Every dude wore identical white tees and khakis, like they’d been drafted into the Hanes army. Sea Brook also gave each student two green sweatshirts printed with the same rising sun logo that had been painted on the van. Lights-out at nine thirty and a wake-up call at six. A basketball court without nets. A cafeteria without knives or forks. They ate sandwiches and apples.
The school was strict; the guys weren’t allowed to talk as they marched between buildings in single-file lines, rotating through their regimented schedules. But Robert quickly discovered that everyone here was getting away with something. Kids offered to sell him Ritalin, Percocet, Vicodin, weed, E. Some sold clean piss. The counselors and teachers gave out carved wooden discs, bottle cap–sized, that could be traded for snacks, breaks from chores, and trips off campus. The tokens were engraved with eagles’ wings, bear claws, shark fins. Guys sold those, too, though not for nearly as much as the other contraband.
Each of the school’s housing units was named for a tree. Redwood was reserved for guys who’d been in fights or caught with drugs and put on twenty-four-hour lockdown; Robert was sent to Maple, the house with the most privileges. He’d been evaluated by an on-staff psychologist and determined not to have any substance abuse problems, major mental illness, or potential for violence, and so he was put in the house with the lounge and foosball table.
Robert slumped through his first math and English classes, and the only nature he saw was the bushes outside his windows and the weed his roommate smoked after lights-out. But, he had been told in orientation, he could start earning Greens, the tokens, right away.
His first day he got one for complying with lights-out at the first request. Robert flipped the Green over to see it was stamped with some kind of paw print; he couldn’t even tell what animal the carving was supposed to represent. He slipped it in his pants pocket and couldn’t find it by morning.
“Hey.” Robert approached a counselor after breakfast, toast crusts piled on his tray. The food wasn’t bad: fresh fruit and eggs, a buffet of cereal boxes. “Can I have another one of those things? The Green? I lost it.”
The counselor shook his head. A silver whistle hung from his neck. Every counselor had something dangling on a chain: whistles, stopwatches, compasses. Just my luck. A school full of gym teachers. “Sorry. We don’t give out duplicates. Gotta be responsible for your things.”
Robert walked away knowing he’d never hold on to enough of those things to earn a bag of Doritos, never mind a trip off campus.
He had to sit through a class three days a week about drugs and drinking, and he’d alternate between studying the floor and the ceiling.
“Do you have anything you’d like to share, Robert?” one of the sad-sack counselors always asked him. These guys drank so much coffee their mugs might as well have been welded to their hands, along with their clipboards, free gifts from pharmaceutical reps. Their pens, handy for note-taking, were also emblazoned with logos: Concerta, Wellbutrin, Lexapro.
Barry Lancaster had never asked him a dumb question like that. Robert shook his head and didn’t say a word.
Time seemed to slow and stretch during the ninety-minute class. Robert found his mind wandering to what Deb had told him about his father. He heard her accusations over and over again. But Robert didn’t believe his father had really killed anyone. Drank too much, no doubt. Gotten into fights, sure. Stolen a cop car, laughing as he did it, definitely. But when Robert thought back to that last time he saw his dad, he couldn’t imagine that Robert Senior had, just minutes before rapping on his son’s window, left another man to die in the street. And when Robert tried to imagine his dad locked in a cell like the one Holt had put him in, well, that just seemed impossible.
More likely, Robert Senior was still on the run, and his mother couldn’t stand the fact that she wasn’t going anywhere at all.
* * *
One day a van left for the woods, taking five guys and two counselors on an “overnight wilderness encounter.” Robert watched from his window as they loaded rolled-up sleeping bags and tents. He thought of how Hulk used to wait for him to trudge off the school bus, his nose pressed to the trailer’s screen door. Robert abandoned the window for his bunk bed and stared at a water stain spreading across the ceiling like a dirty cloud.
Four white cinder-block walls, two metal-framed twin beds, desks, and shelves built into the walls. A window over each bed, a beige shade, fluorescent lights. They were allowed to have books and crayons and paper. No markers, no pens, no pencils. All potential weapons.
