Justified, Anderson.

On the wall there was a small shelf and on the shelf there was a book titled, “Lincoln Outdone, a True Story of The Bush Presidency” Texas looked at it underdisturbed. If asked, he would say Lincoln was on the ten dollar bill, he was alive during the revolution and he was a close contemporary with the modest republican Bush. He was in this office for only a minor reason, he realized, because if it was urgent the headmaster would be rushing through the door, slamming his satchel strapped accordion folder down onto his completely empty desk (he reserved his office, in its entirety, for the purposes of punishment - he said so himself), and begin to speak fluently about a larger, semi-related issue at length without stopping for sometime, then finally getting a man to open up the hatch towards the back left of the office and letting Texas, or whomever had the pleasure, to climb down the wonderful hatch. But the headmaster did not burst into the room. He was, Texas realized, already in the room, he could hear him breathing, the type of breathing that was post panic attack, long, but wavering. The Headmaster was hiding under the desk. 

Texas, seventeen, egregiously tall, and dissidently empathetic despite ancient town-wide events, like how news is heard from distant places, had blond hair, or would, if it wasn’t shaved and he wasn’t wearing a barret. He wasn’t muscular but he could overpower many with his will. He crossed his legs, this infuriated all his instructors, in a feminine way. His friends called it the ball crusher cross. He was unperturbed by this. Those who were not his friends, in the locked school, called him gay. 

The headmaster, still not ready to come out from under the desk, said, “leave the room, count to three, and come back in.” 

“Yessir,” Texas said, not hiding his smile. He got up and left the room and went outside in the receptionists area. The receptionist was a live in. Like all. Their bed was a cot against the wall, now in its stuff sack, away, and the only decoration. Texas stood with his hands in his pockets. Recently he had stopped wanting to beat on his friends. Recently he had decided anything would be better. Even going down the ladder. His friends still liked to beat on him, this had that obliteration bug, that little creeper that stuck in the center of your head, got red hot when the flesh was hit, and told you to destroy the world. No one was getting good sleep anymore. People were irritable. 

He went back into the office. The headmaster was sitting at his desk writing something, probably faking it, on a sheet of printer paper. “I have heard something disturbing. Go ahead and sit.” 

Texas sat. 

“You understand it’s a liability, leaving the school, at night. Like a goddamn cockroach? Don't cry!” 

“I’m not.” Texas wasn’t even close. 

“And for god sakes stop crossing your legs like that.” 

Texas uncrossed his legs. 

“You’re the only person who comes in here and talks back to me. I was wondering about this. Should I tell your parents you’re not a good fit?” 

“I leave the school to work security for the sailors staying in the shore dormitories. I get a gun and I get paid fifty dollars a night.” 

“I don’t see why I need to know that you get a gun? Why did you say that?” 

“It shows I’m responsible.” 

“Having a gun, yes, sure, but telling me? You’re off your rocker, excuse me. What’re you buying with this money? Nothing bad. When I tell your parents that you sneak out, and you look rested for staying up late-” 

“I usually sleep in the security office.” 

“That’s irresponsible.” 

Texas crossed his legs again. “I don’t spend the money. I keep it in the bank.” 

“You don’t have a bank account.” 

“I keep it somewhere like a bank. I can’t tell you.” 

“You’re right. I’m going to tell your parents that you work for the school. Now, don’t make it so obvious. You can have a job, but don’t, for god’s sake, don’t wake up our security. Now-” The headmaster opened his drawer and got a key out, “Take this, use this, you’ll be less noticed. And you’re going to have to do class from the bunker for the rest of the day. As punishment. I won’t tell your parents.” 

He passed him the paper key, smiling nervously, this was the little game they played to compensate. This fake banter and play. All within normal boundary’s except for the hitch at the beginning. 

The bunker, accessed only by the hatch in the headmasters office was a fourteen room complex built during the cold war. The ladder trip down takes twenty two minutes of repetitive climbing. Inside, only one room is unlocked in the long hallway that the ladder drops into. That room has a small TV, notebooks, and a six hour documentary series on the bible. In the bunker, the student is required to fill sixteen pages, ‘of small print writing’, in one of the thousand well stocked composition notebooks, on the documentary. Hidden inside the compartment of a desk in the back of the room are six prefilled notebooks that can be used in emergencies by those who know about them. Today, Texas decided to be a good little student and fill out two journals. Since he was good at composition, and knew the documentary very well from his many stints in the bunker caused by bare knuckle fighting. He could get a notebook done in thirty minutes to an hour, depending on inspiration levels, and fill out another in thirty more minutes making a clone of the first and stashing it in the back desk. After this he often, like today, would fill out a third for fun, because it was the only thing to do. 

