Tobias, with his expensive jeans and perfect posture and countless small courtesies to the staff, had a target on his back big enough to be seen from space, and the ire directed his way had risen accordingly.

A one-time thing with no real consequences. Normally the hazing took the form of having to stand up in class or group therapy and say something humiliating. Except the staff, but they didn’t count anyway. Ghost had heard about the rule Gibson’s crew had laid down for the new guy. He was around eighteen, a good four years older than Ghost, but he clearly had the survival instincts of a toddler.Īs evidenced by the purple bruises half-hidden beneath the sleeve of his T-shirt.Īnd the surprisingly dignified, in-chair potty dance. The boys around him began to return their lunch trays, but Ghost only sat and watched Tobias struggle to make up his mind. The windows were thick, scratched glass, warped and dirty and alarmed, lending a mediocre view of the rest of the sprawling campus: half-full parking lots, the overgrown courtyard-rarely, if ever, used by students-and the eleven cottages housing three hundred boys on the verge of manhood-if they hadn’t tipped over it already. The cafeteria in the Woodbury Residential Treatment Center couldn’t have been more institutional if the administration had tried-long tables with attached benches instead of chairs, plastic silverware, cinder block walls painted white, and linoleum the color of olives, dark enough to conceal suspicious stains. A rich name for a rich boy, and both the name and the money would do exactly zip for the kid if he did something stupid now. Tobias, Ghost was pretty sure his name was.

Badly.ĭon’t do it, Ghost thought again toward the guy. The kid had the nervy air of a new colt, all trusting blue eyes and tentative smiles, and at the moment, the fidgety body language of someone who needed to take a piss. Ghost aimed the silent warning to the teenage boy sitting three spots down from him, who was currently glancing toward the bathroom with a pained expression.

Rough Trade by Sidney Bell