Escape: The Ashwood Lies (Prequel)

by RJ Infantino

  I scribbled out a quick answer, folded my test in half, and walked it up to the front of the classroom. Professor Stein was fading, his half-rimmed glasses drifting down his nose as he pretended to read. I slid my test on top of the pile and tried to sneak away before he noticed, but Stein woke up, grabbed my test, and immediately flipped to the last page. I guess you don’t ask such a bizarre extra-credit question without wanting to read the answers.

  I didn’t want to stick around for the inevitable lecture, so I scooped up my backpack from under my chair and snaked my way between the desks toward the door. I glanced back at the bowed heads and wished my friends a silent good luck. Rosie’s blonde hair was tied up in a bun, skewered by three pens. She worked her fourth pen furiously across her test. She was probably the nicest person I’d ever met, but that girl transformed into a warrior when her grade was on the line.

  Marco? Well, not so much. I watched the deep black curls of his hair shudder along his shoulders. I could almost hear the gears grinding in his head. When he was goofing off last night, we kept telling him he should have been studying.

  My friends were weirdos. It’s why they were my friends.

  I wasn’t the first person to finish. That was Dante of course, but I was still done a good half hour before the final bell. I was so focused on escaping that I almost didn’t feel someone slip a note into my jacket pocket as I walked down the aisle of hunched shoulders. I turned around. It could have been anyone in the second row, but Professor Stein started chuckling to himself (he must have finished reading my answer), so I hurried out the door before he could stop me. Twenty seconds later, I burst through the Industrial Hall doors and went outside.

  Freedom. It tasted like mountain air and fall and sunshine. Which wasn’t really any different from any other day at Ashwood, except now it was Thanksgiving break. And vacation was always a little sweeter.

  As hard as I tried to stop it, my mind still wandered back to the test. I knew I slacked on the essay, but at the end of a grueling fall semester, my limping brain thought the extra half hour of peace would be worth it. Of course, I’d probably feel differently once I got the grade back, but that was a problem that could wait until Monday. And that was a long six days away.

  For now, I had the campus more or less to myself, at least until the bell tower tolled. There was nothing more rare than silence at boarding school, and I’d earned every minute of it. I traced along the granolithic walkway toward the Main Building and my dorm.

  Tucked against the west base of the Pennsylvania Appalachians, Ashwood Prep was cut off from the rest of the world by the mountains on one side and a river on the other. The Founders built the school around an old Quaker farmhouse back in 1806, about as far away from civilization as they could get.

  Isolation. The admissions brochures said it bred focus. They said that it was the key to academic excellence in this chaotic age, but the truth was much more sinister.

  This was my fourth and final year at Ashwood. It had seemed . . . off so far, but I blamed that on being a senior. Of course at Ashwood, they called us fourth years. Somehow, that was supposed to make us seem more collegial. I thought it made us sound pompous.

  It was strange thinking that I’d just finished my last fall semester here. The same things I’d been doing since my first day on campus had recently evolved from a routine into something else, nostalgic with a twist of impatience. Dumb stuff like the bagels in the dining hall started tasting vaguely like frustration. Or the same flight of stairs that I climbed twenty times a day between my dorm room, class, and meals suddenly seemed a little steeper. And the professors, well, the professors were more intense than ever. You’d think they’d understand the pressure we were under, but sometimes it felt like they were more stressed than we were.

  Even the air seemed different this year. Up in the mountains, the November weather was usually brisk on a good day, and there weren’t that many good days. But lately the warm sun never seemed to break, and there was a suspicious lack of clouds.

  Of course, we didn’t think it was suspicious. We thought it was great. It was like a perpetual summer, perfect for playing Ultimate Frisbee out on the East Lawn. No one ever complained about sun. I loosened my tie and flipped my coat over my backpack, risking a dress code violation just to feel the cool breeze.

  Garnet and navy. There were worse colors for straitjackets, and after a while, you just kind of got used to the uniform. From breakfast through dinner, it was coats, ties, and slacks. The girls wore skirts and sweaters or jackets instead.

  Technically, Ashwood sat on more than twelve hundred acres of land, but most of the buildings on campus dotted along the same half-mile stretch. Everything orbited around the Main Building, which was three stories tall and a couple of football fields long. The entire exterior was encased in stately brick. Knotted strands of ivy climbed up between the windows. The first floor of the building was classrooms, with the dorms on the second. The third-floor attic and the basement were strictly off limits.

  The Main Building was one of the few things at Ashwood that looked exactly like it did in the brochures. The library broke out of the east side, mirrored by the dining hall jutting out from the west. I’d always imagined that from up on the mountains, the building looked like an oversize cross or maybe a giant X.

  I peered through a window at a class of first years scratching out the end of their exams. They looked like prisoners or maybe lab rats. I hoped that I didn’t look that haunted, but then I remembered that I didn’t care. The best part about vacation was the mindlessness, but I did run my hands through my hair just in case.

  I needed a trim, but I’d have to wait for Lisa to get back from break. She was a third year, and she was actually pretty good with a pair of scissors. Really good if you could trade her something sweet in return. Contraband started to get scarce near the end of the semesters, but I was pretty good at making mine last. In a week, students would be bringing all sorts of things back from vacation to replenish the stocks. Or at least that’s what we thought.

