Free Boarding School by Clint Adams Page B

“Well can’t you honor me later? Like after breakfast or something when I’m awake?” I asked. I wasn’t sure what to make of all of this.
    The second one then answered me. “No, the tradition is to do this now. At this time of the night.”
    “What about Matt?” I asked. I then looked over at my roommate and saw that he hadn’t noticed any of what was going on next to him. He was just lying there with his eyes closed—sawing logs.
    “No, this has all been arranged just for you. Come on, stand up. A bunch of us are waiting.”
    “A bunch?” I was surprised to hear that I was such an object of interest for so many. I don’t know why, but this was apparently enough to persuade me to get out of bed and go along with these guys. Perhaps I’ m just more prone to powers of persuasion when I’m only half awake.
    When my bare feet first hit that cold linoleum floor, I began to look around the room for something to put on.
    “No!” the first one stopped me as I reached for a pair of pants. “That T-shirt you’re wearing, and your briefs are all ya’ll need. Just put on your sandals and let’s go.”
    “Really?” I asked. “You want me to go someplace in just my underpants?” As strange as this sounded, it really didn’t raise that many red flags in my mind. After all, this was an all-boys school and there were no women around anywhere at this hour of the night.
    “Naw, you don’t need nothin’ else. At this time of night most of us are in what we normally wear to bed anyway.” The first one made it all sound so friendly. As if the three of us were headed for some big pajama party and staying in my underwear would help me to fit in better. Then I noticed that both of these guys were wearing blue jeans. “Yeah, but you two guys have pants on,” I observed.
    “That’s because I normally sleep in the nude,” the first one replied.
    “Yeah, and so do I,” the second one now joined in again. “Hey, we’re runnin’ out of time. Come on, let’s get going.”
    “Fine.” I said nothing more on the subject after that. I decided that it really didn’t make any difference to me at this time of night how I was dressed—or not dressed. And besides, it was normal at the Academy to see boys running around in the dorm hallways wearing nothing but their underpants, especially in the mornings before breakfast and at night before lights out. In fact it was even commonplace for guys to walk into the rooms of other students and sit down for a chat while their friends were dressing. I had figured that this general lack of personal modesty at Ulster had been brought about by the large community shower rooms that the other dorms had. With no partitions or curtains set up between the shower heads, there was little reason for a kid to hide himself after he had showered a bunch of times with practically everyone else in the school. So in silence, I walked over to our closet and slid my feet into my flip-flops. “All right, now what?” I asked once I had them on.
    The first one then pulled a pair of eye shades out from his pocket. “Now we have to blindfold ya.”
    This idea didn’t thrill me. “How come?” I asked.
    The second one was ready with an answer for me. “This group is sort of like a secret society. We want you to become one of us, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to. So if you decide not to join us, we don’t want you to know who any of us are. Otherwise our society wouldn’t be secret anymore. Ya see?”
    The explanation seemed to make sense. After all, they were wearing masks. “I guess.” So I gestured for them to go ahead and put the things on me. The first one placed the elastic string around the back of my head, and then he pulled the shades down over my eyes until the plastic was resting on my nose. I then could feel both sets of their hands pulling my hair out all around from under the string and then smoothing it down straight again. I guess they did this to make sure the eye