Free The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston Page A

collection. Reeves will never know.”
    I shook my head bitterly.
    “If you quit, he’ll say that he was right about you all along,” Prowse said. “You’re not the only boy he’s got it in for, you know. A few weeks from now, he’ll be picking on someone else and all this will have blown over.”
    In the end, I relented and let them pay my fine. I didn’t say a word about it to my father.
    After we got back from Christmas break, the masters informed us that we were all to go, one by one, to Reeves’s office. Throughout the day, we took turns. When one boy came back, the boy who sat behind him left. The boys who came back looked terrified and ignored all whispered questions as to what was going on. When it came my turn, Porter, who had just come back, said Reeves had said I should wait until last. I looked across the room at Prowse, who had not yet had his interview. He shrugged. The interviews went on until it was Prowse’s turn. He grinned and winked at me as he left the room, but when he came back he did not look at me. Finally, the next-to-last boy came back to say that Reeves would see me now.
    When I entered his office, Reeves stood facing the window that overlooked the grounds, ominously tapping it with his swagger-stick pointer. The back of his high-shaven neck was flushed a livid crimson. It was for some reason the only part of him that went red when he was mad, and I had never seen it redder. He was wearing his tasselled mortarboard and his headmaster’s gown.
    He turned around, looked at me through his small round spectacles. He thrust out at me a piece of paper, then withdrew it when I reached for it.
    “What is it, sir?” I said.
    “What is it, sir,” he said. “I’ll tell you what it is, sir, as if you don’t already know, sir. It’s the letter you wrote to the Morning Post , sir — ”
    “No, sir, I didn’t — ”
    “It’s the letter you wrote to the Morning Post , which thankfully was read first by a friend of this school and sent to me and which reads as follows — you may recite along with me if you wish:
    To Whom It May Concern:
The masters at Bishop Feild do not treat us properly. They keep most of our meal money for themselves and with what’s left they buy the cheapest food that they can find. We are always so hungry we cannot concentrate on our work. Then they tell us we are lazy and cane us for making mistakes. They make us buy our notebooks at the school and charge us twice what they are worth. Also, our dormitory is always cold, as there is never enough coal to go around. Three boys had to leave school for good last year they got so sick. Everyone is always coughing. One boy got bitten by a rat.…
    “It goes on and on. A pack of malicious lies. It’s signed, ‘Yours Sincerely, The Boys of Bishop Feild.’ ”
    “I didn’t write that, sir,” I said. “It can’t be in my handwriting.”
    “It isn’t in anybody’s handwriting,” he said. “It’s composed with words and letters cut from books. ‘Our dormitory is always cold.’ You gave yourself away there, Smallwood. The letter is postmarked St. John’s during Christmas vacation, when the only dorm boy in St. John’s was you.”
    “But — ”
    “Can you imagine, Smallwood, how much damage this letter might have done? Imagine what a time the Catholics would have had with it.”
    “But I didn’t write it, sir; I swear.”
    “Are you telling me that someone else did?”
    “I don’t know — no, sir, I don’t know who wrote it. What did the other boys say?”
    “Never mind what they said.”
    “I didn’t write it, sir. Anyone could have put that bit about the dorm in just to get me into trouble.”
    “That’s just like you, Smallwood, to try to put the blame on someone else. Get out of my sight.” I stood there, staring at theletter in his hand. “ Get out !” Reeves said, smashing his pointer on the desk.
    Prowse called a meeting of all the boys, Townies, ’Tories, Lepers, on the athletic