Academic Assassins (24 page)

Lost Boy

It looked as if it had been painted in a flaking rusty brown. A tiny crescent-shaped sliver clung to the wall.

Is that…?

A fingernail. Somebody had inscribed the graffiti in blood.

“Welcome home.”

I spun around. My cell was empty.

“Who said that?”

“Just the voice inside your head.”

The hazy intonations of a boy's voice seeped through a rusted iron grate located behind my latrine. I knelt next to the toilet and peered through. The thinnest shaft connected the
neighboring cell to my own, about two feet cut into the concrete.

“Sully? Is that you?”

“Do I sound like Sully?”

“Guess not.” I tried to think of what to say. “How long have you been here?”

“Who knows?” The boy's voice let out a singsong sigh. “A week, a month. Six months. You'll never know. Not in here. They keep the lights on, twenty-four-seven, so
you'll never know what time it is, whether it's night or day, winter or spring or summer or fall….Life just becomes one long, never-ending stretch of silence.”

Something about this voice sounded familiar. I couldn't quite pin it—but the longer he talked, the more I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd heard it before.

I could see a vague silhouette from the other side of the grate. I squinted in hopes of making out the face, but the rusted grille eclipsed his features.

“My name's Spencer.”

“I know who you are.”

“At least that makes one of us,” I said.

“Don't worry. You've got enough time on your hands now to do all the soul-searching you want.” After a deep breath, he recited—“
I went to the woods because
I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not
lived
.”

My pulse picked up. That was Thoreau. My neighbor knew Thoreau.

I haven't heard somebody quote Thoreau since…

“Who are you?” I asked.

The question hung in the air. “In another life, my name had been Jason.”

“Jason…?” I asked. “Jason
Bowden?
”

“Please. Call me Peashooter. It's been so long since anybody's called me by my real name down here.”

S
peechless. Completely, utterly thunderstruck.

My mind instantly gridlocked with a dozen different questions, each struggling for my tongue's attention, until I couldn't manage to ask a single one.

“Whaaa…?” It was the best my brain could do on such short notice.

“What do you think?” Peashooter asked back. “Right after our parents picked us up from New Leaf, we were thrust back into society—but society didn't want anything
to do with us. There were
consequences
for what the Tribe did. Adults love
consequences
. It's how they maintain social order. Fear of
consequences
.”

“But your mother….” I started to say. “She was so happy to see you.”

He was silent for a moment.

“Even if our families were willing to take us back with open arms, do you really think the rest of society would simply let us go back to our normal lives?”

I didn't know what to say. Nothing I could've said would change anything.

Peashooter was right.

“The world is full of
consequences
, Spencer,” he said. “Sounds like you're learning that the hard way….”

The temperature never fluctuated. The lights never dimmed.

“The place where there is no darkness….”

Just like Orwell had written.

After a while—an hour, two hours,
ten
—I dragged myself off my cot and leaned against the wall next to the latrine.

“You still there?” I asked the emptiness of my cell.

Peashooter's tinny voice responded—“Where else would I go?”

My throat was so dry, it cracked when I asked, “How come nobody told me you were here? Surely somebody had to know….”

“We're Merridew's secrets. She doesn't want the other ants to know we're locked up here. If we mixed in with the other inmates, we might incite a riot.”

“But Sully….She's intermingling with the general pop.”

“Merridew thought she could control Sully,” Peashooter suggested. “Use her to control all the other tribes. Then you came along and had to stir things up again.”

“Hold up. Who's ‘we'?”

“Who else? Compass. Yardstick. Sporkboy. We're all down here, fading away into nothing in our own little Neverneverneverland.”

“Compass is Merridew's grandnephew. She wouldn't lock up her own family.”

“Of course she would,” Peashooter said. “Compass was her first guinea pig. She shocked him into catatonia with her dog collars. Now he's a walking vegetable.”

I had a flash of the plaque in Merridew's office:
Parens patriae
—“The state as parent.”

So much for this messed up family.

“You're one of Merridew's little secrets now,” he said. “We're the kids nobody wants to remember. The true Lost Boys. No one has to look at us or think about
us down here. We don't exist anymore.”

Neither of us said anything for a while.

“Peashooter…?”

“Yeah?”

“I'm sorry. For what happened. For what I did.”

“It wouldn't have lasted,” he said. “The Tribe would never have lasted.”

“But it has,” I insisted. “Sure, it's evolved a little….”
Mutated
might've been a better choice of words. “But the Tribe is still alive
and kicking ass. There are at least five or ten tribes here at Kesey. Maybe even more. The Tribe's not only yours or mine anymore. It's everybody's. The tribe belongs to
everybody.”

“But it needs a leader. Someone strong to take control. To make the hard decisions. Someone who can rule with an iron grip when necessary. Like Peter Pan.”

“Yeah, well.” I laughed to myself. “What happens when Peter Pan grows up to become Fidel Castro?”

We were playing telephone with a couple of tin cans and a piece of string, only our phone was two rusted grates connected by a two-foot chasm of concrete.

Talk about a long-distance phone call.

