Copyright 2025 by James Breitbart, all rights reserved
[3,821 words]
* * * * *Chapter 1
Nolan Pierce
I
had applied to The Wilson School because by the time I got to eighth
grade, I was already sick of the Bible thumping backwater that was
Sissipahaw, North Carolina. All I really knew about it was that it was
in Connecticut, graduated a lot of politicians and captains of
industry, and was very expensive but offered very good scholarships. I
was able to obtain one of the scholarships and talked my parents into
letting me go by pointing out how good their college admissions rate
was. I completed my summer reading and read the student handbook for
new students, suffered through a shopping trip with my mom, and drove
up to Connecticut to check into my new dorm room very early on the day
after Labor Day. The freshmen would have three days of orientation
before most of the upperclassmen arrived on campus.
I knew
from the handbook that The Wilson School emphasized, or at least
pretended to emphasize, ‘self-governance.’ Each freshman dorm had an
assigned faculty supervisor, with a student ‘prefect’ attached to each
floor. Reading through the lines, the faculty supervisor seemed to be
responsible for handling major incidents (rape, overdoses, students
attempting to build nuclear bombs in their dorm rooms), while the
prefect enforced a set of rules for conduct within the hall (quiet
hours, who gets the remote control in the common room when) supposedly
voted on by residents. I would have bet money that when we got there
the prefect was going to talk us into approving the set of rules
approved by the administration.
I’d gotten a letter from the
faculty supervisor, Mrs. Hodes, that was full of slightly patronizing
language about how much I was going to ‘learn and grow’ at Wilson. I
was pretty sure it was more for my parents’ benefit than mine, but it
did tell me that my prefect was named James Calloway. What it didn’t
tell me was that he was hot – with shaggy blonde hair, blue eyes, and a
slightly too small t-shirt that showed off his biceps.
“Hi,”
he extended his hand as my parents, and I reached the third-floor
landing with the first load of luggage. “I’m Jamie, your prefect.”
“Nolan Pierce,” I answered before either of my parents could, “nice to meet you.”
He shook my hand, and I noticed that he was wearing flip-flops. I had a
foot fetish, which I attributed to Sissipahaw Middle School’s
repressive atmosphere. Checking out other guys in the locker room was a
one-way ticket to getting stuffed in a locker, so the only action a gay
boy could get there was watching the other boys slide their feet out of
their sandals under their desks during class. At the time I assumed
Wilson would be the same way and certainly didn’t want Jamie to realize
how hot I thought his toes were.
“You’re in room 305 with Noah Sinclair. Right across from me.”
We walked down the hallway, discovering that laminated pieces of paper
with names of the occupants had been tacked onto each room door. I
knocked on mine and Noah opened it. He had light brown hair, shading to
blond at the tips, and blue eyes, with soft, almost feminine facial
features. He had done Jamie one better in the shoe department and was
totally barefoot. This raised a problem I hadn’t considered in my
excitement at getting out of Sissipahaw. It was going to be much harder
to hide my reactions in a boarding school environment that it had been
back home.
I didn’t have much time to think about the
problem, because Noah immediately introduced me to himself and his dad.
Both of them seemed pretty friendly and offered to help us with our
luggage. They were from Rhode Island and had had a much shorter drive
than us, so Noah had already gotten all his things unpacked, and in the
course of conversation we discovered that his father was a professor of
brain surgery at Brown, which I knew really impressed my mom. They went
downstairs after taking the last suitcase up to talk about whatever it
is parents talk about when their kids are out of earshot, which had the
convenient side effect of getting them out of my hair so I could set my
stuff up how I wanted to.
I was just making the bed when a
very tall boy barged into our room. Well, I guess we did have the door
open, but still. “Hi, I’m Jasper Whitfield,” he announced confidently,
“but you can call me Jas. I’m from New York.”
“Uh, nice to meet you. I’m Nolan.”
“Noah,” Noah waved from his bed, where he had been noodling around on
his guitar. He had his legs crossed and I could see the bottom of his
big toe. It had a very thin layer of dirt from the parking lot and the
floors of the dormitory, and it was finally too much for me. I felt my
penis getting hard and realized much to my embarrassment that if I
didn’t adjust myself it was going to become immediately visible through
my shorts.
“Hey, you didn’t see where the bathroom was, did you?”
“Far end of the hall, but I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet. I’ll walk with you.”
I didn’t exactly feel like I needed an escort, but there was no way to
decline without being rude, and I really needed to take care of my
boner, so I let Jas walk with me. The bathroom had a little curtain on
one side with a sign that said ‘showers’ and a hallway leading past a
row of sinks to an area with urinals on one side and toilet stalls on
the other. I went into one of the toilet stalls, adjusted myself, and
actually did pee to be on the safe side while Jas explored. Just after
I flushed, I heard him exclaim.