Through his window, Robert could see a swath of trees, and beyond that, vacation houses’ peaked roofs. He’d finally crossed the bridge off Yannatok and the view still looked like he’d never left the trailer.
There wasn’t a fence.
His roommate, Dalton, was quiet and gnawed at his nails until they bled. His T-shirt swallowed his lanky frame like a white whale. He’d stolen a car and snorted crystal meth. Once a week, Dalton forfeited his climbs up the rock wall for an NA meeting.
“Crystal makes you crazy,” Dalton told Robert. “I was pulling out my hair, my eyelashes. Thought I had bedbugs.”
They talked after lights-out while Dalton rolled joint after joint. Smoke curled up to Robert on the top bunk. Dalton said more in the dark than he ever did during class. He’d actually been living on Yannatok before his stint in Sea Brook began. His mother had hoped a move to the island from Seattle would keep Dalton away from his tweaker friends. He’d been enrolled in Yannatok High, but had only attended two days before hitchhiking back to the city to be reunited with his meth-smoking buddies. According to him, stealing a car, the transgression that finally landed him here, was the simplest thing Dalton had ever done.
“I did it with a screwdriver. Just popped it in the ignition,” Dalton bragged. “People are so dumb. So many people leave their cars unlocked. And it’s like ‘I wonder where I should park?’ Maybe all the way over here, where it’s pitch black? And I know what I’ll do! I’ll put one of those magnetic boxes under my bumper with the key right in it! Or maybe I’ll leave a spare in the glove box. And a lot of people out here never lock their houses.” He flopped over, ruffling the beige blankets. “It’s like they want their shit to get stolen.”
“I really miss my dog,” Robert said.
Dear Robert,
I feel bad about the last time we talked, but you needed to know some things. I don’t want you going down your father’s path, and I’ve tried to keep you off of it. When you get home, we can talk more and try to make things better around the house. I hope you think about what you want to do in school.
Mom
* * *
Robert rushed through his work and was just as lackluster a student as he’d been at his old school, but “wilderness therapy” was a different story. Sea Brook’s staff trained their charges with the goal of eventually sending them out to the cliffs and the dense woods. The school was equipped with a ropes course and a rock wall dangling with belays. They shot blunt-tipped arrows at rows of foam targets and practiced assembling and tearing down tents, a counselor with a stopwatch cheering them on to beat their previous times.
Robert ruled at all of it. Some guys rolled their eyes and zombie-walked their way through the tires, hung from the rock wall limp as damp shirts on a clothesline. But Robert high-stepped across fields of tires, shimmied up the rock wall, balanced atop a revolving log like he’d been practicing his whole life. His arrows soared and pierced. His tents were sturdy.
Mr. Drew, a counselor with tattoos snaking around his biceps and down his legs, asked him, “You play sports at your school?”
“Nah.”
Robert stooped to help Mr. Drew gather errant arrows from the bases of the targets. Each counselor went by Mister followed by their first name—chumminess countered by deference. “Why not? You’re a natural athlete.”
Because I was always failing everything and never got a physical and couldn’t listen to the announcements long enough to hear when tryouts were. “Sports are stupid.”
Next Mr. Drew showed them how to construct basic water filters out of spare T-shirts and sand, and they all trudged through the firs to a murky creek to test them out. Robert drank greedily from his and wiped cold drops from his chin, amazed it worked.
“Never, ever drink your own urine,” Mr. Drew told them as they gulped their sand-filtered water, and the guys busted up, Robert doubling over. Mr. Drew held up a hand and waited for them to collect themselves. “Seriously. Enough time alone in the wilderness and you get desperate. Dehydration and fatigue can even make you hallucinate. But urine will dehydrate you. Don’t try to filter anything but water. You should always keep an energy bar or trail mix on your person while hiking or camping, too.”
Robert raised his hand. He screwed his face up into an approximation of studiousness. “Excuse me, Mr. Drew. You said your own urine. But what about someone else’s piss?”
They all whooped again.
Mr. Drew glared and continued. “Even candy will keep you alive and give your body some calories to burn. But something with a little protein is a better choice, and no piss.”