  Suddenly, a gaunt visage slipped into the window’s reflection behind me. I really wished I hadn’t flinched. I turned around slowly. It was the dean, Professor Barnwell.

  Pale skin stretched over his bony face, and his sharp nose looked like it might rip through his skin at any moment. The rest of his lanky frame didn’t help the unfortunate similarities to a skeleton. He was wrapped in an ill-fitting cardigan, loose around the waist and short in the arms, and a thin pair of wire-frame glasses sat low on his nose.

  He peered at me over the top of them, even though I was taller by at least a couple of inches. Maybe he was just used to looking down on most students, he was almost six feet himself, but part of me assumed it was some sort of psychological ploy he used to intimidate us.

  “Why aren’t you in your exam?” he asked with a chilly stare.

  “I finished early.”

  “Hm.” It was like he knew that I hadn’t tried my best, like somehow he’d been watching. Almost as if he had every single one of us under constant surveillance.

  He looked me over like he was trying to decide how to punish me, but eventually he just said, “Have a safe trip home.”

  “Actually, I’m staying on campus this year.”

  There was always a small group of students who stuck around during the brief school breaks. Some lived too far away to go home for a couple of days, while others simply didn’t like going back there at all. A few of us fourth years stayed behind to work on our college apps. Or at least that’s what we told our parents.

  Truthfully? Boarding school could actually be a lot of fun with nobody else around. Without classes, it was kind of like camp, just with a lot more opportunities to get yourself into trouble.

  Barnwell didn’t like the sound of that. “Let’s try not to get up to anything then, shall we?” He didn’t stick around for a response.

  I waited until he turned the corner out of view, and then I doubled back down the path
. My bed was calling me, but I had a better idea. I walked around the Main Building until I reached the north corner of the library, where a forgotten fire escape hung ten feet off the ground. It was an old rusty thing that never got used or at least that’s what most people thought, but if you looked really close, there was fresh wear around the hinges. I barely had to jump to pull the ladder down, and after a quick glance over my shoulder, I started to climb.

  The physical part was easy, but my backpack kept getting caught on the sharp metal corners. Sometimes it was hard to remember that I wasn’t the same lanky first year that had showed up on campus almost four years ago. I was still as long and lean as ever, but now there were muscles where there didn’t used to be. All the hours in the gym were to get ready for basketball season, but there wasn’t a rule that said I couldn’t use my newfound strength for other things.

  I kept on going past the library roof until I reached the turret. Okay, the bell tower wasn’t really a turret, but that’s what I called it. I stepped off the ladder onto the landing. The half walls gave 360 degrees of perfect views, and it was the perfect lookout. If I had a bow and arrows, I could have defended the whole school. Well, first I would have had to learn how to use them. Ashwood was a prep school, for better and for worse, but at least we weren’t snotty enough to have an archery class.

  The bell tower landing was a tight fit, maybe five by five feet, and most of that was taken up by the bell. I had to give the school some credit. It was a real bell, a dusty copper bronze one, not speakers that played a bell recording. Of course, it was mechanical—nobody climbed up there every hour—but it sounded authentic all the same.

  I stuffed my backpack in the corner and hopped up on the east ledge. I sat down and dangled my legs over the side. There were still a few minutes before the bell was going to chime, but I didn’t want to get caught in there when it started swinging.

  I don’t know exactly why I decided to climb the bell tower, but the view of the mountains and the East Lawn were both pretty great. I guess I was just bored. That wasn’t a bad thing though. I thought it was great. It was the beautiful kind of boredom that you really had to earn. Sometimes, all I wanted was to be alone just to think.

  Most of the students were still imprisoned in the classrooms until the final bell, but there were a few signs of life around campus. I wasn’t the only person who had finished early. The real geniuses had been out for a while now and were huddled over the picnic tables frantically checking and rechecking the answers they left on their tests. I shook my head. Ashwood had its fair share of overachievers, but not everybody was that high-strung. I spotted more than a few slackers trying to avoid Barnwell and light up in the shade of the trees.

  On the south side of the school, Professor Torres’s Advanced Ecology class was starting to emerge from the forest for the end of their practical examination. That class was legendary. I hated science and couldn’t hack it even if I wanted to, but the test did sound kind of cool. Of course, maybe that was because I didn’t have to take it. Everyone had two hours to rush into the woods and collect as many edible plants as they could find. Grades were awarded on a combination of quantity, variety, and speed. Negative points were enforced if you showed up with something poisonous. There were rumors that Professor Torres made her students eat their bounties, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t true.

  I liked that the exam awarded speed. I was the fastest guy on the basketball team, but that never seemed to come in handy in any of the classes that I took.

  Maybe the test wasn’t as fun as it sounded, though, because every single person who came out of the forest looked stressed out of their minds. A couple slumped in the grass while Torres evaluated their stashes.

  I was more than happy just to watch in peace, but then, the ladder groaned. Someone was coming up.