“There’s no cubicles.”
“What?” I went out to the sink and began washing my hands. Two other
kids walked into the bathroom and at the same time a very worried
looking Jas emerged from the shower room.
“There’s no dividers in there!”
“You mean it’s a gang shower?” One of the boys said. He had similar
coloring to Noah, but I would say he was less good looking, with a
somewhat prominent forehead.
The other boy – tall, dark, and handsome, peaked behind the curtain. “Yep.”
“That means we’ll have to shower in front of each other,” Jas said, sounding a little distraught.
“Or we could just take turns,” I suggested. Jas was starting to get on my nerves.
“There’s like 30 guys on this hall,” the tall, dark, and handsome one said, “it’d take forever if we went one at the time.”
“Besides,” his companion said, “we’ll all be used to it after the Freshman 500.”
“That’s not a real thing,” Jas scoffed.
“Yeah, it is,” tall dark and handsome insisted “my dad and my brother Conor both did it when they were freshmen.”
“Well, maybe it was a thing back in the 70s, but I’m sure they’ve put a stop to it now.”
“Conor’s only a junior this year. Anyway, everybody knows about the Freshman 500, ask him.” He gestured at me.
“I have no idea what you guys are talking about,” I insisted, suddenly feeling as though I’d made a bad first impression.
“It’s ridiculous,” Jas said, “and if you two try it I’m sure you’ll get
in a boatload of trouble.” Perhaps sensing he was outnumbered, he
stalked off. The other two walked to the two closest urinals and
started peeing, unbothered by my presence.
“I’m Dylan,” the
soccer player said, “and this is my roommate Finn.” I had seen the
names Dylan Reed and Finn Callahan on one of the doors I walked past.
“I’m Nolan,” I answered, trying not to act weird about the fact that I was talking to them while they were peeing.
“So, your friend’s Noah Sinclair?”
“No,” I answered hastily, feeling like I needed to defend Noah, “that’s
Jasper, but you can call him Jas. Or I can, anyway. He followed me to
the bathroom.”
“He needs to learn how to tap his foot the
right way,” Finn said, which made Dylan chuckle. I didn’t really get
the joke, but the reference to feet made me a little nervous. They
finished at the urinals and washed their hands, and we all walked down
the hall together. It seemed like Finn and Dylan were getting along
with me better than with Jas, so I chanced a question.
“What is the Freshman 500 anyway?”
“The upperclassmen move into their dorms on Friday,” Finn explained,
“so the tradition is for all the freshmen to streak past their dorms on
Friday night – not all at the same time. You usually go with your hall.
If Jamie’s cool, he’ll talk to you about it.”
“So, if he doesn’t talk about it, he’s not cool?” Dylan asked.
“Probably not. The other way to tell is to check him out in the
showers. If he’s in a secret society, he’ll have a tattoo on his ass.
Secret societies use the Freshman 500 as a test, by the way. If you
don’t do it, they’ll assume you’re pussy and not offer you a bid.”
“So, if Jamie’s not cool?”
“Then we’ll have to sneak out. Everyone in my family has been a Crimson
Circle for the past 100 years, there’s no way I’m blowing my chance to
get tapped.”
I didn’t know what a Crimson Circle was, and I
didn’t ask. My main concern was the streaking part. No one else had
seen me naked since the last time my mother had changed my diaper, and
an erection would be much harder to conceal if I was in a pack with my
entire hall, or even if I snuck out and went with Dylan and Finn. I
didn’t know if I wanted to be in a secret society, but the way Finn
talked made it sound like I would be an outcast if I wasn’t.
Maybe I could sneak out and do the run by myself, without any other
guys. Or maybe Finn was exaggerating based on his father’s old school
stories and I didn’t have anything to worry about. Hell, maybe Jas was
right after all, and the Freshman 500 had been suppressed years ago. I
decided to keep my ears open and my mouth closed and see what I could
learn between now and Friday.
Chapter 2
Jamie Calloway
At
3:00 precisely, I called all 30 of my new freshmen into the common room
for introductions and an explanation of the orientation schedule.
Officially, it was a chance for them to get to know each other and me
to lay down preliminary basic rules (lights out at 10:30, no loud music
before we voted on the official rules. Unofficially, it was a chance
for me to scout them out. I had been given a dossier on each boy and
told to keep a particular eye on two. Jas Whitfield’s father was the
host of a right-wing cable news talk show, and Finn Callahan’s was the
Governor of Washington. Both were members of the Crimson Circle, which
had a strong tradition of admitting legacies.