Today he wrote about his father, what he could remember of him, If you see the Buddha on the street kill him he had tattooed on his hip bone. And a giant colt revolver on his thigh. He drank orange juice in the afternoon and when my sister came down with the blues he would pick the fruit from the fruit tree. Only he knew the location of it on our property. He disagreed with people who jogged for exercise. He thought good exercise came from turning wrenches. 

Someone walked into the room and Texas looked and saw them and threw his pencil at them. They let out a girlish scream. It was a girl, he thought, by the looks of her. And the pencil had been thrown hard enough to impale her biceps. Texas wondered why suicides weren’t more frequent down here, possibly they were. It was the first time he thought of it. 

“Fucking-A” she said. 

“You deserve it,” Texas said quickly. He was unsure what was happening. 

“I thought you’d be Anderson.” 

“I know Anderson. He’s my roommate.” 

“No he’s not.”

“You’re right, but I do know him. He’s in my math class. I’ll get the first aid kit.” Texas did what he said. They had hid one in one of the desks. It took him a minute to find it. “Anderson graduated,” Texas admitted. He went over and handed the Ziplock bag full of gauze and rubbing alcohol to her. 

“No he didn’t.”
Texas smiled, “He did so. He’s thousands of miles away. In Alaska.” 

“Alaska’s maybe, two hundred miles away.” 

“If you say so. You thought Anderson lives down here?” 

“We would watch movies here on days like this and over summer when it was warm.” She yanked the pencil out of her arm. She was dressed mostly like a boy but her hair was done. 

“So there’s a way out, other than the hatch?” 

“You thought you would find him? What are you twenty two?” 

Her arm was spurting. “Twenty one.” He let her wrap herself up with the bandage. The bandage filled almost completely with blood. She put another on. This one worked better. 

“Show me the way out.” 

“Ok.” 

“You just wanted to come down here to think about him?” 

“I miss him. He didn’t really go to Alaska.” 

“I know. Everyone knows. He did something bad.” 

“He did nothing bad down here.” 

“My name’s Texas. My Dad said he was a Buddhist then named me Texas.” 

“My Dad always said Buddhism's the only religion you have to be a communist to join.” 

“Oh hell.” 

“Right. I’ll show you the way out.” She got up and he followed her to a door that had always been locked. She had the key for it, somehow. The door opened and they stepped into a small indoor golf course. 

“I always get in fights on golf courses.”

“Do you play golf?” There was a service door. They crossed the green to get to it. The rolling indoor hills, it was almost impossible. 

“No.”  

“What do you do outside? Other than school.” 

“I go to the beach and build sandcastles.” 

“No, really?” She opened the door with another key. 

“Not at all. I mostly get scared. I think there’s too much to do. I get in my own head. At times like that I think, what do people do? What do people do, really? Nothing. So I do. I go to the beach and build a sandcastle. I’ll go to this woodworking shop and walk in and fill out an application, they have a whole bundle of applications for the youth and I fill one out while no one’s looking, with a different name every time, and turn it in to them. They must have a thousand applications. From me. Different versions of me.” 

There was a staircase behind this door. The girl wasn’t lying. 

“Think I can have a copy of those keys?” He said. 

“What do they say about Anderson?” she asked. 

“You came here looking for him, so he’s on your mind, but you don’t think about him as much as you talk about him do you?” 

“No,” she said. “I mostly think about horses. And politics.” 

“They say he ate a baby at gunpoint,” Texas lied. Well, the impressive truth was Anderson got out early and like a rabid animal shunned for destroying academic opportunities, therefore professional opportunities, and killed himself with a pencil sharpener. “You’re the worst liar I’ve ever met.” 

Outside, through a drainage pipe, they surface on a golf course. Somehow it was evening and the sky was blue as only the ocean was allowed to be, textured in the projecting of a feeling, smooth otherwise. Distantly, past the red brick building of the school where the adolescents were locked, the stacks of the San Francisco skyline, the deeply hidden shore that was present even in its invisibility, was a storm that had just blackly rolled in, thunder only dashes of light within, unchanging and uncaring of its O shape so clearly in the sky that jutted out of its bulbous extra-territorial body like a OK sign. As the storm, spread in its infinite vastness, reached closer to the school the lighter it was, weaker and whiter, and above them, him and this girl, clear blue, rainless skies. He broke down in tears because he had never left the school once since he was dropped off at eleven years old. He was a push over and he couldn’t find the sun, hidden, keeping the color vivid. The girl walked off across the golf course that all the boys always watched heartbroken from the windows of their mostly permanent place (in terms of childhood being where life is spent and adulthood like the school: a place to look out from). Not let out because of some mandate to create better, less emotional, men. Some boys, now, saw their grizzled compulsively lying elder kneeling on it now, broken with freedom. He did not understand it. He did not understand why he had played coy with something so great. The girl stopped and looked back, he could only ignore her because of its immensity. Anderson, you are justified, he thought. We let you down. The truth. 

It could not be expressed, this freedom, he understood that now, without seeing it.