Free The Grievers by Marc Schuster

sitting tight among the crumbling homes of the neighborhood it had called home for well over a century. Although surrounding enclaves were slowly giving way to gentrification, the Academy had, in recent years, taken advantage of the fact that the homes on the block immediately to the north were virtually unlivable. Demolition had begun the previous December, and by the time Neil and I arrived on the scene for our audience with Ennis, the homes were gone. In their place lay a fenced-in parking lot shaded by baby sycamores.
    “Say what you want about Ennis,” Neil said as a security guard waved us into the lot from his air-conditioned booth. “But the guy’s doing a hell of a job fixing the place up.”
    Neil parked his Pontiac between an Audi and a Lexus and told me to be careful when I opened my door. The last thing he needed, he said, was a lawsuit from some seventeen-year-old trust-fund baby for scratching the finish on his car.
    Across the street, the Church of Saint Leonard stood tall behind the gray stone walls that surrounded the Academy. Just like we called the Academy the Academy , we referred to the Church of Saint Leonard simply as the Church , as if there were no other. Back when Neil and I were students, there was talk, however idle, of tearing the whole thing down because it had fallen into such disrepair that a renovation would cost more than the building was worth; but under Ennis’s leadership, the alumni association had raised enough money to replace the roof, chase the pigeons out of the steeple, and restore the building’s marble façade to the gleaming glory of its heyday.
    Passing beneath the stone archway that led to the Academy’s courtyard was like stepping back in time and halfway across the world to a filmmaker’s notion of what the renaissance might have looked like if it had been designed with teenage boys in mind. To the left stood the newly restored Church with its towering white columns, brass doors, and polished marble steps. Straight ahead, the Academy appeared to recline in ageless, stolid rectitude, an unassailable stone bastion of learning and tradition. Between the two was the faculty parking lot, where even the cars appeared to come from an earlier century, particularly compared to the newer makes and models parked in the student lot across the street.
    Inside, teenage boys swarmed all around us in a frenzy of bad skin, rumpled sport coats, and loose neckties, and the stench of puberty hung in the air like an unsavory stew of mushrooms, onions, and gym socks.
    “The human body takes many strange forms,” Neil said, wading through the sea of pimply teens. “Can you believe this used to be us?”
    “You, maybe,” I said. “But I was never this young.”
    A black and white photo of the freshman class was tacked to the bulletin board outside the cafeteria. There were no goofy faces in the bunch, just a small regiment of serious boys scowling at the camera and pretending to be men.

    A FTER CHECKING in with the registrar, Neil and I climbed two flights of steps and followed a narrow hallway to the byzantine suite of offices that once belonged to the faculty, but which Ennis had, over the years, commandeered as his efforts at raising money took on monstrously successful dimensions. Raising a finger when his secretary showed us to his office door, Ennis wrapped up a telephone conversation and told us to please have a seat.
    The carpet was a deep shade of red, and the walls were lined with books: Siddhartha, Man’s Search for Meaning, Twilight of the Idols , and dozens of others with equally intimidating titles. Was Ennis a closet philosopher, I wondered, or were the volumes mere props pilfered from the Academy library to make him look smarter than he really was?
    “Gentlemen,” he said as Neil and I sank into a pair of soft, leather easy chairs. “I wish we could be meeting under better circumstances, but it’s always good to see a pair of familiar faces.”
    Ennis’s eyes