Each of the 30
boys gave their name, where they were from, and a ‘fun fact’ about
them. Whitfield’s fun fact was that he had been to a state dinner at
the White House. Callahan’s was a somewhat more self-deprecating story
about nearly getting caught skinny-dipping by the park rangers on a
family camping trip.
There was one other boy who I hadn’t been
told to keep an eye on but whose dossier had jumped out at me,
particularly the writing samples. Nolan Pierce was a talented fiction
writer. I’d run one of his pieces by my father and he said that it
could probably get published in The New Yorker without
editing. His background was totally obscure – father a computer
programmer, mother an occasional substitute teacher, from a small town
in North Carolina, probably a repressed homosexual. If he had stayed in
that small town for high school, he would have probably gone to the
University of North Carolina and become a teacher or journalist or
something, sending out short stories to regional magazines and trying
to snatch enough free time to draft a novel or screenplay until he gave
up and sank into undeserved obscurity or the deep end of a whisky
bottle. But Wilson, and the Crimson Circle, could give him the
connections he needed to supplement his raw talent – that is if the
Ebony Quill didn’t get to him first and if he didn’t flunk out of the
initiation process.
The Ebony Quill was an issue for the
selection committee; the initiation process was my problem. He seemed
shy, and the fun fact he gave was honestly lackluster (he was on his
middle school’s quiz bowl team). He startled briefly when Owen
Fitzgerald (New York native, skateboarder with an alternative bent, did
the musical all three years of middle school, academically brilliant
but had a rebellious streak and didn’t leave his teachers sad to see
him go) announced as his fun fact that he was gay.
Whitfield
made a face like he had smelled something funny, and Pierce quickly
assumed a neutral expression, but he couldn’t stop himself from
glancing over at Fitzgerald, who had come to the meeting barefoot,
wearing a hemp ankle bracelet and with the last few traces of black
nail polish on his toes. Pierce’s stories had mentioned characters
going barefoot enough that I had already wondered if it was a fetish.
Maybe Fitzgerald would be the right kid to bring him out of his shell.
After the common room meeting, I led my charges to the outdoor
amphitheater for the pep rally that was supposed to kick off the school
year. We were intentionally early to give them an opportunity to
eavesdrop on their small talk. Whitfield latched on to Pierce on the
walk over.
“So, you’re from North Carolina, huh.”
“Yeah. The closest town to me you might have heard of is Chapel Hill.
We’re also just down the road from Climax, which is more fun to give
directions to.”
“My father’s a good friend of Senator
Robeson.” This was an interesting test of Nolan’s response, as Senator
Robeson had been voted ‘homophobe of the year’ by GLAAAD three years
running.
“Oh.” Nolan was carefully neutral.
“Do you know Senator Robeson?”
“I can’t say that we’ve met.”
“He’s very influential on the Foreign Affairs Committee.” The joke
about Senator Robeson on late night television was that he never met a
foreigner he didn’t want to bomb.
“Maybe that’s why I’ve never met him, too busy having foreign affairs to meet his constituents.”
The joke seemed to go over Whitfield’s head. When we got to the
amphitheater, Nolan artfully arranged things so that he ended up
sitting at the far end of a row with his roommate Marcus Flynn, a
scholarship kid from Boston. Whitfield had to sit in the next row, next
to me. Nolan had subtly managed to distance himself from the annoyance
without hurting Whitfield’s feelings.
“Am I supposed to know who Senator Robeson is?” Flynn asked nervously.
“Well,” Nolan drawled, “if you want to repeal women’s suffrage or
legalize hunting immigrants for sport, he’s your man.” It was a good
bon mot, and it put Flynn at ease.
The pep rally ran from
5:00 to 6:30, featuring introductions to the headmaster and the
captains of all the sports teams, a lot of cheering, and a performance
by the marching band.
As the dining hall was between the
amphitheater and the dorm, the boys naturally gravitated there after
the rally, enjoying what for many of them was the first meal they’d
ever had without parental oversight of their nutrition. The soft serve
machine got totally overrun.
Once they were all full, we
returned to the dorm as a big group, and most of the boys hung out in
the common room until lights out.
I kept an eye on Nolan for
the rest of the evening. He didn’t really talk unless someone talked to
him first, but when he did, he usually said something clever, giving
the impression that he could be cruel if he wanted to, but was holding
back until he got the lay of the land. My dad always said that good
writers are always funny, even if their books aren’t.
Whitfield, in contrast, tended to dominate the conversation, making
indiscreet references to his political views. Callahan kept his mouth
shut, but Fitzgerald was less reticent, and I had to redirect the
conversation before it got heated. My choice of redirection was musical
preferences, and I noticed that that got Noah Sinclair more engaged in
the conversation. The dossier mentioned that he had been more outgoing
as a young child, but his mother had died the year before and his
teachers noticed that he had become withdrawn.