“You've got to take this place over,” Peashooter eventually said. “Overthrow Kesey. Overthrow Merridew.”

“You sure that's good advice? Last time you tried to overthrow an institution you nearly burned down an entire summer camp.”

“One spearhead to rule them all.”

“I don't know. I've always considered myself more of an underminer than an overthrower….”

“You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs,” Peashooter suggested. “You can't be a leader without breaking a few heads.”

It made sense that he would want me to follow in his footsteps and lead an uprising until Kesey was in our control.

Who knows? Maybe he was right. But if I took this place over, how long before I turned into some power-mad despot like Peashooter had back at Camp New Leaf?

I rested on my cot and stared at the ceiling. I didn't move much. You wouldn't either after the amount of electricity I'd taken. The voltage never left my bones.

“Good night,” Peashooter broke the silence that had settled over us.

“Is it night already?”

“Might as well be. It's night forever down here.”

Twice daily—or was it three?—a Styrofoam tray would slide through a metal slot in my door. All I ever saw was the hand that slipped it inside.

Always on the tray was a stale loaf of bread with grey chunks of something or other baked in. They may have been fruit at one point—now they were off-color lumps of bland nourishment, like
your sweet ol' grandmama's holiday fruitcake.

Peashooter had nicknamed it “The Fruitcake's Fruitcake.”

“Bon apetit,” I said before gripping the loaf with both hands and gnawing on a corner. I needed to make a pretty sufficient premasticated pˆte of the stuff before fighting back
my gag reflex and forcing the mouthful down. “This tastes awful.”

“Your stomach gets used to it after a while,” Peashooter suggested from the neighboring cell.

I discovered a few alternate usages for my fruitcake beyond sustenance:

My cell's gray walls became a canvas.

Time for a little redecorating…

A little dab here…

A little dab there…

“What are you doing?” Peashooter piped up, momentarily pulling me away from my mural.

“Just sprucing the place up a little.”

“What I wouldn't give for a window,” Peashooter said. “Just a window overlooking a field. I would stare at that grass for weeks and never blink.”

“A book wouldn't be so bad,” I said.

“There's no escaping the Black Hole. Not even into the pages of a book.” He recited a line from
Nineteen Eighty-Four
—“‘
Nothing was your own except
the few cubic centimeters inside your skull….
'”

Why read Orwell when you're living it?

The more I thought about it, the more I slowly realized there were two kinds of freedoms worth fighting for.

There was a physical freedom. That takes breaking out.

Then there was an inner freedom, a place inside your mind where you can escape when the world around you closes in. Nobody, not Merridew or her Men in White, could take that away. That's
where I'd find my freedom in a place like Kesey.

Maybe I wasn't breaking out after all. Maybe I was breaking in to my own mind.

“Still there?” I asked. “Or am I talking to myself?”

“Who says I'm not just another figment of your imagination?”

“Are you?”

This is how Merridew breaks you. Kesey takes away what matters most—contact with others—until you begin to question your own sanity.

You might not be crazy now, but you soon will be….

When basic human interaction is taken away, when you never know when one day ends and the next begins, the baggage of your brain drops away. The parameters of your world contract. Everything
gets smaller. Your sense of self fades.

You start to question who you are.

Whatever you thought you knew about yourself—that was all wrong. Whatever you believed about yourself—that was never true.

That person doesn't exist. That person
never
existed.

That's what Merridew wanted me to think.

When I was out in the woods, I had lost myself. I lost the idea of who I am. I thought I had hit rock bottom in that cave—but maybe there was a little bit further down to go. Maybe I
hadn't really hit the bottom until I made my way to the Hole.

There never was a Spencer Pendleton.

There. I said it.

Spencer Pendleton was just an image. A character in a book.

He was never real to begin with.

Who am I then?

What am I?

Peter Pan?

You have to fight
, Peashooter would say.
Fight back against Merridew's attempt to turn you into another one of her mindless, hollow shells.

I took a long look into the abyss of solitary confinement and saw myself for who I truly am. I am not a hermit. I am not a Thoreau living in the woods any longer.

I wanted to live. I wanted to be free.

I wanted my Tribe—my friends, my family.

I want to be an Academic Assassin.

The florescent tubes buzzed over my head.

In my head.

I don't know how long it had been—days? weeks?—before the lock to my door released with a rusty squeal of grinding hinges as the door swung open.

Grayson sauntered in. He immediately spotted my mural.

“What do you think?” I said as I stood beside it, rather proud of my work—the Tribe's stick figure in masticated mush, spear raised over its head. I had used my
Fruitcake's Fruitcake to paint, struggling to convince my stomach to digest the rest.

“Merridew wants you prepped,” Grayson said with little fanfare.

“What about Sully? Peashooter? You're gonna leave them to rot down here?”

“Pea—
what
?”

“Bowden. Jason Bowden. The kid in the next cell.”

Grayson looked at me like I was crazy. “Nobody's been in there for months.”

I snorted. “Nice try.”

Grayson shook his head as he approached. “Suit yourself.”

“Peashooter!” I called over my shoulder. “They're coming for me!”