  It wasn’t a professor. They would ride the elevator up to the attic and climb up through the trapdoor on the tower floor. I leaned over as far as I dared and saw a head of slick black hair rising toward me.

  It’s funny how well you can recognize someone after living with them for a while. Their voice, their hair, their footsteps. I could tell it was Dante from three floors up.

  I didn’t have to wait long before he was lunging himself onto the landing. It was less graceful than when I did it, which was funny, considering that Dante usually made things look so easy. There was a smoothness to everything he did, like nothing took any effort at all. You could see it in the relaxed confidence he wore on his face. His uniform fit like a second skin. The fact that he was a straight A student, the other captain on the basketball team with me, and the professors’ darling seemed like fate.

  “How’d I know I’d find you up here?” he said, not really asking. His voice was tinged with a hint of disapproval. He broke the rules just as much as I did, but he thought I did it for stupid reasons.

  Dante and I were roommates back in our first year. We couldn’t have been more different, but that early connection never completely went away. There’s nothing quite like mutual suffering to bond two people together.

  If Ashwood was in the business of manufacturing extraordinary students, Dante was their prototype. At least that’s what Ashwood would like you to think. But everyone knew the school had very little to do with creating him, the person or the persona. Me? Well, I was more of a glitch in the design.

  Dante started to say something, but just then the bell tolled, and suddenly we couldn’t even hear ourselves breathe. They said you could hear the chimes from miles around, so you can imagine what it sounded like from three feet away.

  But we were guys, and we were stupid, so neither one of us covered our ears. We just gritted our teeth and pretended not to care. Dante had to hurry to climb up on the ledge to avoid getting whacked by the bell. He swung his feet over the half wall just in time. He was almost as tall as I was, with thickset, handsome looks. His bold Mediterranean skin looked like it was born in the sunshine. The rest of the students started spilling out into the yard, and Dante’s cat-quick eyes watched over them like they were ants.

  Not everyone fell for Dante’s charms, but they loved him or hated him for all the same reasons. Considering we couldn’t have been any more different, I actually didn’t mind him so much. Yeah, he could be a bit of a prick, but he was interesting. And for some reason, he was interested in me. I don’t think he could really get a handle on me, and that was rare for Dante. He liked controlling everything. I think he enjoyed having me around for a challenge as much as anything else. We weren’t exactly friends, and rivals sounds absurd, but there was definitely a quiet competition between us.

  It takes a long time for a bell to chime twelve times, so we didn’t have much choice but to watch Thanksgiving break bloom underneath us. Relief, stress, despair, and laughter. The staid school grounds transformed into a garden of emotion. A few of the more maladjusted students were ripping open textbooks, bemoaning wrong answers. More than one person was crying, but I couldn’t blame them. We’d all been there after an exam or two. But whatever horrors they left behind in the classrooms, it was okay now. They were safe. They could escape into vacation. If I had known that I would never see any of them again, I might have gone down there and wished them good luck.

  Instead, I was just looking for some quiet. In a few minutes, the dorms would be overflowing with energy as everyone hurried to pack before the last shuttles left. Ashwood Prep was tucked away just north of nowhere, and it made getting home for breaks a bit tricky.

  Parents were actively discouraged from picking up their kids on campus. Instead, a series of shuttles ran to the nearest bus depots, airports, and train stations. There was only one bridge across the river that cut us off from the rest of the world, and it didn’t take long before it was overstuffed with vehicles. The bleating car horns would soon be cutting through the typical serenity of the afternoon, as students and faculty alike raced away from the school.

  My eyes scanned the crowd on the ground until I caught
a glimpse of Taylor’s brilliant summer-brown hair splashing about in the sunshine as she flew from one group of friends to another. I wondered if she was staying on campus for Thanksgiving. I hoped so.

  I’d met Taylor during the new student ice-cream social in September. She was a third-year transfer, and somehow I got roped into being an orientation leader. It turned out she didn’t like ice cream. So instead, I managed to find her a bag of Skittles. We sat on top of a picnic table, sharing and talking and arguing over who would get the purples. She called them purples. I called them grapes. We didn’t even notice as everyone else trickled away for dinner. It was one of those moments.

  But then, school happened. It had been three months of smiles in the hallway and quick flirty run-ins here and there, but there was a strange kind of magic at Ashwood. Every time you wanted to avoid someone, they were right around the corner, but when you were actually looking for a girl, it was impossible to find her without her prying pack of third-year friends around. It’s not like I had anything against packs of third-year girls. I just didn’t know them that well.

  To be honest, I didn’t know that much more about Taylor either. I knew she liked bran muffins and that weird generic red juice that they served for breakfast, except on those days when she had fruit instead. I knew she liked books or liked carrying them around at least. She liked purple Skittles and giving things funny names like “purples.”

  She made her own dresses. That might make her sound like a girly girl, but what does that even mean anyway? I still remember the flower dress she was wearing the first time I saw her. I remember because she sat straight down in the dirt while she waited for me to start the school tour. There were benches, but she went right to the ground, in between two frightened-looking first years. It was really cool. She told me she wanted to keep making dresses at school, but the professors were worried that the needles could be used as a weapons. Which was absurd for so many reasons.