I kept an eye
on the clock and announced lights out at exactly 10:30. I stayed up for
another hour or so, making sure all the boys were in bed, or at least
doing a decent job of pretending to be. Then I walked quietly
downstairs, out of my dorm, and across campus to the catacomb.
It was a nondescript building, looking like little more than a shed,
but when you opened the door, it revealed a staircase leading two
stories underground. There was another door, at which I gave a knock
and the secret password. The door swung open to the disrobing room, a
simple concrete room with benches and lockers for the members’ clothes.
I found my locker and stripped completely naked, then walked into the
main meeting chamber.
The chamber was modeled after an old New
England church painted white with plush red carpet that felt
wonderfully soft under my bare feet and lit by a chandelier. There were
rows of pews with a central aisle between them for current members, and
balconies running the length of the room for alumni. I knew that
Governor Callahan and Rick Whitfield were both in the balcony, waiting
for my verdict on their sons.
I strode up the center aisle,
past the mostly empty pews. Most of the upperclassmen weren’t back on
campus yet, and we had just enough for a quorum. I sat at the dais at
the front of the room with the rest of the executive committee – Ellie
Whitman, the first female president in the Crimson Circle’s history and
my girlfriend, Max Harrington, vice-president and captain of the soccer
team, Grace O’Malley, recording secretary and president of the student
council, and historian Jude Whitman. I was the treasurer and would have
to spend some time after the meeting dunning the alumni for donations.
But first, all the current members were expected to report on the
freshmen they had encountered so far, with some light quizzing by the
alumni.
Jack Prescott was the first to quiz me.
“What
do you think of the Whitfield boy?” Mr. Prescott was an aide to the
President, and needed to keep in Rick Whitfield’s good graces if he
planned, as the rumors held he did, to run for Senate after the
President’s second term ended.
“With all due respect, sir, I
think he’s a dud.” There was some whispering in the gallery, and I knew
that I had probably made an enemy of Whitfield’s father, but I had a
duty of candor to the Circle. “He’s entirely too free with his opinions
and thinks other people are more interested in them than they really
are. I think we might be better off if he has four years to mature and
gets another chance to joint the Illuminati through a fraternity in
college.”
Mr. Whitfield stood up and objected. “You’re just
politically biased because I called your father’s last novel obscene.”
It had been something of a scandal,
Ellie gaveled him into
silence. “I would remind the membership that the purpose of this
meeting is to collect information, not to decide on taps. Jamie, you
will offer Jasper Whitfield the same chance to prove himself as every
other boy in your care.”
“What about Callahan?” Somebody called out.
“He performed better than Whitfield in my judgement,” I said, “he’s
confident, but not to the point of being obnoxious, and seems to have a
good rapport with his dorm-mates so far.”
Ellie hit the gavel again. “Are there any more students you wish to discuss.”
“Yes, Nolan Pierce. He’s quite a talented writer, and shy, but witty. I
would encourage everyone to review the writing samples uploaded to the
dossier in our online database, especially Mrs. Caldwell and Ms.
Langford. Maggie Caldwell was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and
Vivian Langford was a well-known literary critic. They would be able to
back up my impression of Nolan’s writing for the less literarily
inclined among the alumni. “The only challenge is that I’m not sure
I’ll be able to convince him to do the Freshman 500 in time.”
After all the students present had given their reviews, the meeting
adjourned and both students and alumni returned to the disrobing room
to retrieve our clothes. I was taken aside by Jack Prescott.
“You know, if this Pierce kid is really that self-conscious about his
body, he’s probably not going to be comfortable in the showers either.”
“There’s not much he can do about that,” I said.
“Except try to take his showers very early in the morning or very late
at night. Which might be a good time to catch him alone.”
“That’s a good idea.” Such a good idea that I didn’t bother putting my
clothes back on and carried them all the way back to the dorm.
Fortunately, I didn’t run into Ms. Hodes.
Once back in my
room I set an alarm for the ungodly hour of 5:00 a.m., reasoning that
even the most dedicated of prudes wouldn’t wake up before then. Sure
enough, I heard Nolan’s door gently close a few minutes later. I
grabbed my shower things and followed him down the hallway to the
bathroom.
Nolan had taken his clothes off by the entrance to
the shower. Some guys always did this the first few days of freshman
year but quickly stopped when it became obvious that there wasn’t
really room for multiple people to put their clothes in the same place.
There was a wet spot on his pajama bottoms. I touched it with my big
toe and discovered that it was sticky. He must have either masturbated
in bed, or, more likely given what I knew of his personality, had a wet
dream.
I hung up my towel on the hook, opened the shower curtain, and went inside.