School For Troubled Boys

by Lina Langley

  SCHOOL FOR TROUBLED BOYS

  M/M GAY ROMANCE

  BY LINA LANGLEY

  © 2017

  Lina Langley

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without express written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is intended for adults only. It contains explicit sexual scenes and is not suitable for children.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  BLURB

  No teen wants to end up at Freemount residential school, a place that advertises itself as a school for troubled boys. Quinn has found himself surrounded by boys with problems that feel much bigger than his own.

  But regardless of how hard he has worked toward earning his release, it doesn’t feel that much closer than when he first got admitted, and there’s a part of him that infinitely prefers the residential school to the environment he came from.

  So maybe he isn’t working as hard as he could to get out. Maybe he should—he probably should—be working a little harder toward earning his freedom.

  And then there’s David.

  Other-worldly David, his new dormmate, who seems to pay little attention to everything going on around him.

  Beautiful David, the boy who his best friend seems to be head-over-heels for.

  The only boy who can make his best friend happy.

  He can’t just take that away from him. Not even if David would make Quinn happy. Right?

  Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of vomiting.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It had been a couple of weeks since I had met my new roommate and he had barely said a thing to me. He was bottom bunk, I was top bunk, and he stayed there most of the time, doing something on a sketchbook which he always seemed to close immediately as soon as he heard footsteps coming toward the room.

  I remembered the first time I had seen him. He had walked into our room, escorted by one of the guards—technically, we were supposed to call them staff, but we all called them guards—and he hadn’t even met my gaze when he had been told he would be sharing the room with me.

  I barely looked at him then. Tall, lanky, with dyed reddish blond hair that went down to the nape of his neck and cat-eye glasses, he looked more like a hipster than a “troubled boy.” I couldn’t see any tattoos on him, at least not from where I was sitting.

  “You’ll get your stuff tomorrow,” the guard told him. “We just have to inspect it first.”

  My new roommate didn’t say a thing. He just stared at the guard, but there was nothing threatening about the way he was looking at the man in white scrubs. It was with more awe than anger or defiance. It seemed to confuse the guard, because he turned around and walked out of the room, saying nothing else.

  “Hi,” I said, putting down my book. The least I could do was be polite to the kid. After all, he was going to have to put up with living in this hell hole with me for at least another six months. “I’m Quinn.”

  He craned his neck to look up at me. “David,” he said, continuing to look at me with those wide eyes. He didn’t seem scared, not exactly, but I didn’t know the guy, and in any case, if he wasn’t scared, he was an idiot.

  “Bottom bunk is yours,” I said after a little while. “And, just a head’s up, the bed gets super squeaky.”

  “Right,” he said flatly. I had no idea if he understood what I was getting at, but he got on the bunk under me and didn’t make another peep for the rest of the night.

  That was the extent of conversation I’d had with him. It didn’t matter how many times I had explained it to my best friend, Alix seemed to completely ignore the fact that David was as interesting as a rock and had been pushing for more and more information.

  This was, once again, one of those conversations. We were out in the yard, weeding plants, and he was leaning in close to me to make sure that the guard didn’t hear us.

  “But he’s so cute,” he said. “There’s really nothing I can use?”

  I grabbed a shrub, pulling it off the ground and flattening it with my hands to make as much noise as possible. “Sorry, man,” I said. “I mean, you could ask him if he likes art. He always has this sketchbook with him. Never shows me any of it. Or anyone, really.”

  Alix twisted his lips. A year younger than me, Alix looked tougher than he was. He liked following the rules. Pursuing another student was definitely against the rules, so I knew he had it bad for this kid. “Fuck,” he said as he weeded the plant in front of us. “Well, thanks anyway.”

  I sighed. I knew it was just a crush, but Alix sounded devastated. It might have just been a silly crush, but Alix deserved for good things to happen to him. If there was any person who didn’t deserve to be at Freemount, it was him. He deserved a little bit of happiness.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll try to see what he likes. You know, really likes.”

  Alix’s brown eyes began to glimmer. “Really?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Really. I’ll even talk you up a bit.”

  He grinned at me. “Q, you’re the best.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’d do the same for me, right?”

  “Riiight,” he said, winking at me. We both stifled a laugh as we continued to work. The guard had noticed us talking and he was getting closer to us, ready to discipline us.

  Or what they called discipline, anyway.

  We finished the tasks we had to do, then made our way to the dorms. Calling them dorms was generous. Freemount had started off as a Victorian household, one of those built for impossibly rich people, but the founders had converted the upstairs area into rooms for students. There were only five rooms upstairs, one room per every two boys, sometimes three when they were shuffling us around. Staff slept on the first floor or off-campus.

