on the face of his teacher in front of Anderson's stolidity. He could not strike again, not without cause for punishment, and they both knew it.
"Sit down."
Anderson did it immediately, suppressing a light smile. To his surprise, he saw Rob do the same. The emotion which tinted his blue eyes had changed: the anxiety had evolved in a feeling which, undoubtedly despite him, congratulated the young man for his insolence.
Curiosity.
A latent boredom imprisoned Whitwood, and it was the first time, in the space of the four long years he had passed between these walls, that Robert Hamilton was beginning to feel a meagre hope that something interesting would happen through a certain James Anderson.