  As shit as the place was, the rooms weren’t particularly small. There were still remnants of the past with the crown molding on the ceiling and the horrid curtains which Freemount insisted on having, but the rooms were big and the space well-utilized.

  The bunk bed was the furthest thing from the door. Two rooms had access to an en-suite bathroom, but we had to share our bathroom with the remaining three rooms on the floor, which meant that there were six boys to one bathroom.

  There was a bathroom downstairs, too, but it was only fitted with a toilet and a sink, so it wasn’t as if anyone could use it to get ready in the morning.

  Other than the bunk bed, rooms all had bookshelves stacked with donated books—none of which had been checked by staff before putting up, thank God—along with a dresser and a small sitting area with a desk in case we had to do any homework. There were no electronics allowed in any room, and that included phones, which we’d had to hand in on admission.

  Sometimes, if we were good, they would give them back to us on weekends, but most of us were never that good, and so the only people we would end up calling would be our parents.

  I didn’t know abou
t anyone else, but those were conversations I never looked forward to having. My parents only seemed concerned about me now that I didn’t live with them. As the clock ticked forward toward my release—graduation, technically, but it definitely felt like a release—I could hear their interest in their only son beginning to wane every time we spoke.

  Those phone calls were supposed to be rewards, but they never made me feel any better and I didn’t find them very motivational as goals.

  I was thinking about all these things as I climbed the stairs to get to my dorm. There were a few ways to approach talking to David about things, but I had yet to really try.

  I didn’t find him particularly interesting. It wasn’t until Alix had told me he wanted to get to know the guy that I even considered striking up a conversation with him.

  The room was dark when I entered it. Each student was given a few weeks to adjust, with plenty of study and self-reflection time, which everyone seemed to spend masturbating more than anything else.

  But David was right there, lying on the bed and staring up at the bottom of my bunk bed. His sketchpad was next to him, closed, as usual, and his feet were on the bed, his knees pointed up toward the sky.

  His head was on the pillow, his eyes wide open.

  “Yo,” I said after a little while. It felt weird, like I was disturbing him, but he turned around to look at me. He didn’t smile. There wasn’t even a flicker of recognition on his face.

  “Oh, hey, Quinn,” he said after a little while.

  I furrowed my brow. He had never said my name before and I couldn’t help but find it a little weird. “What have you been doing all day?”

  “Thinking,” he said.

  “All day?”

  He snickered, but there was no humor in his voice. “Yes,” he said. “All day.”

  I had no idea where to go from there. People usually seemed to have an easy time opening up to me, but David didn’t seem to be inclined to do so, and it felt like the conversation was long over. I cleared my throat as I walked over to him. “Do you have a minute?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. He swung his legs over the side of the bed so that his feet were touching the floor. The hair dye had faded and his hair was now more blond and light pink than anything else. “Sure,” he said. “S’up?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied as I sat down next to him. His bed was still warm from his body. “I guess, since we are cellmates, I thought we should get to know each other.”

  He turned to look at me then and for the first time I could remember since I had met him, he actually smiled at me. There was some warmth I had never seen in him before and for a split second, I supposed I could see what made Alix attracted to him.

  “What do you want to know, Quinn?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What are you in for?”

  “Bad behavior,” he replied, winking at me.

  I smiled and shook my head. “We’re all in for bad behavior,” I said. “What did you do?”

  “What pushed them over the edge?”

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  He sighed. “It’s stupid,” he said.

  “How about I start?” I said, leaning back on his mattress. “Because I’m going to let you in on a secret. Are you ready?”

  “Sure,” he said, laying down beside me. “I’m ready.”

  “They are all stupid,” he said. “Every single reason a parent gives to bring us here is dumb.”

  He turned to look at me, his mouth slightly parted. He said nothing. I could see his teeth, which were slightly uneven, and they shone under the electric yellow light in the bedroom.

  “I was never a good kid,” I said. “You know, bad grades, casual pot use, even some harsher stuff. Standard truancy.”

  He listened.

  “I was into drinking,” I said. “Not a lot, but you know, enough that they noticed I was stealing their shit. Anyway, I threw a party when they were away for the weekend, and they walked in on me and this guy. And, you know, the girl he was dating.”

  “Oh,” he said after a little while.

  “They knew I was into guys, I think,” I said. “They didn’t know I was into girls, too. Being gay is okay, y’know, but being bisexual is just an indication that you’re unstable. Well, according to my parents, anyway. That was all they needed to ship me off.”

  “Shit,” he said. “That sucks.”

  “They were mad about the party,” I said, looking up at the boards at the bottom of the top bunk. “But they were especially mad about the threesome. They said it just showed I wasn’t making good choices and that I had to be on drugs.”

  “Were you?” he asked after a little while.

  “I mean, yeah,” I said. “But there’s nothing wrong with having experiences.”

  He nodded at that.

  “See? Stupid,” I said. “What about you?”

  He stared at the board above him. I noticed how blue his eyes were for the first time since I had seen him. I hadn’t been able to really see his eye color because of those cat-eye glasses he always wore. “My mom died,” he said after a beat.

  “Your mom died?” I asked, my mouth dry. There were plenty of heartless reasons to send a kid to a school like Freemount, but a dying parent had to be one of the worst ones I had ever heard.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “And I didn’t leave my room at all for, I don’t know, four months.”

  “At all?”

  He shrugged. “Well, I went to the bathroom,” he said. “But that was in the room, so I don’t think it counts.”

  I turned on my side to be able to look at him properly. I furrowed my brow as my gaze moved over his body. Small-framed, but with long arms and long legs, he looked sort of uneven, alien. Ethereal. His skin was milky white and his eyes were cloudy. When he turned to look at me, I realized that I had been mistaken.

  It was only one eye which was blue. The other one was light brown, making him look even weirder than he had appeared only a second ago. I told myself to stop staring.

  It was rude. I averted my gaze, looking down at my own body. “How did you eat?”

  “My stepdad brought food up sometimes,” he said. “When he stopped, my sister started to.”

  “Fuck,” I said. “That sounds difficult.”

  He nodded, still saying nothing. I didn’t know how I was supposed to transpose this information into something Alix could use and David didn’t seem like he was willing to give anything else up.

  I sat up. “It’s not so bad here,” I said after a little while. “I mean, it sucks, but I’ve heard of much worse places. This one is accredited, at least.”

  He furrowed his brow and sat up next to me.

  “A few of the other kids have been to worse facilities,” I continued when I saw his questioning look. “They seem to think this is a walk in the park, you know, comparatively.”

  He shrugged his shoulders after a little while. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never been anywhere like this and I don’t like it.”

  I nodded. “Nah,” I said. “Nobody likes this place. But there’s no tough love or anything like that. It’s all just structured routines, self-esteem exercises and building positive peer groups.”

  “You sound like a brochure,” David said after cracking a smile.

  “Well, there is punishment,” I replied with a chuckle. “They take away your privileges and stuff like that. They also make you clean up after everyone else. That kind of thing. Their bark is worse than their bite.”

  “You seem scared of them,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Nah,” I said. “The teachers are chill, and the therapists are cool too. Staff is there for muscle, really, but they report everything you do back to the academic staff, which can spell trouble for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I looked away from him. “If any member of staff reports a lot of shit about you, then your caseworker might want to extend your stay,” I said. “Until you’re ready to go back home.”


  He was quiet for a few seconds. When he spoke again, he did so quietly. “That seems sort of broken,” he said.

  I nodded. “Yeah,” I replied, then turned to smile at him. “It’s super broken. But it’s the best they got. You know, for kids like us. We’re the lucky ones.”

  He paled a little at that. He was already quite pale and I was a little worried he was going to faint on me after I had said that. “I don’t feel lucky,” he said.

  I licked my lips. “Yeah,” I replied. “None of us do.”

  He sighed. He didn’t say anything as he stood up, then turned to look at me over his shoulder. “I think I need some air,” he said before he walked out the door.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Alix was sitting in front of me. Pete, a year older than me, was sitting next to me, picking at his food. David was next to Alix, across from Pete, glaring at the food in front of him.

  In his defense, it was hardly appetizing. Overcooked pasta with turkey meatballs that looked more like mush than anything else hardly inspired anyone.

  Alix turned to look at David. “If you say you’re a vegetarian, they give you better food.”

  David looked at Alix’s food. It did look better than the rest of ours, an arugula salad with slices of tempeh and almonds, but it did mean that when we went out on expeditions they would only give us cheese sandwiches, which was a sacrifice I was unwilling to make.

  “If you say you’re a vegetarian, just make sure you really like cheese,” Pete chimed in, his voice deep and gravelly.

  I nodded. “Yup,” I said. “And that you don’t hate cheese sandwiches. Fuck, I hate a cheese sandwich.”

  That made David laugh quietly. “I don’t mind this,” he said. “It’s better than the stuff my stepdad made back home.”

  Alix shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, then looked down at his food. “But just remember that you could have had all of this.”

  David smiled at him. “I’ll keep it in mind,” he said.

  Alix went back to chatting with Pete while I continued to watch David. He did eat, surprisingly, but he did so slowly. He was clearly thinking about something else, his gaze focused on the wall in front of him.